Here we are, back again for a whole new year of our regular monthly dives into the pages of an exactly forty-year old copy of Computer & Video Games magazine, which is always quite the time capsule for anyone with any interest at all in video games! It is, however, that time of year when doing this by month on the cover rather than publication date doesn’t quite work because these things always came out the month before it said on them, so this is the Christmas issue a month late! But it’s a small price to pay for making sense the rest of the year, and I promise to go easy on the Christmas references as far as possible because if you’re reading this around time of publication at the start of January 2026, you will no doubt be sick to death of Christmas by now! Anyway, as always, a quick recap of where it’s coming from – I started collecting C&VG in earnest a few months into 1985, and carried on without missing an issue until well into 1992. A few years back, I decided to complete the set from 1985 with a bit of help from eBay, then inevitably decided to keep going backwards into 1984 so I had my own copy of the ones I’d first read second-hand from a friend. And obviously, while I was doing that, I thought I might as well keep going further back, as and when the opportunity arose and the price was right, as well as trying to expand out of the other end of my collection too, although that’s still proving a lot more difficult than the older ones for some reason! Plenty of time to keep working on that though, so without any further delay, let’s jump into the January 1986 issue, where as usual, the plan is to flick through the magazine together, checking out the news, reviews, type-in games listings, features and notable adverts (which are often the best bits), pulling out whatever catches my eye, in the order it catches it, and providing a bit of commentary on top…

We’ll begin as usual with what’s on the cover, which, apart from a stain from a contemporary can of Cherry Coke or something, is dominated by a striking illustration of Michael J Fox as Marty McFly in Back to the Future! Honestly, I’ve never got the fuss about that series, but I know I’m in the minority, so everyone else can fill their boots with not only a preview of the tie-in game in this very issue, but a chance to win a “dream prize” which appears to be a copy of the soundtrack, the book of the film and the game on your choice of ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 or Amstrad CPC. All you have to do is list five items you’d bring Back to the Future from anywhere in the past and why, which I can tell you because clearly I didn’t bother entering this so the coupon is still there… I must confess though, I noticed a few missing pages when I was looking for that, so that’s some adverts we won’t be looking at later because they ended up on my bedroom wall, and likewise, the free giant calendar also mentioned on the front cover probably also ended up there too! A few more competitions promoted on there I can tell you about though, and while I wasn’t bothered about the last one, “Win: Fred Flintstone’s Ghetto Blaster!” couldn’t be more up my street! Turns out it was a National Panasonic one rather than anything prehistoric though, and a copy of the new Flintstones game by Quicksilva, which I’m sure we’ll come back to later. Elsewhere, you can also win a copy of their new war game, Death Wake, and there’s another competition to win Elektra Glide, a cool futuristic racer for Atari 8-bit or C64, but if I can’t listen like the Flintstones then I’ll watch Ghostbusters instead please, which I can do by entering to win a copy of that on video cassette, which was apparently worth £70 back then… Which is why we had those wonderful rental shops! Last one for this month, and almost equally exciting, is a tie-in to the new Geoff Capes Strongman game, where you can not only get your hands on copy of that, but a set of classic eighties exercise equipment too – and yes, that does mean chest expanders! Just check out that pic above, even if it is just an excuse to share one of my favourite adverts ever again across the page from it!

You know it’s nearly Christmas when the Games News is full of stuff about war games on the BBC and Russ Abbot lookalike competition winners! New screenshots of the upcoming new Wally adventure though, Three Weeks in Paradise, as well as a sneak peek at horror “spoof” movie tie-in Friday the 13th, which just about qualifies as so bad it’s good on both Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, although the latter really is dreadful! Enigma Force is looking alright though – it’s Denton Designs’ follow-up to the pioneering but “slow and sometimes tedious” icon-driven strategy game Shadowfire, and although this ended-up just as initially baffling, the Commodore 64 soundtrack is superb! There’s also news of Ultimate’s Wild West-themed Outlaws on C64 and “Gunfight” on the Spectrum, which, as I write, I’ve just got further into than I ever have before… Assuming they do actually mean Gunfright! There are a lot of words across three pages here this month but most of it puts even Shadowfire to shame, so I’ll finish on a not tedious at all feature on Koronis Rift, the third title to finally make its way to the UK (following Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer) from the recent Epyx and LucasFilm partnership. Not sure it gets the attention today of either of its predecessors, but I reckon it’s an accessible but deep and very fun bit of atmospheric sci-fi adventuring that deserves a mention here, and I hope we’ll come across a review of it in the next couple of issues!

Speaking of reviews, let’s go there next, where Game of the Month is another underrated classic, Swords and Sorcery on the ZX Spectrum! It’s standard Dungeons and Dragons fayre, but with an innovative menu-driven control system that was crying out for the mouse to come along! Actually, that, as well as the overall presentation, reminds me a lot of Slaine that followed a bit later, as well as stuff like The Bard’s Tale, which, thinking about it, might be a better idea to play today! The opposite of underrated next, with that The Flintstones on C64, and not a ghettoblaster in sight as we help Fred build his house, which is even more dull than it sounds and in no way deserves nines across the board! I of the Mask, on the other hand, almost does, except for the six out of ten sound, and is a very good-looking ZX Spectrum 3D maze game from the guy behind the seminal Ant Attack, but over the page you’ve also got budget stunner Spellbound on there, as well as one of the Spectrum’s great arcade conversions in Commando… And a stuffy old tank game called Panzadrome! As usual, there’s way more than I can cover here, and a lot of it is equally pretty average stuff – Durell’s Critical Mass, the generally terrible Artic’s actually not terrible International Rugby and slightly above-average Discs of Death, then there’s Sir Fred, Robot Messiah, BC’s Quest for Tires, 3D Boxing… And, outside of the definitive version of Chuckie Egg, one of the Amstrad CPC’s all-time greats in Sorcery, an absolutely gorgeous and absorbing magical flying platformer type-thing – the reviewer says it’s his all-time favourite game and I get it! Oh yeah, I did do a deep-dive on it here too if you want to find out more!

As if we didn’t have our fill of them in the news section, there is a an additional double-page of war games reviews too, with Battle of Britain scoring well on the CPC and C64, but I’ve never seen the number six appear so many times everywhere else, so we’ll jump to the far more exciting Arcade Action feature. I know it happened most months around this time but it’s incredible to think we were seeing this stuff for the very first time here! This month we’re at the Associated Leisure Preview 86 event (which actually took place the previous October), where it sounds like Gauntlet, Choplifter, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the three-screened “monster of a machine” that was Buggy Boy were the stars of the show… Just seeing a picture of it here gives me goosebumps all over again, so seeing it in the flesh for the first time there must have been incredible! Really fascinating to see talk about Trivial Pursuit and what would become the pub-staple quiz machine starting to evolve too, while conversely, Universal’s Captain Zap seemed to be the last hurrah for the laser-disc. We’ll leave the show with Taito’s excellent Legend of Kage making a first appearance, as well as the more obscure Typhoon Gal and Knuckle Joe, and similarly, SNK introduced ASO, a shoot ‘em up that I probably had heard of because I read these mags word for word over and over, but was new to me all over again as I read about it now! I do know Data East’s gangster-themed Shoot Out though, so no screenshot of Green Beret accompanying the separate feature about it is going to fool me!

Oh good, it’s the Adventure section next! And while I’m not going to tell you there weren’t three pages filled with nothing but nerd-words to begin with, there’s actually another three pages on top of big and very colourful screenshot-filled pages of adventure game reviews too! Still mostly average at best text adventures you’ve never heard of though, albeit with graphical embellishments coming almost as standard now! A tie-in for the magical Never Ending Story though, which does look good even if you’re unlikely to ever see much of it, and a game called Wishbringer by genre pioneers Infocom on Atari 8-bit, C64 and Apple, priced at a whopping £31.95 but scoring perfect tens across the board, and in all seriousness, was a very forward-thinking, accessible and enjoyable pure text adventure that would go on to have a very long shelf-life on a lot of platforms! I know I make fun of the Adventure section every time we get to it (or more often than not don’t get to it) for being boring and stuffy and nerdy and all that but I actually enjoyed it this time – okay, I literally did totally ignore half of it, but it’s a start! And I’m even going to give it its own photo above. Good work!

According to the contents page, there was a pull-out book of type-in games listing that I obviously pulled-out at the time so I can’t really tell you much about those except what I can see on the accompanying preview image on the contents page, which says there were three of them and they were called Fort Invincible, Sea Rescue and Space Mission. Other features this month include what I originally took to be a very in-depth preview of that Back to the Future game, but is actually more of an in-depth look at the screen layout – check out the pic here if you don’t believe me, and that’s only half of it! To supplement this month’s apparent obsession with war games, there’s a two-page feature on the C&VG team’s experiences playing paintball… Actually, I seem to remember a few months back (but maybe more) where they kept saying about how everyone was done with all these shallow action games and shoot ‘em ups and stuff being dead, and we’d all be playing these more engaging strategic experiences in the future instead. All will be revealed in the coming months, I’m sure, although my gut-feeling is they backed the wrong horse there! There’s also a poster of last month’s Game of the Month, Tau Ceti, and a lovely map of Steven Crow’s sprawling space action-adventure Starquake, plus all the usual comic strips, type-in bug fixes and the like, but I think we can start to bring this issue home with a look at some of those notable adverts that are most of the reason why this is the “Mega Xmas Issue” referred to on the cover!

We’ve been admiring Ultimate Play the Game’s adverts for years here, but this time we have an all-new batch being advertised, maybe not quite reaching the iconic visual heights of Knight Lore or Atic Atac, but it’s exciting all the same, with Blackwyche standing out as an, er, masterclass in eighties airbrush design, while the almost forgotten Cyberun is virtually predicting the nineties with those clean lines and bold colours! And on that topic, there’s also a lovely pair of single-page ads for Imagine’s Comic Bakery and the newly-released Amstrad and BBC versions of Match Day, both competing to destroy your eyes first with ungodly amounts of colour! And on that topic, as well as their new International Rugby game we saw reviewed earlier, Artic also have the audacity to try and sell you World Cup too – possibly the worst game of football ever, and up there with the worst games ever full-stop… Good grief, imagine getting that for Christmas! One of my favourite baseball games, Hardball, is also here, letting its screenshots do all the talking and so it should, while the upcoming Superbowl goes for even more colour, just as your eyes were starting to see again, and then along comes Konami’s excellent Ping Pong to shove the most eighties shades of green you’ve ever seen down your throat! As always, these tend to have a long shelf life, so hopefully I can squeeze a few of them into next month’s feature, but what the hell, I’ll throw in some more now… Those gorgeous BBC Match Day visuals deserve to be seen!

Just realised that Ultimate advert appears again later on, but on a single page this time – so good they ran it twice! It being Christmas, the compilations are out in force too, so I’ll mention a couple of my favourites to finish with… First is U.S. Gold’s Arcade Hall of fame, featuring Spy Hunter, Tapper, Up ‘N’ Down, Aztec Challenge and Blue Max on the C64, then Blue Max, Raid, Flak, Rocco and Hunchback II on the Spectrum, which I enjoyed at the time but with hindsight wasn’t a patch on the C64 version; rubbish advert featuring a generic Manuel-style cocktail waiter and various generic vehicles either way though! Then there’s They Sold a Million, where you got Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, Beach Head, Jet Set Willy and Sabre Wulf on the Spectrum and CPC or The Staff of Karnath on C64, and that’s just awesome all around! And that’s also a good place to call it a day for this issue, so I hope you enjoyed flicking through it with me, and I also hope I’ll see you in a month or so when February 1986 rolls around!

As always, I’ll never expect anything for what I do here but if you’d like to buy me a Ko-fi and help towards increasingly expensive hosting and storage costs then it will always be really appreciated! And be sure to follow me on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) or Threads for my latest retro-gaming nonsense, and also on Bluesky, which is under my real name but most it ends up there too if you prefer!