The 20 Greatest BBC Micro Games of All-Time 

Given how popular this video has been I thought I'd add the full Top 50 for you in a pinned post: 50 - Bonecruncher 49 - E-Type 48 - Arkanoid 47 - Sabre Wulf 46 - Dunjunz 45 - Commando 44 - Sphinx Adventure 43 - The Hobbit 42 - Boffin 41 - Jetpac 40 - Codename Droid 39 - The Last Ninja 38 - Wizardore 37 - Castle of Magic 36 - Jet Boot Jack 35 - Football Manager 34 - Hopper 33 - Snowball 32 - Knightlore 31 - Stunt Car Racer 30 - Aviator 29 - Rocket Raid 28 - Manic Miner 27 - Firetrack 26 - Arcadians 25 - Daredevil Dennis 24 - XOR 23 - The Sentinel 22 - Twin Kingdom Valley 21 - Jet Set Willy 20 - Starship Command 19 - Killer Gorilla 18 - Ravenskull 17 - Stryker's Run 16 - Granny's Garden 15 - Zalaga 14 - Thrust 13 - Imogen 12 - Mr. Ee! 11 - Planetoid 10 - Snapper 9 - Castle Quest 8 - Frak! 7 - Repton 3 6 - Citadel 5 - Revs 4 - Exile 3 - Repton 2 - Chuckie Egg 1 - Elite PHEW!

One of my favourite games on the BBC was a UK government simulator, in which you would pick a party (Conservative, Labour or Liberals), choose policies, and produce a Budget. If you chose wisely, you would win the general election. Got me interested in politics.

This was my childhood. It got me hooked on programming which became my career. I recently bought a BBC Micro for the nostalgia.

"Defender" was superb on BBC Micro. Really authentic.

I had an Acorn Electron at home and used a BBC Micro B at school so plenty of memories here. My all time favourite game was Chuckie Egg but did play Elite, Repton 1-3 and especially Ravernskull plenty of fond memories.

I was lucky enough to get a BBC model B in 1983 and still have it to this day along with the 5.25" floppy drive and tape drive. I keep meaning to try and get it running again :)

I still have my original BBC B and assorted kit still works. Burned a huge amount of hours on Starship command and the side scroller Scramble. I still get my Atari 2600 console out of the box every year for the tank battle game. Horrendously fun when adult beverages have been consumed

One of my favourites was Codename: Droid - Strykers run part 2. Great game

Even if you weren't a big fan of Elite, you have to admit that its impact on gaming and how ahead of its time it was is undeniable. Elite is only one of three 8bit games to get a retrospective 10/10 from Edge magazine. The other two games were Exile (another original BBC Micro title) and Super Mario Bros.

10 print " my teacher is a prat ! " 20 goto 10 😂 Aghhhh. . . The good old days of innocence

Can't believe Geoff Crammond's "Sentinel" didn't get a mention. It's #2 to Elite in my personal list, but I guess a lot of people didn't "get it" at the time.

Gosh, this takes me back a bit. I was writing software and teaching computing during those golden years and the Acorn computers were just amazing. The coding would have been pretty simple for all these games bar one - Zalaga. I never saw this and can’t believe they managed it on a Beeb! Hats off to whoever did the coding! 🎉

Brilliant. I played loads of those games. Brought back so many memories.

We had a BBC Model B when I was a kid. We were by no means well off, but my dad was an engineer, and he recognized the importance of the new microcomputers. I was only little at the time, but I remember him agonizing over the decision to buy one. It was almost like an illness, I guess he must have been losing sleep over the decision. Eventually, my Mom talked him into just going for it, and he brought it home one evening after work. Many years later, my parents were watching Cash in the Attic, which was a TV show in which people would gather together all the junk in their house, and sell it to finance a vacation or something. In one episode, the family had a BBC Micro, and the 'expert' on the show told them it wasn't worth anything, and to not even bother trying to sell it. My parents happened to be having a clear-out at around the same time, and hearing this advice, they threw the mint condition Beeb and the 5.25" floppy drive in a skip. I was absolutely gutted, and I am still sore about it to this day lol.

I remember playing “Granny’s Garden” at primary school 😂 Then used a BBC to cut parts on a CNC at secondary 😮school

Old fart nerds such as myself are very impressed by this video. 👍

Elite, Revs and Chuckie Egg were my favourites. Me and my brother also enjoyed Sabre Wolf, for its ace maze and Knightlore, which was 3D isometric fantastic.I preferred Arcadians as a shooting aliens game. I’m 52 now, and race iRacing in VR, my journey started with Revs, through the F1GP Crammond games.

A lot of fond memories in there. I loved Chuckie Egg. I’m slightly surprised Danger UXB wasn’t mentioned.

Revs was impossible to play! Still seeing it lights up some memberberries!

Honarable mentions Manic Miner, Adventure, Jet Pack, Twin Kingdom Valley, Commando, Harvey Headbanger, Sabre Wolfe.

Elite is/was one of the best games of it's era. Way ahead of the curve. When I was a kid, I always dreamed that one day, someone would make a game to expand it and use modern computing power to really push at what could become possible. I had to wait until 2003 for that to happen. that is when I discovered Eve Online. I've not played it in a while because it is super easy to completely lose you RL to the game. It is one of those games that just sucks you in and consumes you.

My dad owned a BBC model B (issue 4) and I had an Acorn Electron which meant I was the de facto computer guy at primary school. Then my dad got an Archimedes 310 which gave me a leg up at secondary school. They were amazing systems for the time, and the quality of the games were excellent. I’m surprised Bumble Bee, Frenzy, Psycastria, Swoop and Tempest didn’t make the list. The top three was no surprise though. I also loved Thrust. Regarding the educational games the one that sticks in my mind most was Suburban Fox. There was also one I can’t remember the name of where you were building a settlement that included a moat, and you had a set time to get everything done. You had to allocate workers to the building, defenders against attacks from other groups, and foragers to go and get enough food for everyone. Good times.

Born in '67 its great to see the games I used to play as a child, thankyou. Remember some of them well. Did my A'Level Computer Science at School with one of these; wrote a BASIC version of Space Invaders for my O'level project. LOL

I worked at Micro power in Leeds. Selling BBC machines.

I used to play ' Elite ' and ' Chuckie egg ' on the BBC Electron. 😊👍 And ' joust '

I remember playing elite and being blown away by how "next level" it was. The 3d graphics and the scope of the game felt like nothing I had ever played before. Probably in terms of sheer fun I would have to put it in my top 10 games of all time. Sure, these days its primitive, but at the time it was unprecedentedly good.

_Chuckie Egg_ at no. 2 and _Elite_ at no. 1 - that's correct. _Defender_ was good too, and I also enjoyed... was it _Missile base?_ Where missiles were raining from the sky and you had to fire interceptor missiles to keep your bases intact. Something like that.

My school had one that had a three button mouse. Had this isometric 3D game where you flew some green triangle aircraft. The left button fired white dots middle button slow boost and right button for fast boost. You flew over random generated islands had no sound and no clue what to do but was fun learning to fly the ship and shoot a tree accurately :) EDIT It was the acorn Archimedes and the game was LANDER

The trick with Castle Quest was to trap all 4 of the little red men and squash them into one man, then I think it was possible to finish the game. Anyone else remember this?

Those sound effects brought back some happy memories of times I should'vebeen studying. 😊 One of my fellow students at Jodrell Bank spent most of an afternoon rolling over the score on Chuckie Egg - having discovered that the levels just repeated after a certain point, without getting any harder. My favourite was Knight Lore (with a personal high score of 3, after weeks of playing and making a huge paper map of the dungeon) - disappointed not to see it on the list.

Glad to see Citadel, snapper & Chuckie Egg here. I always loved Magic mushrooms & tarzan, spyhunter, jetpack can't believe they're not on the list

Castle Quest was one of my faves! 🤩

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Am 53 yo & ad a BeeB in 1984. Great to find this channel!

I would have had Dare Devil Denis on there!

I'm a Californian. So, Commodores, Apple IIEs and 8086s. After 40 years you could put me in front of Pango, 3Daemon or Montezuma's Revenge and after 5 minutes my muscle memory alone would be playing them through. Why I love vids on early UK computer gaming is we never had Those computers over here. Though I do remember running into a ZX once when I was a kid. And let's not forget Pinball Construction Set, though you never really "won" that game. And let's not get started on BASIC. And especially (shiver) assembly code... These kids these days and their HTML. Pretty sure none of them even know how many compiler layers their code is going through. Always remember, we speak human language, digital computers speak 0 and 1. We've made a lot of translators to manage the language gap. 10 rem rant over

The BBC Micro was incredibly well-served with unofficial arcade clones - easily the best versions on any 8-bit micro of early arcade classics like Pac-Man, Defender, Space Panic, Frogger, Asteroids, Lunar Rescue, Zaxxon, etc. And it's all the more impressive when you bear in mind that the machine only had about 16K of RAM available once you were in any graphics mode other than Teletext.

Elite was by far its best game absolutely ground breaking for that time. Still have my bbc micro b in the loft, it has a side way eprom expansion board so it can run games and programs from eproms. It has a teletext adapter, music 500 and a floppy disk drive. I learnt to program on it and wrote two simple games. Good times.

I remember castle quest with fond memories. Micropower had one of there main offices in Leeds with a big showroom, and of course they had castle quest running on every machine. When you completed the game it showed your finish time on the end screen. Me and 2 friends could complete the game in less than 10 minutes which they said was impossible so we went around and did it on all there display computers :)

Still playing ELITE on my PC (as Oolite) some 40 years later.

Genuinely surprised that Codename Droid didn't make it onto the list. Lot of nostalgia looking back through those - though I now have a temptation to see if I can find a Twin Kingdom Valley emulator out there somewhere - I never did beat that game.

Hunchback was epic!!! ❤ Granny’s Garden!!

My dad bought a BBC B which at the time was annoying because all my mates had ZX Spectrum's, I had hardly anyone I could swap games with. The only guy I could swap with had an Acorn Electron that ran at half the speed so all his games were too fast and my games ran too slow for him. I do remember typing pages of BASIC from magazines which were always a little underwhelming and recording games that were broadcast by radio Bristol.

I wanted either a Spectrum or C64, but my Dad said "Nope, you'll get what the schools are using", then we bought the Viglen PC Kit (made it look somewhat like a PC XT/AT, and installed 2 5.25 floppy drives). I also bought every copy of 'Input' magazine and thus the 4 binders to contain them, and lol, semi successfully programed and got working most of the 'input' programs. Games wise? MANY were played... - Thrust: HELL YEAH... excellent game. - Elite: Yeah I did ok, until a friend of mine managed to get the cheat disk that allowed FULL weapons/armour/credits and such, and then spent hundreds of hours exploring, 'Kickin ass' and such... Good times! - Chuckie egg: Hahaha you surely are bringing out the classics here! - Mission Impossible: I played this on a mates C64... I THINK there was creepy speech in it too, "You'll stay foreverrrrr" (or something like that) - Arkanoid: Oh God yeah, MANY hours on that one too! What about Galaga? I chewed through MANY levels on that brilliant game! 😏🤣🤣 🦇😎🦇 🇬🇧

Frak!....Such a beautiful game. So difficult to play, but so so beautiful.

I remember “Imogen”, “Jetpack”, “Banjax”, “Thrust”, and “Podd”. I also remember “Mr E” being on an arcade machine in the 80s and “Planetoid” was known as “Guardian” on the Commodore 64.

Exile was my Grandad's favourite game. He had it on C64, though.

Exile. My favourite 8-bit game.

Chuckie Egg is the game I have fondest memories of, but I’m surprised that Codename Droid (the follow up to Stryker’s Run) doesn’t get more love here, that was an amazing game for the time. And The Last Ninja too, all of the kids were playing that back in the day. Shout out to the amazing Play It Again Sam series where you got 4 games for the price of 1, that was my childhood!

One thing you got wrong Acornsoft's PacMan clone was always called Snapper. Atari made them change the graphics into cartoon figures

Fortress was a real game changer with 3D looking play. Played it endlessly and thought it was impossible. Tried again a few years ago in an emulator and completed the whole game (basically two long runs) on my second attempt. Was amazed at how difficult it seemed when the idea of what was on screen was so new. And how easy and slow it all was coming from a PS4 etc like 35 years later..

I loved Ravenskull. Many years later I went back with BeebEm and scum-saved my way through all of it.

What no Yellow River Kingdom?! Sure it came free with the Welcome cassette but I sure as hell played it a lot. I think my dad played Repton more than I did!

Still own my Electron. I figured Elite and Chuckie Egg would be up there. Also loved playing text adventures, Sphinx if I recall. Thank you for taking us down memory lane.

As much as I loved my ZX Spectrum (and still do) I was always slightly envious of friends who had a BBC Micro and a copy of Elite. It was just so damn good on that machine.

I used to use the BBC computer when I was at school. A friend had a BBC computer and we used to play Elite on his machine. I'm still playing Elite now.

I'm surprised not to see Scramble on there!!

"May I use your sideways RAM?" 😀

I too had an Acorn Electron, got it Christmas 1985. I remember my mum looking at it in the shop window saying she was checking the price for my Uncle Kevin. £99.99. Repton2 will forever be my favourite game.

Didn't really play much Elite on my friend's BBC (though Frontier, the sequel, was a firm favourite when i was lucky enough to get an Amiga). I enjoyed Chuckie Egg, but the games I spent the most time on were Tanks and Canyon Battle (a vertical scroller arcade). I still occaisonaly play Tanks with my kids on a BBC Emulator - that game never grows old!

I was a bit addicted as a kid. Had a C64, BBC B and a Speccy in my 8 bit collection. BY FAR the best version of Elite was on the BBC. But you missed one exceptional game. "The Sentinal". Never played it on the Speccy - but did on the BBC and C64. And OMG how that could be missed amazes me.

We had a C64 at home since 1983. I started school that year but didn't encounter a computer at school until middle school, and even then it was a vic 20 that sat in a corridor unused. There was a BBC in the library at secondary school and we used one ONCE in maths class playing a snooker game about angles, but mostly we played blockbusters on the library BBC if it was raining and couldn't play footy. By then we had business studies GCSE with RM Nimbus 286s running win 3.1 which we mostly used for copyingsuper pixelated soft porn bitmaps of Pamela Anderson and other lingerie models. ..

Yay! The thing i said was on the video! Thanks for making me a part of this. And Starship Command is still ace. Although a confession: i didn't have a Beeb as a kid, but the much cheaper Electron (although the best game lists will basically be the same) Granny's Garden is nonsense though, and i never understood what made it educational.

I always liked and often played Rocket Raid by Acornsoft. which was an unofficial clone of Scramble. Another one I often played with friends was Tycoon by Warlock Software, a property trading game rather like Monopoly.

I remember this being called BBC Model B when I was at school, I personally owned the original Spectrum 48K and Aquarius, loved them and spent countless hours typing in programmes from magazines then spending even more hours copying hex code.

Funny to think as a child schools would have one BBC Micro in the whole school bar my last school which had a couple. Near the end of my final year they got about three PCs if I recall & they had a demo of Magic Carpet. I was lucky in the mid 80s as a child as my father bought a BBC Master and although we only had the cassette player, it was my first computer. My first game was Revs & the only game my mum was ever able to beat me at was Aqua Attack on the Cassette that came with the computer, we also had Killer Gorilla, Airwolf & few others that slip my mind. If I recall Aqua was at 107 on the tape counter. My father even had a cartridge that plugged into it, but I never knew exactly what it was or what it did. I do know it had spaces for four chips and his had three plugged in it & there was two switches on the top. In the next decade or so I progressed to a C64, Amiga 1200 & then into the world of PCs. Used to love playing Chuckie Egg at school on the old Micros, I have a port of it on PC and still play it. Also played Citadel, a game with a hunchback & Granny’s Garden.

I have huge nostalgia for the Beeb, my dad worked for the council going round schools fixing these and "aquired" one somehow (a B, then a Master). We had loads of bootleg compilation disks with around 20 games on each, I still have them (along with our original Master & CUB monitor) although the disk drives no longer work (I bought a USB drive a few years ago though). My fave games were Elite (of course), Killer Gorilla, Monsters, Arcadians, Jet Pak, Snapper, Canyon Battle, Hunchback, Daredevil Dennis, Labyrinth, Maze (Acornsoft), Eagle's Wing, Rocket Raid, Pole Position, Road Runner and loads more. Also, some educational games which were fun and also played them at school: Granny's Garden, The Lost Frog, Merlin's Castle, L, Table Worms. Will need to get them all set up again, this video and typing this comment has got me right in the mood, lol. Cheers! :)

My dad banned us from playing Brian Jacks because he was worried about the keyboard breaking😆

We had the Master 128. I loved Cyborg Warriors. Graphically great feeling of thundering across an alien landscape. Anything Acornsoft or Micro Power was guaranteed to be good. Glad to see Imogen there as well.

I think you have got it so right, the order of the games, I was a Speccy owner but referred to the bbc use to play all Speccy games and bbc games via an emulator app which are both free today, brought a cheap android tablet and the games are all on there absolutely hundreds of them👍🏻

The only one I am sad didn't make the list is Magic Mushrooms. An ok game by itself but the level editor made it one to keep coming back to. Also a mention for a much later release Repton Infinity; which included a rudimentary scripting language you could do some interesting stuff with.

Nice to see Granny's Garden, I played it at school on the Nimbus in the early 90s. I can play through it in a few minutes now I've memorised most of the answers. The Witch hits different on a 34" widescreen. Several years ago I collected together (copies of) all the ports I could find- Amiga, BBC, C64, CPC, Nimbus and Spectrum. I've paid for the more modern iOS one though.

That commercial is awesome.

Planetoid was originally called Defender before someone thought they'd better change it to avoid litigation. There was a bug in the original version whereby if you collected all the little men without depositing them, and then killed all the aliens the new level would have 256 men and no aliens. It was fun do do this and then just kill all the men.

We usually had some time during IT before the teacher got in to furtively copy games amongst ourselves and play them for a couple of minutes. I remember playing a time pilot knockoff and resetting it just before getting caught 🙂

My very first exposure to computers, it was 1985 and I was in year 6 at primary school. My teacher didn't have a clue how to use it. If I remember correctly I think it used 8 inch floppy disks.

There really was no competition for the number one slot - Elite was orders of magnitude ahead of the closest competition. I got through so many Quickshot leaf spring joysticks on my journey to Elite rank. They just weren't built well enough to survive the rigors of a Thargoid attack in witch-space :)

It's not so much that Thrust is a good game - it was the draw of the 'realistic' physics at a high framerate. People don't talk about flight sims going from low FPS to high FPS - but it was very much a 'thing' in terms of attractiveness. An overclocked old sim still holds up - it was the physics + a certain threshold of framerate that really hooked people - and Thrust tapped into that.

I remember playing pip's island adventure on the bbc in primary school. I also briefly owned one in the late 90s and had the teletext adapter

I remember making an OS fiddle, so when playing defender you could hold the return key to get continuous shots rather than having to keep hitting the key. Inspired by my friend, who I thought was going to break the keyboard!

Fortress and Sentinel should definitely be in there.

If you tried to pirate Frak it would just play Captain Pugwash!

Pole position should get in there :-P

Ooh nice, Revs, that was fab especially when you got the expansion tracks. snettertons bombhole was pretty amazing to see. There was also a flight sim called Aviator by Geoff Crammond. . . You can also change gear btw....

I think Granny's Garden ending up on the list was a pure nostalgia vote. It's not really much of a game so much as a pretty linear set of screens. That said, the one for if you're caught by the witch is probably the biggest reason it's burned into so many people's memories!

I am shocked they didn’t get sued! Some of these look like straight ports not clones!

Elite was elite. Just amazing

Aviator is the one that is missing for me, first attempt at something vaguely like a realistic flight sim. As a kid I had a massive challenge picking which game to buy first, Aviator, which I already knew about, or Elite, which had just been released.

If a "BBC Mini" plug and play system would be released today (like the commodore and NES has done recently) do you believe it would be successful, or not sell at all?

A good list :)

Great list

Loved using it back in the day

Like you played them in school , my tiny welsh school(25 pupils) had one, fond memories of planetoid and zaxxon , i had commodore plus 4 then spectrum plus 2 as my das was truck driver my other equally humble friends had spectrums ( a 48 and a 228 ) but my posher friends with tory dads had beebs

everyone already knows what will be #1

I loved going on the BBC at primary school, then got to use BBC Basic again at secondary school on the RM Nimbus; I was unaware it was an emulator and had programs to select.

Had a BBC B at home for 5 years before moving onto PC. I had most of these games but surprised that some of them, eg Chuckie Egg I've never heard of! Also, Exile, No. 4? That's insane!

Before I even watch this video, the early Acornsoft arcade clones were excellent. Snapper (Pac Man), Planetoid (Defender), Arcadians (Galaxians) and Meteors (Asteroids). They were the games I played at the arcade (or kebab shops) at that time. Starship Command was innovative and what I consider the predecessor to Elite which was the best game of all time. eta: I really liked Super Invaders too - a then modern 80's version of 70's Space Invaders.

It’s funny, I had a BBC Micro and completely missed out on Oregon Trail and Elite. I played the hell out of the Repton games though, and Citadel. Starship Command was really cool. I remember some other games but not the titles coz it’s been so long!

Never played games on the BBC, only used them at school. Doomsday Project anyone?

I remember playing Chuckie Egg for the BBC Micro at school, and then I Decided there & Then I wanted one but it was Too Expensive. So I Eventuly settled on A 48k Speccy which turned out a Really Smart Move.

Solid list. Couple of games that missed out are Deathstar, Labyrinth and Space pilot.