It’s only the second of these features proper but the conundrum that’s been at the back of my mind since I came up with the idea has already reared its ugly head… Magazines were (and what’s left of them probably still are) always a month ahead of themselves, so you’d get the June copy in May, the October copy in September, and so on. For our purposes here, though, where we’re flicking through these wonderful gaming time capsules from exactly forty years ago together, for eleven months of the year that slight twist on reality isn’t really a big deal. However, nothing gives away reality like Christmas! And here we are then, undeniably celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the January 1983 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine a month too late, and at time of publication at least, probably when Christmas is the last thing you want to hear about! I’ll do my best to steer clear though, and we’ll just keep it between us until this time next year again!

Which is a good point to quickly recap how we got here, but feel free to skip ahead if you’ve read it before! I started collecting C&VG in earnest a couple of months into 1985, and would then carry on without missing an issue until well into 1992. A couple of years ago, I decided to complete 1985 with a bit of help from eBay, but inevitably I then decided to keep heading backwards into 1984 to have my own copy of the ones I’d first read second-hand from a friend, then, while I was there, I might as well keep going back even further as the opportunity arose, when the price was right! Which reminds me, I saw a very rare first issue from November 1981 on eBay recently going for about £60! That little problem is still a way off for me though, and I’m actually still working my way to completing 1984, which I’ll endeavour to do as we go through this year, but as things currently stand this feature will be monthly until April, then a bit sporadic after that, before going monthly for potentially years to come this time next year!

The plan, as always, is to delve into the magazine, check out the news, reviews, features, type-ins (for as long as they last) and notable adverts (where that time capsule thing really comes into its own!), pulling out whatever catches my eye, in the order it catches it, and providing you with a bit of a commentary. And with that, let’s start with all the news from January 1984, which honestly – it being Christmas (but don’t tell anyone!) – is a little light this month, but I reckon we can still find a few gems! For example, did you know that “war games are fast taking over from shoot ‘em ups as the most popular kind of computer game?” That’s what the piece about Imagine’s upcoming Stonkers, the strangely-named “hi-res” tactical tank battle simulation for the Spectrum, reliably informs us. Which I suppose is why it’s better remembered four decades on than the likes of their Jetpac and Arcadia… Also on the Spectrum, a speech recognition add-on called Micro Command that will allow you to control specially commissioned titles from the likes of Virgin Games with your voice, using the supplied microphone. I don’t remember ever hearing of this again, although there would be a million of these pricey but ultimately useless peripherals to follow, and I do also have a vested interest because about five years later my A-level technology project would involve creating something very similar!

Elsewhere, we learn that Llamasoft is testing a revolutionary German program that will reduce the time to load a 16K program from over six minutes to ten seconds, potentially meaning the end of the new-fangled disk drive as we know it! And cut-price record company K-Tel are getting in on the Spectrum and VIC-20 action with a bunch of double-sided cassettes featuring the likes of The Battle of the Toothpaste Tubes coupled with Castle Colditz, and a bunch of other games we’d also never hear about again, although I did always fancy the VIC-20 one with Tomb of Dracula on it! I know we’re pretending Christmas didn’t happen, but for next year maybe keep in mind that Elm Computers have developed three seasonal programs that will mean you never need to send a Christmas card again, with animated graphics and festive sounds. Assuming, I suppose, the person receiving them has the same computer as you, although it doesn’t really go into any of the logistics or even what they work on, but if you’re still interested you can get them for £2.50 each or £7 for a pack of three! Last up this month, we learn that some American startup company called Electronic Arts has been founded by the bloke who made the pinball game, Rasterblaster, together with a bunch of other less well-known independent games designers, and they’ll be continuing the pinball theme with The Pinball Construction Set, which is shaping up to be the hottest of their first releases. Wonder if we’ll ever hear about them again?

As usual in this period, games reviews are divided into “software” reviews for the home computers and “video gaming” reviews for the consoles, so I’ll follow suit and begin with game of the month, International Soccer on the Commodore 64, which is “…by far the best sports simulation ever produced for any microcomputer and is the standard by which all future sports games will be judged.” Keep that in mind, Electronic Arts! In the meantime, I know you’ve probably never heard of it either, but it is “the best game yet for the Commodore 64” with player animation “about as realistic as computer graphics will allow,” the ability to change your team colours, and even Queen Elizabeth presenting you with the cup at the end! Elsewhere, TI 99/4A users are getting some of that newly-popular tank battling, and Dragon 32 owners are getting an undersea take on Frogger with Bug Diver, but that correctly all sounds as average as the belated and generally crappy C64 port of the aforementioned Spectrum and VIC-20 classic Arcadia!

The clone wars continue unabated over on the Spectrum, with no less than four versions of Donkey Kong going head-to-head this month. Killer Kong’s unique twist seems to be ramping up the difficulty with a deluge of barrels for a very wobbly take on Mario to fail miserably at jumping over. In total contrast, Krazy Kong by PSS is deemed way too easy, with the reviewer looping it on his first go, but at least it’s recognisably a Donkey Kong rip-off because after taking thirty minutes to load, C-Tech’s Krazy Kong was apparently nothing like it and also full of bugs. Probably best to avoid anything called Krazy Kong then, and stick with Kong, a pretty decent version by Ocean. Other highlights on the home computers this time out include Bengo on the VIC-20, which does a very decent job of Pengo, and Transistor’s Revenge, a circuit board-themed shooter on the BBC that’s apparently the year’s best game on there!

Let’s jump over to the consoles for a bit of “video gaming” now, and there are some real treats, starting with a superb conversion of Popeye for the Colecovision – which it had better be at £29.95! There’s also a dear old favourite of mine, Bounty Bob on the Atari VCS (or 2600), which has you walking all over the platforms in a mine to claim them for yourself (by changing their colour as you go) while avoiding all sorts of hazards. I love it, and according to this review, if you want a climbing game then this is “certainly better than the top-selling Donkey Kong” so stick that on the box! Finally this month, on that fancy new all-in-one Vectrex (see October 1983 feature here), they’re sticking it to the shoot ‘em up yet again, with the main criticism against Bedlam seemingly being that it’s not an “adventure game or strategy challenge!” The end is nigh indeed!

The Arcade Action section in C&VG would never fail to impress for years to come, and this month was no different, although I’m not sure that if I wanted to become better at Stargate (also known as Defender II), being told “it is very helpful to be good at Defender” is a particularly constructive way to start the guide from an expert reader that kicks-off this section! Things pick up with laser disc arcade shooter Interstellar Laser Fantasy, which in reality is as much style over substance as you’d expect, and even more so for M.A.C.H. 3, built on similar tech, and using actual video footage from the front of a plane for an equal parts stunning and primitive take on Afterburner. Bizarrely, considering these were just pre-Dragon’s Lair, so as good-looking as anyone had ever seen in a game up to that point, there’s not a screenshot in sight and they’re all generally greeted without any fanfare whatsoever! Not so for the real highlight here though, Namco’s Pole Position, which would soon become the real reason I’d want to visit the travelling funfair when it turned up a couple of times a year, at least until they got a sit-down Star Wars machine! Anyway, this is actually another tips feature, as I assume it was reviewed in one of those earlier issues I haven’t got yet, but it’s a decent introduction to the game all the same, and it’s penned by the legendary Julian Rignall this time, rather than Ian Boffin (no joke!) from Woking!

Why is Sherlock Holmes on the cover, you might ask? Well, originally I thought it was somehow associated with the 28-page Book of Adventure pull-out supplement included in this issue (which, impressively, is still stapled in my eBay copy), but apart from a competition elsewhere in the magazine where you can win a C&VG “The Champ” shirt if you answer some Holmes-inspired riddles, I’m not sure of any direct link, so it’s still unsolved! What you do get in this slightly confused and mostly dry bonus supplement though (which was generally the case with the smaller, more regular Adventure section in the mag each month), are seven pages of reviews, which, as well as the expected trawl through a load of text adventures, includes a section of “video games adventure” reviews, where we unexpectedly find none other than Pitfall, which it doesn’t say but I guess is the Colecovision version as the 2600 one had been around a while by now, and there weren’t any other versions quite yet. Then you’ve got interviews with Mr Adventure, Scott Adams (who did the very first game I ever finished, Pirate Adventure on the VIC-20!) and Philip Mitchell, who did Melbourne House’s The Hobbit. There’s also stuff on writing your own adventures, some tabletop RPGs and that long-since redundant turn-based RPG you used to play by post, one move at a time for £1-2 a go. Which I might just know from experience!

Of course, we’ve also got the usual stack of type-in games listings, with no less than nine of the things this time! Starting on the Spectrum, who needs all those Kong klones from earlier when you’ve got Demolition, which also sounds like it started life as one! The Texas TI 99/4A has Paratrooper, a war-themed dodge ‘em up, while Crash Landing on the Atari 400/800 takes a different approach to coming down from the skies, in a take of all those building bombing games like Blitz that were around back then. Dragon 32 owners got a very short and sweet race car game called Road Runner, while BBC owners had a lot more typing to do but would then be rewarded by Crawler, a Centipede clone. Assuming it actually worked! The roles were reversed for us VIC-20 cool dudes with another insect game, Turnip Turmoil, while Space Blockade on the ZX81 had you guiding shuttles through aliens instead. Part one of a proper beast of a type-in for the Sharp MZ80K next, and it’s an adventure called Lost in the Jungle, which we’ll certainly come back to next time to see where it’s heading, but what I really appreciated for now was that it acknowledged the act of typing-in gave away the game, although I’m not sure the suggestion about asking a friend to type it in instead was massively realistic! The highlight this month, though, has to be ROX 64, by none other than the legendary Jeff Minter! He provided a whopping four pages of BASIC program code for the Commodore 64, which is hopefully going to reward your efforts with what seems to be a take on Missile Command, where you’re shooting meteors out of the sky. Looks like pretty advanced BASIC to me too, with both sprite and sound synthesis, and a proper magazine seller!

What really jumped out at me in this issue is how much colour we now find in the adverts, as opposed to the classified-type listings of old, and this increasingly isn’t just restricted to big guns like Imagine hogging double-pages all over the place (although they still do), but also the likes of Supersoft, with their big C64 lineup of more stuff that hasn’t seen the light of day since, and a bunch of flight-related sims from young upstarts Hewson, and Interceptor with their Vortex Raider, and Artic with I’m in Shock – which is what I’d be if anything from that company was ever any good! No denying the biggest and boldest of the adverts this month come from Software Projects though, with two huge, separate adverts on a double-page spread for Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, and these actually relate to another news story I was saving from earlier, which saw creator Matthew Smith parting ways with Bug Byte and, thanks to an unusual clause in his contract, bringing his games with him when he joined Software Projects.

You could literally have filled your bedroom wall with just the best of the adverts that must have taken up a good half of the whopping 170-pages in this magazine, but I’ll skip what might be my personal favourite because it’s a very Christmassy Ocean one for Kong from earlier, plus Mr. Wimpy and Eskimo Eddie! Instead, I’ll close with an early appearance by one of my all-time favourite platformers, Chuckie Egg, although it looks like this was still well before the Amstrad CPC version I’d know best a few years later! Classics everywhere you look in this issue though (and a lot more besides), and a real treat to look back on so long after the event, with the benefit of hindsight! By the way, did you spot Mario and Luigi as you’ve probably never seen them before in the Game & Watch advert a few paragraphs earlier?

Aside from everything else we’ve looked at, there’s the usual page of bug fixes for previously published type-ins, several pages on programming your own stuff, some weird play-by-mail nerd game, and all the usual competitions and puzzles, but I’ll finish this time with a quick look at the charts. On the Spectrum, Ultimate’s Lunar Jetman tops the top ten, with its predecessor still hanging around behind the revolutionary Ant Attack and the timeless Atic Atac. I really need to look up 3D Grand Prix, at the top of the ZX81 chart, although I see the world “Artic” attached to it, so maybe need to manage my expectations a bit! On the VIC-20 it’s yet another Krazy Kong at number one, although I’m fairly sure they mean Crazy Kong, which was the version by Interceptor I owned! I really need to do a deep-dive on Wizard and the Princess too – the VIC’s answer to Skyrim! Finally, on the Atari 400/800, the usual selection of proper arcade licenses, topped by Donkey Kong then Centipede then Dig-Dug, but then quite the smattering of strategy-type games too, so maybe there was something in that shoot ‘em up being dead thing after all! And with that, I think we can close this month’s issue, which I really hope you enjoyed looking through with me, and be sure to check back for more of the same when February 1984 arrives!