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Some brief background info: Spectrums were British 8-bit home computers first appearing in 1982, also released as Timex internationally and still widely cloned in Soviet areas after their official discontinuation in 1992. They were affordable products that despite the aspirations of founder Sir Clive Sinclair (1940-2021) were mainly bought and used for games, but also gave a generation or two of people now in IT careers a first taste of programming.

It's probably been a decade plus since I looked at an issue of Your Sinclair (even as scans) and I already know from the cover it's going to take a lot of words to even slightly do it justice. Googling anything to do with YS is a rabbit hole. After five minutes I was skimming a Guardian column by Rich Pelley from 2023 about the annual Crap Games Compilation it inspired, which is also going to lead to a book review (already posted here).

Like a lot of old magazines you can read along online and no-one seems to hassle archive.org about it: https://archive.org/details/your-sinclair-79

Let's start with the cover. It's 1992. Although there are no new computers there are still new games being released for the Spectrum, mainly as 3.99 budget titles, and there's another year and a bit of the magazine to go before it rides off into the sunset with the Big Final Issue. YS still has a page count of 68 for a cover price of £2.50 and some ad pages, mainly for the Amiga. The cover is a commissioned artwork of the star of one of those budget games, Captain Dynamo by Codemasters, hugging what appears to be Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage. If not an internal job the art is probably worth a good chunk of whatever the person who converted that game to a Speccy version got paid, although apparently it was done for the Commodore 64 and also ported to the Atari ST, Amiga and PC so the Codies must have had some faith in it. It's a platformer about an ageing superhero brought out of retirement although that probably isn't discernible from the in game graphics, none of those platforms being capable of art like Wildstorm's Welcome to Tranquillity.

The cover is actually fairly tame by YS standards, but there's the little touches every issue got with tag lines on everything as well as one for the cover feature. There's the "Schwing Packed Free Tape", the masthead as well as claiming to be the world's best selling Spectrum mag is "NOT an official Kellogg's publication", and the bar code almost imperceptibly reads "Toot my flute mama!" above it. There's also a bit about the cover tape contents in the box where it would be (and this copy did come with, albeit separate, for seven quid off eBay) but the same space also contains a 64 square word search. Various other features are also shouted out. The back cover ad is for Nintendo mag Total!

Interestingly enough, the letters page mentions that a YS reader survey showed that most Spec chums also had other computers and consoles. This was definitely the case personally, although which I don't recall Archimedes/Acorn machines getting mentions in YS. There was a lot of cross pollination within Future Publishing gaming mags and other publishers of games journalists, and whilst YS liked to talk about being produced in a shed and having rivalries with other titles names would often pop up elsewhere. For example, Rich Pelley started with YS at 14 and went on to publications including the Daily Mail (boo hiss). The staff were also often presented as characters and caricatures or in shaggy dog anecdotes (although articles were friendly, honest with opinions and often would include personal anecdotes that rang true) and a few featured more than others, but even adding up the names mentioned shows it was quite a big operation and more egalitarian than might be assumed for a computer mag, with female editors and journalists always mainstays. It wouldn't be far off to say the Shed Crew had been cast as a print version of the Blue Peter presenting team, if more in tune with their mostly school age audience.

This was an exams and summer holiday issue and it plays into the non Spectrum content, which there's quite a lot of. Not just the credits list, which asks/invents answers to the question "what was the first thing you did after your last exam?" for all of the people and publications listed, but pieces about coping with exam stress, a competition for Fun School software, the Joystick Jugglers section introducing the reviewing team leaning into education nostalgia, but pages and pages about summer survival, frisbee games, a now regular Haylp agony column, uses for a high score card given away free with the previous issue, a dictionary of YS slang, competition to win a football signed by Gary Lineker, cartoon strip Ernie the Psychotic Madman, Flip! lifestyle section covering films, books, comics and handheld games, and some bollocks about where the stars of games such as Jetpac were now. Some of this may have been lost on a 10 or 11 year old, particularly things like Alan Moore's V For Vendetta, and it's fair to say that although I loved the Ernie strips (it's sort of a latter day The Outbursts of Everett True) I didn't appreciate all of the other cultural stuff aimed at teenagers at the time, but the rest of the magazine was sufficiently Spectrum related to keep me reading.

In this issue Jon Pillar had a hardware feature about peripherals, there were regular columns about adventure games, programming Q&A page Spec Tec, six pages of cheats, advice and maps in the Tipshop, Sam Coupe news and reviews, letters, editorial stuff, full price reviews, budget reviews, new game previews, subs and back issues, merch sales, next issue, and even a few Spectrum relevant ads. A fair bit of this is obvious filler and even younger readers would have realised it, but coupled with a packed cover tape for less than the price of one budget game it comes across as pretty good value.

When I say packed, the tape at this point in the mag's life was called The Magnificent Seven and this one included four full games as well as other stuff, two of them ex commercial and two from readers. They all look quite decent, and YS cover mounted tapes like this for years.

Other commentators have pointed out that cover tapes accelerated the end of the platform, cannibalising sales from companies still supporting it and their own advertisers. This is absolutely valid. Besides YS it was rare to be buying games separately and they weren't as much of a presence in Woolworths, Smiths or wherever by this point. They were affordable compared to other platforms and the tape did offer a route to sales, though, as the demo of Turbo the Tortoise on it coupled with a glowing review in the mag led to a rare purchase, and I have good memories of that for a monochrome platformer. It's very much in the Mario style, the Spectrum version aping Gameboy graphics. I think there was a bit of confusion because publisher Hi-Tec went bust and the game was bought and re-released by Codemasters which made it initially hard to get, but it was worth holding out for. And it was pitched at my level, having six levels, big sprites, not being insanely difficult and in fact achievable in a gaming session whilst still having some replay value.

You can tell it was fairly popular from the fact there's a 2023 anniversary edition: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8919

Ultimately, the hardware constraints of the Spectrum limited what could be done or converted for it without graphics becoming a pixelated mess and, as heretical as it sounds, after years of reading Retro Gamer articles with comparison screenshots, I think the Commodore 64 (which I never owned or played back then) was probably a better computer. Much of the love I have for the Speccy and pride in being part of its community comes from YS spreading its style and anarchism into the wider world. Nothing encourages kids to read more than something worth reading, that they connect with and which introduces them to using the power of writing to express themselves. In a funky skillo sort of way.

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