You join me, dear reader, for a bit of an experiment! I started collecting Computer & Video Games magazine in earnest in early 1985, buying every issue every month until the middle of 1992 when, at 20-years old by then, a combination of falling behind on the latest gaming tech while I was a penniless student, other priorities such as music and copious gigs to attend, and the emergence of lads mags meant it just wasn’t something I needed to buy anymore. Back to when I was still 12-years old though, I’d been reading a couple of friends’ copies for a while by then – the magazine itself had been around since its first issue in November 1981, but I reckon it was late 1983 before it appeared on my radar, and then I was avidly reading it second-hand through most of 1984 before I started getting it for myself. I’ve read those early copies of mine – from 1985-1987 in particular – dozens if not hundreds of times, and while other mags from the time have been consigned to boxes in the garage if they’re lucky or, more likely, just binned once I’d first read them, these have always been to hand and regularly dipped in and out of ever since.

They currently reside on a shelf in my dressing room (which isn’t as fancy as it sounds!) but it won’t be too long before I need to relocate them to somewhere with more space because, for a couple of years now, the collection has been growing again! My first copy originally was March 1985, which would have been bought in February as magazines have always been dated a month ahead, and I thought it would be nice to have a look on eBay and see if I could complete the year, and the same for 1992. I haven’t got to 1992 yet but I have been busy in the other direction! Inevitably, of course, once I’d picked those up I wanted my own copies of my friend’s copies from 1984 too. Then I was tempted by 1983 and 1982… The thing is, where the copy we’ll have a look at in a sec cost 75p at the time, we’re now talking £10-15 each, probably because most of them aren’t exactly readily available all the time, so it’s a game of patience as well as money. This has led to me picking up what I can when I can rather than the methodical approach backwards I originally planned, and as a result I’m nowhere near completing 1984 yet, but there’s hopefully no real hurry…

And then I came up with the idea you’re looking at now! I’ve been toying with it since I covered some highlights from a couple of these back issues as they turned up in the post in my regular Weekly Spotlights but it was cemented when I was putting together a feature on Discovering Tower of Evil on Commodore VIC-20 a few weeks back as I write, where I ended up spending way more paragraphs than originally intended picking out and discussing some highlights from the June 1984 issue, such as the monthly charts, some of the reviews, some of the adverts and the type-ins, including a legendary one that was an official add-on to Jet Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum by its very creator, Matthew Smith! Anyway, that’s where I realised that curating and commenting on these pieces of gaming history as it was happening was probably more interesting than an Atic Atac rip-off for the VIC-20 (which I’d also discovered in that issue, hence the coverage). And here we are! The plan is more of the same, but maybe a bit more of more of the same, and with this pilot I’m mainly seeing how it works. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the August 1983 issue yet, or any further on into the year I could have delayed for so I could do a nice round anniversary, but I reckon this latest copy I picked up, from August 1982, isn’t a bad substitute even if we’ve missed its 40th birthday! From here though, if all goes well, I’ll return with some actual 40th anniversaries in 2024, one per month where I’ve got the issues to cover them, and then in 2025 we’re all guns blazing for every month for at least the next eight years, and no doubt a lot more by the time we get there once I get to 1992 and onwards.

If we’re talking the mag’s original form, I reckon there’s potential to go all the way to 2004 with this, which will be in 2044 by the time we get there, which will make me 72-years old but let’s not get ahead of ourselves because we need to head back to 1982 first! And before anything else, I need to mention this incredible cover, which, of all the covers on all my issues might be my favourite… Note to self, top ten C&VG covers feature! Anyway, it’s by Stuart Briers, who I think is a London-based artist and illustrator who’s still very much active today, with some especially cool scientific-surrealism pieces to his name, but what we’ve got here is an even more cool ghastly, robed, drooling skeleton towering over the classic Psycho-style haunted house on a dramatic moonlit night! Actually, when I say “Psycho-style” it is the Psycho House, right down to the same roof tiles! A very striking thing it is all the same though, and just to highlight the value of a type-in game to computer game mags around this time, that’s what it’s promoting, just like that June 1984 issue I mentioned a minute ago did for that Jet Set Willy listing!

I’ll come back to type-ins, but the plan next is just to flick through the magazine, check out its news, reviews, features and notable adverts, and pull out whatever catches my eye in the order it catches it. And the first thing that caught it was the revelation from none other than Sir Clive Sinclair himself that you can now get hold of “The world’s best personal computer for under £500!” He means the ZX Spectrum, of course, and as well as his signature, there’s even more heft to that statement from the likes of Your Computer, saying “…the Spectrum is way ahead of its competitors” or Personal Computing Weekly with “…the quality of the colour display is excellent!” As well as all that, and stuff like “full colour” (meaning eight colours plus brightness and intensity control) or “full-size moving-key keyboard”, and the lure of the ZX Printer peripheral, I did find it a little odd that he was talking about it being less than £500, which is written in huge type, when actually even the mighty 48K RAM Spectrum was only £175 at this point, which it also says in smaller text right below. Why not “under £200” or even “for £125” if we’re talking the 16K version? But what do I know?

I wanted to cover the month’s news next but honestly there’s not a huge amount here – plenty of Pac-Man and Scramble clones for the VIC-20, BBC, ZX81 and so on, but not much else of historic note or that I’ve even heard of, maybe apart from Colossal Adventure, a sophisticated for the time text adventure from Level 9 Computing. August was always the same, I guess. There is a feature on a bunch of upcoming arcade games for the Atari VCS or 2600 “TV games centre” too, such as Defender and Head On, together with some lovely hand-drawn screenshots, but I’m going to jump to where the best of the action was always to be found in C&VG – Arcade Action! As we go forward with these there’ll be regular first glimpses of all-time classics I’m sure, and this month is no different as we’re introduced to Zaxxon! Unfortunately, an uninspiring introduction with another hand-drawn screenshot is about all we get – no review, no being dumbfounded by this miracle of isometric shoot ‘em up action, no indication that it will still be regarded as a pioneering classic four decades later, just a very dry description of how the gameplay progresses. No wonder I don’t particularly like it! We’ve also got some tips on playing Missile Command, a slightly more enthusiastic look at the obscure arcade maze game Pepper II, another one called Devil Fish, and Portman (or Port Man), a “visual game” where you have to stack luggage on a ship that looks like a primitive version of Klax. Going to try that one for myself!

Adverts aside, which I’ll return to shortly, we’ve now got thirty or so pages of those games listings for you to type in by yourself to your machine of choice. There was usually something for everyone’s machine, and as time went on you’d still be getting stuff for the likes of the VIC-20 and ZX81 long after the reviews had dried up, just to keep the users buying. Which I know from jealous experience!!! This month’s menu begins with Mozaic, a jigsaw puzzler for the Sharp MZ-80K, which is a combination of letters and numbers I can honestly say I don’t remember ever hearing before right now! Lovely listing though – straightforward and relatively short – and one of those you can visualise from the lines of graphics data even if you don’t own a Sharp MZ-80K. Which I bet you don’t! Actually, it’s also one of those you might want to have a go at converting to your own machine, which I might occasionally have been prone to at least attempting! Next up is our cover star, Haunted House for the, er, 12K Acorn Atom! Now, we’ve already established this isn’t the only time a type-in would ever feature on the front page, but I reckon it’s the only time a 12K Acorn Atom game of any kind did! This is another really short type-in, and it’s a text adventure where you need to escape the horrors of the titular haunted house… Which is totally spoiled by the act of typing it in!!!

Over on the BBC they’ve got Breakout, which I assume is the official BASIC arcade conversion, then the exotic TRS-80 Level II is getting Space Hopper, which seems to be a pretty sophisticated bouncing about game, set over several stages. The ZX81 has Fur Trapper, with you massacring the local wildlife to trade their fur; reminds me of my old type-in space strategy favourite Ganymede for the VIC-20 and looks alright, albeit not subject matter you’d find in a magazine today! Martian Explorer for the Atari 400/800 is next, with you flying through underground caves and tunnels where landing on fuelling platforms is seemingly the main challenge – I’m sure this is based on an arcade game too but can’t for the life of me remember the name. Watch out for some very precise DATA lines to type in here or what’s on your dials is not going to help you in the slightest though! The wonderful VIC-20 isn’t missing out on the arcade ports either, with Rocks, which is “similar to that arcade favourite Asteroids.” Again, looks like a straightforward listing and I’d have been all over this one at the time! Last one for this month is Roborun, a maze game for the 16K ZX Spectrum where you just need to get out alive over three increasingly difficult levels. This one was the very first ZX Spectrum listing to feature in C&VG so a good place to end on these this time!

It wouldn’t be long before these mags were full of colourful and massively exciting single- and double-page adverts for games but there’s hardly a visual feast to be devoured here yet – lots of photos of nerds saying buy your computer or your expansion or your weird printer from us, then lots of smaller ones for home-grown games on all the weird and wonderful machines we’ve talked about already that would look vaguely familiar to anyone who’d set foot in an arcade at the time… Who can forget Scarfman for the Tandy and his mazey pill-addiction? And if you thought that Arcade Action coverage of Zaxxon was dry, wait until you see the two-page listing of ZX81 software from Sinclair, covering various games “compilations” plus all your Fun to Learn educational packs, and not forgetting the Business / Household section. This contains some real treats, like The Collector’s Pack for collectors of stamps or coins to keep up to four hundred records of up to six different items, and The Club Record Controller for clubs to maintain records for up to one hundred members, and they’re both just £9.95 but beware because “some of the more elaborate programs can only be run on a ZX81 augmented by the ZX 16K RAM pack” which includes these two! My favourite here, though, is in the games section, and the snappily-named Cassette G8: Super Programs 8, which actually contains only one program, Star Trail, a variant of the brilliant old grid-based Star Trek game that was available on everything, “plus blank tape on side 2!”

We’re going to stick with games as we close with reviews, and six of them spread across a whole two pages right near the back of the magazine, sandwiched between various BASIC programming features! I’m not sure I’ve heard of any of these anyway, but let’s have a quick dip in… We start with Battle of Britain on the ZX81 (expanded, of course, it being an elaborate program and all), with no graphics and just a map, which apparently detracts from realism but despite being “poorly written” could be better with considerable re-writing! Couldn’t we all… Over on the Atari 400/800, Murder at Awesome Hall is a spin on Cluedo that’s sounding not visually exciting and a bit boring. The Atom is back next, all 12K of it, and the Adventure pack featuring three games, one of which wouldn’t load, one sounds like the type-in from earlier, and the other is a fantasy take on a similar theme – your £11.50 “could be better spent on a more worthwhile game” was the conclusion! At £22.95 Mouskattack is a crazy pricey disk-based game for the 32K Atari where you have to catch rats in a maze but they like it despite the outrageous cost! And the same for the last game this month, Shockwave, for the Tangerine Microtan (Micron) system – yes, you heard me right! It’s a space game, apparently infuriating and tricky but unlike anything you’ve played before, which might be why I’m struggling to picture it from what they say but it sounds a bit like Galaxians from what I can fathom. Maybe I should become a member of the Tangerine Users Group so I can take advantage of their 25% discounted price of £5.62 and find out… Better than £22.95 – still can’t believe that!

And on that bombshell, I think we can close, and I’ll leave you with the sole full-colour glimpse of the magazine’s future with the advert on the back cover for “a new range of Electronic Entertainment” (also known as video games) for Apple II, including such titles as Minotaur, Phantoms Five and Fly Wars, from The Leisure Collection, a division of Zynar Ltd. And that’s that for August 1982! I know we’re right back at the dawn of history here, but even so, I’ve had a blast covering this stuff and now I really can’t wait to get a year or two into the future and start looking at this retro gaming hobby we all love when it was still science fiction appearing before our eyes every month! If you’ve enjoyed reading this half as much as I did writing it then I’ll be happy because I know you will be too, so worst case I’ll look forward to seeing you in a few months’ time for this as a more regular feature, although if I can pick up some more from late 1983 in the meantime we’ll have another practice then!