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Big K

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2015 3:34 pm
by Iain
I've been reading through Big K's over the past. Going through issue 6 at the moment.

It's a great magazine and published at a very interesting time in the video / computer business.

Over the past few issues, you can see the C64 getting stronger with comments related to sales and more space giving over to reviews of its games etc. Can't say the same about the poor Dragon 32 though... :)

Here's a short news item, which I found interesting:

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64 MARCHES ON

ACTIVISION, THE giant American indie software house, have now added the world's best-selling micro-computer - the Commodore 64 - to their list of target machines.

First games on CBM cassettes are: Beamrider; Decathlon; River Raid; Pitfall; Pitfall II; H.E.R.O.; Zenji, and Toy Bizarre. All but the last two are conversions.

The American company has also successfully sued Cornish outfit Microdeal, claiming that the latter's Cuthbert In The Jungle is a rip-off of Pitfall. Microdeal have given a High Court undertaking to shelve the Cuthbert game permanently.
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Not too surprising that Activision won the case related to Cuthbert In The Jungle! The magazine at this time is also full of reviews of games that are very like the classic coin-op games of the period, i.e. rip-offs. Thankfully you can see some original software peaking through. How many Space Invader rip-offs could the market support?!

Re: Big K

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2015 5:45 pm
by Mayhem
I've actually got an original of "Cuthbert in the Jungle" in my collection, it was one of the games my father got when he purchased our C64 from a work colleague.

Re: Big K

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2015 10:08 pm
by Iain
I think I played it on my cousin's Tandy many a year ago. It was advertised quite a bit in the previous Big K issues as part of a MicroDeal advert.

I was just doing a bit of searching there for Microdeal and found this rather surprising bit of text on their Wikipeda article:
The 8-bit software market dwindled toward the end of the 1980s and Symes officially announced that Microdeal would no longer publish for the Dragon and Tandy machines on 1 January 1988; from this point they would concentrate on the newer generation of 16-bit computers, the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, with their remaining stock of Dragon and Tandy software to be sold off by a company called Computape.
I can't imagine there being much of a market for the Dragon or Tandy by 1988, especially considering the Dragon hadn't been manufactured since 1984!

Re: Big K

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2015 3:41 pm
by Professor Brian Strain
I did buy one issue of Big K back in the day, the one with the Jeff Minter interview. A much livelier and more colourful mag than CCI and Your Commodore.

Re: Big K

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2015 9:59 am
by Iain
I'm finding it pretty impressive. A good mix of serious and leisure and by issue 6 they seem to be including screen shots of the games a lot more. There wasn't too many of them in the very early issues! :)