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Kombos” in Greek means “knot”, a name I chose because of the gameʼs “artificial personality” striving to “tie-up in knots” (of complexity) unsuspecting… human victims, most of whom eventually became blissfully addicted Kombos-players, at the time, in Greece. Bear in mind, that at the time of Kombosʼ release (July 1984), the ZX Spectrum was only two years old. Ah well, those were the days…(as they say). In fact, some of these people still remember “
Kombos” three decades later, e.g. in the
Greek “retro-maniacs” forum, where “Kombos 1″ was officially resurrected in public, forever saved from oblivion: A rare cassette-recording of “
Kombos” was discovered by
Mr Mavrogiannopoulos, a ZX-Spectrum veteran (while my own “Kombos” cassettes are damaged); a cassette clean enough for conversion into a snapshot-file (*.sna) that can run on any ZX-Spectrum emulator. Here is an English translation (summary) of the
retromaniax forumʼs discovery:
…We are happy that we have identified and electronically-preserved the first Greek commercial game for home-computers, the electronic “sophist” Kombos and Polylogiki!
We had previously addressed
Mr Stathis who had told us that he does not have a copy and is earnestly looking for one. In an interview with
Mr Mavrogiannopoulos, among other things he showed us a tape of this double game! We brought these two people together and they gave us their permission to digitize and upload the game online.
The digitization was very difficult. While other titles were easily digitized, due to the poor condition of that cassette it obstinately refused. We tried to convert it to aTZX-file with repair filters, with no succes. Fortunately, eventually the wonderful community of WOS helped us and we got it perfect (special thanx to Gilby, Richl)
Note: To start with, we uploaded it as an Sna (snapshot-file) that can be loaded on any Spectrum emulator…
here is a recent video-recording of a complete “Kombos” game-session on an emulator:
[video=youtube;6w2KpsE_-Rk]
