Here we are for another semi- but hopefully increasingly regular delve into an exactly forty-year old copy of Computer & Video Games magazine, which it turns out might just be quite the time capsule for anyone into gaming! Just to recap how we got here, 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 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 thought might as well keep going back even further as the opportunity arose, as long as the price was right! Currently we’re still looking good to do these things monthly until May but I’ll keep doing my best to plug any gaps as we go through this year, then no question we’ll be monthly after that!

We’ve done a few of these things now but as always, the plan is to flick through the magazine together, 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. This time we also have the added bonus of the 52-page Book of Games that came with this issue, so I’ll do a quick recap of that as well. In the meantime, let’s begin by checking out what’s going on this month in Games News!

Well, when we eventually get there because you’ve got a good twenty pages of adverts to negotiate first, which I think is the first time I’ve noticed the magazine being front-loaded with so many! Anyway, Miner Willy is coming to the Commodore 64! Absolute heresy, of course, but apparently conversions from the Spectrum to the C64 are doing alright for Software Projects so we’ll see how this one goes in a few issues time! Also on the C64, Scope, a new “graphics programming language” that lets you write fast arcade games using plain English for just £14.95, which almost sounds too good to be true… Speaking of which, good news for anyone who’d just got an Acorn Electron for Christmas because apparently the market is about to be flooded with new games from Acornsoft and Program Power, including the “best selling” Killer Gorilla! Good to know you made the right choice.

Not much else of note to report on so we’ll jump to reviews, where we’re seeing some genuinely iconic titles making their first appearances, and as was the fashion at the time, they’re split into “Software Reviews” for home computer stuff and “Video Gaming” for consoles. Game of the Month is unquestionably Atic Atac on the ZX Spectrum… “Apart from the keyboard control, Atic Atac must rate as the best yet from Ultimate. It runs on a 48K Spectrum and is well worth the £5.50 you’ll have to pay.” I love how excited they are about what would forever be considered one of the greatest games of all time landing on their doormat this month! I should also give some context that they meant keyboard control was a bit crap versus a nice Kempston joystick, which they’d mentioned previously. Ultimate weren’t done there either because the VIC-20 version of Jetpac scored almost as big, and deservedly so because the thing is an absolute miracle and still a joy to play!

Legendary ZX Spectrum BurgerTime rip-off Mr Wimpy also makes a better account of itself than it probably deserved, but this is probably a good place to skip ahead a few pages to the consoles, where we begin with Gorf on Colecovision, “another cloning of a well known arcade game” indeed! I love Gorf and I reckon this is a decent version but it scored very average in their weird “video gaming” review format, where games were rated out of five on action, graphics, addiction and theme, whatever that is! There’s a Colecovision conversion next, with Smurf on the Atari VCS (or 2600), a cute platformer but “will the challenge last if you are a dedicated video player?” I think the biggest score this month (though it’s hard to tell!) is awarded to David Crane of Pitfall fame’s Decathlon, also on the VCS, where you’re wrecking your joystick over ten track and field events that end up being almost as gruelling as the real thing! Incredible game though, and there’s an interview with David Crane in this issue too, which is short but a really fascinating insight into his thinking, as well as the fledgling Activision… “When designing a game, you’ve got two choices – sports games or arcade type games.” Wise words!

Arcade Action next and for me it doesn’t get much better than this! Elevator Action sits painfully right on the doorstep of my top ten games of all time, and while there’s not a screenshot in sight, looking back now I kind of like the cartoons we got this month instead! You’re a spy travelling down a massive building – mostly by elevator – avoiding or shooting enemy agents and collecting secret documents before escaping and moving to the next. It’s a wonderful game but don’t just take my word for it… “Elevator Action by Taito Corporation has a really original theme and I found it a pleasant change from the normal spaceage shoot-em-ups.” Put that on the back of the box! Elsewhere we’ve got a look at Nintendo’s Donkey Kong 3, which they reckon is another sure fire arcade hit, as well a handful of mostly forgotten laser disc games, including as Sega’s Star Blazer (which I think would be released here as Galaxy Ranger) and Atari’s Fire Fox, featuring “a simulation model of the cockpit” found in Clint Eastwood’s hugely underrated fighter jet thriller of the same name.

It’s a bumper month for those of us into huge type-in BASIC games listings in the hope they might actually work, with not only that free bonus book full of them (which I’ll come back to later) but also the usual gaggle of them in the magazine itself. Listing of the month is Mission Impossible for the Spectrum, where you’re transporting nuclear fuel rods from the top of the screen to the bottom while avoiding laser fire and robots, although I think the title probably refers to typing in all those numeric DATA commands correctly! There’s also plenty of animal action if you prefer, with bird-dodger Eagle for the Sharp MZ80K and the first part of a real beast called Lost in the Jungle, also for the obviously massively popular MZ80K, while over on the Oric you’re being chased through a forest by a relentless beast in Rhino! I’m pretty sure I did this VIC-20 game, Skier, at the time when I borrowed my friend’s copy, as I often did around now, and it’s a tiny listing for a tiny skiing down a mountain avoiding obstacles game. Alien Attack looks like an equally simple space shooter for the Dragon 32; the C64 gets a strangely timed space-Santa game, Planet Quarrk; BBC owners get exactly the nerdy listing they deserve with Reversi; and finally, on the Atari 400/800, Briky has you building a wall in the face of bombs and moles! Huge listing that one too so expect nothing less than a classic when you’re done typing!

Elsewhere in the mag, the regular Adventure section seems to be growing in words by the month and will soon become the snoozefest I remember avoiding every issue for the next decade! Despite that, I will obviously report anything of note in there now though… I just can’t see anything of note this time! There is a really cool special feature on Namco though, which is also a fascinating snapshot of the Japanese games industry at the time, with arcade clones such a problem that they employed twenty detectives to track down the pirates! There’s also the current arcade trend for sports games (see, David Crane knew his stuff after all!), the increasing popularity of laser discs and also the huge gap still in the market for home computers that Sega in particular apparently had their eye on at the time with their SC-3000… There’s more science fiction to be found in the Extra Bits feature, with a guide on how to extend the capabilities of your computer with wild ideas about communicating over phone lines, faster storage with disk drives, expanding your computer’s memory and a £30 light-rifle for the Spectrum, C64 and VIC-20!

There’s more about creating graphics, chess computers and the usual corrections for previous issue’s type-in games, but I’ll quickly jump to the games charts for this month now, which excitingly have been extended to include top tens for three young upstarts, Dragon 32, Commodore 64 and BBC B! The Hobbit is running wild on the C64 and BBC too, taking both top spots, although looking down the rest of these lists, as well as the Dragon’s, it’s hardly the rich pickings we’re seeing elsewhere, with a load of clones and not great versions of stuff from other machines. Ultimate are hogging the top two places in the Spectrum chart with Atic Atac and Lunar Jetman, while the rest is such a fantastic snapshot of the Spectrum when I first new it – Chequered Flag, Manic Miner, Trans Am… The ZX81 has Krazy Kong at number one followed by the incredible 3D Monster Maze and the very ambitious Flight Simulation and Football Manager. Wizard and Princess is another very ambitious game that I’ve got on my list of games to cover in detail in 2024, and that tops the VIC-20 list, which excitingly then has the very first two games I bought for mine, Crazy Kong and Arcadia, following close behind! Finally, the Atari 400/800 has no need for dodgy Kong Klones because it’s got the real deal at number two, while Pole Position rightfully sits at number one.

I like to finish these features with a look at some of the adverts that increasingly take up what seems like most of 150+ pages in these issues by now but no problem there because I reckon they give us as good an insight into where we were with gaming in February 1984 as anything else we’ve looked at so far. Not really sure where to start though! We’ll go with Atarisoft, who are finally taking the fight to all those clones that still dominate the charts we just looked at, as well as a lot of these other adverts, with a library of their own official arcade conversions for all the popular home computers that are “so close to our originals, it’s like having an “Amusement Arcade” in your own living room.” There’s definitely a trend towards big, full-colour adverts here, and not just from the emerging giants like Ocean but also things like Blue Thunder from Richard Wilcox Software, which interestingly is still in the minority of having a single game taking up a whole page. Changing his name to something more catchy like Elite Systems a bit sooner might have helped its first wave of sales more than this advert did though! There seems to be a lot of peripherals getting the big colour treatment this month too, like the EMAX Arcade Professional joystick, which is remarkably like a modern arcade stick but with less buttons, or the legendary Currah Micro Speech expansion that would repeat any rude word you cared to type in, but would also extend the sound capabilities of a handful of compatible games, like the aforementioned Mr Wimpy. There were also light-pen painting sets, dot matrix printers and even a programmable joystick interface for the Spectrum so you could solve that Atic Atac keyboard control problem once and for all!

That’s going to do us for the magazine itself but let me quickly summarise what’s in that bonus bumper 52-page Book of Games that came with it! I think it had proved popular when they’d done similar the year before, and no surprise either because type-ins were often as good as it got between Christmas and birthdays! Here we’ve got a total of twenty games for the ZX81, Texas TI99/4A, Atari 400/800, ZX Spectrum, Sharp MZ80K, Electron, VIC-20, Commodore 64, BBC B and Dragon 32, and they’re a mix of simple arcade games, slightly more complex adventures, arcade clones (including my favourite game here, Frogga for the ZX81, which would have been priceless at the time!) and a few takes on family favourites like Simon and Connect Four. I love these things and I was over the moon when it arrived with this issue of C&VG when I finally got hold of it a few months back because I wasn’t expecting it to still be there! And with that, we’ll close the February 1984 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine, and I’ll see you next time for the fortieth anniversary of the March one!

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