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Torenstad — A Teenage Coder's ZX Spectrum City Builder from 1986

In late 2023, a box of old ZX Spectrum cassettes turned up at a house clearance sale in Groningen. Most were commercial releases — Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, the usual suspects. But one unlabeled tape, with “TORENSTAD” written on it in ballpoint pen, turned out to be something remarkable: a previously undocumented Dutch-language city building game from 1986.

The Discovery

The tape was purchased by Geert Bakker, a retro computing collector based in Groningen, who bought the entire box for €15. When he loaded Torenstad on his ZX Spectrum 48K, he was surprised to find a fully playable city builder — entirely in Dutch — with a level of complexity that seemed ambitious for the platform.

“I was expecting a simple BASIC program, maybe a half-finished experiment,” Bakker told us. “Instead, I got a proper game with menus, a scrolling map, and an economic simulation. Someone put real work into this.”

Bakker posted screenshots on the Spectrum Computing forum, where the game generated immediate interest. No one in the ZX Spectrum preservation community had ever heard of Torenstad.

The Game

Torenstad (“Tower City”) drops the player into the role of a burgemeester (mayor) of a small Dutch town. Starting with a modest budget of 50,000 guilders, you must build housing, commercial zones, and infrastructure to grow your town into a thriving city.

The game uses a top-down view with a scrollable 32x32 tile map. Buildings are represented by simple but readable character graphics — houses are small squares with a triangle roof, factories have a chimney with animated “smoke” (a flickering character), and the gemeentehuis (town hall) occupies a prominent 2x2 tile space in the center.

What makes Torenstad interesting is its simulation model. The game tracks several variables:

  • Bevolking (Population) — grows based on available housing and employment
  • Tevredenheid (Satisfaction) — affected by the balance of housing, parks, and industry
  • Werkgelegenheid (Employment) — determined by commercial and industrial buildings
  • Financiën (Finances) — tax income minus maintenance costs

If satisfaction drops too low, residents leave. If employment can’t keep up with population, satisfaction drops. The feedback loops create genuinely interesting strategic decisions, especially given that money is always tight.

The game also features a rudimentary disaster system. Every few in-game years, a random event occurs — a flood (this is the Netherlands, after all), a factory fire, or a recession that cuts tax revenue in half. These events force the player to maintain financial reserves rather than spending everything on expansion.

The Developer

Through the Spectrum Computing forum community, Bakker was able to track down the original developer: Harmen Veldstra, who was 16 years old when he made Torenstad in 1986. Veldstra, now a civil engineer living in Leeuwarden, was astonished to learn that his childhood creation had survived.

“I wrote it over the summer holiday in 1986,” Veldstra said. “I was obsessed with SimCity — well, not SimCity exactly, because that came out later. I’d read about city simulation games in a British computer magazine and wanted to make my own version. In Dutch, because my English wasn’t good enough to do the menus in English.”

Veldstra wrote the game in a mix of BASIC and Z80 machine code. The map scrolling routine and the simulation engine were in assembly for performance, while the menu system and text display were in BASIC. He estimated the total development time at about three months.

He never distributed the game beyond showing it to a few school friends. The cassette that Bakker found was likely the only copy ever made — Veldstra’s own tape had been thrown away decades ago when his parents cleared out his childhood bedroom.

Significance

Torenstad is notable for several reasons. It appears to be one of the earliest Dutch-language video games — most Dutch developers of the era wrote their games in English for wider distribution. It also predates SimCity (1989) by three years, though Veldstra is quick to point out that city-building games existed before his version, citing Utopia (1982) for the Intellivision as an influence he learned about later.

The game has been preserved as a TAP file and can be played in any ZX Spectrum emulator. The Dutch text adds a layer of charm — seeing terms like “BELASTINGINKOMSTEN” (tax revenue) and “BOUWVERGUNNING” (building permit) in a ZX Spectrum game is delightfully incongruous.

For the ZX Spectrum preservation community, Torenstad is exactly the kind of find that makes the hobby worthwhile: an unknown game by an unknown developer, sitting in a box for nearly 40 years, that turns out to be genuinely interesting and historically significant.

Bakker has donated the original cassette to the HomeComputerMuseum in Helmond, where it joins their growing collection of Dutch-made software.