CRASH History

1987

- Issue 37
- Issue 38
- Issue 39
- Issue 40
- Issue 41
- Issue 42
- Issue 43
- Issue 44
- Issue 45
- Issue 46
- Issue 47
- Issue 48

February 1987, Issue No. 37

Released on January 22nd

Ian Craig returned to the cover for the New Year with Ocean’s Top Gun. It proved quite a popular illustration with readers, though I thought it suffered from problems similar to those of the Lightforce painting three issues earlier — doubtful definition of areas and a very rough finish which prevented the machine from looking like polished silver. And it was a single-minded image, lacking the visual gag which had become so much the hallmark of CRASH cover paintings.

We now enter a very difficult year for Newsfield, for CRASH, and for me to describe. I shall linger less on the software, which is dealt with in my 1987 Lookback, and concentrate more on the internal affairs of the magazine. As we entered 1987 no-one had any idea the turmoil that lay ahead.

People tend to regard a company as a smooth-working entity, but that’s very misleading. It would be far better to compare a company to an individual, or even at times to a family. When you meet someone you know slightly in the street and they wave hello to you, you never stop to think of the problems they may have — just like you do. And a company, however familiar and successful, has problems too. At times Newsfield has been like a large family, with all the members heading in much the same direction, yet split by family rifts, arguments, even feuds. The first upset of 1987 came when Sean Masterson resigned before Christmas to devote himself to his love of fantasy gaming; on Frontline he was replaced by Philippa Irving. But it was far from being the last change.

LM had been launched successfully, yet there were thunderclouds. It looked like it was going to be a struggle to get the essential advertising in to support the very expensive publication, with its large editorial staff and many contributors adding to the usual costs of typesetting, repro and printing. Against this worrying background were set the computer magazines’ problems, few of which the public saw.

The biggest concerned CRASH. It was really a magazine without an editor, which is a bit like a ship without a captain, with no-one to guide it. Graeme Kidd’s time was shared among all three computer magazines, and CRASH seemed to lose some of its direction. The spelling mistakes and the typos were slipping back in, despite Ciarán Brennan’s valiant efforts to stem them. But he was working on ZZAP! and AMTIX! as well, so there was too much subbing for him to do alone. For the February issue, Roger Kean was called back from LM’s Gravel Hill office to help sort it out; otherwise the issue would never even have made it to the printer on time.

In the Art Department, where Oliver was busy designing LM, there was also a serious problem. Both lan Craig and Dick Shiner had found they preferred being freelance to suffering the punishing regular schedules of magazine work, and as this issue went to press both of them resigned their jobs (though Dick, who still lives in Ludlow, continued doing some freelance work for Newsfield). Oliver was faced once again with having to do all the covers, but for the rest there were four layout artists, and Gordon Druce became art director of the three computer titles — it was sufficient.

Discussions about the CRASH reviews had been popular for quite some time, and as early as August 1986 a straw poll of the regular reviewers revealed that they would not mind having their names with their comments. To protect them, this hadn’t been done before; CRASH is unlike most other computer magazines because most of the reviewers are not professional writers or critics, but local school and college people. The anonymity was beginning to irritate readers, however, and so with the New Year, we changed the system. Ben Stone, Mike Dunn and Paul Sumner became real names, and to go with it a mild revamp of the ratings took place, with Use Of Computer and Getting Started both being replaced by Presentation. It was to be the first of several changes in the three-year-old rating system.

March 1987, Issue No. 38

Released on February 26th

The March cover was a masterpiece of magical atmosphere, a theme in blue mist. As usual time was a problem. The subject was to be a composite image to suit the month’s two Smashes, Feud and Ranarama. Oliver opted for lightly painting vague outlines, then airbrushing blue and black over the surface, leaving himself with the task of picking out highlights and the lightning with a brush in white. The accuracy of the line is hard to achieve but Oliver makes it look easy — and that is his wizardry.

Some of the big software houses seemed to be coming unstuck with the new year; US Gold faltered with their licensed Masters Of The Universe (Gremlin is making another attempt now) which received only 28%. Melbourne House did little better with Bazooka Bill (42%) and just as badly with 2000AD’s Judge Dredd — they were working on Inspector Gadget too, but that would never see the light of day; Konami’s Jail Break was disastrous (47%); Electric Dreams’s ancient zapper Tempest raised only an average flicker at 62%; US Gold tried ten-pin bowling, but Tenth Frame only knocked down 56% of its skittles; Leisure Genius finally made it out with Scalextric, and that got 57%. It was left to Steve Turner’s Ranarama for Hewson and a £1.99 budget game, Feud, on Mastertronic’s Bulldog label to win the Smashes.

What was going wrong? Hard to say, but the failed games had a few things in common: a rushed appearance, little content and often very poor graphics. We wondered whether Christmas had knocked the stuffing out of everyone.

Things were little better in Ludlow. For several months it had become clear that advertising revenue in the Amstrad CPC field had almost dried up because the sales of games simply didn’t warrant software houses spending money to promote them. So AMTIX! was badly hit financially, and during early February it became obvious the magazine could no longer survive the way it was. An attempt was made to change its nature dramatically, but forecasts showed that wouldn’t work either. Newsfield’s management decided to close AMTIX! down, and its editorial team of five was told the bad news — they would become redundant after their April issue went to press in mid-March. Only Richard Eddy would be retained to work on CRASH.

But meanwhile CRASH had its problems too. The experiences of February’s issue were repeated, with Roger Kean being hauled away from LM to help put together the reviews at the last moment. He was alarmed at the way they were being written: this was not the fault of the reviewing team — the reviewers’ sole responsibility was to play the games and write a short critical comment on each — but derived from the lack of editorial control. Roger and Ciarán spent a fraught weekend furiously rewriting just about everything, and then Roger spent the next two days in film planning, helping finish off the very late issue.

It seemed like the last straw, and once CRASH had gone to press, Newsfield reluctantly decided some rearrangement was essential. The financial problem of LM was another story, but editorially it was running very smoothly, so Roger Kean returned to King Street and once again took up editorship of CRASH, the magazine he had helped found. Lee and Hannah left in the reshuffle, and Graeme Kidd was moved to Gravel Hill to edit LM.

The full-time team Roger now inherited included myself (also doing other jobs), Ciarán Brennan, who became Assistant Editor, Richard Eddy and Ben Stone. For three days a week Ian Phillipson came in to write ‘intros’, the long descriptive sections of the reviews. He had been hired just before Roger took over and was still uncertain how the reviews should be tackled, but it wouldn’t be long before Ian became an essential part of the new CRASH. The young part-timers included Mike Dunn and Paul Sumner, but there were a few others waiting to try their hands as well. We all got ready for a revitalised CRASH.

April 1987, Issue No. 39

Released on March 26th

A new spirit swept CRASH; for the first time in ages Oliver and Roger were able to work together on ideas for the cover. The general opinion was to put Ocean’s Head Over Heels on the cover, but Oliver was alarmed that this could lead to yet another ‘cutesy’ picture. He wanted something tougher. Roger suggested basing the painting on the Evil Emperor instead, and using the idea of the space between the planets in the game’s scenario. That did the trick, and Oliver turned in one of the best pictures yet.

There was a new spirit indeed. It had already been suggested just after Christmas that CRASH was falling behind on colour content, that our rivals were providing more colour screenshots than we were. One of Roger Kean’s first jobs was to assess whether Newsfield’s increasingly experienced film-planners; already adept at putting tinted boxes, coloured text and so on into pages, could tackle the complexities of planning pages which included the laser-scanned four-colour separations from which full-colour photos are printed. This job would normally be undertaken by a professional repro house.

Cost had been the prohibiting factor. Normally it costs approximately £60 for every colour picture to be scanned by a laser scanner (the equipment is too expensive for Newsfield to have in-house): 30 reviews each getting two colour pictures would therefore cost around £3,600, far more than affordable. But if all the photographs taken from the monitor could be exactly the same size as each other, then whole batches of transparencies could be stitched together and scanned at the same time. (They’d have to be the same size so that when the pictures were all enlarged together by the same percentage they’d fit the magazine’s column widths precisely.)

When these sets of separations returned from the London company which does Newsfield’s scanning, the film-planning department could fit them into pages already laid out by our Art Department. Using this method, Roger and Cameron managed to trim the cost of screenshots down to about £10 per picture, enabling CRASH to go almost full-colour.

We tried the new system out with the April issue, though not with every screen, and it worked well. From now on CRASH would be colour throughout, whenever feasible. And because we now kept the separations, CRASH would always be able to reuse any picture whenever required at no extra cost for features like Playing Tips.

Lee Paddon’s interview with Australian programmer Steve Taylor went into the issue, but before it was printed it required an update. Steve worked for Melbourne House, but news arrived that Melbourne House UK had been sold to budget giants Mastertronic. It may have been a surprise to the public, but the deal, it seemed, had been under discussion for some time.

Mastertronic had come a long way since the days when their budget range was really cheap rubbish. But with labels like M.A.D. and Bulldog they were often putting out quality games at still very low prices, and now they owned one of the industry’s oldest and most respected full-price software houses — though it has to be said that Melbourne House had been going through a poor patch for some six months.

And here again was a second consecutive month where there were only two Smashes, and one was a budget game — in this case Firebird’s I, Ball. The other was, of course, Ocean’s Head Over Heels, widely regarded as the best game Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond had written. It was hardly apparent at the time, but Head Over Heels was part of a new pattern for Ocean who, like the rest of us, realised that full-price games were fighting for their lives in the 8-bit marketplace. 1986 had been an uneven year for them and, because of the volume Ocean put out, they were as much to blame as anyone for the low profile licensed games had achieved in the public’s mind. And the budget houses were profiting from that.

An insight, one of rare honesty from a software publisher, was offered by Ocean’s Gary Bracey when he told CRASH that Ocean’s recent record had not been as good as it should have been, both for the quality of product and for the accuracy of advertised delivery time. It was this open recognition of past failings that would now motivate Ocean for the coming year; they would do their very best to offer value for money.

May 1987, Issue No. 40

Released on April 30th

The Enduro Racer cover is a very straightforward one, and it was chosen largely for the opportunity it offered Oliver to produce an exciting action picture. The main figure is smaller than it might have been because there had to be a strap announcing the Playing Tips Supplement, which was nicely tied in: the biker looks like he has just leapt over it. Never one to miss a light-hearted dig when the occasion arises, Oliver made the crashing biker wear a helmet adorned with the letters CVG.

For the April issue, Roger Kean had become CRASH Editor halfway through its production schedule. With May’s issue he felt he could really get to grips with some of the problems that had been ailing the magazine.

The reviews were first. Several previous issues had failed to cover anything like the volume of games released in the month, and it had always been CRASH’s boast that we did cover everything. The problem was that since the early days the number of pages devoted to features and specialist sections like Frontline, Tech Niche and Adventure Trail had expanded dramatically. Increasing the number of review pages would mean expanding the magazine beyond its economic size. Much tighter writing would be required from now on, so that a review would take up less space and more would fit in.

Roger and Ciarán looked closely at recent reviews and decided that many were heavily padded without providing sensible information. One result of the new attitude was that the issue packed in 37 reviews (more than for ages, excluding February’s issue) and still left space for the other features, including the 32-page Playing Tips Supplement. The reviews were also split into three categories. each with a different design style: Smashes, those above 50% Overall and those below, allowing us more freedom to give short reviews to games that hardly deserved a full page to themselves.

Then there was the extra colour: in May’s issue virtually every game was featured in colour (apart from some latecomers and the adventures), even in the Playing Tips and Frontline. Readers seemed to approve of the colour, but not every letter was so kind about the shorter reviews — the shortness of the Krakout review was especially resented by some.

The number of reviewers also came under consideration. Ben, Paul, Mike and Richard were doing a sterling job, but it was felt that some fresh blood was required, and over the next few months that would arrive. The first new face in was that of Gareth Adams, another Ludlow local studying at the College, and a CRASH reader from the start.

A casualty of the new broom was my Hall Of Slime. To be honest it had outgrown its usefulness and there was a thought of axing it to make way for something new, though no-one knew quite what at that time.

While the dust appeared to be settling at the King Street offices after six months of unrest. Newsfield was facing a serious problem with LM. Despite its obvious popularity with readers, LM was in financial difficulties. Circulation was increasing nicely, but advertisers were still too wary of the ‘youth market’ and thus the magazine’s revenue was almost non-existent and it lost nearly £20,000 each issue. The gamble had not paid off. It was like AMTIX! all over again, only on a spectacularly larger scale. Emergency management meetings were held to see if anything could be done, but to no avail. A few days before Issue 5 was due to go to press at the end of April an announcement was made to the company that LM would have to close down.

For the second time within two months, the management were faced with making staff redundant. It was a terrible blow, personally, in terms of prestige and financially. Trade papers, including Computer Trade Weekly, erroneously suggested that Newsfield had lost half a million on LM. The real figure was nothing like that, but it was a heavy enough loss. The leave-taking a few days later was sad — but on the bright side, all the LM staffers found themselves other publishing work within a few weeks.

June 1987, Issue No. 41

Released on May 28th

What can I say about this cover that hasn’t already been said in detail in the Forum? It did cause CRASH trouble with WH Smith, who at one point considered withdrawing the issue from sale, but then contented themselves with extracting a written promise from Newsfield to be more careful in future. The moral issue apart, it remains a powerfully painted image which suits the game ideally. It also caused C&VG to hiccup, because apparently Palace had given them the ‘exclusive cover’, unaware we were doing one. C&VG evidently withdrew theirs.

Not everyone on the LM team was made redundant. Graeme Kidd remained in place as an editor without portfolio and Publishing Executive, and Barnaby Page, LM’s Subeditor, came to CRASH to become its Assistant Editor. Ciarán Brennan moved over to ZZAP! full-time.

And LM’s closure was an ill wind which blew some good for the casual reviewers because more work stations were created as more Amstrad PCW8256 ‘Joyces’, used for writing, came to CRASH from the defunct magazine. CRASH itself had moved again, returning from the middle to the lower floor.

And another new-old face (re)appeared. While Roger Kean was editing LM at Gravel Hill, Robin Candy started turning up for the odd chat. The strains of the previous year were exorcised, and with Roger’s return to King Street and CRASH, Robin indicated he would like to start writing again, largely because he needed finance for his band, Ad Lib To Fade, and because he had recently taken up skiing in Switzerland, which is an expensive pursuit! His first task was an article on the history of software houses and the changes in attitudes over the past four years. Robin’s return seemed to complete the feeling that the old CRASH spirit was back in force.

The new spirit ushered in video reviews, well aware that there would be catcalls from some readers crying ‘LM!’. To be truthful, those first few were written for LM, but the reasoning behind including them had not been lost (in reverse) on the fantasy film magazine Star Burst, which every month reviewed computer games. CRASH readers, we argued, are likely to be heavily into video-watching, so it makes sense. And despite several mutters of protest, the experiment seems to have worked well for most readers.

Recent independent market research has shown that we were right — of a range of magazines aimed at the ‘youth market’, including Smash Hits and the weekly music papers, CRASH and ZZAP! readers came out as the most avid hirers of videos. You are also, it transpires from the same research, the biggest purchasers of blank audio tapes — though that’s probably a subject we shouldn’t touch upon... !

Not to be outdone by my Playing Tips Supplement in the May issue, Derek Brewster provided a special supplement for adventurers, which included two Smashes for The Pawn and Shadows Of Mordor.

Robin Candy became involved in an interesting project almost immediately upon his return to the fold. As work on this issue began, Roger and Richard Eddy had visited programmer Pete Cooke at his home in Leicester to have a look at the part-completed Micronaut One, his first game for Nexus. At that time Pete had only designed three of the game’s four tunnel networks with a special utility he’d devised. Everyone thought it would be a good idea if someone from CRASH designed the fourth and hardest. Richard volunteered. However, he was due to attend a journalism course in London which cut across tunnel-designing, so Robin took the utility home and designed a network himself. He was never credited in the game, but to avoid any accusations of hidden bias Roger and Barnaby mentioned Robin’s involvement in the next month’s editorial. And fortunately, when Micronaut One arrived it was quite good enough to speak for itself without any personal partiality to boost its rating.

July 1987, Issue No. 42

Released on June 25th

After Dan Dare and the original Hulton Eagle comic, the greatest inspiration to the younger Oliver Frey had been the films of James Bond (he has them all, except the subject of this cover, on video). So it was no hardship for Oliver to do a Bond illustration for Domark’s The Living Daylights. It was good timing, too, because this issue hit the streets several days before the film opened in London, making CRASH one of the first magazines of any type to carry the image.

Synchronicity is a bit like déjà vu in reverse: if you hear or read a strange word you have never heard before, and then, over the next few days, several times you happen to see or hear that word used, that is synchronicity. Early in the month of June, Roger Kean attended a software fling on a Thames boat given by MicroProse. Mingling with the massed computer journalists, he was bemused to be confronted by someone from Computer & Video Games who informed him that they knew Newsfield was planning to break with its machine-specific tradition and publish a multicomputer magazine rather like C&VG. It was certainly news to Roger, though, he said, he kept a ‘poker face’.

Two days later Newsfield’s advertising department offered up a plan for a multicomputer entertainment magazine to cover all popular 8-bit and 16-bit computers, not to outdo CRASH or ZZAP! but to complement them. A few hours later, when no-one outside Newsfield’s management had been told of the proposal, someone rang up from a software house to ask how long it would be before the new magazine would happen. It seemed like an omen!

A few days later THE GAMES MACHINE was born, in concept at least, aimed to publish its first issue in time for The PCW Show in late September. A fortnight later we first heard that Future Publishing intended launching Ace — now that’s synchronicity!

Meanwhile CRASH was settling in nicely. Three more reviewers joined the stable: Robin Candy, now doing comments, Mark Rothwell, a friend of the brothers Rignall, and then Nick Roberts. Nick lived in Ludlow, had read CRASH for three years and felt he could take the Tips off my shoulders. To try him out, Roger asked him to do review comments, and so he too started coming in after school hours. His quiet, no-nonsense attitude quickly earned him everyone’s respect, and it was clear that it would not be long before my temporary Playing Tips stint ended.

And in fact there was a fourth reviewer. Dominic Handy had been a regular visitor to the Towers over three years, usually to buy games from the mail-order department — though his views on some games occasionally found their way into print via one or other of the reviewers — but also to undertake the odd writing job. As a film buff he was a natural for the new video section, and he started coming in more and more often.

The scope of CRASH continued to expand, with features on special effects in The Living Daylights and on the Nintendo console adding more reading matter to the magazine’s Spectrum core.

And an unusual aspect of this CRASH was the OINK! Supplement. This had been arranged two months earlier in conjunction with the anarchic comic’s publishers, IPC, and CRL, who were producing a game based on its piggy antics. To my knowledge, this was the first time anything like this had been tried in a computer magazine, and we were interested to see the reaction. Predictably, it was mixed! Many thought it insulting to have a young children’s comic in CRASH, yet newsagents had been moving it out of reach, considering OINK!’s contents to be of a nature more adult than was suitable for youngsters.

We saw an early version of the game on the Commodore, were given a rather useless Spectrum screenshot (the background only), and to date, that’s been that...

At the very moment when it seemed the year’s earlier troubles had become a memory, an earthquake shock hit us. Without warning Gary Penn, ZZAP! Editor, resigned, saying he was worn out. As he had some holiday owed, he left at the end of the week, and everyone held their breaths to see what would happen...

August 1987, Issue No. 43

Released on July 30th

Another favourite Frey subject — Fred Astaire films. Plans for a lavish and largely monochrome Astaire cover had been formulated ages before but never carried out. When the great Hollywood star died Oliver insisted on dedicating the issue of CRASH to him, and featuring him with his most famous partner, Ginger Rogers, on the cover. The other elements, dancing on a newly-arrived Spectrum +3, were the issue’s lead games: Tai-Pan, Micronaut One, Exolon and The Big Sleaze. It was another compilation cover, a style for which Oliver has become justifiably celebrated.

The Fred Astaire cover found an echo on page 63, detailing the results of the 1987 CRASHtionnaire, where his face (and Ginger Rogers’s) appeared at the foot of a reproduced Radio Times page. That was to illustrate the CRASHtionnaire’s findings on your TV viewing habits, but it was a good example of the kind of detail the art department has to consider when laying out. In recent months everyone on the team had become more aware of the value of cross-referencing items within an issue, and even a tiny item like the Astaire picture can add to the enjoyment of reading a magazine.

Our big thrill (well, there were two really) was the new Spectrum +3 with its Amstrad-style disk drive. The reviewers weren’t particularly impressed, largely because it was nothing more than a 128K with a disk drive instead of a datacorder, and also because there were no really good games available on the disks yet. Simon N Goodwin wasn’t raving either, though he considered the machine professionally-made and well-documented, because he felt you could upgrade with better disk systems than the one Amstrad provided. Software houses were cautious about releasing disk games for a machine which nobody had bought yet, too, as one of CRASH’s increasingly common in-depth news features reported. And there was the price — £249 was far too high. We all suspected Amstrad of hiking it so as not to ruin +2 high-street sales — a cynical supposition which would be proved all too true within a few months.

The other thrill was the arrival of Hewson’s Uzi pump-action water pistols — prizes for the Exolon competition. Naturally they had to be tried out, and anyway, we needed photographs for the competition page. Richard, Roger, Robin and Skippy went out dry and came back soaked. Fortunately, as the picture showed, it was a hot day. Several innocent bystanders got squirted, including Markie Kendrick from art. His David Sylvian-style hairdo was ruined, so he sulked, which resulted in the little remark from the comps minion. But we all forgot; art always has the last laugh...

Tie-ins fared pretty badly; The Living Daylights, Challenge Of The Gobots, Road Runner, Flash Gordon, all did from bad to average, only Ocean’s delayed Tai-Pan — and then only on the 128 — got anywhere, and that was a Smash.

Meanwhile, another of those news features focused on The Bug and its arguments with the software industry — the first sign of CRASH’s reborn interest in fanzines, that was to show itself in a renovated Fanzine File.

During the latter part of the schedule, THE GAMES MACHINE got under way, and Graeme Kidd got his portfolio back as its Co-Editor. His other half turned out to be none other than Gary Penn, who had decided that he would like to work on the new magazine (Ciarán Brennan had taken over ZZAP!). They set themselves up in Gravel Hill, using the offices not long before vacated by LM. TGM — as it became known — was going to cover more than just computers, and one of the first articles written was a comparison of laser-tag systems. Suddenly the water pistols had a rival as numerous different electronic guns began to appear. It was not, of course, very conducive to hard work in the CRASH offices to know others were zapping each other (or ‘testing’) nearby, but somehow we managed to keep our reviewers’ minds on their own games.

September 1987, Issue No. 44

Released on August 27th

When he saw the preview copy of Ocean’s Renegade, Oliver immediately said he wanted to do a cover of it when the review copy arrived. It was back to the single, powerful image, not unlike the notorious Barbarian cover, but with more restraint! It was rumoured that Roger Kean posed for Polaroid shots from which Oliver modelled the figure, and while Roger’s undoubtedly something of a hunk, no-one believed that Oliver hadn’t added considerably to the street fighter’s physique to make it one of the best figure pictures he had done.

In two respects, this was a momentous issue. Once again the CRASH reviews underwent a change after much discussion. We had dropped the Value For Money rating with the July issue, largely because of the plethora of budget games. It had seemed to us impossible to continue calculating value for money in any meaningful way when games at £2 and £10 were considered as the same product. Also, some readers had more money than others, making an arbitrary measure of value for money meaningless. Actually, this move brought the CRASH ratings more into line with Roger Kean’s original concept for reviews — that the reader should make the decision about the worth of a game after having read everything the reviewers had to say about it.

Now the Comments box was tweaked: Control Keys was dropped (the days when they made a significant difference to playability were over with universal joysticks and definable-keys options), Skill Levels was dropped in favour of a new Options line which also included details on definable keys, two-player modes and so on, Use Of Colour was merged with Graphics to make the comment more logical; but perhaps the most notable addition was that of each reviewer’s Overall percentage, which explained more clearly how a game’s Overall rating was arrived at.

And then there was the very first ever CRASH Challenge. ZZAP! had run reader/reviewer challenges since it started, and while they were fun to do, they were always a beast to organise. AMTIX! also had a challenge, so the pressure to include one in CRASH had been there for some time. We resisted the temptation easily enough seeing the other magazines struggling to get theirs sorted out each month. But the recent CRASHtionnaire had forced our hands without doubt. Too many readers wanted a CRASH Challenge for the magazine to refuse it.

In addition to the organisational problems (finding the time, inevitably a Saturday; getting the challenger to Ludlow; finding someone to take photos), there was always that nagging feeling in the reviewers’ minds that they didn’t want to make prats of themselves by losing to a mere reader. However, by dint of moral pressure, Barnaby persuaded Paul Sumner to go first — he’s such a natural leader of men, it was argued, that if he did it, the others would feel bound to — and duly he met Mark Turford from Wednesbury on a Saturday afternoon, and just as duly, he lost. They played Mikie as Nick Roberts sat with pad and pen in hand to record this historic defeat. It was ignominy after the ZZAP! Challenge, where Julian Rignall won month after month till people began to think he was Jeff Minter.

Perhaps not quite so earthshattering, but much sillier still, was the arrival in CRASH of Markie Kendrick’s King Grub, star of LM, T-shirts and... now the strip. Mark had created the character for LM, but when the magazine closed he refused to stop drawing the darned thing and eventually Roger was forced to give way and make room.

Advance planning for THE GAMES MACHINE resulted in a brochure for would-be advertisers, and in slightly modified form it appeared in the centre of this issue. Historically speaking, the most interesting aspect is the two serious-looking figures in the middle wielding laser guns. The man on the left was, of course, ZZAP!’s Julian Rignall, but few realised that the lass on the right was Glenys Powell, CRASH and ZZAP!’s Editorial Assistant, and, more importantly, Julian’s fiancée.

And THE GAMES MACHINE was about to make history itself, with its press date shortly after this CRASH.

October 1987, Issue No. 45

Released on September 24th

This cover bore the CRASH Sampler cassette. Often cover mounts simply obscure the artwork underneath, but Oliver had always argued that if we did one, the mounted object would have to blend in as much as possible. The image itself could be anything, but there wasn’t room for a full-blown painting based on the issue’s contents; it was Roger who suggested returning to the monster that adorned the cover of Issue 1, only closer up, and have it hold the cassette in its claws. Oliver obliged with actinic light and machine-oiled fangs. It is fascinating to hold up the two covers and compare them.

The reference to CRASHes past on the cover was not entirely inadvertent. It already seems an age of its own now, but this was the first issue in which I began recalling the CRASH History of four years. And once again Roger Kean was on the move — well, almost, for he became Editorial Director of the three computer titles, while Barnaby Page became Managing Editor of CRASH. It wasn’t much change for CRASH, where Barnaby had been running large sections of the magazine for some months anyway, but the simple change in titles was a sign of the year’s third upheaval at Newsfield.

It would be wrong to publish many of the confidential details, so suffice it to say that there were serious problems with the way THE GAMES MACHINE was run by its two editors (fortunately they didn’t show in the finished product), and shortly after the completion of its first issue Graeme Kidd and Gary Penn were asked to leave the company. That didn’t cause any catastrophes itself, but when ZZAP! Editor Ciarán Brennan decided a few days later to leave Ludlow and return to London a reshuffle was essential. Roger Kean assumed Graeme Kidd’s role of general overseer, which job he had been effectively doing for several months at King Street anyway; Barnaby took over CRASH,. Julian Rignall became Managing Editor of ZZAP!; and Dominic Handy became a full-time Staff Writer at CRASH.

A few weeks after all these changes, Newsfield left for the annual shebang at Olympia, the tenth PCW Show, where all the company’s upheavals were soon subsumed under the chaos of meeting software houses, signing autographs, selling CRASH T-shirts and fighting a spirited sticker war against Your Sinclair. In fact the only long-term casualty of Newsfield’s internal changes was Fear & Loathing; John Minson, who had been a personal friend of the dismissed Graeme Kidd, was no longer happy with writing for CRASH.

However, a new writer and a new section arrived. Paul Evans, a CRASH reader from Liverpool, had written to Barnaby asking if he might try doing a column for CRASH on modem communications. The magazine’s policy had always been to give anyone a try — and it had often had useful results — so Paul’s column started in this issue, and soon became a regular feature.

Et Al also made its debut, the video section having transformed itself into this motley collection of videos, books, games and offbeat little snippets.

And as for the games... given the general mood at the time, one could be forgiven for thinking that Virgin’s How To Be A Complete Bastard might have been made a Smash, but in fact the real problem with it was describing it in the magazine, given the language used in the game. I thought the review was as tasteful as could be, but we still got letters complaining, and even a notification from the Press Council about parental complaints. Sometimes you can’t even call a spade a trowel.

November 1987, Issue No. 46

Released on October 29th

The CRASH History created echoes everywhere. Issue 1’s cover had seen its latter-day counterpart in October, and now in November the King Kong cover of Issue 2 rebounded in the illustration for Activision’s Rampage, previewed that month (and indeed the painting from Issue 2 was used in the competition inside). The vision of gigantic destruction was reminiscent of the covers for the Fleetway War Picture Library series that Oliver used to paint in the Seventies. Note how the angle of the skyscraper leads the eye straight to the announcement of the 3-D section, just as intended.

The hectic days of The PCW Show were over — for everyone except the writers, still working on a seven-page news section which took stock of the software world as seen at Olympia. And back in Ludlow, the show went on. Barnaby’s editorial informed us of yet another Ludlow College reviewer joining the ranks, which made up for the loss of Gareth Adams, who had moved away. Bym Welthy (an unlikely name), Barnaby told us, had first contributed to CRASH around the end of 1984 (the mention of Issue 3 was an error), having turned up then as a friend of Ben Stone’s — to the inevitable greeting of ‘Bym and Ben, the flowerpot men’. Back in those days he’d undergone the CRASH initiation ordeal, being photographed for CRASH T-shirt ads. And though it was a long gap till this month when his familiar red head of hair reappeared, he was excused modelling T-shirts again.

This was our special 3-D issue, the one with the free red-and-green glasses inside, and what fun it had been for the Art Department. When the 3-D special was first conceived two months earlier, the notion had been to do what all magazines do: buy the spectacles from the specialist company that made them, and send the artwork to be turned into 3-D to one of the two repro houses in Britain which specialise in 3-D techniques. It was only afterwards, when plans to have loads of illustrations and text in 3-D were well under way, that it was discovered that the cost of three-dimensionalising was approximately £400 per drawing!

Roger Kean decided we could do the work in-house. All we had to do, apparently (!), was discover what it was the specialists did. Roger and Markie Kendrick pored over 3-D comics (of which Markie has a big collection), and figured it out. The problem, though, was being able to proof the result so it could be looked at through the spectacles to see if it had worked properly. This was achieved through use of a special colour proofing system used in film planning to cheek complicated colour pages. The proofed drawings came out in process magenta and process yellow/cyan (to make green), and were not quite the colours used to print the pages, but close enough.

A scream of ‘Eureka!’ from film planning brought the entire building crowding into the room to peer through the spectacles in wonder. Throughout the following days it became a habit to leap up or downstairs as each new masterpiece was proofed, each getting more ambitious. The CRASH Charts, for instance, had eleven planes of depth to them, and the whole issue represented weeks of painstaking cutting, repasting and adjusting to get the effects right.

In the room next to film planning, Oliver Frey was setting up his new editorial department for THE GAMES MACHINE. It had been moved from Gravel Hill because of problems with screen photography, and also to keep all the editorial staff together. Downstairs in the CRASH room, Nick Roberts got the job he had originally written in for, compiling the Playing Tips; and another new face slipped quietly in to join Barnaby, Dominic and Ian Phillipson. David Peters was to meet the urgent need for a Subeditor to plough through the dozens of thousands of words which each CRASH contains, correcting and trimming where necessary. Meanwhile, Ben Stone moved to continue his training at another magazine in the area, What’s On In Shropshire, though he continued to come into CRASH several times a week to write reviews and features.

December 1987

Issue 47

When you’re wandering around a newsagent’s, what grabs the attention is a cover with a striking design or image. In taking Incentive’s Freescape game Driller as a cover theme, Oliver gave himself a problem: to make it obvious what the painting was about, it had to contain recognisable elements from the game or the adverts, yet those were not action-packer, Driller being a more cerebral game. And of course much of Driller’s power came from its peculiar 3-D graphics, which would be hard to recreate without straight copying. So he opted for the fish-eye lens image, a neat notion which wraps virtually 360° of view into one picture.

Judge Death also appeared on the cover, drawing attention to the 16-page supplement inside the issue. This had been set up in conjunction with Piranha, to tie in with their Judge Death licensed game, after their interest in the OINK! supplement.

It was generally agreed that something from 2000AD would be even more likely to involve CRASH and ZZAP!’s readers than OINK!. 2000AD’s publishers were unwilling to participate — the title had just been bought by Robert Maxwell’s BMPC group — but Titan Books, who held rights not to the 2000AD characters themselves but to all the printed stories and artwork, were about to launch a Judge Anderson reprint series and were liaising with Piranha on the game of Judge Death. Titan were persuaded to contribute the supplement artwork, in colour.

The 2000AD stories were in black and white, so the supplement in colour in CRASH and ZZAP! was something of a novelty. Titan’s artist took the original pages, shot them to film to make a black-and-white image, then photocopied each page by a special process which rendered the image in a very pale blue. This gave him a design which he could colour in, the blue photocopy barely registering. The coloured pages were then sent to us together with the monochrome film, and we had the colour laser-scanned to provide the necessary four-colour separations. We combined them with the Titan’s monochrome film, and suddenly, there was Judge Death in full colour.

Apart from the supplement — which prevented the third part of this CRASH History going in the issue, because there weren’t enough pages to fit them both in as well as all the usual content of CRASH — and the background feature on 2000AD and Titan Books, this CRASH had the first half of Robin Candy’s huge feature on tie-ins. It was an appropriate time to examine the growth of tie-ins over four years; licences seemed to be growing ever more important, and CRASH was in retrospective mood anyway.

January 1988, Issue 48

Released on December 17th

This was our fourth Christmas cover, and the conflict between a seasonal picture and the decision to feature a particular game was a problem. On the other hand, in a year of violent games, Pac-Land at least offered a more peaceful theme. I confess a disadvantage: as I write this, the painting hasn’t be done, but the idea is to have loads of Pacs playing about in the snow, and so you, as well as I, can be the judge of the result when we see it.

It is now almost exactly four years to the day that Roger Kean, Matthew Uffindell and myself sat around the only two typewriters we possessed, staring at blank sheets of paper, wondering what it was Spectrum-owners wanted to read, trying to conceive of the first edition of CRASH. I am not sure whether the three of us harboured ambitions of seeing the company grow; probably, but magazines are organic things, and somehow they grow of their own accord.

Newsfield was six people then: Roger, Oliver and Franco Frey, Matthew, Denise Roberts and myself part-time. At the moment of greatest growth (in terms of personnel), when LM was launched, it employed 60 full-time staff, also using eight college-age reviewers and some 30 regular contributors. Today there are just 34 full-time staff. It is a much slimmer operation, but also a much more streamlined and effective one.

We have seen Sir Clive Sinclair’s ‘toy’ computer become the best seller in Britain, enjoying unrivalled software support from games which have ranged from utter drivel to demonstrations of the kind of skills that even mainframe programmers would envy. Recently we saw the 8-bit market start to falter as budget-priced games took hold and unit sales fell; this has particularly hit the Spectrum, yet the games are still being produced and we are always capable of being surprised by some new piece of cleverness. And despite the much discussed fall-off of sales generally, Spectrum magazines continue to ride high. The ‘Shropshire fanzine’ of early 1984 attained the highest sales in Britain of any computer magazine — and at one point the highest world-wide sales of any British computer magazine and is still the market leader, along with its sister publication ZZAP!

It is difficult to predict what the next four years will bring, but you can be sure that CRASH will aim to be the best, whatever the incidental difficulties; as I write this, upstairs in the Art Department Markie Kendrick and his fellow designer Wayne Allen are laying out the Christmas Specials of CRASH and ZZAP!. We thought it would be a tough task for three, but unexpectedly just two people are doing it, because Art Director Gordon Druce has recently decided to leave. By the time you read this, however, you will know they succeeded nonetheless.

Have an enjoyable Christmas and see you next year.

At the conclusion of this history, I thought it would be appropriate to give a credit to some of the people who, either in the limelight or behind the scenes, have helped make CRASH through the years. In alphabetical order:

Gareth Adams, Wayne Allen, Kim Andersen, Jon Bates, Michael Baxter, Ciarán Brennan, Derek Brewster, Robin Candy, Sebastian Clare, Sue Colet, Ian Craig, Tim Croton, Mel Croucher, Karl Cowdale, Gordon Druce, Richard Eddy, Paul Evans, Tony Flanagan, Franco Frey, Oliver Frey, Kelvin Gosnell, Simon N Goodwin, Dominic Handy, Dave Hawkes, Philippa Irving, Brendon Kavanagh, Roger Kean, Markie Kendrick, Graeme Kidd, Carol Kinsey, David Lester, Gary Liddon, Tony Lorton, Fran Mable, Rosetta Macleod, Sean Masterson, John Minson, Sally Newman, Nick Orchard, Lee Paddon, Barnaby Page, Michael Parkinson, Chris Passey, Denise Roberts, Nick Roberts, Mark Rothwell, Angus Ryall, Bill Scolding, Dick Shiner, Hannah Smith, Jeremy Spencer, Ben Stone, Paul Sumner, Gareth Sumpter, Matthew Uffindell, Massimo Valducci, Bym Welthy, David Western, Nik Wild; plus all the guys at Scan Studios, Neil Townley and everyone at Carlisle, and John and Jo at Tortoise Shell.

And John Edwards, who got in all those adverts at the start that paid for it.

December 1987, Issue No. 47

Released on November 26th

When you’re wandering around a newsagent’s, what grabs the attention is a cover with a striking design or image. In taking Incentive’s Freescape game Driller as a cover theme, Oliver gave himself a problem: to make it obvious what the painting was about, it had to contain recognisable elements from the game or the adverts, yet those were not action-packer, Driller being a more cerebral game. And of course much of Driller’s power came from its peculiar 3-D graphics, which would be hard to recreate without straight copying. So he opted for the fish-eye lens image, a neat notion which wraps virtually 360° of view into one picture.

Judge Death also appeared on the cover, drawing attention to the 16-page supplement inside the issue. This had been set up in conjunction with Piranha, to tie in with their Judge Death licensed game, after their interest in the OINK! supplement.

It was generally agreed that something from 2000AD would be even more likely to involve CRASH and ZZAP!’s readers than OINK!. 2000AD’s publishers were unwilling to participate — the title had just been bought by Robert Maxwell’s BMPC group — but Titan Books, who held rights not to the 2000AD characters themselves but to all the printed stories and artwork, were about to launch a Judge Anderson reprint series and were liaising with Piranha on the game of Judge Death. Titan were persuaded to contribute the supplement artwork, in colour.

The 2000AD stories were in black and white, so the supplement in colour in CRASH and ZZAP! was something of a novelty. Titan’s artist took the original pages, shot them to film to make a black-and-white image, then photocopied each page by a special process which rendered the image in a very pale blue. This gave him a design which he could colour in, the blue photocopy barely registering. The coloured pages were then sent to us together with the monochrome film, and we had the colour laser-scanned to provide the necessary four-colour separations. We combined them with the Titan’s monochrome film, and suddenly, there was Judge Death in full colour.

Apart from the supplement — which prevented the third part of this CRASH History going in the issue, because there weren’t enough pages to fit them both in as well as all the usual content of CRASH — and the background feature on 2000AD and Titan Books, this CRASH had the first half of Robin Candy’s huge feature on tie-ins. It was an appropriate time to examine the growth of tie-ins over four years; licences seemed to be growing ever more important, and CRASH was in retrospective mood anyway.

January 1988, Issue No. 48

Released on December 17th

This was our fourth Christmas cover, and the conflict between a seasonal picture and the decision to feature a particular game was a problem. On the other hand, in a year of violent games, Pac-Land at least offered a more peaceful theme. I confess a disadvantage: as I write this, the painting hasn’t be done, but the idea is to have loads of Pacs playing about in the snow, and so you, as well as I, can be the judge of the result when we see it.

It is now almost exactly four years to the day that Roger Kean, Matthew Uffindell and myself sat around the only two typewriters we possessed, staring at blank sheets of paper, wondering what it was Spectrum-owners wanted to read, trying to conceive of the first edition of CRASH. I am not sure whether the three of us harboured ambitions of seeing the company grow; probably, but magazines are organic things, and somehow they grow of their own accord.

Newsfield was six people then: Roger, Oliver and Franco Frey, Matthew, Denise Roberts and myself part-time. At the moment of greatest growth (in terms of personnel), when LM was launched, it employed 60 full-time staff, also using eight college-age reviewers and some 30 regular contributors. Today there are just 34 full-time staff. It is a much slimmer operation, but also a much more streamlined and effective one.

We have seen Sir Clive Sinclair’s ‘toy’ computer become the best seller in Britain, enjoying unrivalled software support from games which have ranged from utter drivel to demonstrations of the kind of skills that even mainframe programmers would envy. Recently we saw the 8-bit market start to falter as budget-priced games took hold and unit sales fell; this has particularly hit the Spectrum, yet the games are still being produced and we are always capable of being surprised by some new piece of cleverness. And despite the much discussed fall-off of sales generally, Spectrum magazines continue to ride high. The ‘Shropshire fanzine’ of early 1984 attained the highest sales in Britain of any computer magazine — and at one point the highest world-wide sales of any British computer magazine and is still the market leader, along with its sister publication ZZAP!

It is difficult to predict what the next four years will bring, but you can be sure that CRASH will aim to be the best, whatever the incidental difficulties; as I write this, upstairs in the Art Department Markie Kendrick and his fellow designer Wayne Allen are laying out the Christmas Specials of CRASH and ZZAP!. We thought it would be a tough task for three, but unexpectedly just two people are doing it, because Art Director Gordon Druce has recently decided to leave. By the time you read this, however, you will know they succeeded nonetheless.

Have an enjoyable Christmas and see you next year.

At the conclusion of this history, I thought it would be appropriate to give a credit to some of the people who, either in the limelight or behind the scenes, have helped make CRASH through the years. In alphabetical order:

Gareth Adams, Wayne Allen, Kim Andersen, Jon Bates, Michael Baxter, Ciarán Brennan, Derek Brewster, Robin Candy, Sebastian Clare, Sue Colet, Ian Craig, Tim Croton, Mel Croucher, Karl Cowdale, Gordon Druce, Richard Eddy, Paul Evans, Tony Flanagan, Franco Frey, Oliver Frey, Kelvin Gosnell, Simon N Goodwin, Dominic Handy, Dave Hawkes, Philippa Irving, Brendon Kavanagh, Roger Kean, Markie Kendrick, Graeme Kidd, Carol Kinsey, David Lester, Gary Liddon, Tony Lorton, Fran Mable, Rosetta Macleod, Sean Masterson, John Minson, Sally Newman, Nick Orchard, Lee Paddon, Barnaby Page, Michael Parkinson, Chris Passey, Denise Roberts, Nick Roberts, Mark Rothwell, Angus Ryall, Bill Scolding, Dick Shiner, Hannah Smith, Jeremy Spencer, Ben Stone, Paul Sumner, Gareth Sumpter, Matthew Uffindell, Massimo Valducci, Bym Welthy, David Western, Nik Wild; plus all the guys at Scan Studios, Neil Townley and everyone at Carlisle, and John and Jo at Tortoise Shell.

And John Edwards, who got in all those adverts at the start that paid for it.