If you had an 8 bit home computer around 1990, it was a time of plenty. Not big name new releases (although there were still plenty of those being released), nor do i refer to the burgeoning budget market. Instead, I’m referring to the massive growth of “free” games being given away by your favourite (and not so favourite) magazines.

You see, whilst the budget market was still growing, and publishers such as Ocean were still putting out big, full price releases, the market was slowing down. The inevitable decline was starting. Afterall, the 2 leading machines at the time in the UK, the ZX Spectrum and the C64 were both 8 years into their life by this point. The 16 bit market had exploded in late 1987 when Commodore released the cost reduced Amiga 500, and that combined with the steady sales of the Atari ST (although that too was showing signs of decline at this point) were eating away at the 8 bit market. And that’s before you get to the Master System and Mega Drive from Sega revitalising the long stagnant console market.

So, the leading magazines of the day were desperate to keep hold of as big a share of the market as they could. They tried exclusive features and reviews. They tried giving away books, sweets, posters, even entire other magazines. But it got harder to stand out. So they went for the next most obvious thing: Software.

Now, most of the 8 bit magazines had been giving away game demos and full games on covertapes for 2 to 3 years at this point. You usually got a full game and a demo (sometime playable, sometimes not), and that was that. But during 1990, this began to ramp up. seeing tapes with 3 or 4 full games, and maybe some “extras” like pokes became increasingly common. And as we began 1991, it all exploded.

Sinclair User went up with a tape containing 6 pieces of software. Your Sinclair retaliated in kind. Crash kinda stayed out of it, but still upped the ante to 4 or 5 titles. Then SU jumped up to 8 ((The Great 8 they originally titled the tape), so YS went with their “Magnificent 7” series. SU upped the ante again by going to a massive 10 pieces of software on their covertape, then a frankly ludicrous 12!

At this point, ELSPA, the trade association for publishers stepped in. This was going too far. They were concerned that being given so many free games each month was effectively stopping the owners of the 8 bit computers from actually buying any software released to the shops. So a deal was brokered. Magazines could only feature 2 full, commercial titles on a tape each month. Of course, to keep the volume of software high, they used some unique tricks to geta round this, such as unreleased games from publishers, or readers games (what we would call homebrew these days), plus titles from the demoscene. This placated the publishers, and kept the remaining readers mostly happy.

of course, the covertapes were not truly responsible for the decline of the 8 bit market. The hardware was old. Newer, shinier systems were available. It was the natural end of the Spectrum and C64 product cycle. The covertape war was certainly a contributing factor, but it really wasn’t the cause.