In June 1989 CRASH told its readers that “tapes on magazine covers aren’t new, of course”. Other magazines, it said, had “stuck them on their covers month in month out, often full of duff tripe hardly worth the tape”. Its own Mega Power Tape would be different: “Four games and more for £1.50!”, a special edition of the Oliver twins’ Dizzy, Moon Cresta, Wanted: Monty Mole and Micronaut One, with a playable level of Sanxion and a side of POKEs. The cover price went down, not up.
That was the bargain that made a cover tape hard to resist: a cassette of programs taped to the front of a magazine, loaded like any shop-bought game, free with the issue. British magazines for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC gave them away for about ten years. By 1991 the Spectrum magazines were competing on how many games each tape held, the software publishers’ trade body stepped in, and the same argument reached the Amiga magazines and their cover disks.
Before the tape wars
Programs had come with magazines before. In April 1984 Big K promised utility programs for the BBC Micro and Spectrum in its May issue on a seven-inch “FLEXI-DISC”, a thin plastic record: “Just off-load to cassette and RUN”. In December 1984 Personal Computer Games gave away a cassette it called its “ridiculously generous free gift”. Side one held demos of Spectrum games such as Micromega’s Jasper! and Virgin’s Strangeloop, with a BBC program at the end marked by a voice announcing it; side two held Commodore 64 programs, including a look at Boulder Dash and a complete part of Domark’s adventure Eureka. The magazine explained how to note the tape counter so readers could find each program again.
Not everyone was impressed. When a reader asked ZZAP!64 in December 1985 for a demo tape on its Christmas cover, “a bit like the old PCG mega gift”, the reply was that there was “absolutely NO CHANCE that Newsfield will give away a ‘mega’ ‘gift’ of which only half the games load”. The real drawback, it added, was distribution: a bundle of magazines with cassettes stuck to them was an “untidy mess that newsagents don’t much like (they keep falling off the shelves)”.
Other magazines went ahead. The first issue of Your Sinclair, in January 1986, had a demo of Rasputin “sellotaped to the front”, as the magazine remembered in 1993. Amstrad Action gave away the whole of PSS’s arcade adventure The Covenant on its cover cassette in May 1986, and in January 1987 a tape of its type-ins, so readers could “ENJOY our greatest-ever type-ins without typing in!” (see Type-in listings).
A tape every month
From 1988 the tape became a monthly fixture:
| Magazine | Tape | Every issue from |
|---|---|---|
| Sinclair User | Megatape | March 1988 (“Megatape One”) |
| ZZAP!64 | Megatape | October 1988 |
| Your Sinclair | Smash Tape | 1989 |
| CRASH | Mega Power Tape, later Powertape | June 1989 |
| Commodore Format | CF Smash Hits, then Power Pack from issue 3 | its first issue, October 1990 |
| Amstrad Action | covertape | April 1991 |
ZZAP!’s first Megatape went wrong before it reached the shops. It was to carry a playable level of Katakis, which Activision thought too close to R-Type; U.S. Gold agreed to withdraw the game and its promotional material, and the tape counted as promotional material after the cover had been printed and the tapes duplicated.
The cassettes were mass-produced by duplication firms, not by the magazines. Faulty CRASH tapes went back to Spool Ltd of Deeside, in Clwyd; faulty Amstrad Action and Commodore Format tapes to Ablex Audio Video of Telford, with the returns address numbered for each issue (“AA67 Covertape Returns”). Loading could still fail. With its first regular covertape in April 1991, Amstrad Action printed advice on trying different volume levels, because “computers can be very fussy about the volume they will load at”, cleaning the tape heads with “a cotton bud soaked in alcohol”, and adjusting the recorder’s head alignment. A year later a tape was “so packed that we’ve had to split the pokes into two sets. Group A is on side one, Group B is on side two.”
The tape wars
As the 8-bit market shrank, the Spectrum magazines competed on quantity. Your Sinclair’s Smash Tapes grew into 4-Packs, then 6-Packs, then “Magnificent 7s”. In August 1991 its editor answered a reader’s complaint by saying that “all the Speccy mags have decided to cut their games down to two per month for a couple of issues … just to see what happens”, and hoped it would stop “all this stupid Ten-Pack and 12-Pack business”: “I’m as peeved off as you are about these tape wars.”
The pressure came from the publishers. In January 1992 Sinclair User told a reader that ELSPA, the European Leisure Software Publishers Association, had asked the Spectrum magazines “not to have so many games on the tape. They say that we’re destroying the industry and taking the money away from them so that they can’t afford to advertise their wares. So, we’ve stopped.”
Complete games on 16-bit disks
The Amiga and Atari ST magazines put 3.5-inch floppy disks on their covers instead of tapes, and Amiga Format carried one from its first issue in 1989 (see Magazine cover disks). The same argument reached them in 1991. Amiga Power, launched that spring, gave away a complete game, Bombuzal, on the disk with its first issue and promised one every month.
In August 1991 Amiga Power put ELSPA’s case to its readers in an interview with the association’s general secretary, Roger Bennett. ELSPA, he said, had no mandate to tell anyone what to do, but publishers had seen that “with AMIGA POWER offering complete 16-bit games you had the possibility of a magazine cover-mount war starting similar to that which has developed in the 8-bit market”. ELSPA argued that “covermounts have killed the full price Spectrum software market”. The industry, he explained, counted on three “windows” for a game: full price, then a compilation, then a budget release at about a tenner. The fear was “pressure to covermount games that haven’t yet been on compilation or budget release, thus denying software houses secondary ways of earning money from their products.” Amiga Power disagreed with parts of the argument, but announced that “no more complete commercial games will appear on our coverdisks for the foreseeable future”.
ACE told a reader that September that the ban on full-price games came into force on 1 August 1991. Amiga Format’s review of the year put it more briefly: “No more free games from mags.”
For budget labels (see Budget games), the covermount was a competitor for the same old games at an even lower price, and the “third window” was the one ELSPA said covermounts threatened.
The end of the tape, and after
The tapes lasted as long as the magazines. CRASH merged with Sinclair User in 1992. Your Sinclair’s last issue, in September 1993, came without a tape and joked about it: “£2.95 for a 68-page mag without a covertape may seem a bit steep”. Amstrad Action still had a covertape when its last issue appeared in June 1995, and Commodore Format closed with the October 1995 issue, remembering the “oodles of free software, game demos and the like on a free cover mounted Power Pack”.
Disks and then CDs carried the idea on. Even the best-known maker of Amiga copy protection worked on cover disks: Rob Northen, whose Copylock protected hundreds of games, told the German magazine Amiga Joker in 1992 that he had developed dual- and triple-format disks that could put Amiga, ST and PC programs on one disk, for cover disks among other uses. CU Amiga added a cover CD in November 1995, and Amiga Format a CD edition in June 1996.
An earlier answer elsewhere
Selling programs on cassette alongside a magazine was older than the British cover tape. The Australian TRS-80 monthly MICRO-80 offered each issue’s programs on a cassette from its first issue in December 1979: $3.50 extra, or a year of magazine and cassette for $60. It was a separate purchase, not a gift on the cover.
Sources
- Big K issue 1, April 1984: house advertisement for the flexi-disc. Issue 2, May 1984: the flexi-disc notes (“The disc is NOT a floppy”).
- Personal Computer Games, December 1984: contents and p. 34, the cover cassette and its programs.
- ZZAP!64 issue 8, December 1985: letters page (the “PCG mega gift” and the reply).
- Your Sinclair issue 68, August 1991: letters page (the tape wars). Issue 93, September 1993: p. 2 (the price joke) and Jonathan Davies, “The YS Story” (the first covertape, Rasputin; Smash Tapes with every issue from 1989; 4-Packs, 6-Packs and Magnificent 7s).
- Amstrad Action issue 8, May 1986: cover cassette (The Covenant). Issue 16, January 1987: cover. Issue 67, April 1991: covertape pages (“Tape Trouble?” and the Ablex returns address). Issue 79, April 1992: covertape pages (the pokes split across two sides). Issue 117, June 1995: the last issue.
- Sinclair User issue 72, March 1988: Megatape One. Issue 119, January 1992: letters page (ELSPA and the number of games on the tape).
- ZZAP!64 issue 42, October 1988: the first Megatape; see the ZZAP!64 entry for Katakis.
- CRASH issue 65, June 1989: “The shape of thrills to come” and “Thrills on tape” (the Mega Power Tape, its programs, the £1.50 price and the Spool returns address).
- Commodore Format issue 1, October 1990: the CF Smash Hits tape. Issue 3, December 1990: the first PowerPack. Issue 61, October 1995: the last issue and its history of the magazine.
- Amiga Power issue 1, May 1991: coverdisk (Bombuzal). Issue 4, August 1991: “ELSPA talks! Covermounted games — right or wrong?”, interview with Roger Bennett.
- ACE issue 48, September 1991: letters page (the full-game ban from 1 August 1991).
- Amiga Format issue 30, January 1992: “The Amiga Year” (the agreement on free games).
- Amiga Joker, March 1992: Dr. Freak, interview with Rob Northen (dual- and triple-format cover disks).
- CU Amiga, November 1995, and Amiga Format issue 85, June 1996: the first cover CDs; see those entries.
- MICRO-80 issue 1, December 1979: the cassette offer.