CRASH History

- Introduction

1984

- Issue 1
- Issue 2
- Issue 3
- Issue 4
- Issue 5
- Issue 6
- Issue 7
- Issue 8
- Issue 9
- Issue 10
- Issue 11
- Issue 12

DADDY, WHERE WERE YOU WHEN

STARTED?

The CRASH & Spectrum Software History

A four-part series

On the facing page starts the first in a series of four 24-page pull-out supplements, which will build into a history of Spectrum software over the past four years.

Each month’s supplement consists of 12 CRASH covers, presented as they were originally printed (or as nearly as we can recreate one or two of the earlier ones), backed by a short article written by Lloyd Mangram, detailing events in the month of the cover.

He talks about the games reviewed, the software houses involved and reactions to the software, all set against a background of how CRASH happened. Intimate stories, many never before revealed, illustrate the problems besetting the small team which launched CRASH and explan how it grew to be the magazine it is today.

It may seem self-indulgent publishing our own history after only four years, but these have been a frenzied 1,460 days — and it isn’t only our own history, but also that of the Spectrum computer and the enormous number of people who because of their interest, faith and imagination made it the most successful of machines.

This is a retrospective, not a funeral, a celebration and not a wake. The four years’ worth of covers are concluded in the Christmas Special, Issue 48.

And now over to Lloyd...

February 1984, Issue No. 1

Released on January 13th

The ‘Chairman’, as he’s now known, hangs in the Newsfield boardroom. This first cover of CRASH was not based on any particular game, but took its inspiration from the chrome-teethed, machine-oil-dripping alien from the film Alien. It’s really a simple gag — an alien playing Space Invaders, the screen reflected in his eyes. The object was to provide a striking and ferocious image to leap off the news shelves, and to declare to the world that CRASH was very different to existing computer magazines with their reliance on photographed hardware.

Work started on the first issue of CRASH well before Christmas 1983. The editorial team, which was to remain unchanged for three months, consisted of Roger Kean, Oliver Frey, Lloyd Mangram and Matthew Uffindell, a 17-year-old who had been buying software from Crash Micro Games Action mail order. As he lived nearby, he popped in to purchase games and somehow never quite left. Many of CRASH’s early reviewers were recruited in this fashion. Matthew now works in Newsfield’s art department as a senior film planner — one of the people who put the images on film, ready for the printers.

At the 1983 PCW Show, held at the Barbican that year, Roger Kean and CRASH financial director Franco Frey roved around the stands trying to convince software houses that a really new magazine was about to arrive. Interest was generally luke warm, but nevertheless, by mid-December when the issue had to be ready, 27 pages of advertising had been sold — enough to provide CRASH with the funds to print!

The original concept behind CRASH had been to provide a low-key, low-cost magazine, mostly in monochrome, to attract the numerous software houses who couldn’t afford the advertising rates of the existing glossies, so several of the first issues were printed on cheap newsprint with a heavier colour section wrapped around. As it turned out, most advertisers opted for colour advertisements and so gradually CRASH became as glossy (and as expensive to advertise in) as the rest. It was while Roger was driving to Milton Keynes to watch the first colour coming off the press that he was stopped by the police for speeding — at 3.30 in the morning. On explaining to the officers that he was rushing to a birth, he was let off with a caution. He’s never broken a speed limit since...

Issue One had lots to offer, including an amazing 60 reviews, the first time ever so much space had been devoted to Spectrum games. Among them were notables like Zaxxan from Starzone, a bunch of youngsters who later got into a legal wrangle with US Gold when the official version of Zaxxon was released, Bugaboo (The Flea) from Quicksilva, which got 92% and would have been a Smash had there been Smashes in those days, and of course the Game of the Month, Micromega’s 3-D Deathchase — still a great thrill to play. Programming innovations were still largely a thing of the future, but Sandy White’s Ant Attack (Quicksilva) raised some eyebrows, although I remember Matthew and I feeling that it lacked something in the gameplay.

Then there was the fabled Living Guide, which was to run for the first four issues before it became too unwieldy to cope with. It listed every game you could lay your hands on under classified headings like ‘Platformers’, ‘Maze Games’ and so on. Matthew and another young reviewer, Chris Passey, provided a comparison of Invader/Galaxian games in Run It Again, Franco reviewed and compared joystick interfaces, we launched the first ever readers’ hotline chart, and offered readers the chance to become a CRASH reviewer in a competition. Interestingly, one of its runners-up was a young man by the name of John Minson, but more of him much later ...

We also profiled Rabbit Software, Blaby Games and Carnell, who were finishing their much-heralded Wrath of Magra. And to round off, I did my first ever look back at the software year. The weakest spot in that first CRASH (and for several issues) was the lack of a proper adventure reviewer. Buried deep in the Living Guide were mini reviews of Star Trek and Velnor’s Lair, two games from a tiny outfit called Neptune, operated by one Derek Brewster ...

March 1984, Issue No. 2

Released on February 16th

Coming from a film-making background, Oliver Frey loves powerful images and classic Thirties and Forties monochrome movies, interests never better reflected than in the second CRASH cover. It celebrated the proliferation of Donkey Kong clones on the Spectrum at the time, and related it to the Run It Again article in the issue comparing Mario’s many attempts to rescue his girl from the overgrown ape’s clutches. Note Kong’s cavalier treatment of the Spectrum itself — Oliver is to use the computer repeatedly in cover illustrations as a player in the drama, quite revolutionary in 1984.

It was a bit of a conceit to state on the cover ‘Over 400 Games Reviewed’ (345 were in the Guide), but the gung-ho exclamation ideally indicates the small CRASH team’s euphoria at public reaction to Issue One — we wanted everyone to know that we were the biggest and the best!

Attitudes within the trade were equally invigorating; several specialist shops acclaimed CRASH as the long-awaited Spectrum Bible. Even Computer & Video Games sent us a congratulations card, but I fear they saw us as no competition, merely a local fanzine to be encouraged; few people at the time realised that as many as 50,000 copies of Issue One sold nationally. It was a heady figure and one not to be repeated for quite some time.

February’s weather, however, brought CRASH down to earth. The schedule ran late. Oliver worked for 30 hours nonstop to complete Terminal Man, while John Edwards, newly-recruited advertisement manager, stood anxiously by, waiting to take the layout boards down to the London printer who wanted to start at 9.30am. John had to catch the 6am train from Birmingham New Street. At 4am on a freezing winter morning Oliver finished, but Roger Kean (who was still working on the Living Guide) did not.

At 5am, the boards still four pages incomplete, Roger drove John the 40 miles to Birmingham through a heavy snow storm. After ten minutes they were stuck on a steep hill outside Ludlow. Turning back to try another route, they came across a skidded lorry with its nose in a ditch. The unfortunate driver turned out to be a local news trade wholesaler, delivering magazines to Ludlow. Seeing the CRASH boards, as they gave him a lift back into town, the driver exclaimed excitedly. He owned a Spectrum and had loved the first issue. So there they were, John frustrated, Roger struggling with the terrible conditions, and a mad lorry driver who wanted nothing more than to talk about high scores on Lunar Jetman!

They got through in the end, the printer did the job in time, and Issue Two did arrive. To many people’s horror, there were five Games Of The Month (‘confusing to have so many,’ wrote one reader), and in their very different ways they indicated that Spectrum games were improving rapidly and almost beyond belief. Top was Ultimate’s classic Atic Atac, but Android 2 showed Costa Panayi flexing his muscles for Vortex with the best 3-D effects yet seen. Like the first two, Krakatoa (Abbex) offered large graphics which were a novelty in early 84, combined with complex gameplay and a wicked sense of humour (also a rare commodity). Scuba Dive (Durell) also boasted large and effectively fishy graphics with interestingly different game objectives, while Microsphere’s Wheelie was to prove one of the most addictive games of the year.

We also ran our first ‘real’ competition, for Fantasy, promoting Doomsday Castle. It was so successful that it set the pattern for an increasing number of competitions thereafter.

Because of their oddly unergonomic arrangement, games only offering the cursors for control lost percentage points badly in those days! But we praised small-company inventiveness in an article examining some joysticks which were actually attached to the Spectrum to physically manipulate the cursed cursors. Franco had a good listen to Currah’s ahead-of-its-time speech unit, and Hewson’s Steve Turner was interviewed as well as the four lads from Starzone.

I also had quite a few letters to print and answer — among them was a complaint that at five pounds, the price of software was far too high. Things never change...

April 1984, Issue No. 3

Released on March 22nd

This cover first demonstrated Oliver Frey’s ability to combine several disparate elements into one picture. It related to an article on Melbourne House and Australian Philip Mitchell, who programmed The Hobbit and was working on the very delayed Sherlock Holmes. Melbourne’s H.U.R.G. (High Level User-Friendly Real Time Games Designer) had nothing to do with Philip, but was reviewed in the issue, so Oliver melded the two ideas by having Sherlock peer through his magnifying glass in which is reflected (backwards) a clue to H.U.R.G.

With monthly pressures getting tough, we all welcomed the arrival in Ludlow of David Western, a one-time colleague of Roger Kean. David lent a valued hand to the artwork layout, allowing Roger to concentrate more on the writing and planning. The stress is plainly seen in the cover, which had no issue number, and on the contents page, where Roger happily but, erroneously stated it was Issue Four! David, now Newsfield’s Production Controller, was, (and still is) an excellent photographer, and the marked improvement in our screen shots was noted.

Taking pictures from a monitor is no simple matter, and all CRASH had at the time was a rented 14-inch telly! I can remember getting in the engineer to look at it because all the colour was being pulled into one corner leaving the rest black-and-white. The bemused man took it away and brought another, shaking his head, saying only a strong magnet could produce such an effect. I refrained from telling him that David had been waving his very powerful light meter over the screen — it contained a massive magnetic field!

Further improvements in picture quality had to wait until the wonderful Microvitec Cub monitor arrived for review, but with David’s ministrations, people everywhere began praising our colour screen shots, at least (they appear so fuzzy now).

CRASH was, unwittingly, about to unleash a media war. We regarded ourselves a specialist enthusiasts, and so news of any program in progress excited us, and we wanted to convey that feeling to the readers. We were also very chatty with software houses, so it came as no surprise that we were easily able to get very advanced screen shots of Matthew Smith’s unfinished Jet Set Willy, possibly the most eagerly awaited game of all time. As a result, CRASH was the first to print pictures, despite plenty of interest in the project from other magazines.

On top of that, through close and friendly relations with Micromega, we were also the first to spot the potential of Code Name Mat by Derek Brewster. When it was first shown to us, it had no name, and the joke became current that Mat referred to Matthew Uffindell, the CRASH reviewer who was the first player in the country to get his hands on it — and who knows, it may be true ...

All this frenzied previewing activity put CRASH markedly ahead of the other magazines at the time, but they soon started fighting back and the scrabble for advance information was on in earnest. The trick, however, was not only to be first with words and pictures, but also to spot the real winners. We weren’t always right ...

Issue Three showed another improvement — the paper. The printer was changed and CRASH went fully glossy. Games Of The Month were given a logo on the review page instead of being bunched up at the start, the first of these being Blue Thunder (Richard Wilcox, soon to be absorbed by his family into Elite Systems), Cavern Fighter from Bug-Byte, and Night Gunner by Digital Integration. Although Matthew, Roger and I liked Blue Thunder, there was an adverse reaction from some readers, but everyone seemed agreed that the graphically uninspiring Cavern Fighter was a damned good ‘Scramble’ game.

Hardware novelty object was Stack’s Light Rifle, which caused battles between Matthew and Chris Passey to use it. It was fun but hardly earthshatteringly good, and it’s amusing now to see the games consoles bringing the idea back — with somewhat more accurate results.

Oh, and we did the first ever CRASHtionnaire to find out how well readers thought the magazine was doing.

May 1984, Issue No. 4

Released on April 26th

Still relying principally on the dynamics of a large, powerful face for a cover image, Oliver turned his attention to the adventure market. He’d done many illustrations for books dealing with mystery and horror subjects, and since so many adventures featured evil wizards and sorcerers, the character on this cover sprang easily enough to mind. Discussion, however, revealed that Oliver was unhappy with the finished picture because it didn’t seem to have any computer relevance. Roger suggested adding the ‘what now’ cursor to the eye and the visual gag was complete.

Reflecting the cover, and probably because he felt guilty at not covering adventure games as much as he should have done, Roger Kean spent many hours writing an adventure with Gilsoft’s new machine code utility, The Quill. As I can testify, the result was quite unpublishable, but the time wasn’t wasted because he managed to write a fulsome article on the use of The Quill, as well as reviewing several Gilsoft Quilled adventures.

This was a time when young hopeful programmers expected to get their games accepted for publishing for the simple reason that they had written them. To some professional programmers The Quill seemed a frightening idea, a means of making adventure-writing simple, so anyone could do it and take away their living. But The Quill was a tool, not a source of inspiration, and it proved that there can never be any substitute for imagination.

Still with adventures, Issue Four saw the modest beginning of Derek Brewster’s Adventure Trail. For some weeks, Derek had been persuading Roger that CRASH desperately needed someone who understood the genre to write a proper column. Politically, appointing Derek to the chair was a good move, for he had a pedigree both with adventure and arcade games (his Code Name Mat was one of the CRASH Smashes, which made their first appearance in this issue too). There were a lot of points to be earned for the still-struggling magazine by having notable like Derek write for it — and it was a nice one in the eye for the more established titles!

In addition to Code Name Mat, with its complexity of 3-D space gameplay, others in the new Smash breed included two from Software Projects, Jet Set Willy (about to cause havoc by being both immensely exciting to play and containing the famous ‘Attic Bug’ that stopped you from completing the game!) and the appealing but difficult Tribble Trouble. Steve Turner finally got his reward for long service with a Smash for Hewson’s 3-D Lunattack, and for further pushing forward the barriers of his major interest, realistic-perspective games.

It was also a time when large concerns not normally involved in computer games tried testing the water. One of the biggest, Thorn EMI, launched some games through its label, Creative Sparks, and Orc Attack became a Smash, not so much for its graphics, which were amusing, but for its fiendishly difficult gameplay. Creative Sparks was to have a roller-coaster existence, finally ending up as Creative Sparks Distribution, which recently went into receivership.

But one small, as yet unknown, software house made its first appearance in CRASH month with a game we really liked, one largely ignored by other magazines. It was Ad Astra and the programmers had thought, perhaps, of calling themselves Gargoyle Games ...

This was the issue where we revealed the CRASH Reviewers competition results. The blurb noted that the winner had won by a faint margin. One of the runners-up was a certain John Minson. To think, had the margin been a touch fainter he could have been writing for CRASH a fraction of the exorbitant fee he now commands! Well, we all make mistakes. Looking at his entry, there’s little to suggest that this man will one day turn into a voracious ligger of vituperative prose and metamorphose into the Hunter S Minson we all know and ...

May’s Living Guide dealt with board games, simulations, strategies and adventures. At the end it said ‘Next Month: Arcade Games’, but the Guide had become too huge to fit in, and too much effort for the overworked team — it was destined never to return.

June 1984, Issue No. 5

Released on May 24th

Having had his fill of page-compressed faces of alien monsters, giant apes, famous detectives and evil warlocks, Oliver broke out with this space action cover. No particular game was in mind apart from the Defender / Scramble concept, but the idea for a canyon constructed of game cassettes was Roger Kean’s. It was a typical situation in the early days for Oliver to think up an idea, for Roger, David or Matthew to rework it as a visual gag, which Oliver would then implement so interestingly. And this picture long remained a favourite with readers.

The cover slogan, The ONE BIG Spectrum Software MAG, wasn’t merely bombast, it was actually an aggressive parody of Big K’s logo. Big K was another example of a large corporation (IPC) testing the software waters, in this case with a magazine, but though it was a multiuser title, Big K’s prelaunch blurb strode across preserves we at CRASH regarded as peculiarly our own at the time, namely being irreverent about software (though of course we also thought we were the only really serious ones — that’s called having your cake and eating it).

When I look at the contents page of Issue Five, the thing that strikes me now is that of all the sections competitions was actually the biggest — seven DIYs — proving the point that we recognised their popularity. But one of those competitions stands out markedly, the Atic Atac map. Game maps were unheard of in publications in 1984 — it simply hadn’t occurred to anyone that mapping a game was relevant, but there was no doubt that some games being produced were actually made up from maps in the programmers’ minds. Atic Atac was one such, and certainly one where having a map before you helped playing it. There was also the fear that printing a game map might upset the software house, for games stayed upon the shop shelves far longer then than they do today. It was definitely a feather in the CRASH cap to sign a competition deal with Ultimate, for the magically successful software house was traditionally uncommunicative with both public and press. Later, C&VG editor Tim Metcalf even complained good-naturedly to Roger Kean about the secret CRASH pipeline to Ultimate affection.

Maps were the latest thing; Issue Five saw the inaugural edition of the Playing Tips. My desk was expanded and I began regurgitating the erudite scribblings of readers who added helpful hints to their letters. Among those had been primitive Atic Atac maps, and one or two reasonable versions of Jet Set Willy’s terrifying mansion. The best, by Kenneth Kyle from Notts, was avidly pored over by Roger Kean (who got A level geography at school). He spent an entire weekend checking it out against the game, using a handy infinite lives cheat supplied by an embryonic hacker, and drawing up his own map which then appeared in the issue, thanking Kenneth for his inspiring version.

It started a trend; from this point on CRASH would have to have maps whenever possible, and before long every other computer mag dealing with games would follow suit. Otherwise the Playing Tips seem pretty tame now, along the, ‘from levels 17-24 of Chuckie Egg, both the robot hens and the yellow hen are after you. This increases the excitement and makes it much harder’ line. Thrilling.

This June issue was the real launch of Beyond, a powerful new software house put together by EMAP, publishers of C&VG and Sinclair User. Beyond’s try-out game, Space Station Zebra, had proved a dud, but Psytron was a Smash, largely because of the complex, interlinked game elements and its use of crosshatched graphics. The technique wasn’t exactly new, but this was the first time monochromatic line drawings had been used so extensively on a plain-coloured background, providing a tremendously detailed effect.

Meanwhile, Derek’s new Adventure Trail had also found a Smash in Hewson’s Fantasia Diamond. But at Psytron’s release, Beyond hinted that a revolutionary new adventure game, Lords Of Midnight, was almost ready ...

July 1984, Issue No. 6

Released on June 28th

This cover is unique, for to date it is the only one that is actually a photograph, albeit one of Oliver’s artwork. Relating to an article about 3-D games, the picture’s theme was taken from the newly released film Raiders Of The Lost Ark. ‘Indie’ is seen threatening a statue bearing a Spectrum, ravaged to form the characters 3D. The foreground and background were also painted artwork, but when the three layers were set up one behind the other rather like a cardboard stage set, the soft focus created a three-dimensional effect.

CRASH was rapidly expanding, both in scope and in the people who worked for it, at least on a casual basis. As Kean, Frey and Western fiddled around in the ‘studio’ (in reality Roger’s bedroom) setting up the various bits and pieces for the cover shot and getting the lighting and focus just right, downstairs another mail-order-buying youngster tried his hand at writing a test review (of Rabbit’s dreadful Deathstar, if my memory serves). He was 13-year-old Robin Candy, who, to his eternal embarrassment, appeared in a photograph sitting cross-legged on a Spectrum wearing a CRASH T-shirt as part of the Hotline spread.

Roger reckoned the test was satisfactory, and Robin joined the reviewing team along with Matthew Uffindell, Chris Passey and one or two other Ludlow locals.

Three other newcomers made their first appearance, Signpost in the Adventure Trail, Ultimate’s enduring Lunar Jetman comic strip drawn by John Richardson, and at the end of the Playing Tips, my Hall Of Slime, which lasted up until recently when I thought it had finally had its day. Nearly every other magazine ran high-score tables for readers, usually called Hall Of Fame or Roll Of Honour. When asked to do the same in CRASH I thought it would be boring to repeat the formula, and since none of the scores printed elsewhere seemed to be checked out for truthfulness (and how can you all too often?), and the whole high-scoring ethos seemed reminiscent of ‘creeping’ at school, I opted for the Hall Of Slime — a special home for high-scoring creepie-crawlies. It worked a treat!

The centre spread saw our first ever colour map, part one of the Atic Atac plan, done with the help of competition entries. But the amazing feature of this issue was the mammoth article Roger prepared on 3-D games to date. 14 pages long, it examined the nature of 3-D perspective and then showed how each form had been implemented on the Spectrum through some 60 games. Once again, in many respects it was a ‘first’; no other entertainment computer magazine had ever attempted such an exhaustive, or long, feature before. And it went against the traditionalist grain — publications aimed at a teenage market were supposed to present short, snappy articles in recognition of the short attention span of young people. It was an outmoded concept CRASH threw away, we all believed our readers capable of reading long, detailed and intelligent pieces (even when we were often forced to listen to some surprisingly fluent obscenities on the Hotline answering machine!).

Despite the onset of the summer months, software was holding up well. Five games were Smashed, the oddly-named Worse Things Happen At Sea from Silversoft, which was maddeningly addictive and funny, Bug Byte’s Antics, the very playable high-scoring game Moon Alert from Ocean, an adventure Smash in Level 9’s Snowball — first of the famous trilogy — and the dubiously-acclaimed Sabre Wulf from Ultimate. There’s no doubt it should have been a Smash — it’s just that it arrived so late in the month we hardly had time to play it enough, and copped out by not rating it at all!

Up until this moment, CRASH had been produced from a house, really from just two small rooms, but the company’s finances had improved sufficiently to afford proper offices. As Issue Six came towards completion, Newsfield leased three floors of a building in Ludlow. We were all looking forward to being able to stretch out a bit, to be able to write and do the artwork in less cramped quarters.

August 1984, Issue No. 7

Released on July 26th

Right from the start Oliver had been illustrating CRASH with a mixture of action-packed comic-strip pictures and gentler, more humorous cartoons of variously-shaped alien beings. The latter became very popular with readers, who dubbed them ‘Oli-bugs’. They can still be seen at the top of the editorial page today. To mark the holiday season, Oliver gave dynamic game themes a rest — and the bugs a cover. A typical CRASH reader relaxes with friends on the sands of some far off planet, complete with all the luggage he needs — a monitor, joystick and his Spectrum.

During July, as the August issue was being written, Newsfield moved into its new premises in King Street — in spirit if not in fact. Hold ups over the lease meant that we were still crammed like sprats in a pickling jar in Roger’s house where we had started out.

Space wasn’t the only concern, the need for more professional equipment to produce the magazine’s black-and-white pictures had led to the procurement of a large, computer-operated process camera. It was important to have it, and it had been thought that there would be space to put it. The machine arrived in July with no home, but the directors took the risk of installing it in the new offices hoping that the lease problems would be sorted out quickly. Fortunately they were, although not in time for this edition. The camera went on the third floor and weighed a ton; it would have been awful to have had to carry it all the way down again!

Out in the wide world, a terrible event had taken place: the great British software hope, Imagine, had collapsed owing fortunes, including several thousand pounds of advertising revenue to CRASH. At the time, it seemed to be the most visible tip of an iceberg of financial strains for the software industry, and directly led to the notion of the summer software Slump, a concept that’s stayed with us ever since.

And yet this issue provided some excellent games. The three arcade Smashes were from Micro-something-or-others. There was Micromega’s marvellous bike road-racer, Full Throttle, Micromania’s Kosmic Kanga and Mikro-Gen’s Automania. Of the last, the review kicked off saying ‘Meet a new hero ... Wally Week is destined for big things...’ It wasn’t a psychic prediction but a reference to the pay rise he hoped to get from working hard in a car factory. Now, it’s a matter of history that Mr Week was indeed destined to become very big. The other biggie was Beyond’s Lords Of Midnight, which had finally arrived and sent Derek into paroxysms of delight. It set ‘new high standards in Spectrum software,’ he declared.

Among those that just missed being a Smash were Ocean’s Cavelon, another Panayi 3-D game from Vortex, TLL and 3-D Tank Duel, this last from a new software house called Realtime, now developers of many Spectrum games for large companies. One of the three programmers, Andrew Onions, was originally from Ludlow. His parents lived five doors away from Roger Kean (incidentally, the house is now rented by Richard Eddy and some others from Newsfield). Everyone loved Tank Duel, the best-ever implementation of that old arcade original, Battlezone. But we were also aware that the review could be called biased if the Ludlow connection became recognised, so Matthew Uffindell and Chris Passey were kept in the dark as to who Andrew Onions was!

Advertising was becoming increasingly more professional, better images, better designs and more impact. Along with the improvement, however, came an additional helping of hype — classier boasting doesn’t necessarily mean a classier product. The more pre-release exposure a game received, the harder it could fall — companies too. One such game, well advertised and eagerly awaited, was also one of the earliest ‘big’ licences, CRL’s War Of The Worlds. Based on HG Wells’s famous novel and with a helping hand from Jeff Wayne’s equally famous music, the game proved only too well that a good idea and loads of hype aren’t set for success unless there’s also good game design and a decent program in there somewhere. Soon enough, the established companies would be able to employ the talents of individuals and teams, but in 1984 the best of those people were struggling to make their names as independent outfits, like Realtime.

September 1984, Issue No. 8

Released on August 30th

Again we have a summery cover to suit the season, and one that isn’t related to any game. This is a splendid example of the Spectrum device being used in a surreal manner to create effect. The distributor voiced a worry that readers wouldn’t be able to tell from the painting that it was a computer magazine. But one glimpse of that P-quotes-PRINT key was like a neon sign to any rubber-keyed Spectrum owner — and they were all rubber keys then. In order not to distract from the picture, the cover lines were kept, for CRASH, to a modest minimum.

The King Street offices are situated on three floors above a Victoria Wine shop in the very centre of Ludlow. In August, when CRASH moved in, only the top two floors were used, and they looked empty enough when we were all installed! The first floor was occupied by a subtenant who astonishingly enough was also in the computer business, a programmer of educational software.

Reception, mail order, subscriptions and administration went on the second floor, run by Franco Frey and Denise Roberts. Denise had joined Newsfield only a month or two after Matthew, to take over his mail order responsibilities when he was moved across to do CRASH reviews back in December 83.

Of the four rooms on the top floor, one became an art room for layout and one a writing room with two desks and typewriters, one held the process cameras and the other was used for photographing screens and as a photographic darkroom. It was great luxury to have all that breathing room, and at last a proper set up existed for receiving visits from software houses. Our first two such were notable. Graham Stafford and Simon Brattel of Crystal Computing came to tell the world that they were henceforth to be known as Design Design, and to give the reviewers a preview of Dark Star, just about the fastest 3-D vector graphics game ever written. And Gargoyle Games, in the form of Greg Follis, Ted Heathcote and Roy Carter, nipped over from Dudley to show us a game in a revolutionary new style for which Gargoyle was to become celebrated. It was Tir Na Nòg.

We were doing well for previews, for a day later Andrew Hewson appeared bearing gifts in the form of Steve Turner’s latest game, The Legend Of Avalon. This graphical adventure marked a distinct change of pace and 3-D style for Steve, and even in an unfinished form it looked very exciting. These early previews made CRASH’s manifesto of being first with new games, new software houses and innovations a reality. The ‘exclusives’ war was beginning to hot up, but we felt well satisfied with August!

When not hard at work looking after the business end of CRASH or reviewing utilities, Franco Frey wore his other hat as an engineer. For some months he’d been developing a hardware programmable interface for the Spectrum, and suddenly it was ready to market. We had tried out several prototypes in the office, and they made setting up joysticks much easier. It was the Frel Comcon, which was to become a huge success. Our preview was a rather easy scoop to make!

Hot games were more in the news than the reviews, although Creative Sparks’s Black Hawk was Smashed for its addictivity (certainly not its graphics whatever the ratings said), and of course there was the state-of-the-art sports simulation from Psion, Match Point. Derek provided the third: Adventure International’s The Hulk with its pretty graphics.

Legend provided us with hype when they announced The Great Space Race. The campaign relied heavily on the reputation of their Valhalla, although many suggested that Legend was busily recreating an aura of success around the earlier game greater than it really deserved in order to justify claims for The Great Space Race. ‘A spectacular futuristic romp ...’ said our News page hopefully, but there was to be a five-month wait to find out whether or not the hype would justify the hope.

October 1984, Issue No. 9

Released on September 27th

Oliver’s Ziggy cover was amongst the most popular he produced. It was really the first CRASH cover definitely promoting a specific game, Fantasy’s Backpacker’s Guide To The Universe. Here was an opportunity to use his imagination to bring to life objects, characters and weird aliens involved in a game that no-one had yet seen, all from written details offered in the prerelease description. The result is a powerful picture which, ironically, probably informed more readers of what hero Ziggy was like than anything Fantasy themselves put out.

By its ninth edition, the effect CRASH was beginning to have on the software industry was, in turn, being reapplied to its staff. Roger Kean had already been horrified a couple of months earlier at Micromania’s concern when they were informed by the most powerful software distributor of the time that unless a game achieved better than 65% in CRASH it wouldn’t be accepted for distribution. Now, proof sheets of CRASH reviews were being requested by retail chains to see whether a game was worthy of shelf space.

It put pressure on the reviewing team — Matthew, Chris Passey and Robin Candy — because software houses wanted to present unfinished games to discover what the reviewers would like to see improved, so that the game had a chance of becoming a CRASH Smash. Some may have considered that a visit with the personal touch would influence the team by putting it on the spot when it came to making an impartial judgement. If so, as many were to be disappointed by Matthew’s outspoken opinions and Robin’s downright stubbornness. Now another young reviewer had appeared (and undergone the ritual photograph pushing CRASH T-shirts on the Hotline page). He was Ben Stone, from nearby Tenbury, and he was as daunting in his opinions as the others, despite his newcomer status.

The Ziggy cover did little to help. That kind of coverage was eagerly sought by companies desperate to convince shops that their game was about to sell in its tens of thousands, and since it seemed that Fantasy got a cover with apparently no trouble, Roger found himself inundated with calls suggesting ideas that would have kept CRASH in covers until the 1990s! As a consequence, for the remainder of the year Oliver avoided game-linked cover paintings.

One of the questing visitors was Angus Ryall of Games Workshop, but he stayed longer than most, becoming our strategy columnist for the new Frontline. Another was Steve Wilcox of newly-formed Elite, who brought with him the oddly-named Kokotoni Wilf. Over several days both Matthew and Robin debated with Elite’s programmers on minor improvements before pronouncing themselves satisfied, but Steve may have been disappointed that Kokotoni Wilf still missed being a Smash.

In fact Smashes were a bit thin — the pre-Christmas period was looming and software houses were holding back, apart from Gremlin Graphics. They’d scored quite a coup with TV news coverage of their ‘mining’ game which caricatured Arthur Scargill, then very much in the news because of the national miners’ strike. Wanted: Monty Mole was a surefire Smash, capturing all the addictivity of Jet Set Willy and offering loads of new puzzling problems to solve.

Within days we achieved a cheat mode for Monty Mole and began preparing the map for a future issue. It was a typical late-afternoon situation: Ben (school over for the day) playing the game to reach every screen one by one, Roger sitting sketchpad in hand roughing out the screens for Oliver to fill in the detail later, Matthew in another corner alternating between reviewing and making halftone pictures for David Western in the layout room, Robin sorting through mail ready for me to start the Forum. The jokes about Robin taking over my desk were no jokes!

If this paints a suspiciously cosy picture of contentment and smacks of nostalgia for its own sake, don’t be fooled — it was hard work for the small team. Within a few short months a massive expansion was about to take place and the coming changes would sunder the simpler comforts we then enjoyed.

The first indication of change was the arrival of a black Apricot xi computer. For Roger Kean, at least, the days of typewriters, paper and Tipp-Ex were over.

November 1984, Issue No. 10

Released on October 25th

Sometimes cover ideas arrive without trouble, but there were always issues when nothing suggested itself. Normally Oliver prefers to work one-and-a-half times up on finished size to allow for crisper detail, but when he’s running late the repro house would rather have the painting same size. This cover was the first done at printed size because the decision to go with the joystick-comparison article was made at the last moment. In some ways it’s my personal favourite — you could cut the atmosphere with a knife — and yet it was done in three hours flat!

I can remember Roger and Oliver being rather proud of having raised as much as £4,000 in prizes, possibly because it indicated how far CRASH had come from that first issue when C&VG regarded us as a local fanzine with potential. Now, without a lot of effort, we had software houses eager to participate in competitions and put up real money in value. Once again, the DIY section was the biggest in the contents.

And talking of the contents page ... another development was taking place, almost wit bout anyone noticing it. The page’s basic shape had remained the same for a while, using rainbow colours when we had time to put them in. Originally this complicated procedure was undertaken by our repro house in London, but after CRASH moved into its new offices, a film-processing machine was purchased to shoot finished artwork to negatives for the printer, thus cutting overhead costs considerably. Matthew and Roger, who looked after the technical end of layout as well as writing reviews and articles, began to experiment with preparing colour for the printer. For several months to come, they were to do the contents page in-house. which explains why it was more or less ambitious, depending on how much time they had.

From this small beginning Newsfield began to do more film planning, adding colour to many pages that otherwise would have been monochrome. Today the process requires an entire department of its own, managed by Matthew Uffindell.

The big feature was a comparison of joysticks, which was pretty exhaustive — and exhausting — The team were thrashing the damned things for weeks, using Ocean’s Daley Thompson’s Decathlon as the wrecking game. And that came on top of several tiring days at The PCW Show, held at Olympia. CRASH didn’t have a stand because of the cost, but Roger, Oliver and Matthew waded round talking to as many exhibitors as they could, Wearing specially-made CRASH badges, they were frequently stopped by visitors who wanted to meet anyone from the magazine.

As usual the show prompted massive releases of games and there were seven Smashes. Pyjamarama was the second Wally Week game from Mikro-Gen, a massive leap forward with its arcade and adventure combinations. Delta Wing (Creative Sparks) was a sort of forerunner of mercenary. There was Hewson’s Legend Of Avalon, the complex helicopter simulation from Durell called Combat Lynx, and two games from our own Derek Brewster, the arcade Jasper and the enduring adventure Kentilla. Jasper just made it by a spot, but the tragedy is that although Derek had it ready before Jet Set Willy, contractual complications delayed its release; had it been released then, it would have been a real eye-opener, but advances in software were being made fast and it was almost out of date.

There was one other Smash, Booty, our first budget hit from newly-created Firebird.

This was our first issue composed on a computer. Learning to use a word processor and then all the complications involved with getting the typesetting back for layout meant it was quite fraught at times, and for most things I still preferred my typewriter. However, the length of POKE routines was increasing, and dealing with them was never my strongest point, so I was secretly pleased to discover Robin Candy entering them happily for me on the Apricot when Roger wasn’t around. It was the thin end of the wedge of course — discontented with providing review comments and sorting mail, Robin wanted to get to do ‘some serious’ writing, and for me, the writing was on the wall as far as Playing Tips was concerned.

December 1984, Issue No. 11

Released on November 15th

There were moments when people glibly assumed Oliver Frey loathed Spectrums owing to the number he destroyed in CRASH cover illustrations, but the opposite was the truth. As he remarked when ZZAP! came along, the old Spectrum was one of the friendliest objects which simply lent itself to painting, unlike the brown Commodore 64 which merely resembled a piece of fudge. Here’s another cover unrelated to any game, excepting perhaps Mizar’s Out Of The Shadows, and one that was actually a reworking of an old mail order catalogue cover, featuring a hero bursting forth from a TV screen.

The promise Realtime had shown in 3-D Tank Duel was well and truly realised in their second release, Starstrike, which recreated all the thrills of the popular coin-op Star Wars. It was in a bit of a race with Design Design’s Dark Star, a similar game in principle. But both Smashes showed how a closely related concept can be very differently implemented. In their own ways, they were state-of-the-art software.

Equally excellent and very different from either ‘Star’ game and from each other were the Smashes Tir Na Nòg and Skool Daze. Gargoyle Games gave us Cuchulainn, Sidhe and Greg Follis’s Grego-Celtic mythology, giant animated characters, mental 3-D and a game hard to distinguish between pure adventure and arcade/explorer. Microsphere’s characters were smaller, but beautifully animated against authentic school backgrounds, providing another sort of adventure game but with properly crude schoolboy humour as its theme. These two were also state-of-the-art. Bug-Byte’s Turmoil and Melbourne’s Sir Lancelot were not, but were still highly playable and addictive games of sufficient quality to make them stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Deep down in the Adventure Trail (or rather up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he lives) Derek was telling everyone who had packed away their Spectrums to get them out and fill the boxes with straw and tortoises, for ‘when it comes to Spectrum software, you’ve never had it so good.’ He was excited by Level 9’s Return To Eden, Bug-Byte’s Twin Kingdom Valley, Games Workshop’s Tower Of Despair and the ebulliently, wickedly funny Valkyrie 17 from the anarchic Ram Jam Corporation (through Palace Software).

To cap it off Out Of The Shadows from unknown Mizar was a Smash, and thereby hangs a tale — and a CRASH failure. If anyone at CRASH felt unhappy about the reliance distributors and retailers were putting on CRASH reviews for stocking, then they were probably equally happy at being able to employ this unasked for power on the behalf of new or very small software houses. Some were finding it harder to get a look in with the increasingly professional and hard-nosed market place. Our record in their favour had been encouraging. But with Mizar, we drew a blank. No distributor would accept the game, having failed to spot its marketability, despite its CRASH Smash status. It was galling. And it showed more clearly than ever that the world was changing with blinding speed. At the beginning of 1984, an advertisement helped sales, by the end of the year even a full-scale marketing campaign was capable of failing to attract the distributors’ attention. For the small independent software house, it looked like the beginning of the end.

Up until this time much of CRASH editorial was written without travelling the country visiting software houses, most being done over the phone. More recently we had been happy to see how many people would actually trek up to Ludlow to visit us, a mark indeed of acceptance. But two pleasant occasions forced first Roger and Oliver to visit London, and then Matthew and Roger. The first was a trip to see a preview of the film The Last Starfighter (about which Roger wrote an article on its use of computer graphics), and the second was to see a preview of Ghostbusters, set to be the first real big film tie-in. But for the game from conquering American company Activision we had to wait ...

Christmas 1984, Issue No. 12

Released on December 13th

Well, what do you do for a Christmassy cover illustration? It isn’t a time for taut statements on the nature of violent life and sudden death. The painting was intended as a strong contrast to the first cover, which set the tone for CRASH, and Oliver opted for a gentle picture depicting Santa handing out Spectrums to the deprived natives of a distant planet. He employed a technique which he uses occasionally, that of spraying the background colours over lightly drawn figures, then picking them out gently in colours which blend with the background.

The Christmas Special was going to be a nightmare, everyone knew it. Only two-and-a-half weeks to write and produce it due to the schedule being compressed, and it was intended to have 196 pages, bigger than anything we had tackled before.

On top of that, the first floor of King Street had become vacant with the educational software company moving on, and it was felt sensible to move editorial down there, giving art more room upstairs. The evidence is there to see in the issue, because Roger put together a feature about how CRASH happens, and there’s a photograph of himself sitting at an L-shaped desk with Matthew, ostensibly reviewing a game. How empty and tidy the place looks compared to now! This move further delayed the writing however.

And what were we looking at? The original plan had been to do an issue full of competitions, special features and few reviews, on the grounds that everyone would already have released everything for Christmas. It didn’t work out that way of course, for so many software houses were late, and there were still over 30 games in. Among them was the double bill from Ultimate, Underwurlde and Knight Lore, which continued the Sabreman saga started in Sabre Wulf and at the same time undid everyone’s hopes that the Midland company would return to a sensible price level from the earlier game’s, then-outrageous £9.95. Still, there was no doubting their quality, and they were Smashes. The better of the two, Knight Lore, was to initiate an entire genre, the isometric perspective 3-D exploring game.

Derek’s Smash was for The Runes Of Zendos from Dorcas (formerly Doric). It was their second game, but despite its Smash, here again was an adventure game that failed to find the market it deserved. A different tune entirely for Boulder Dash and its hero Rockford, who would soon be adopted as a mascot by Newsfield’s second title, ZZAP! 64. If its graphics weren’t outstanding, that hardly mattered. This was a maddeningly addictive mind-game and its strength lay in the idea more than in its appearance.

After all the interest, Fantasy’s Backpackers Guide To The Universe was a little disappointing, though a genuinely unusual game. Somehow the market generally thought so too, because after good starting sales, it slumped, eventually taking Fantasy with it.

Ghostbusters was still under wraps, so it fell to Elite to come up with a major TV tie-in, The Fall Guy. However the game was hardly major although I recall it having some good points. Perhaps more effort went into setting up the licence deal than into the design and programming, a feeling which would persist for a long time when it came to big licences. Elite were going for TV tie-ins in a big way, and the issue also carried a preview of their next intended game, Airwolf, and mentioned its follow up, Dukes Of Hazzard. Airwolf was unwittingly to do CRASH a big favour, but more of that in the appropriate month.

I still retained my Playing Tips, but only by a hair’s breadth as Robin Candy waded in with three pages of POKEs specially compiled for Christmas. It was to be my last month on the Tips for many a moon, Robin would take over in the New Year.

As my first job for Issue One had been to write the Look Back, it seemed only fitting that it was also my last task for Issue 12 — to complete the first Year of CRASH.