I never had a Sinclair Spectrum computer – I had a Commodore 64, and then its successor the Amiga. People were buying and playing games on those and other computers and consoles alongside the Spectrum in the late ‘80s, but it seems like they were not as popular, and so Spectrum games are what I will be defaulting to for this project when I don’t have proof otherwise. I have monthly Spectrum charts from Your Sinclair to use for that whole time, which makes that handy, but I also have a couple of pieces of evidence to support the assumption that the Spectrum was on top:
The Guardian, 2 June 1988
The article above takes us through to 1988 as exclusively Spectrum/Commodore 64 #1s, and since the two 8-bit machines tended to get similar versions of the same releases at the same time, it seems like arbitrarily covering one or the other shouldn’t be too far off the ideal combined chart. There are a few places where I have all formats charts that confirm Commodore 64 exclusive games as #1, or can work out that the Commodore 64 version was the more popular one, and in those places that’s what I’ll be playing. Otherwise I will be going for the Spectrum ones. Because…
Your Sinclair, May 1987
This article, together with a couple of similar stats at other times and a set of Spectrum #1s as late as 1991 when I do have multi-platform charts, gives me confidence to go with the (cheaper, British) Spectrum as the winner of the two computers for playing games on. Note also that Nintendo’s NES wasn’t even in the conversation in the UK!