Who created the video game Bollenstreek?

Bollenstreek was created by Arie de Wit, a horticulture student at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He was 21 years old and developed the game on a ZX Spectrum 48K in 1985 as a side project during his studies.

What is the video game Bollenstreek about?

Bollenstreek ("Bulb Region") is a simulation game about running a tulip bulb farm in the Bollenstreek region of South Holland. Players plant, grow, and harvest tulip bulbs, manage soil conditions and weather risks, and sell their harvest through the Dutch flower auction clock system at Aalsmeer.

How many copies of Bollenstreek were sold?

About 110 copies of Bollenstreek were sold on cassette tape for ƒ12.50, mostly through ads in the Dutch ZX Spectrum newsletter Spectrum Gebruikersclub and at user group meetings in the Leiden-Den Haag area.

What is the Dutch flower auction clock in Bollenstreek?

Bollenstreek simulates the Dutch auction clock system used at the Aalsmeer flower auction (now Royal FloraHolland). In a Dutch auction, the price starts high and counts down. Buyers must decide when to press the button to buy — wait too long and someone else gets it first. This system is faithfully reproduced in the game.

Bollenstreek — The ZX Spectrum Tulip Farming Game from Leiden

The Netherlands is famous for its tulips, and the Bollenstreek — the “Bulb Region” stretching from Leiden to Haarlem — is where most of them are grown. In 1985, a horticulture student turned that expertise into a ZX Spectrum game. Bollenstreek is a tulip farming simulation that takes its subject matter more seriously than you’d expect from a game that runs on 48 kilobytes of RAM.

The Game

Bollenstreek plays out over a series of growing seasons. The player manages a small tulip farm near Lisse, starting with a modest plot and a selection of common bulb varieties: red Apeldoorn, yellow Golden Apeldoorn, and the classic red-and-white Kees Nelis.

Each season follows the real tulip growing cycle:

Autumn: Plant bulbs in your fields. Choose which varieties to grow and how much to plant. Soil preparation costs money.
Winter: Hope for cold weather. Tulips need a sustained cold period (koude-eisen) to flower properly. A mild winter — randomly determined — can ruin your crop.
Spring: Your tulips flower (or don’t). The game displays a simple but charming overhead view of your fields, with colored blocks representing different varieties in bloom.
Summer: Harvest and sell at auction.

The auction system is the game’s most distinctive feature. It simulates the Dutch auction clock used at Aalsmeer (now Royal FloraHolland), the world’s largest flower auction. In a Dutch auction, the price starts high and counts down on a clock face. Buyers must press a button at the moment they want to buy — too early and you overpay for your purchase capacity, too late and another buyer takes the lot.

In the game, you’re the seller, but you’re competing against AI-controlled farms that also bring stock to the auction. If everyone has a bumper crop of Apeldoorn, prices drop. If your exotic Semper Augustus (yes, it’s in the game — a nod to the 1637 tulip mania) is the only one at auction, you can command extraordinary prices.

Over multiple seasons, players can reinvest profits to buy more land, invest in greenhouse facilities (protecting against weather), or develop new varieties through a simplified breeding mechanic.

The Developer

Arie de Wit was studying horticulture at what was then the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden (now Leiden University) when he made Bollenstreek. Growing up in Sassenheim, right in the heart of the Bollenstreek, he’d spent childhood summers helping on a neighbor’s tulip farm.

“I knew how the bulb trade worked because I’d grown up around it,” De Wit told us. “The auction clock, the grading system, the varieties — it was all second nature to me. When I got my Spectrum, I wanted to turn that knowledge into a game.”

De Wit wrote Bollenstreek in Sinclair BASIC with time-critical routines (mainly the auction clock animation) in Z80 assembly. The weather model was based on actual Dutch climate data — he copied average temperatures and rainfall figures from a textbook in the university library.

“The hardest part was making the auction interesting,” De Wit said. “In real life, the clock takes seconds. In the game, I had to slow it down and add tension. I made the price drop in visible steps on a simulated clock face, with a beeping sound that got faster as the price fell. It was crude, but people told me it genuinely made them nervous.”

Distribution

De Wit sold Bollenstreek through the Spectrum Gebruikersclub (Spectrum User Club) newsletter and at user group meetings in the Leiden-Den Haag area. Copies were ƒ12.50 on cassette.

About 110 copies were sold. “Most buyers were from the Bollenstreek themselves,” De Wit noted. “People who actually worked in the flower trade thought it was hilarious. A few told me the auction model was surprisingly accurate.”

After the Game

De Wit completed his degree and went into — unsurprisingly — the Dutch flower trade. He spent his career in bulb export, eventually running his own company selling tulip bulbs to garden centers in the UK and Germany. He is still active in the trade today.

“I sometimes think about Bollenstreek when I see the real auction clock in action at Aalsmeer,” he said. “My 48K simulation wasn’t that far off, honestly.”

Preservation

A cassette dump of Bollenstreek was made in 2012 by a member of the Dutch Spectrum Users club who had kept his copy since the 1980s. It runs in any ZX Spectrum emulator. The tulip field display — colored blocks blooming in sequence — is more charming than it has any right to be. And the auction clock, even in its blocky ZX Spectrum form, still makes you hold your breath.

See also: Torenstad — another Dutch ZX Spectrum game from the 1980s, and Kabeljauw — a Dutch MSX simulation about North Sea fishing.