When you were a youngster in the early 80′s and wanted to entertain yourself with an electronic game, you were pretty limited. Before I was lucky enough to own an Atari 2600, I played with an original Speak & Spell. It was a gift from my parents and my dad hooked up an AC adapter to it, to save on batteries. I’d play with it for hours learning how to spell. Just hearing that familiar electronic voice again and a rush of memories flood my brain of days past. Perhaps it was my fondness of the game that’s helped me be such a good speller today.

You can still enjoy the classic fun of Speak & Spell with online emulators like the one from Kevin St. Onge or Jake Smith’s version. My favorite game was the hangman styled game called Mystery Word. The only problem I had was the pronunciation of words. It was difficult to tell the difference between certain words it wanted me to spell. For example “specific” or “pacific”, they both sounded the same on that single-chip voice synthesizer and I usually guess wrong.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 by Andrew "Savage" Speers and is filed under Flashback, Play, Toys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.