Games that came over the radio

A program recorded on tape is nothing but sound, and sound can travel through the air. In Yugoslavia, the idea came about around the Galaksija, a computer anyone could build at home: an editor of the magazine Računari u vašoj kući suggested to Zoran Modli, presenter of the programme Ventilator 202 on Radio Belgrade, that he broadcast the sound of computer programs for listeners to record and then load into their machines ^[1].

The broadcasts began in the autumn of 1983. In three years, Ventilator 202 transmitted about 150 programs for the Galaksija, the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, including a digital magazine, Hack News. The programme became a sharing network: listeners recorded, modified the software and sent in the new versions to be broadcast again ^[2].

For three years, a Belgrade radio programme broadcast 150 computer programs.

In Slovenia, Radio Študent in Ljubljana did the same with Spectrum games in 1984, and that is how it released the text adventures Kontrabant, by Žiga Turk and Matevž Kmet. Forty years later, on 8 May 2024, at the request of the Slovenian Computer History Museum, the station broadcast Kontrabant 2 again on 89.3 MHz, at around 21:30, for anyone who wanted to record it once more ^[3].

In Poland, Rozgłośnia Harcerska, the scouts' radio station, had talked about computers in a science magazine programme since 1984, at the initiative of the journalist Tomasz Jordan. On 1 July 1986 it launched Radiokomputer, with programs for the Commodore 64, Atari XL/XE and ZX Spectrum, for listeners to record on cassette ^[4].

Portugal had it too. In 2018, the blog Planeta Sinclair published a recording of a pirate radio broadcast with the sound of Ocean's game Moon Alert. In the comments, in 2025, Rui Matoso said that he was the one broadcasting games on Radioeste, in Torres Vedras, in a slot of games and news for the Spectrum, and that older listeners would phone in with no idea what that noise was ^[5].