Well, anyway, let's profile Ireland (by which I mean all of it - the whole island). As you'll see in this type-in from David Perry!
My first thought goes to Tir Na Nog (and its sequel, well, prequel, Dun Durach), which have a strong Irish feel, but was actually written in the west midlands of the UK. Tir Na Nog is Irish for 'Land Of Youth', which is where the first game is set. Both games are certainly strongly rooted in Celtic mythology.
Again I bring up the UK but this leads onto an actual Irish outlet - from the ashes of Britain's Martech rose Emerald Software, mostly populated by people from Waterford Regional Technical College and University College Dublin. This was a development house rather than a publisher. For the Speccy they came up with The Deep (US Gold), Fallen Angel (Screen 7 - a kind of reincarnation of Martech); Moonwalker (US Gold), The Running Man (Grandslam) and Vigilante (US Gold). Damian Scattergood worked there.
There's another development house from Ireland. This one's quite jaw dropping because of its backstory. St Bride's School came up with a lot of adventures, mostly for CRL. Not actually a proper school as such, it was... well... something that could be described as a bizarre Victorian all-female cult that despised television and other facets of modern life, yet somehow got into writing computer games, and later had some murky connections to far-right politics. Yes, that's quite a rabbit hole to go down and it sounds far-fetched, but I'm not making up any of it! Their debut game, The Secret Of St Bride's released in 1985, was quite an 'autobiographical' release, covering its location in County Donegal. Check out that copyright date!
Attempts to work out who St Bride's actually were have been drenched in enigma!
Don Priestley has been long cited as an Ireland-based programmer, but the truth is he's a Brit who did almost all his work in the UK. He did move to Ireland for a short while, and that's probably where he made Trap Door, Through The Trap Door and Flunky.
Over in the north, Derry-based Mystic Software published a couple of text adventures (Future Tense and The Red Lion) in 1987.
Well, that's a rather brief sojourn to Ireland, and I've only come up with three games actually based in the country (although one of those is debatable).
Over to you lot for ZX Spectrum games with an Irish connection...
