It’s been a long time since I took a look at the Your Spectrum magazines (as explained in my first post about old Spectrum mags). But the new Spectrum Next computer is nearing launch, so I thought I would catch up with the remaining mags I still haven’t looked at yet. Here’s my look at the highlights of Your Spectrum Issue 15 from June 1985.
All images are taken from the ever-awesome Internet Archive. Here is the full magazine if you want to take a closer look. https://archive.org/details/your-spectrum-magazine-15
In the page above it’s great to see the 3-2-1 Ted Rogers reference and also to see Jools Holland presenting Ultimate with a golden joystick award!
Cool to see a review of a hacking book which references my all time favourite movie, WarGames (which was only about two years old at this point). A nicely written piece in the style of Adrian Mole. And another jibe at the Sinclair C5 with the picture of Super Gran!
Look at that Top Ten. Nearly every game is a classic. And four games in the Top Ten from Ultimate!
The legend that is Bob Holness. I’ll have a Z and an X please Bob!
50 games on one cassette. That’s just crazy. You would need a tape counter on your cassette deck for sure!
Just including this page as it isn’t their regular artist.
I’ve never heard of this game, Starion. It looks like a bit of a clone of my favourite game of all time, Elite. Might be worth checking out!
Bit weird that this add leads with a line that at a glance looks like ‘Frankie Goes To Hollywood’ but actually the cover photo is of Blancmange!
I had never really heard about Modems in 1985. Good of them to be talking about that sort of thing in this mag though.
I’ve heard so many people rave about how cool these old microfairs used to be.
Duncan
Sep 7, 2019 -
Interesting adverts etc. The Bank of England inflation calculator shows that you need to multiply by 3 to get 2018 prices. Did you spot the Sanyo “medium resolution” colour monitor for £273 (£819 today) or the fact that the only printer in the review capable of printing on A4 was £150 (£450 in 2018).
The Microfair advert caught my eye too. Although I never went to one of those I regularly went to “The Computer Shopper Show” at Olympia in the 1990s. The big retailers like Watford Electronics used to bring lorries literally into Olympia; literally and sell things like printers fat bargain prices (i.e at about a 20% discount) from the back of them.
A lasting memory was calling a friend from a call box there to tell him. “They’ve got 4MByte SIMMS for just £80. Do you want me to get you one?” Of course he couldn’t resist the bargain of the year.
Retromash
Sep 9, 2019 -
I heard about the Olympia shows too. Must have been cool to go to. And 4MB for £80? Wow.