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By Lloyd Mangram
September
1986
Issue 32
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Of
all the covers in 1986, Oliver most looked forward to
doing September's. He had been an avid Dan Dare/Eagle
fan as a boy, admired Frank Hampson (Dare's creator)
and Frank Bellamy, who both had drawn some of the original
strips, and finally got to draw Dan Dare himself
when Eagle was relaunched in the Eighties. But
Oliver never rated the relaunched Eagle, so the
notion of recreating an original Fifties-style Eagle
front page for Virgin's acclaimed Dan Dare was
close to his heart - as was having a comic as a CRASH
cover.
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The long-running Genesis - Birth Of A Game competition had
reached midway point by September's issue. The judges, Domark
and Design Design, had finally whittled the enormous amount
of entries down to John Eggleton and Kat Trap. The
rest of the series would now deal with the programming, packaging
and marketing.
Programming, packaging and marketing was a problem Beyond
were just about to walk headlong into as the company blithely
announced to John Minson exciting plans for the official Star
Trek game, little knowing that production of the game
would take almost as long as a voyage of the starship Enterprise.
Minson had another laugh up his sleeve: Gary Liddon and Andrew
Wright had managed to crash their company car a week after
getting it. The accident took place in a Manchester one-way
street (they were going the wrong way, of course) and the
car belonged to Thalamus. Yes, Newsfield had taken the plunge
and created its own software house.
Thalamus really started at the July Commodore Show when a
young man from Finland introduced himself in halting English
as Stavros Fasoulas and showed Roger Kean a Commodore 64 game
called Rainbow Warrior. Roger was so impressed with
it that he persuaded the other directors to start a label
and market the game. Stavros signed up, Gary Liddon was moved
from Newsfield's magazines to look after programming technicalities,
and Andrew Wright of Activision was appointed to head Thalamus
(a name which he and Gary Liddon devised). Rainbow Warrior
changed name to Sanxion and the rest, as they say,
would be history - at least for the 64. Thalamus has yet to
produce a Spectrum game.
 Tie-in
time looked pretty good for a change. Virgin's Dan Dare
proved to be addictive, playable and quite original. It was
also clever of them to make the game different on each of
the main 8-bit machines, avoiding the inevitable, and often
invidious, comparisons. Going from one Dan to another, Mirrorsoft
repeated a success with Dynamite Dan II, improving
elements of the original to make an entirely new game. Mikro-Gen
just missed a Smash by a hair's breadth with Stainless
Steel, a shoot-em-up based loosely on Harry Harrison's
Stainless Steel Rat character as re-envisaged by 2000AD, while
CRL found themselves in Derek Brewster's good books with Fergus
McNeill's lampoon The Boggit. Incidentally, The
Hobbit was still at Number 7 in the CRASH Charts!
Another near-Smash was ACE, one of the best flight
simulations on the Spectrum at the time, and it came from
Cascade - one of the earliest Spectrum houses, but usually
known for their classified ads for cheap compilations.
Upstairs was beginning to resemble the moment before the
Great Flood, when the ark was incomplete and rain threatened.
The administrative move to Gravel Hill was held up by decorating,
but the new LM team was getting busy writing and designing
a dummy of the magazine to be presented to potential advertisers
at a launch party set for mid-September. To add to the problems,
the art department needed more people to cope with a fourth
magazine. The solution seemed to be to move Matthew Uffindell
and his huge light table down a floor, but only once the administrative
people and LM had moved off to Gravel Hill. Somehow we packed
the animals in two by two - and it rained chaos.
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