CRASH History

1986

- Issue 25
- Issue 26
- Issue 27
- Issue 28
- Issue 29
- Issue 30
- Issue 31
- Issue 32
- Issue 33
- Issue 34
- Issue 35
- Issue 36

February 1986, Issue No. 25

Released on January 24th

Inspiration for a cover image was lacking, so everyone was pleased when Imagine’s Mikie became a Smash since it gave Oliver a subject suitable for his particular talents — a figure seen in action within a dynamic composition. The character of Mikie is so energetic he’s simply burst through the cover paper, scattering hearts in his wake — the cover and the game neatly tied in with Saint Valentine’s Day. In a way it also acted as a symbol for the new year beginning; CRASH was crashing through again...

The cover’s bounciness could also have been taken as a symbol for a new face on the CRASH team. For the first time the reviewing team figured in the masthead, and among the names was one Mike Dunn. As they had been wont to do since CRASH started, Ludlow lads with Spectrums dropped in after school hours to see what was happening, and some of them were dragooned into writing review comments. Mike was one such. Robin Candy told everyone that Mike’s school nickname was Skippy because he skipped wherever he went, and this information was soon confirmed when Roger Kean reported that he had almost been knocked flying in the street as Mike skipped violently past him on the way down a Ludlow hill. Skippy is a now a respectable bespectacled college student with a far more sedate gait, but the nickname still sticks.

On a more serious note February marked the start of a run of cover paintings with which Oliver was less than satisfied, though in retrospect some of them are outstanding. It wasn’t so much that they were poorly executed, more that he felt uninspired by the subject matter. An illustrator requires a brief for his work and previously he and Roger Kean had worked on the ideas themselves. Naturally, the chosen subject was therefore always one which Oliver enjoyed and the sort of thing he excelled at. Now, with three magazines going, he had to rely far more on the editors for their ideas and briefs, and in the case of CRASH Graeme Kidd seemed to prefer humorous subjects — Mikie was one and Jack The Nipper notoriously so.

Still, this is no reflection on Mikie the game, which got its Smash, the first of two that month for Imagine. The other, also a Konami conversion, was the onomatopoeiac Yie Ar Kung Fu, which received praise for its ‘arcade style playability’, one reviewer commenting that Imagine was fast becoming one of the best development houses in the country. As you can tell from the enthusiasm, these were still the heady days of coin-op conversions: a moment of freshness before the tedium of overkill which would all too soon set in.

Four other games merited Smashes. Martech’s Zoids finally made it through; Electronic Pencil Co. had done a fine job, maintaining a high standard of graphics and providing an engrossing game. Their innovative approach made mincemeat of the notion that a licence from something as childish as a series of toy monsters means a thinly-disguised piece of marketing schlock. Zoids is Martech’s monument for posterity. Ultimate looked back on form with Gunfright, an entertaining advance on their Nightshade, while Gargoyle Games proved they had more in them than complex graphic adventures of the Dun Darach type. Sweevo’s World had something in common with Ultimate’s Knight Lore and Alien 8 style of presentation, but took it further to provide a game both compelling to play and very funny. In fact it was to be the precursor of a genre which would reach fulfilment in Head Over Heels. Derek, meanwhile, was praising Activision’s adventure Mindshadow while berating their lack of marketing for it — an omission the company was not usually noted for...

After its recent run of successes — Critical Mass and Saboteur — we featured Durell. Robert White’s company had been with us since the earliest Spectrum days and had always strived to be both good and different. It seems sad, as I write this, to reflect that Durell no longer exists in its previous form, sold, as it was at the 1987 PCW Show, to Elite...

March 1986, Issue No. 26

Released on February 27th

The March cover was, and still is, only the second CRASH cover to feature a photograph as its main element (the first was Issue Six’s, a photo of several assembled pieces of Oliver’s artwork). Max Headroom had become something of a cult on TV, and for the subsidiary pictures Oliver drew on images from the specially-made feature film about how Max came into being. The trouble was that as Max was already a created image, Oliver thought painting him ran the danger of making him less than instantly recognisable, hence the photo.

Good software was still catching up with us in March, though Max Headroom had to wait another two months. There were seven Smashes and a lot of near misses. It had to be Mikro-Gen’s month, two Smashes and Battle Of The Planets, which got 77%. Three Weeks In Paradise was yet another Wally Week extravaganza which showed that the formula had not quite worn thin yet, while Sir Fred was a fairy tale of damsels in distress and bold, rather well-animated, knights off to their rescue.

US Gold provided cold comfort with the excellent conversion of Winter Games — good enough to get over the multiload problem; Ocean scored with the unusual M.O.V.I.E. — forced perspective, icon control and a good detective story from a new Yugoslavian programmer of an unpronounceable name (later identified as Dusko Dimitrijevic); Mirrorsoft came up with one of the best flight simulations ever in Spitfire 40; and Derek fairly revelled in the conclusion of Level 9’s Silicon Dreams Trilogy, Worm In Paradise, and Melbourne House’s long-awaited Lord Of The Rings.

Among the near misses was Design Design’s Forbidden Planet, another ultrahigh-speed 3-D vector from their famous ‘Basil’ and Simon Brattell, but despite its playability we wondered whether it was different enough from Dark Star to warrant being Smashed. They also had a different type of game out: 2112 was an arcade-adventure in similar style to Dun Darach featuring a mechanoid dog called Poddy. Programmer Graham Stafford took the name from Jeremy Spencer’s pet dog, which was often seen in the offices — it was nice to know that some Newsfield personnel appeared in games!

Licensed tie-ins were by now established. Rambo was a good example, Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase by Don Priestley for DK’Tronics a rather odd one, Zorro from US Gold a somewhat poorer one, and hovering uneasily somewhere between the brilliant and the banal there was Quicksilva’s Fred Flintstone tie-in Yabba Dabba Doo!.

On the Playing Tips pages, a new-look Robin Candy peered out. After several complaints in print, the Newsfield art department gave the playing tips a new page heading, and Robin’s very outdated photo-graphic was replaced by an Oliver Frey drawing. Robin was pleased by the fact of a revamp, less thrilled by the picture; he wanted no picture at all. The argument became acrimonious, especially when Robin realised it was likely to be used on the following month’s Playing Tips Supplement cover. In the end he agreed to the new heading with grave misgivings. It was a shame — though few people inside the company, and no readers, realised it at the time, the argument had caused a serious rift between Robin on one side and Roger Kean and Oliver Frey on the other. The rift was to grow wider...

Till this time software houses had usually put out games under their own name. I have already mentioned Electric Dreams being one of the first attached labels (to Activision), and now CRL — an often uneven producer of software and sometimes a company in search of an identity — launched a new side label called Nu Wave with I-D. I-D was to be the first of a series of new ‘conundrum’ games for people fed up of blasting and maze-walking. As Automata had found with Deus Ex Machina, however, CRL was to discover that the money really lay with blasting, and Nu Wave would disappear beneath the old attack waves.

April 1986, Issue No. 27

Released on March 27th

After the cosiness of February’s Mikie cover and the intricate interweaving of Max Headroom elements on the March cover, Oliver felt it was time again for an out-and-out shoot-’em-up picture. The arrival of the British 128K Spectrum gave him his opportunity for another surreal space painting, with the new machine figuring as a giant craft like something out of Star Wars. As with so many illustrations during this year, it was painted fractionally smaller than you see it reproduced, because it had to be done in a hurry.

What was life like in CRASH Towers as 1986 began to speed up? ‘Crammed’ is the answer. The art department had expanded to cope with three magazines. Dick Shiner, a freelance designer whose background was London advertising agencies but who had been living in Ludlow for some years, had helped out over the busy Christmas period... and stayed on as Art Director, relieving Oliver Frey of some workload. This also let David Western become Production Controller full-time. Then there were the two layout artists, Gordon Druce and Tony Lorton, and Matthew Uffindell looking after picture reproduction and film planning.

Next floor down, life had become a joke. The administration of accounts, advertising, mail order and subscriptions for three magazines meant every spare inch was used. And on the lowest floor the three titles fought for editorial space to write and room to photograph the screenshots. CRASH had been moved into the smallest of the three main rooms and housed its editor, newcomer Hannah Smith (she arrived near the end of this month’s schedule) and the regular coterie of reviewers. I floated to land wherever space opened up for me. It would be nice to say that despite the cramped conditions we were all a jolly bunch, and for the most part that was the case, but tight schedules, sometimes missed, led to friction and patches of bad feeling here and there.

The arrival of the 128K Spectrum was a diversion though, and it was well and truly dissected through several articles, not least one written by ZZAP! Staff Writer Julian Rignall, which investigated games upgraded to take account of the new machine’s capabilities. These included Robin Of The Wood, Nodes Of Yesod, Three Weeks In Paradise and the engagingly renamed Sweevo’s Whirled.

Sweevo’s came in for the heavy treatment in Robin Candy’s Playing Tips Supplement, 24 pages of tips and maps, and the massive listing by Phil Churchyard that created a Sweevo’s World screen editor. The value of this unique program has since been underlined by the number of mappable 3-D games that now offer game designers as a matter of course. And the success of this screen editor’s cassette version, then available from CRASH, was one of the first sparks that led to thoughts about a Newsfield software house — but realisation of that particular dream would take some time.

I had a busy time with the Forum, what with the many letters about the Friday The 13th cover (December) and Tony Bridge, adventure columnist with Popular Computing Weekly, complaining bitterly about how he had been ripped off by the CRASH Christmas Special edition. His comments were to lead to a massive vote of confidence for that issue in later Forums.

Less confidence was apparent with tie-ins. We were entering the period where software houses would grab anything licensable whether it was suitable for a game or not, often rushing out the result to capitalise on the licensed character’s popularity in other media. Elite came off best with a Smash for the venerable arcade original Bombjack, but Ocean’s Transformers was disappointing from Denton Designs, CRL’s Blade Runner was a sad affair and Britannia’s Play Your Cards Right, based on the Bruce Forsyth TV game, was dreadful. There was a warning here, but few took heed, rushing madly into more licences, while letters began suggesting that the very idea of a tie-in meant a poor product. Originality would soon become a keyword, and in the CRASH Readers’ Awards announcement that was made plain — it was Firebird’s Elite that swept the board.

May 1986, Issue No. 28

Released on April 24th

The editorial brief was simple enough: make something out of Samantha Fox Strip Poker and Starstrike II. It was an inhibiting notion, and one which Oliver left till he could no longer avoid doing the illustration. With this cover, a very popular one, it is the strength and dynamism of Oliver’s composition that makes it work at all. He was pleased with the effect, but in general he hated the illustration and felt it was rather like a poorly-licensed game — the subject was unsuitable for an exciting picture.

The month’s two big bits of news were of a very different nature. Most important was the announcement, as the issue went to press, that Alan Michael Sugar’s Amstrad had bought out Sir Clive Sinclair’s Sinclair Research, and thus the ZX Spectrum would from then on belong to Amstrad. There were very mixed feelings about this move at the time, and few people today could honestly say that many of their doubts have been removed since.

The other was that the Audit Bureau Of Circulations had declared CRASH the biggest-selling computer title in Britain, overtaking both Sinclair User and Computer & Video Games (though the latter had a marginally higher figure when foreign sales were taken into account). It was a triumph for everyone, but especially for the original tiny team that had dared to challenge the entrenched positions of so many established titles. W H Smith, before the launch of Issue 1, had said that CRASH could never really succeed as a games-only, single-user magazine; two years later we had proved them wrong.

It was a happy moment for the whole company, but before the issue was completed, something quite sad occurred. The rumbling arguments between Robin Candy and Roger Kean, which had flared up over Roger’s insistence that there should be a picture of Robin on the new Playing Tips heading because there had always been one of him there, suddenly reached flashpoint. There was an argument in the middle of the office and as a result it was decided not to use Robin any more. He was able to take a last look at his Playing Tips being laid out in the art department before leaving. However, as every CRASH reader knows, it may have been the last of Robin Candy’s Playing Tips, but it was by no means the end of Robin, though a year was to go by before his reappearance.

Max Headroom finally arrived, and though it rated fairly well (85%) it was something of a disappointment. Not so Realtime’s Starstrike II, however, with its filled-in vector graphics pushing the Spectrum beyond limits already set by pundits, sitting atop a fast and complex shoot-’em-up game. We also Smashed Ultimate’s Cyberun, often forgotten since but more of a follow-on from Lunar Jetman than anything to do with the isometrics of Knight Lore etc.

After the huge success of the film the game version of Back To The Future from Electric Dreams came as a damp squib, a mishmash plot based on the film’s action but with no game behind it. There was far more fun to be had with Imagine’s excellent implementation of Konami’s Ping Pong and Gremlin’s karate-book tie-in The Way Of The Tiger. But the game which caused most excitement was Ocean’s Batman from Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond, who had gone out of their way to make the most densely detailed isometric graphics yet seen. And the game was good too.

Near the end of April as the May issue concluded, the three Newsfield directors, the brothers Frey and Roger Kean, took a week off in Cornwall to work out the details for a new magazine they were planning. It was to have a broad subject base and be aimed at the so-called youth market. No-one could think of what to call it, so for the time being they jokingly gave it the working title of LM — Lloyd Mangram’s Leisure Monthly. It stuck.

June 1986, Issue No. 29

Released on May 29th

This cover was tied to Heavy On The Magick, the latest from Gargoyle Games. In the past Oliver has been happy to work with their games as cover themes, but he had little chance to see this one. However, the other options for the month’s cover had already been used for ZZAP! and AMTIX! (notably Redhawk, on AMTIX!). The editorial decision was postponed till the last moment, as was increasingly the practice, leaving only hours for the illustration to be done. Again, composition turned what could have been a weak cover into a powerful image.

CRASH was continually adding new sections. In this month John Minson went solo as his Fear & Loathing page was detached from the news, freeing him to be even more irreverent (or should that be irrelevant?) about the software industry. John had earlier done a piece about play-by-mail games, and now Brendon Kavanagh arrived to start a regular column devoted to the subject. Then there was the Art Gallery — or On The Screen, as it became known — a page of readers’ Spectrum art sponsored by Rainbird, producers of the Art Studio graphics utilities. And to top that off, we began the first of a long series (Genesis) aimed at finding the CRASH reader who could design a complete game worthy of being programmed by Design Design and marketed properly by Domark.

Domark were in need of a lift too, for after an age Friday The 13th had arrived. We were kinder than ZZAP! (they gave it an appropriate 13%), but it was still pretty dire. So was much else on the tie-in front: Ocean’s TV licence V was poorly thought-out and boring, TV’s The Young Ones fared hardly better from Orpheus, and in an attempt at a really obscure tie-in Firebird gave us The Comet Game to coincide with the arrival of Halley’s interplanetary body in our skies. The natural phenomenon was magnificent, the game was silly.

Derek had been quiet for some months, with nothing very inspiring to review, but he got Heavy On The Magick and delightedly Smashed it. Meanwhile Gary Liddon was given the task of solo reviewing — a departure from the norm — for Red Hawk, a comic tie-in from Melbourne House. That was a Smash too. So was the excellent Spindizzy, which restored Electric Dreams to some of its former glory. The Spectrum version was by Paul Shirley (aided by Phil Churchyard, who had done the Sweevo’s World screen editor for Robin Candy’s Playing Tips Supplement).

It was a great game month, because there was also the first ever 128K Smash (Knight Tyme from M.A.D.), one for Sean Masterson’s Frontline (the CCS Desert Rats), a marvellous conversion of the Commodore 64 hit Bounder (Gremlin Graphics), another for Ultimate in Pentagram, and Quazatron, an extremely clever conversion that was almost a rewrite of Hewson’s huge Commodore 64 hit Paradroid. That was by Andrew Braybrook, but Steve Turner’s Spectrum Quazatron borrowed from it and reinvented it, making it a wholly new and interesting product.

The big problem, of course, was the Playing Tips, now rudderless without Robin. The answer lay with Hannah Smith, and though she might seem in retrospect to have been an obvious choice, a lot of soul-searching went into the decision. Would a predominantly male teenage readership accept a ‘girlie tipster’ stepping into the shoes of Robin "Very Popular" Candy? We thought they just might. They did. Promoting Hannah as the ‘computer world’s first and only female tipster’ would lead to a veritable war with Computer & Video Games who claimed that their Melissa Ravenflame held that pre-eminent position. But at least readers could ring Hannah and speak with her, whereas doing the same with C&VG led to long silences. It was to lead to an attempted confrontation at the 1986 PCW Show when Melissa Ravenflame stickers running down Hannah were plastered over everything, including the Newsfield stand. Hannah issued a head-to-head challenge, which, not unsurprisingly, ‘Melissa’ declined.

July 1986, Issue No. 30

Released on June 26th

It’s not a reflection on the game it portrays, Gremlin Graphics’s Jack The Nipper — but of all the covers he has painted, this remains the one Oliver hates the most. Its subject matter runs counter to everything he enjoys illustrating. His strength lies in action, strong composition and powerful figure work. For days he was despondent at the thought of a benappied infant on a CRASH cover, and how he was going to do it. Under protest, at the last hour, he penned and coloured it, and it was a creditable effort.

It was an indication of how ‘professional’ the organisation was becoming when, in the middle of June, the management sat down to design the Newsfield stand for the forthcoming PCW Show. Previously, the magazines’ attendance had been a case either of wandering round or of restriction to something resembling a long table with hand-lettered signs. This year, we were told, there would be a proper stand built by a contractor. Gosh, were we excited. But that was ages away, so who cared?

Rather more to the point was the argument about the spelling of ‘magic’. Gargoyle Games had insisted on Heavy On The Magick, now Level 9 gave us The Price of Magik. Derek Brewster did not enter into the discussion, preferring instead to award Level 9 a Smash. He must have been pleased, not so much because good adventures had been a little thin on the ground, but because there were fewer and fewer full-price adventures appearing. The trend would continue, and today the majority of 8-bit adventures are provided through mall order from committed individual programmers.

Besides The Price Of Magik we had Jack The Nipper, which created yet another cute character for Gremlin Graphics’s repertory company of cute characters and got its Smash for being highly playable, entertaining and having ‘masterful graphics’. Then there was Ghosts ’N Goblins, awaited with bated breath — would the popular Capcom coin-op be a success or a flop for Elite? They pulled it off, and Ghosts ’N Goblins was one of the best conversions from an arcade original yet seen. And finally, just to prove they could do it, Domark came up with Splitting Images, not a TV tie-in, but a block puzzle based on caricatures of the famous. It was irresistible and gave Domark their first ever Smash.

Licences were in the doldrums again, apart from Ghosts ’N Goblins, for Mirrorsoft’s game version of the film of Biggles was very disappointing, not very innovative and consisted of three poorly-implemented subgames — it was rather like the film, in fact. And US Gold got themselves into terrible trouble with mistimed World Cup fever. It was almost instantly clear to us that the much-hyped World Cup Carnival was a minutely modified version of Artic’s two-year-old and forgettable World Cup Soccer. It cost £9.95, though remaindered versions of Artic’s original were to be had for £1.99. Retailers, distributors and buyers reacted as one in an outcry. Later, US Gold was forced to admit that they had planned a far better game, but programming delays and marketing problems had overtaken them. Timing was of the essence and in the end a decision was taken to buy and repackage the Artic game instead. In a way it provided a perfect example of what, at the worst, was so wrong with licensed and endorsed games. At best it was misguided, at worst it was seen by the public as a cynical attempt to pretend an old game was something new and get everyone to buy it all over again for the sake of a few bits of added packaging.

Quietly, in the midst of this, veteran software house New Generation pushed out the Spectrum version of Cliff Hanger, a sort of cowboy forerunner of Road Runner. It was a moderately enjoyable game, notable most of all for the fact that the advert told a story; cheques and postal orders were to be made payable to Virgin Games. It was to be New Generation’s last fling before quietly disappearing.

August 1986, Issue No. 31

Released on July 31st

Hannah Smith’s claim to unique girlie tipsterdom and the backlash from C&VG’s ‘Melissa Ravenflame’ led directly to this cover — basically an advertising campaign for Hannah. The original brief — Hannah mud-wrestling with Melissa — was deemed too inflammatory, so Oliver substituted an alien for the Ravenflame. More in his element than for several issues, Oliver turned in what became the most popular cover of the year, atmospheric, amusing and provocative by turns. CRASH always seems at its best with its back to the wall fighting for a belief...

Three new names appeared on this issue’s masthead. lan Craig was a well-known commercial illustrator, and some of his computer-related work had appeared the previous year in the Issue 21 On The Cover feature. The object was to have someone to help with the massive workload of illustrations, which up till then had all been on Oliver’s shoulders. Tony Flanagan was a college lecturer from near Telford who wanted to move into journalism. He became the third Staff Writer for CRASH, but his time at the Towers turned out to be short. The third name had a familiar ring about it, especially to ZZAP! readers, for it was Julian’s brother, Jonathan Rignall. The increasingly complex film-planning work we were undertaking in-house meant that Matthew Uffindell had less and less time to spare in the process camera room making halftone pictures. So Jonathan was brought into the department as a process-camera operator.

The month of July saw much activity on the new magazine, too — LM had become a reality, a launch date was set for a free copy with the Christmas Specials of the three computer titles, and Roger Kean was beginning interviews for the large new editorial team that would be required for this ambitious project. It was also clear that the King Street offices could no longer cope. Newsfield had been searching for over a year for premises big enough for expansion, but there was nowhere available in Ludlow. So a large semidetached house similar in size to the King Street headquarters was purchased and converted to offices for administration and LM editorial. This was on Gravel Hill, Ludlow (once misspelled ‘Grovel Hill’, and it would soon be nicknamed ‘The Grovelry’ since it was where the pay cheques were issued... ). But the move was still over a month away as the August issue started.

In the meantime, the tiny CRASH office was even more cramped, so Tony Flanagan was dispatched to Liverpool to interview Software Projects about their forthcoming conversion of Dragon’s Lair. Interest ran high, partly because of Dragon’s Lair arcade fame, partly because no-one could see how Coleco’s complex, interactive game would come out on a home micro. It was hoped they would do better with it than US Gold did with the conversion of Kung Fu Master, a flaccid beat-’em-up which got 56% — the same as Subterranean Nightmare, but the latter was a £2.99 budget game under US Gold’s new Americana label. Americana worked well enough for them on the Commodore 64, where golden oldies imported direct from the States offered good value for money, but of course in converting most lost their original qualities on the Spectrum and proved to be no more than low-value games like so many other budget products of the period.

Still, Firebird scored a budget Smash, Rebel Star, with Sean Masterson in Frontline, and a full-price one with Heartland. This arcade adventure was programmed by Odin, who had ceased marketing their own product to become Telecomsoft developers... the absorption of independents by larger software houses continued. The Edge had a hit on their hands as the Marble Madness clone Bobby Bearing found CRASH favour; and so did Palace with the follow-up Cauldron II, successful because though it was a sequel in name, in gameplay it was entirely different from the first Cauldron, a very polished platform game. Hewson brought out Pyracurse, an isometrically 3-D scrolling adventure in the mould of Dragontorc, but the peculiar problems it presented made it special.

Our peculiar problems were about to start — school holidays and nowhere to seat anyone...

September 1986, Issue No. 32

Released on August 28th

Of all the covers in 1986, Oliver most looked forward to doing September’s. He had been an avid Dan Dare/Eagle fan as a boy, admired Frank Hampson (Dare’s creator) and Frank Bellamy, who both had drawn some of the original strips, and finally got to draw Dan Dare himself when Eagle was relaunched in the Eighties. But Oliver never rated the relaunched Eagle, so the notion of recreating an original Fifties-style Eagle front page for Virgin’s acclaimed Dan Dare was close to his heart — as was having a comic as a CRASH cover.

The long-running Genesis — Birth Of A Game competition had reached midway point by September’s issue. The judges, Domark and Design Design, had finally whittled the enormous amount of entries down to John Eggleton and Kat Trap. The rest of the series would now deal with the programming, packaging and marketing.

Programming, packaging and marketing was a problem Beyond were just about to walk headlong into as the company blithely announced to John Minson exciting plans for the official Star Trek game, little knowing that production of the game would take almost as long as a voyage of the starship Enterprise. Minson had another laugh up his sleeve: Gary Liddon and Andrew Wright had managed to crash their company car a week after getting it. The accident took place in a Manchester one-way street (they were going the wrong way, of course) and the car belonged to Thalamus. Yes, Newsfield had taken the plunge and created its own software house.

Thalamus really started at the July Commodore Show when a young man from Finland introduced himself in halting English as Stavros Fasoulas and showed Roger Kean a Commodore 64 game called Rainbow Warrior. Roger was so impressed with it that he persuaded the other directors to start a label and market the game. Stavros signed up, Gary Liddon was moved from Newsfield’s magazines to look after programming technicalities, and Andrew Wright of Activision was appointed to head Thalamus (a name which he and Gary Liddon devised). Rainbow Warrior changed name to Sanxion and the rest, as they say, would be history — at least for the 64. Thalamus has yet to produce a Spectrum game.

Tie-in time looked pretty good for a change. Virgin’s Dan Dare proved to be addictive, playable and quite original. It was also clever of them to make the game different on each of the main 8-bit machines, avoiding the inevitable, and often invidious, comparisons. Going from one Dan to another, Mirrorsoft repeated a success with Dynamite Dan II, improving elements of the original to make an entirely new game. Mikro-Gen just missed a Smash by a hair’s breadth with Stainless Steel, a shoot-em-up based loosely on Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat character as re-envisaged by 2000AD, while CRL found themselves in Derek Brewster’s good books with Fergus McNeill’s lampoon The Boggit. Incidentally, The Hobbit was still at Number 7 in the CRASH Charts!

Another near-Smash was ACE, one of the best flight simulations on the Spectrum at the time, and it came from Cascade — one of the earliest Spectrum houses, but usually known for their classified ads for cheap compilations.

Upstairs was beginning to resemble the moment before the Great Flood, when the ark was incomplete and rain threatened. The administrative move to Gravel Hill was held up by decorating, but the new LM team was getting busy writing and designing a dummy of the magazine to be presented to potential advertisers at a launch party set for mid-September. To add to the problems, the art department needed more people to cope with a fourth magazine. The solution seemed to be to move Matthew Uffindell and his huge light table down a floor, but only once the administrative people and LM had moved off to Gravel Hill. Somehow we packed the animals in two by two — and it rained chaos.

October 1986, Issue No. 33

Released on September 25th

October’s cover marked a departure from the previous 32 covers; for the first time in the CRASH history it was painted by a hand other than Oliver Frey’s, that of Ian Craig. It was not designed with any particular game in mind, but did have a passing resemblance to (and was a visual pun on) Oliver’s very first CRASH cover. For the savage face, Ian used a photograph of a friend, though the pointed ears and sharp fangs were invented. As Oliver does with many pictures, Ian used an airbrush and then overpainted with an ordinary brush.

Early in September most of the editorial and mail-order staff decamped to London’s Olympia for the ninth PCW Show. It was the year of the infamous sticker campaign, when C&VG plastered the Newsfield stand with Melissa Ravenflame adhesive labels, and Newsfield retaliated with some Hannah Smith stickers printed at the last moment. At one point, Commodore User editor Eugene Lacy returned to the EMAP stand’s office and could no longer find the door — Mike Dunn and Ben Stone had hidden it under literally hundreds of stickers.

It was also the moment when Gargoyle Games underwent a metamorphosis and became Faster Than Light. Apart from the excitement of their own two games, Lightforce and Shockway Rider, they had a hit on their hands for Elite with the much-delayed Scooby Doo. Elite were riding high: after a disappointing Commodore 64 conversion of the coin-op Paper Boy, it only just missed a CRASH Smash on the Spectrum, though the Capcom conversion 1941 did far less well. Domark followed up the puzzles of Splitting Images with the official version of Trivial Pursuit. Despite the many trivia clones already out, the qualities of Domark’s version shone out, and it too received a Smash. We also thought highly of Costa Panayi’s Revolution, a 3-D puzzle-solving game which earned Vortex yet another in their long line of Smashes.

The biggest disappointment, though hardly a surprise, came with Ocean’s ludicrously delayed Knight Rider. Rumours from within Ocean’s offices had said it was a poor effort, and it was.

Internally there were some sweeping changes. The new offices opened, admin moved out, film planning moved down, LM moved across for two weeks from its small room into what had been advertising before finally departing to Gravel Hill, CRASH moved upstairs to where LM had been and Cameron Pound’s photographic empire gained the room CRASH had just vacated. It was a bit like playing Splitting Images.

Graeme Kidd waved a goodbye of sorts. At the very end of August, shortly after CRASH’s new Staff Writer Tony Flanagan had decided to leave, Graeme himself resigned over administrative problems. It was a difficult moment, with CRASH short-staffed and LM starting up, so Graeme was offered a new job as Publishing Executive in overall charge of the three computer magazines — which he accepted. However, he would remain titular editor of CRASH for a while yet. Meanwhile, Roger Kean had finally relinquished the editorship of ZZAP! to Gary Penn, and moved with the rest of LM to their new home in Gravel Hill. It was a busy month.

And on top of that came news from the Audit Bureau Of Circulations that CRASH was still the biggest-selling computer title in Britain, outstripping all others at over 100,000 copies a month. Roger Kean recalled a meeting in April 1984 with several top people from the old Imagine in Liverpool, when someone prophetically told him that CRASH was so different that it was bound to sell over 100,000 a month soon. He had been pleased, but seriously doubted CRASH would ever reach those sorts of figures. Doing better than 50,000 would have been a thrill for us in those early months.

At about the moment the October edition reached the printers, LM was officially launched at a big party in London, where the dummy was introduced to potential advertisers and Roger Kean made a speech he had rehearsed for days. I hate parties, I didn’t go.

November 1986, Issue No. 34

Released on October 23rd

For me this is probably the least interesting CRASH cover, and certainly a disappointment from Ian Craig after the previous month’s. The dynamics work well enough but the definition of both craft and explosion is poor; it is hard to see where you are or what is happening. The illustration, of course, relates to FTL’s game Lightforce.

With the departure of Tony Flanagan there was another shuffle as Lee Paddon moved over from AMTIX! to CRASH. Lee had joined Newsfield some months earlier from the magazine Your Computer to act as the AMTIX! Software Editor — not that there was a lot of good software to be concerned about. We seemed to have moved into that strange post-PCW Show period when there ought to be lots of games released but software houses are still fighting to get their product completed.

Gargoyle Games’s new FTL label kicked off well, however, with Lightforce (right), bemusing everyone with the fact that it was a hard and fast shoot-’em-up in the Xevious vein rather than a complex scrolling graphic adventure. ‘A chance,’ said the Smash review, for ‘mainstream arcade entertainment,’ unfortunately forgetting that that was exactly how Gargoyle Games had started out three years earlier, with the 3-D shoot-’em-up Ad Astra. And Lightforce’s graphics strongly resembled Ad Astra.

Quicksilva’s Glider Rider was an odd case; the 48K version of this 3-D forced-perspective road game got 80%, but the 128K version soared to 92%. The real difference seemed to be the sound. And sound was only one of the problems faced by Digital Integration’s TT Racer. It lost favour for being too much of a simulation and being too difficult to play.

But there were two more Smashes. Napoleon At War from CCS excited Sean Masterson, and the game with the silliest name ever — Fat Worm Blows A Sparky — earned Durell some extravagant praise for the ‘stunningly original’ solid 3-D graphics and its wormy animation.

There were enough disappointments for several issues, mostly in the budget range, where there was hardly anything of quality (apart from a few games on Mastertronic’s M.A.D. label). Following on from the previous month’s release of Knight Rider came another Ocean game 18 months late — Street Hawk. Again the difficulties of developing the game shone through, though it did slightly better with 68%. Another tie-in proved a letdown: Asterix And The Magic Cauldron from Melbourne House. Heavily pushed as their big Christmas game, it was so bug-ridden that playability was irrelevant. The big arcade conversion was Dragon’s Lair, but Software Projects’s problem in reproducing anything of the original’s video-disk graphics — largely regarded as the only really interesting element of the arcade machine — let it down dismally on the Spectrum.

Gremlin Graphics fared far better with their Spectrum version of the Commodore 64 hit Trailblazer and it was a creditable and addictive game which just missed being a Smash at 88%.

We featured an interview with programmer Don Priestley, a man with possibly the longest Spectrum track record; but from a historical point of view it was the interviewer rather than the interviewee who was noteworthy. Bill Scolding had been the editor of Sinclair User and taken that magazine from a strong position to the leading place till CRASH overtook its sales. Bill never seemed to have borne CRASH any hard feelings over the previous year’s verbal war — so when he resigned from Sinclair User earlier in 1986 he had come to Ludlow to help out for a few weeks with editorial, leading to his ex-colleagues ringing him at home with a cheery ‘Morning Judas’. Sticks and stones etc...

December 1986, Issue No. 35

Released on November 20th

After the letdown of the Lightforce cover illustration, Oliver Frey steamed back in with a large close-up monster picture. The excuse for it was Ocean’s Cobra, and rather than slavishly devise some illustration based on the game Oliver chose to interpret the title literally. The serpent is very much in Frey/CRASH style: chromium-plated needle fangs, slavering jaws agape dripping what could be alien machine oil. Its impact is undeniable, and I think it was the strongest image of the year.

As if to make up for the November issue, December’s provided seven Smashes. Denton Designs struck back after some indeterminate games with The Great Escape for Ocean, displaying yet another form of isometric perspective to describe the World War II POW castle from which the player hoped to escape. And Hewson must have been pleased; Steve Crow, with three previous Smashes for other software houses to his name, programmed his fourth for them. Firelord was a game of chivalry set to Steve’s characteristically attractive graphics. Then there was the risky conversion of Andrew Braybrook’s monster Commodore 64 hit Uridium. The risk paid off — much credit to Dominic Robinson, who recreated the original fast-scrolling bas-relief graphics very well.

Durell clocked up another Smash with their dragon story Thanatos, and Mosaic’s adaptation of a Dick Francis novel gave Derek a pre-Christmas treat in the Adventure Trail. Ocean hit big film tie-in time when Cobra — cynically expected to be a terrible disaster — turned out to be a fast, addictive and playable winner.

One of the year’s big coin-op successes had been Gauntlet, an obvious case for conversion. US Gold had the official rights, but clones were a-cloning and it was a close race between Firebird, who got a Smash for Druid, and Electric Dreams, who just didn’t for Dandy. But what was interesting was Dandy’s claim to originality, for the coin-op Gauntlet was a conversion of the original Atari game called Dandy written by student John Palevich!

There were some close misses, too; Palace’s The Sacred Armour Of Antiriad, for example. But if Ocean’s tie-in gamble with Cobra had paid off, US Gold’s big gamble with The Goonies did not — it was a dispiriting mishmash of a game.

December was also notable for the first time budget-game reviews were grouped together; this ‘budget ghetto’ had (and has since) often been considered for CRASH, but rarely repeated.

Kat Trap was coming along well, and after the previous month’s preview December’s issue included an article about how Oliver was painting the game’s packaging — and the ad appeared too, though it wasn’t included in Bill Scolding’s wry look at software advertising, a funny article which reviewed some recent ads and rated them in traditional CRASH style.

The first issue (Issue Zero) of LM was almost ready for printing; to reach as many readers as possible, it was to be included free in the Christmas Specials of CRASH, ZZAP! and AMTIX! rather than go on the newsagents’ shelves on its own. Up in the art department life was frenzied, as they would soon be working on four magazines simultaneously. Still, two new paste-up artists appeared to help out: Sebastian Clare and Tim Croton. Sebastian’s father had once owned a company called Small School Software, whose premises had been the first floor of the King Street Offices before CRASH editorial moved down there late in 1984... circles within circles.

And there were two other new staff members; in film planning Newsfield took on Nick Orchard, a school-leaver, for Matthew Uffindell to train as a colour film planner (he was bearing in mind the extra work involved on the all-colour LM). And downstairs in the photographic department, Cameron Pound received some help from Michael Parkinson, a YTS trainee from nearby Tenbury Wells.

Newsfield’s first office Christmas do, held at a restaurant outside Ludlow, had been for ten people. The second had been for 40 (staff and family) and was held at the Bull Inn (home of the fictitious Old Flatulence Bitter). This year’s was to be for some 64 staff and many invitees — we were getting bigger...

Christmas Special 1986/1987, Issue No. 36

Released on December 10th

The nature of CRASH Christmas issue covers was established, but this year Oliver had a problem; CDS had been promised a cover based around their Brian Clough’s Football Fortunes. He resolved it by setting loads of Olibugs round a table playing the board/computer game, while Clough, dressed as Santa Claus, peered on. It was unusual because it was entirely monochrome — but this suited Oliver, who had three other covers to do at the same time. Yet the vigorous line drawing makes its own impact, and it remains one of the best-taken risks in his CRASH career.

CRASH readers got their first chance to see Newsfield’s biggest gamble to date with a free 80-page issue of LM. There was also an article inside CRASH showing a picture of the LM editorial team taken at the London office (LM had two offices!). I wasn’t present, which was just as well, because the picture was very dark. A staggering 296,000 copies of LM Issue Zero were printed, and the investment then, and in later months, would very nearly cripple the company.

Where to hold the Christmas ‘do’ was settled by booking Ludlow’s biggest disco (out of two), the Starline Club. In the event, some 150 people turned up, some software houses travelling right across the country to be there. It pleased us a lot that they made the effort.

Yet another new face turned up in the art department, that of Markie Kendrick, who applied for the job because he knew the magazines and had once even drawn a Sabreman cartoon strip. Markie was a good find, quick at layout and fast on the draw — it was his comic inventiveness that led to King Grub in LM (and later in CRASH).

The games were less exciting, though Realtime gave us their very best Smash yet in Starglider — good on the 48K version, extraordinary on the 128K — for Rainbird, and Rainbird also received Derek’s accolade for their Jewels Of Darkness compilation of Level 9’s older adventures. But Derek was less than pleased with the ‘Class Of ’86’ overall, thinking it a generally lacklustre year for adventures games.

Design Design had been busy; two for Piranha included the Smashed 3-D Dracula story Nosferatu and the less than Smashed 2000AD licence Rogue Trooper; and then there was Domark’s Kat Trap. At last the Genesis comp had given birth. It was a bit hard for the CRASH reviewers because they were all aware of the danger of bias, or at least being accused of it, so extra care was taken: however, Kat Trap still did well at 84%.

The remaining Smashes went to CRL for Pete Cooke’s stunning follow-up to Tau Ceti, Academy, and to veterans Microsphere for their brilliant detective arcade adventure Contact Sam Cruise.

The big fun event for all the magazines was the Reviewers’ Challenge, which starred Gary Penn and Julian Rignall representing ZZAP!, Richard Eddy and Massimo Valducci representing AMTIX! and Ben Stone and Mike ‘Skippy’ Dunn representing CRASH. Massimo was a young man from Shrewsbury who had been given a job earlier as a trainee subeditor, but had drifted into the role of AMTIX! reviewer. His Italian good looks made him popular with the female members of Newsfield staff, and their bets were on him to win. Everyone else’s were on Julian Rignall as supposedly the company’s ace arcadester, but in the event it was Ben Stone who won for CRASH... much to his surprise.

Just before the Christmas rush really began, the magazines got themselves a real live subeditor in mad Irishman Ciarán Brennan (a sub’s job is to go through articles checking the spelling, grammar and sense of the piece, rewriting if necessary). During the early days much fun was made of typographical errors in CRASH (though they were as apparent in other magazines). Now there was no excuse...