CRASH | Code Like It's 198x

CRASH was a British monthly magazine about ZX Spectrum games. Its first issue, dated February 1984, cost 75p and came from a small company in Ludlow, Shropshire: “Crash Micro is published monthly by Newsfield Ltd, PO Box 10, Ludlow”. The editor was Roger Kean; Oliver Frey was credited as designer and painted the cover.

The first editorial set out what would make the magazine different. Every major review would be “undertaken by at least three reviewers” so that personal taste would even out, and the reviewers would be “games players, not professional reviewers in the usual sense”. CRASH ran for 98 issues, until April 1992, and its reviews, maps, tips and letters became a large part of how Spectrum owners talked about their games.

Fast facts

Publisher: Newsfield, Ludlow, Shropshire, from issue 1 to issue 93; then Europress from issue 94.
First issue: February 1984. Final issue: April 1992 (issue 98).
Founding editor: Roger Kean, with Oliver Frey as designer and cover artist.
Cover price: 75p at launch; £1.25 in May 1989; £1.50 with the first monthly cover tape in June 1989; £1.95 by December 1989; back to £1.70 in April 1990; £2.20 by the last issue.
Cover tape: the Mega Power Tape, later the Powertape, a monthly cassette of games, demos and POKEs from issue 65 (June 1989).

The CRASH Smash and the score

A CRASH review was a serious thing, and the shape of it changed as the magazine aged. Issue 1 in 1984 scored seven axes:

1984	by 1989
Use of computer	Presentation
Graphics	Graphics
Playability	Sound
Getting started	Playability
Addictive qualities	Overall
Value for money
Overall

“Use of computer” and “Getting started” date the magazine to 1984, when whether a program used the machine well, and whether you could work out how to start it, were open questions. Both were gone by the end of the decade, replaced by Presentation and Sound. By August 1985 the magazine explained that the Overall percentage was “a separate and distinct rating”, and that “ALL ratings are an average of three reviewers’ opinions”.

Lasting Interest was never one of the axes, though it is often remembered as one. The words turn up in CRASH reviews as ordinary prose, “little lasting interest”, but never as a line in a score box. As a scoring category it belongs to magazines such as Amiga Format. Lastability, likewise, was a score line in ZZAP!64; in CRASH it was only ever a word in a review. The difference matters because this Vault quotes CRASH percentages throughout, and a score attributed to an axis the magazine never had is a score nobody can check.

A score above 90% earned the CRASH Smash, the magazine’s top award; a game rated at exactly 90% in 1984 was also called a Smash. Publishers quoted Smashes in their advertising: “Crash Smash 91%” was still appearing in mail-order advertising in 1990.

The writers who filled those pages over the years included Robin Candy, Ben Stone, Mark Caswell, Nick Roberts and Richard Eddy.

Oliver Frey covers

Much of CRASH’s look came from Oliver Frey’s painted covers, which often illustrated one of the month’s games. The covers could be controversial. In October 1987 the letters page was still sorting through the “Barbarian backlash” over a recent cover, while a reader complained that CRASH had started putting games that were not Smashes, such as Renegade and Barbarian, on the front because their images “were better for selling magazines”. The same page answered a rumour about the Renegade cover’s model: it was Roger Kean, “well his arms anyway”, with Robin Candy supplying the stomach.

Multi-page maps

A big game in CRASH often came with a map of every screen. The back-issue lists advertise a Jet Set Willy map in issue 5 (June 1984), a Lords of Midnight map in issue 11 (December 1984) and a Knight Lore map in issue 17 (June 1985). Readers drew them too: in 1984 the magazine ran a competition with Ultimate for the best-looking Sabre Wulf map and printed the honourable mentions in December.

Lloyd Mangram and the Forum

The letters page, “Lloyd Mangram’s Forum”, mixed genuine reader questions and complaints with running jokes that recurred for years. Lloyd’s byline appears from the first issue. He did not exist. In 2004 former Newsfield employee Matthew Uffindell wrote in Retro Gamer that “Lloyd’s input was the joint combination of text and opinion from both Roger and myself”, meaning Roger Kean. The name also signed letters pages in Newsfield’s Commodore magazine ZZAP!64.

The end

CRASH ended in April 1992 with issue 98, but it changed hands first, and the join is visible in the run itself. Issue 93 is dated October 1991; issue 94 is dated December 1991. There is no November. Newsfield had gone under, and Europress appears in the magazine for the first time in issue 94. That issue told the story in its own style: the staff arrived at “CRASH Towers” on 17 September 1991 to find “a spaceship that looked an awful lot like a redundancy cheque”, and noted that Future Publishing, publisher of rival Your Sinclair, had tried to buy CRASH and ZZAP!64 when Newsfield went bust.

So the last five issues are not Newsfield’s, and issue 98 announced that “From next month CRASH is joining forces with SINCLAIR USER”.

The name came back in 2017, when Fusion Retro Books crowdfunded a hardback CRASH Annual 2018, edited by Roger Kean with a cover by Oliver Frey.

Sources

CRASH issue 1, February 1984, p. 5 (staff list, publisher, “Single copy: 75p”), p. 9 (editorial on three reviewers) and p. 12 (the seven rating axes).
CRASH issue 7, August 1984, p. 94, and issue 17, June 1985, p. 22: a 90% rating as a Smash; the rating key “Above 90% — a CRASH Smash”.
CRASH issue 19, August 1985, p. 17: ratings as an average of three reviewers.
CRASH issue 1, February 1984, pp. 38, 71 and 85: articles under Lloyd Mangram’s byline.
CRASH issue 11, December 1984, p. 73: the Sabre Wulf map competition.
CRASH issue 24, January 1986, p. 179: back-issue list with the maps.
CRASH issue 45, October 1987, p. 33: the Forum on the Renegade and Barbarian covers.
CRASH issue 64, May 1989; issue 65, June 1989, pp. 1 and 5 (price and the first Mega Power Tape); issue 71, December 1989; issue 75, April 1990; issue 98, April 1992: cover prices.
CRASH issue 93, October 1991; issue 94, December 1991, pp. 5 and 10 (Europress; the redundancies; Future’s bid); issue 98, April 1992, p. 12 (the merger with Sinclair User).
8000 Plus issue 41, February 1990, p. 71: “Crash Smash 91%” in an advertisement.
Retro Gamer issue 2, 2004, p. 46: Matthew Uffindell on Lloyd Mangram.
Indie Retro News, “Crash 2018 Annual - Kickstarter revival of the classic ZX Spectrum Crash magazine is launched!”, July 2017, and Fusion Retro Books’ CRASH Annual 2018 backers page (web, secondary): https://www.indieretronews.com/2017/07/crash-2018-annual-kickstarter-revival.html, https://fusionretrobooks.com/pages/crash-kickstarter-backers