The Sinclair Spectrum was the adolescent computer of choice in Britain in 1984, when the television series was broadcast, and games -- amateur, nifty and dire -- proliferated wildly. Inevitably, there was a Tripods game. Here is a picture of the tape cassette sleeve, slightly foxed:

This (perhaps somewhat flatulent) Tripod strides past Houses of Parliament in the background -- a nicely inappropriate touch, since London features neither in the books, nor the television series, nor indeed the game. It's a sort of rudimentary role-playing game, where each turn

THERE IS NO TRIPOD DANGER

THE WEATHER IS SUNNY
WILL IS BY A WINDMILL
TIME TO NIGHTFALL I I I I I I I

Entering France by a choice of six ports (Le Havre, La Rochelle, etc.), finding "relics" and food, using a mirror and a radio to TRY TO DISORIENTATE Tripods and so on, our hero... actually it's not clear to me what our hero does, but perhaps there are mountains an awfully large number of turns away. (Make enough wrong moves, and you can be tracked, or worse, YOUR IMMUNITY TO TRIPODS IS REDUCED.) In the mean time, we spend a lot of time IN A BEET FIELD, AT A CHATEAU, etc., and a Tripod never turns up when you want one, so it's actually quite a realistic version of the television series.

I probably shouldn't be so rude to this game. It has a sort of integrity about it. If you start at La Rochelle, you initially face East -- inland -- for instance. You can catch a rabbit if you already have a snare, and so on. It really is trying quite hard to recreate the mood of the original, no mean ambition considering it looks like this:

The arrow points to a Tripod. (OK, so I accidentally got the mouse arrow included in the screen grab. Nobody's perfect.) Sometimes you get two Tripods. I found the radio once.

Bill Potts, part of the team who built the game ("in a back bedroom in Darras Hall Northumberland") now writes to say that "there are no Tripods here" was the catch-phrase of Dr Denis Benton, who has now sadly died, whenever problems were run into. "I'm sure he'd appreciate your comments on the geography, he was a stickler for such."