The Spectrum Covertape War Part 1: The Road Race Begins

Meet The Mags

SINCLAIR USER was the longest running of the three main Spectrum magazines, starting in April 1982 and running for 134 issues. It was a more serious affair in its early days, with type-in listings and technical articles prevalent, although it focused mainly on gaming in its latter years. Despite merging with one of its rivals, it finally gave up the ghost in April 1993, which was nevertheless an incredible run for any magazine, let alone one dedicated to a single particular piece of technology.

YOUR SINCLAIR (left) started its life in controversy as it rose from the ashes of YOUR SPECTRUM, a considerably drier and more technically-minded magazine. The new format concentrated mainly on games and contained an off-beat, sometimes anarchic sense of humour that appealed to many. It was the youngest of the three, having started life in only January 1986, and outlasted the other two, finally folding in August 1993 – which is quite amazing considering how outclassed the Spectrum was by then, with Amiga’s and Atari ST’s all the rage and of course the Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo consoles the latest gaming must-haves.

CRASH was perhaps the most well known of the three, and its combination of humour as well as an unashamed dedication to games endeared it to a vast mass of Spectrum owners. It concentrated chiefly on reviews, previews and gameplay tips and boasted fantastic covers thanks to the very talented artist Oliver Frey. Despite its success, Crash had a sad demise: the last Newsfield issue was number 93 in October 1991; less than a year later, new owners Europress had flogged the title on to Emap who derogatorily merged it with their own Sinclair User (with little obvious internal change); fortunately this absurd creation didn’t last for long as the Crash logo got smaller and smaller until it eventually disappeared altogether after eight issues.

The Road Race Begins…

It was dated January 1986: the first issue of Your Sinclair (it had previously been known as Your Spectrum) and it held a cassette on it's front cover. Within this small piece of plastic and magnetic tape was a demo of the Firebird game Rasputin, an isometric 3D game that signified a very important beginning for Spectrum owners all over the UK. Sales of this issue were no doubt higher than normal, but the publishers might have put this down to the new format and name rather than the box and tape on the cover. As a result, the power of the covertape was not realised, and it was some time before another appeared.

The May 1987 issue of the same magazine was the next time a covertape was included, and the game that was offered marked another milestone, for this was no two-level demo; this was the real deal, a fully playable 100% complete game, albeit one that original publishers Ocean had deemed unsuitable for commercial release. And indeed, Road Race was perhaps not the greatest racing game, but crucially, it was free (or rather free-ish – the price of the magazine had been surreptitiously raised), and whetted everyone's appetite for more cheap gaming.

The very next month from Your Sinclair gave us already what many regarded as the pinnacle of covertape games. The Imagine arcade conversion of Arkanoid had been around for some time, resulting in several bandwagon-jumping clones. Your Sinclair managed to bag a generous exclusive from Elite and covertape the marvellous Batty for their loyal readers. The game was an instant hit and copies of the magazine flew off newsagent's shelves up and down the country; in fact, Batty was so good, it even received a subsequent commercial release as part of Elite's Hit-pak compilation as well as the inevitable budget appearance.

Your Sinclair labelled these games their “Smash Tapes” and they had set the bar for cover-mounted games, so it wasn't long before one of their rivals had something for it's readers as well. The Crash Sampler (issue 45, October 1987) offered up a seemingly generous seven game demos, but unfortunately not all of them were playable. The best of these were one-level snippets of Imagine's arcade conversion Athena and Elite's long awaited Ikari Warriors. As was already common, there was no box for the cassette to save costs, but an inlay was provided for you to cut out and insert into a spare plastic box that most resourceful Spectrum gamers were bound to have lying around.

Finally, Sinclair User eventually entered the fray with their Megatape One proudly attached to issue 72 (already boasting of "the best tape ever"!). It offered an exclusive game called Zarjas (by Binary Design no less), although this was merely an expanded version of a mini-game from Mastertronic's Zub, and not particularly groundbreaking. A demo of Vietnam war title 19: Boot Camp accompanied the shoot 'em up and was also fun.

This gentle trading of blows marked the beginning of a full-scale battle that would slowly come to signify the end of the road for the ZX Spectrum games market as well as the magazines themselves.

Part 2: Exclusives and Demos - will be posted on Thursday.