I’m continuing my look through all the old Your Spectrum and Your Sinclair magazines in the run up to the ZX Spectrum Next launch (as explained before in my first post about Old Spectrum Mags). Here’s my look at the highlights of Your Spectrum Issue 08 from October 1984.
All images are taken from the Internet Archive. Here is the full magazine if you want to take a closer look. Kudos to Jason Scott for uploading it. https://archive.org/details/your-spectrum-magazine-08
In the ad below, it’s hilarious today to think that the fact that this product gave you a quarter of a megabyte more would be the headline. But actually that was pretty huge back in the day! The Sinclair QL had ‘only’ 128k at that point so an extra 256k was enormous!
I do find the whole history of Kempston and the Competition Pro joystick quite confusing. I’ll need to research it properly one day. But here is a nice early advert for the ‘Kempston Joystick Pro 5000’.
I wonder how many kids showed their parents the ad on the bottom left here. “Honest, Mum. It’s not just for games. It’s great for education too.” And the parents all got sucked in. The fools.
Ultimate takes the top spot again this month, this time with Sabre Wulf! Three games in the top five for Ultimate. Chuckie Egg’s having a real push too. I wonder where it will be next month.
I never knew about these ‘keypanels’ back in the day. Quite a cool idea!
What a great teasing advert from the legend that is Ian Livingstone here. It reminds me of the Protovision advert in the film WarGames. I’ve actually never heard of this game before. It sounds intriguing. I wonder if we’ll see any more of it later in this issue…
A pretty epic advert for a pretty epic game. A classic on the Spectrum.
Who remembers Logo, the turtle that printed shapes out on your classroom floor? Most people remember using it on their BBC Micros in school, but I never knew it was also available on the Speccy.
Well, what do you know. Another ad for Eureka! With Ian Livingstone’s moustachioed mug in the corner too and also an amazing prize for 1984 of £25,000 up for grabs! I’m really going to have research this one a bit more. It looks like a fascinating gaming exercise.
I love that you could buy Your Spectrum t-shirts, but they don’t really show off the design do they? Is that person in the photo wearing the photo that you’re spending your money on? I’m not even really sure what the t-shirt says.
TLL – what a classic Spectrum game. Still holds up today too. And once again Your Spectrum produces a fantastic map/game graphic. I’m really going to have to do a separate blog post focussing purely on the maps that they produced.
Interesting ad below. Are they saying that this printer can replace a sibling for your child?
Interesting name for a joystick. The RAT! Cool concept though. Feels almost like an early Wii remote!
