The Sinclair ZX Spectrum is perhaps the most famous home computer to come out of the British Isles.
Launched in 1982, it is credited with creating an entire generation of designers, artists and developers, and continues to attract adoration and attention more than 40 years later – as evidenced by the amazing success of the recent Spectrum Next crowdfunding campaign.
The Spectrum Next is an enhanced version of Sir Clive Sinclair's legendary home micro built around FPGA technology, and its first Kickstarter campaign actually took place all the way back in 2017. A second campaign went live in 2023, and over 10,000 systems have been sold as a result.
Last week, a third (and perhaps final) Kickstarter appeared, and it has already raised almost £1.5 million, blasting past its initial target of £250,000 in around seven minutes.
We were lucky enough to speak to Henrique Olifiers, founder and director of SpecNext Ltd., about the new campaign, the age-old rivalry with Commodore, and the future of Spectrum Next in general.
Time Extension: Congratulations on the amazing success of the campaign - were you expecting this kind of response?
Henrique Olifiers: Thank you for the kind words. It has been a rollercoaster for the past few days!
Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this level of success. Secretly, we always wished for something like this to happen, sure, but we planned for a campaign roughly the size of the first one, with the people who missed the first two campaigns. Turns out there’s a lot more love for the Speccy out there, and we’re trending towards becoming the most successful campaign to date.
We’ve reached the total funding goal in just seven minutes. Three hours later, we raised the total amount the first campaign raised in a month. We ended the first day with twice as much raised as the last Kickstarter’s first day.
As I said, it's a rollercoaster – but a very, very cool one. It will boost and reinvigorate the ZX Spectrum Next community as a whole, and that’s what we set out to do.
The news that this new version will be capable of running C64 games caused quite a bit of commotion in the retro community, given the rivalry that exists between C64 and Spectrum fans. Has it been amusing to watch this reaction play out online?
That classic rivalry only remains as banter now. We have all grown up, managed to see each other’s perspective, and come to love both platforms. As far as I can tell, there’s no rivalry anymore, especially since we all agree that the Speccy is the superior platform!
Jokes aside, we’re in awe of what Christian ‘Perifractic’ Simpson managed to achieve. To bring the Commodore assets under the umbrella of someone absolutely passionate about it, a true fan, bodes very well for the future of the platform. We are fans of what’s happening there and are ready to help in any way we can.
As you've just alluded to, Commodore is in the news again thanks to the 'revival' of the brand - did that have anything to do with including a C64 core with the Next? Was this a bit of light-hearted fun, perhaps?
As you can imagine, bringing up a fully compatible C64 core for the ZX Spectrum Next is not an easy job and takes quite a bit of time. We started a while back in ‘24, and when we announced its existence earlier this year, along with the licensing of the C64 ROMs from Cloanto, we had no idea of what was around the corner for all things Commodore.
I hope we find opportunities to keep poking fun at each other, but in the background, helping one another as much as possible. There’s a lot to do and get right to ship these machines, and we can certainly use the help.
As well as the announced cores, are there plans for others in the future? What's the limit on what we can expect?
We just announced support for the Sam Coupé core as a stretch goal, and there are a dozen community-built cores, such as the BBC. It’s hard to put a limit on what’s possible… I certainly didn’t expect to see a 68020 fully expanded machine such as the Sinclair QL to come to life, yet here we are.
The important thing for us is that any core that we officially support meets two criteria: one, it’s fully compatible, functional and two, its ROMs are properly licensed. It’s fairly easy to get a core that ‘runs’, but falls short of supporting a keyboard or the SD card, for instance. It’s got to be rounded, and licensed.
And yes, there are more coming.
Are you able to tell us any more about the football game and 3D game you've included as stretch goals? Who is developing those, and when can we expect to see them?
While some of the stretch goal games are certain to ship with the Next’s SD card, some are likely to require more time.
We have the beginnings of a football game, and are working on a new network stack as the original one didn’t advance as we hoped it would. The 3D game has two avenues in development at the moment and, believe it or not, I’m the one behind one of them.
I hope to see demos shipping in December, but as of yet, we have no idea when they will ship. Let’s go for ‘when it’s ready’, as it works for Valve.
As you're including a more powerful FPGA in the Spectrum Next this time around, will that create a disconnect between the issue 3 Next and the ones already out in the field? Will existing owners miss out on any future features or updates as a result of this upgrade?
No, never. This is a core tenet of the project: anything we do has to run on Issues 1 & 2, there’s no obsolescence, period.
That said, people will make use of the extra room in the FPGA, there’s no stopping that, and rightly so. But the litmus test goes like this: let’s take the Sinclair QL core for example. The QL core runs on all three machines. But if someone implements, say, a 68882 math co-processor, it’s likely it will only fit in the Issues 2 & 3. The original Issue 1 will still be able to run all the QL software out there, but the Issues 2 & 3 will run it faster.
The ZX Spectrum Next Issue 3 will be able to implement a lot of neat features the Issue 1 & 2 won’t, but none of these features are required to run the games, apps and drivers that are released for the Next.
That’s how we ensure no one gets left behind once they join the Spectrum Next community.
It's been said that this is the final time the Spectrum Next will be crowdfunded, but has the response given you reason to believe this could become a product which is in active production constantly? Surely the demand is there?
We went into this campaign with the mindset to serve the people who asked us to put a new batch out there, and to expand the community in order to make it more appealing for the developers to create their games and apps in the knowledge there’s a larger audience for them. There are lots of ways to keep the ZX Spectrum Next going, from clones to other teams making compatible machines.
As long as we can do something to keep the momentum of the platform, we’ll do it. But right now, the last thing on our minds is a Kickstarter 4, that I can assure you of!
We'd like to thank Henrique for giving up his valuable time to speak with us. If you'd like to back the Spectrum Next, you can do so here.