The Spectrum Covertape War Part 2: Exclusives, Demos & Compilations

Exclusives and Demos

Demos and magazine-exclusive games dominated the early exchanges in the covertape war. Crash continued its Sneak Preview tapes, which all contained tasters of generally high-quality games. Issue 54 had playable snippets of Incentive’s latest Freescape game, The Dark Side, whilst issue 58 boasted a whole level’s worth of fun from Ocean’s superb movie license Robocop.
Sinclair User mixed exclusive games, sometimes based around the SU mascot, a rather mean-looking teddy bear, in titles such as Go, Bear, Go (a fun Pengo clone) and Bear a Grudge (a Space Harrier style effort containing digitised pics of the SU staff to shoot at) with demos of a somewhat lesser quality to Crash. Trendsetters Your Sinclair continued their one game a month policy with some original games of mixed quality: Moley Christmas, Blind Panic and The People from Sirius were all reasonable efforts but Dusko Dimitrevic’s Play for Your Life - a poorly implemented attempt at a 3-D future sports game - was disappointing, especially after its over-hyped addictive qualities.

Eventually however, the previously commercial games began to slip out. First Crash dipped its toes in the water with Sophistry, an oblique but polished maze game; Your Sinclair had Dinamic’s Dustin on the cover of issue 34 and Sinclair User offered a “SU Edition” of Dan Dare 2: The Mekon’s Revenge, before eventually going the whole hog and putting Hewson’s Sci-Fi adventure Astroclone on Megatape 6, issue 77.

The conflict was in full swing now and the respective publishers hounded software houses for games to put on their tapes. After time, someone realised quantity was perhaps more important than quality, and so began the next phase in the war.

Compilation Chaos

Issue 65 of Crash from June ’89 was one of the first compilation-style covertapes. Under a title of “The Shape of Thrills to Come”, the editorial boasted of a policy of “GOOD games, where you don’t feel cheated after loading.” They also stuck the knife into their competitors, claiming their rivals’ tapes were full of “dull tripe” and this incendiary claim added fuel to the brewing conflict. The cassette contained four full games, a demo and the obligatory pokes that could be loaded in to the Speccy, saving all that laborious typing. Crucially, Crash’s claim was accurate, at least initially: the games were of good quality thanks to the bearded-wonder Pete Cooke’s superb Micronaut 1, followed by a Special Crash Edition of Codemasters’ popular Dizzy, fun arcade classic Moon Cresta and more platform action in the form of Wanted: Monty Mole. The demo was of the Thalamus shooter Sanxion.

Unfortunately for actual readers of the magazine, this issue marked the beginning of the “pamphlet” era, which, with a mere 36 pages (including advertisements) meant not-a-lot for you to read. Crash had been slimming down steadily from its one-thirty page average the year before, and now the focus had quite clearly shifted to the cassette on the front cover.

The Spanish Connection: Microhobby Magazine
Microhobby was a Spanish magazine that began in November 1984 and finally ceased publication at the end of 1992. Early issues of the magazine were given away with the Microhobby Semanal cassette, but the games on this cassette were always reader type-ins, and often nowhere near commercial standard.

Eventually the semanal cassette ceased publication but the magazine was popular enough to continue, and in time started its own covertapes. These were more in line with the UK Magazines, including demos, previously released commercial titles and reader games.

The standard of the Microhobby games was consistently good: classics such as Green Beret, The Great Escape, Ghostbusters, Hyper Sports, Ping Pong, Spy Hunter, Mikie and Xenon all saw action on its cover as well as the unsurprising games from Dinamic and other Spanish developers - of which the renowned La Abadia Del Crimen was a particular highlight. This was in addition to some fantastic exclusive games such as Zhak, Yucan, Ares and Frankie, all playable and colourful platformers.

But best of all, MicroHobby managed to bag some Ultimate games to put on their cassette. The classics Sabre Wulf, Knight Lore and Gunfright all appeared on their tapes in the early nineties, amazingly good bargains for any gamer. (thanks to Ivanzx)

Saturday: More compilation chaos and the beginning of the end.