The Spectrum Covertape War Part 4: Game Over

As the commercial life of the ZX Spectrum slowly ebbed away, the three main Sinclair magazines got more and more desperate in their attempts to shift units. The tape was now paramount, although both Your Sinclair and Sinclair User kept commendably high page counts compared to Crash Magazine’s massively reduced written content. Tape boxes were always included now; no more cutting the inlay out and ruining your magazine, not that anybody cared much for the paper element anymore.

Crash’s descent began early as issue 90 (July 1991), with number 26 of their “Presents” tapes representing something of a nadir. One serviceable, but six-year old game (Hewson’s Dragontorc), one, again very old, but average game (Design Design’s 2112ad) and a slew of demos, budget games and homebrew efforts spread over 2 cassettes was a poor offering, despite superficial good value. The cover price of Crash had also now risen to £2.99 despite its anorexic content which meant you could get a pretty decent re-released budget game for the same amount.

Sinclair User fared somewhat better that year with issue 108 continuing the “Six of the Best” theme, and whilst the name remained inaccurate, it at least offered some gaming goodness in the form of the excellent shooter Bedlam from Go!, supported by Ocean’s Gutz and the elderly, but still playable Dynamite Dan from Mirrorsoft. Your Sinclair bumped up their efforts and nicked one of Ocean’s compilation titles to boot: The Magnificent Seven featured every month and mixed up demos with original and ex-commercial titles. Issue 64 is probably the best if only because it contains the wonderful Bumpy by Loricels, ably supported by Spindizzy and the Street Fighter-esque beat ‘em up Human Killing Machine.

The end was in sight, though, and Crash was the first to go with issue 98 of April 1992, Crash Presents Tape 34. Its final cassette perhaps summed up it’s half-baked attempt at covergames: Mind Games’ reasonable but little-known puzzler Pi-R Squared; Quicksilva’s pretty, but frustrating Glider Rider; a demo of an obscure budget game entitled Biff and the obligatory Poke Zone.

Sinclair User, after the 12 pack of issue 112 in December 1991, settled down to a mere eight programs for the majority of 1992. As many of these eight consisted of music demos, pokes, tape magazines and utilities, the title was a bit disingenuous, and the quality of games noticeably poorer. It was also painfully obvious how the page count had been drastically cut as well, with the last few issues coming in at under forty pages. Cheap text adventures and game designer efforts were common as budgets were slashed thanks to a fast-disappearing readership. Perhaps even more tragically, titles that had appeared on previous covertapes began to re-surface, a sure sign that the magazines were struggling to fill their strips of tape every month.

Your Sinclair braved it alone for a few more months, but in the end even they faced the inevitable, and the penultimate issue, number 92 from August 1993, contained a tape quite clearly aimed at a younger audience. A demo of Playdays by Alternative, a limp shoot ‘em up and CRL’s seven-year old graphic text adventure Bugsy completed the games, with a geography program and music demo thrown in to boost the total count. An article in the magazine detailing how to play Spectrum games on an Amiga and other superior formats just about summed up the state of affairs and it was a very sad end, not least to the magazines that gave all Speccy owners such entertainment over the years. Of course, thanks in no small part to websites such as World of Spectrum and the thousands of fans all over the world, we now know the computer lived on; but this scenario would have been impossible to visualise back in 1993.


The Spectrum magazine covertapes are often held up as all that was wrong in the Spectrum’s final few years; yet conversely, many a Spectrum gamers’ best memories come from the titles featured on them. Whether it be the bat-and-ball action of Batty, discovering old classics such as Chaos or Beach Head or the endless replaying of one-level demos of Ikari Warriors, Midnight Resistance and Robocop, at the time there was no internet therefore no on-line community spreading remakes, or demos and original games to download and sample. A cassette mounted on the cover of a magazine was the best way of trying a game for yourself before shelling out your pocket money or for getting cheap entertainment to go along with your monthly fix of Speccy news.

And for that, we should be thankful.