🗨️ _This happy corner of the world was born from childhood nostalgia. Comment with kindness. Start a conversation not a fire._ ❓ Did you used to read Zzap!64 or is it all Greek (or Italian) to you? And if you're not from the UK, did find this interesting as a way to see how things were going down across the pond?
I remember Zzap!64 but never read it as I was in another camp. I still have my collection of Acorn user and Micro user though. Good to hear your memories and what I missed out on.
Two-years older (from Southern California not UK) and loved this post and familiar Gen X nostalgia notes -- truly a complete and finished documentary! Thank you. I devoured Creative Computing magazine and later Byte magazine. It was Antic magazine (I had a VIC-20 but spent more time with an Atari 800 and later Atari 520 ST) that most closely aligns in game-focused style in my experience, but less Mad magazine-style than Zzap!64. Fun that I'm watching this on a business trip to London (Chiswick) just down the road from the former Zzap!64 headquarters mentioned.
I never missed a copy of Zzap, or just about every c64 and Amiga mag. Ran out of storage in my bedroom and ended up stacking them in the garden shed. The floorboards ended up bowing under the weight and the flooring rotted away, along with the mags. :( Great memories.
Never grew up with Zzap!64 (unfortunately), being in the states, but man. I can just imagine how fun it was to see a new issue. There's just a special nostalgia for those of us into computing back then... it was like this special club we all could be a part of. And magazine culture was really something else. I even made a fanzine, too, with some friends, black and white, waiting overnight for it to print on our old computers chugging away. Kudos... excellent episode.
I worked on Crash and occasionally Zzap 64 (in the cartoony days, I briefly saw my Frankenstein's monster face in the video). That was a trip down memory lane (I was Lloyd Mangram a couple of times back in the day). I doubt anyone remembers Corky Caswell now :-)
Hi Mark, I remember your tips section and reviews and have a lot of love for Zzap! 64, plus its immediate successor Commodore Force. The early issues (that I found on Archive.org) stand up well today. As Christian said in his clip, it also had some influence in my writing style - as did Commodore Format and Amiga Power. My first issue was the infamous Issue 82. Furthermore, we took Zzap! 64 alongside the other Commodore mag that lasted till October 1995, so we had a neat balance of games reviews and serious stuff to enjoy in the pre-internet era.
@@StuartVallantine Thank you for saying that Stuart, I inherited the tips section mostly because I liked (and still like) to find easy ways to complete games. And of course the internet has made that printed format obsolete now, I wish RU-vid was around then (although I would have been out of a job). It was fun to play computer games all day, it was my first job out of school, and the best I've had so far :-)
As an American military brat and uber C64 fan back in the 80s, I was blown away by ZZAP!64 when my dad was stationed in the UK for 2 years. As a gamer, I favored ZZAP64! over the American magazines that the base sold back then. I remembered how excited I was when the first demo cassette was taped on the front of the magazine. I remember going against their review and my better judgment, I bought the budget game Master Ninja. Maybe it was the price or I was just curious but I regretted it. I maybe loaded it 2 or three times then let it collect dust on my shelf.
I loved Zzap!64 in australia it cost a lot and i find the money some how lol to get it I got to say i also loved commodore format and your commodore Zzap!64 was the heart and soul of the c64.. it's what us kids read over and over I would take it home read it cover to cover then start again :) cover tapes were great for me as well .. Had dreams of growing up and having my game on there.. But in the end i do dreamcast homebrew games and development still do it today I started in that in 2002 my main aim was geting a c64 emulator running on dreamcast.. anyways thanks for this video .. i got tears at points was a great time to be alive
I didn't think it was that expensive, I mean it was higher priced than the Australian Commodore Review but cheaper than the US mags. Zzap was a great mag and fairly popular in Australia.
In Melbourne you could get the air freight copy within one week of release from dedicated C= dealers or the technical book shop in the city but it cost around $16. When I found out I bought 3 of the latest editions all at once. I was in ZZAP64 heaven. I think the normal news agency price was ~ $5 ?
When I started collecting Zzap 64 and Commodore Format, they were usually 2 months behind, and cost around $9, unless they had a double cassette covertape, then it went up to $10 to $12. Oddly enough, my first issue of Zzap was in this video (with the woman on the cover for the review of Monaco Grand Prix), and my first issue of CF had Supremacy on the cover.
I love this channel; 'dad' jokes galore, interesting content, but what impresses me the most is the relaxed attitude of Puppyfractic... this truly shows how kind-hearted Lord and Lady Fractic are.
I can just about remember buying zzap64 every month for 3 or so years and it did have an effect on my writing and communication skills. I won a few prizes too, including a copy of Denaris on cassette, which should still be in storage, along with joysticks and a c64, as well as an amiga and lord knows what else. It was a long time ago, but i think there was one friend who actually had every issue of zzap in these zzap logo embossed binders. They were pristine. If he still has them, wherever he may be, then he's sitting on a goldmine! I enjoyed this immensely. Thank you for the warmth of nostalgia on a Saturday afternoon. 👍
I must have had at least the first 30 issues of Zzap64!. Stupidly I threw them all away when I moved house. Used to love reading Crash and then Zzap64 when I was a teenager. Couldn't wait until it was released every month, used to run up to the newsagents to get my copy. Brilliant video, many thanks for taking the time to produce it.
Crumbs, I adored Crash and ZZap and still have a.bunch of them - even some Amtix and LM magazines. Along with C&VG, they started my obsession with magazines which culminated with an editorial job on Personal Computer World magazine during most of the Nineties.
On University Challenge last night, none of the students could identify a C64. One guessed "ZX-80", another "Macintosh, er... 83?". For shame! Paxman chuckled and said it must seem like ancient history to them! (Bloomin' cheek!) I got my C64 & 1541 in 1985 when I was 17, and bought Zzap! 64 every month from #1. I'd come over from Crash, having had a 48K Spectrum. Fave games were Gribbley's Day Out, Kikstart, Boulderdash, Spy vs. Spy - good times. Switched to 520STFM & A500 of course in 1987/1988. Nice piece, Mr P!
great vid.. i was a young australian zzap fanatic for a few years and seeing some of these covers for the first time in ages was awesome. JR was definitely my favourite thing about the reviews.. dude just knew how to make me laugh as a kid. the christmas editions were the best.. huge! I read and reread those things until they fell apart. 🙏👌✌️
This reminds me: my mom gave me a stack of maybe 25 issues of some publication they subscribed to around the time they bought their new 800XL, and I haven't read them yet. I should investigate! In other news, I had no idea that Zzap existed, but it's always fun to see someone else's nostalgia for retro computer topics. Cheers from Tucson!
Just discovered this channel, absolutely fantastic. I've been a gamer since the 70s Atari years, and a lifelong technophile and computer tinker - first one was a zx81 with my schoolmates (!) Also a fixer by nature; everything in our home gets taken apart and repaired. Currently restoring a couple of old Dell laptops for the kids to muck around on. Love the restoration videos! This film is really weird for me because I was a teenager mid 80s and I had a Commodore 64., plus my parents ran a grocers and newsagents. However, I have no recollection whatsoever of Zzap!64. I would have loved it. Saying that I lived in a small village in south midlands so it might have passed us by. Still, very odd we never stocked it. Tbh I was more interested in 200AD and Punisher comics!
This brought back some great memories. I lived for the day Zzap!64 hit the shelves of my local newsagent. I worked at a Commodore mail-order place (Indi Direct Mail in Lichfield) during the summer of 1993 during my university summer holidays. The warehouse manager there was one Robin Hogg, who wrote for Zzap!64 in its later days, so it was something of a geek moment to meet him. I was like "Are you Robin Hogg from Zzap!64?!". Lovely bloke, who I'm sure was quite bemused by some rando remembering him by his pencilled likeness from years before. I once won two competitions in the same issue. The main prize was 365 packets of Chewits. I sold most of them in the playground!
we had an italian (licensed) version of zzap which was based on the uk magazine with some translated articles and some original italian ones. It was an awesome magazine!
Off work today with a bad back. This video cheered me up no end. So many good memories. Look at those gorgeous artworks, not just the covers either. Ahhh I miss those days. This is where you got your news from about new games etc. Now it's websites and silly youtube channels....... Oh I mean... erm.... er.......
Great video, used to buy this religiously . I was in Long Beach recently for work reasons. Strange to think that anyone in California could understand rainy evenings reading A64 mag. Makes the world small! Great video.
Really cool retrospective on such a cool magazine. I feel sad to have missed out on not only never having an C64 when I was a kid, but not having such an awesome magazine as this to read with it!
This is perfect! I keep looking for videos to watch that will confuse the RU-vid algorithm. As far as I can tell, it now thinks I am 10-70 years old, all genders, grew up in the UK/US/Germany, and I am either extremely susceptible to advertising or just click randomly.
Amazing nostalgia trip. I would always hunt down Zzap 64 in my local newsagent here in Australia. This was a great mini doco! I ended up being inspired in my professional life by Zzap 64, eventually editing the Australian multi-platform gaming mag, HYPER, for a number of years in the late 90s. The irreverent humour in Zzap was a big influence.
As a spectrum owner back in the day, I always read Crash, but often c64 owning mates would bring zzap into school and we'd swap and chat about how good or bad various versions were. I was fortunate enough to be donated many copies of crash a couple of years back, but always liked to read zzap too.... And of course they both had fantastic Frey cover artwork!!
In France we had Hebdogiciel, which started as a pure listing paper, where people could publish Basic listings, mostly games, for all the current home computers, but then quickly transformed in a more reviewish format. They brutally honest, with a lot of in page cartoons drawn by Raymond Carali famous French cartoon artist. They gained quite a following and were hated by the industry (Amstrad and Alan Sugar were among their preferred targets).
Wow, I just discovered a site that has all the programs ever published in Hebdogiciel to download. It's interesting for people searching old BASIC games for old home computers www.hebdogiciel.free.fr/ there are quite some rare machines (ok, it's in French but might be interesting for some).
And Micro News later on kept a bit of that flame alive... I guess Micro News (first published as MSX News) was quite a "moral" successor to Hebdoooooo (with Carali drawing stuff in there too). :) Those were the times... :)
Zzap64 was popular here in Australia. I was in my early 20s and used to look forward reading it on the tram on the way home from Adelaide city on a Friday once a month. As with most magazines that came via surface mail we were 2 to 3 months behind but the best thing about 80s mags and especially Zzap was they were fat chunky magazines full of appeal. Many mags these days are thin lethargic glossy with no character. I don't have complete collections but I have hundreds of issues of mags like Zzap Crash Pcg Commodore User Cvg Big K etc etc all self bought and kept in good well read condition. Great story. Please do some other mags later!
Great work on this video! Despite (mostly) growing up in Canada, I'm a huge Zzap!64 fan. I learned about it when I lived in Australia for a year in 1987, and then grabbed a couple more issues when I was in the UK in 1990. It wasn't available in Canada, and none of my friends knew about it. And then Commodore Force somehow found distribution here in Thunder Bay, Canada in 1993 - 1994, which was absolutely bizarre. I couldn't really believe it as I bought each issue.
That was a great vid! so bloody nostalgic, took me right back. I loved Zzap!64, I lived above a newsagent and was friendly with the owner so he'd give me a copy a week early before it hit the shelves. I recently explored my mums attic, not been up there in 30+ yrs and found loads of mags, a stack of Zzaps too :)
I missed out on Zzap and crash because I had an Atari 800XL but I looked on with envy as my classmates read their Zzap! 64 magazines which looked so more exciting than my Atari User.
I used to buy quite a few computer magazines (I'd started work in 1984, so had more than just pocket money), but I didn't know Zzap was going to be launched - I don't recall reading any 'coming soon' adverts for it in other mags. One lunchtime I wandered into a newsagents and saw issue 1 on the shelf, and bought it. I got Elite because of the review, and wasn't too disappointed. Zzap definitely inspired many more game purchases. I moved to the Amiga in November 1986, so I didn't get that many more issues, maybe the first 12? Oddly, history repeated itself a little when Retro Gamer was launched. I had no idea it was going to be launched, wandered into WH Smith one lunchtime, and there was issue 1 on the shelf...
Loved the documentary. The zzap 64 that sticks in my mind was where they the competition where you had to read the entire magazine for clues. 2021 annual duly backed, look forward to reading the review!
ZZap! was a huge thing here in Italy. You also can still find the complete collection in pdf here. www.zzap.it/ Initially much of the content was simply translated from the UK version, but soon many Italian reviewers and writers get onboard. I think I've a bunch of old copies at my parent's house. Great times, indeed.
Aargh. Just phoned my mum to ask if my box of computer mags is still in her attic. Apparently she sold them at a car boot sale years ago. She remembers because they sold to one buyer before the sale started. Gutted, but on a positive note, along with pretty much every toy I collected and looked after which she also sold, all proceeds went to charity. So I guess she’s forgiven. Thanks for the great video. Best wishes from Manchester.
What a view back to the days.. I loved Zzap!64 and waited for this magazine days before it came to Denmark. Keep doing these retro views... Great.... I loved Andrew Braybrook telling about his new games being developed... Super video.. Thanx a lot...
For those that fancy a read you can find most Zzap!64 issues archived to read here or download in PDF format archive.org/search.php?query=zzap+64&page=2 And Crash magazine here archive.org/search.php?query=crash%20magazine
I sold all of my Zzap64's on eBay. The postage cost the buyer more than he paid for them. I don't know if he got them. I never even got a thanks. I still got all of my Eagles though.
Just brilliant! Brought back so many memories from my youth! I imported a ton of magazines including ZZap 64 to Sweden just because our own computer magazines were crap! And in all honesty and as a nod to Ladyfractic I also imported Compute! from the states... Keep up the fantastic content!!!
Zzap64 was very popular in Malta, and you ABSOLUTELY needed a subscription at the newsagents to make sure you managed to buy a copy. Had purchased issue 1, loved it, and went on to keep buying it until it sort of ... petered out ... I also had some Italian issues, and as you say, were translations, especially the reviews (recensioni)...
Yeah Lads! Here in New Zealand as a early teenager. I especially remember the championship between the reviewers on games like World Games. And of course those cover tapes!
I was more of a Commodore Format magazine man at the time- 1991. I did though get a hold of some ZZapps over time and loved it. Jaz Rignalll of course started there, and his work in Mean Machines has a massive influence on how I wrote, spoke and thought whennit came to sharing views on stuff with me friends. The classic magazines from the 80s, early 90s had a huge personality to them with the staff being fairly young themselves and lived and thought like their readership. They had a brilliant anarchist, rock and roll attitude and approach to how they did reviews and wrote in general. Very influenced too, by telly shows and comics like Vic Reeves, the Young Ones, and tings like that. It was a genius recepie that I still love to read back through and appreciate even more. The more corporate, straight faced and laced magazines that emerged in later years never had the class and classroom charm of the legendary reads in Zzapp, Crash, and Mean Machines. Loved this video!
Excellent video mate, Amstrad Computer User was my mag of choice. Had tons of them, would read them over and over. Never got bored, I guess these would have been the same for you! 😉
Exactly! But inevitably, when I moved to Amiga, for whatever reason the fascination with Zzap went away (for then...) and I remember putting them in a tub to take down to the recycling centre. 🤦♂️ I realized making this just how much I miss and loved it. So amazing that we have the annuals now thanks to Chris Wilkins, Roger Kean, and the others. 👍🕹
After finding it in the inernational press section at a train station I subscribed from germany for some time. Loved the game cheats. And the attached tapes.
Zzap 64 great memories of going down to the newsagents on my bike every month the day it came out and loved playing those cover tape demos. I had every issue and threw them all away 15 years ago when I moved house, I slowly building up a collection again but they now go for upto £10 on Ebay :(
@@AntStiller Wow so you are Oliver Frey on his days off! So cool. I'm honoured you watched it. How was the vibe in the office? This stuff is fascinating...
@@RetroRecipes We were collaborating from all around the world (with two of us here in Australia) so it was mostly via email/chat but it was still an amazing and friendly experience and I felt in a small way I'd had a glimpse into what it was like in the actual Zzap! offices. And thanks for the Oli compliment! It's no lie that he's my inspiration for the RESET64 cover art I do. reset.cbm8bit.com/
We had Zzap!64 in Finland, but we also had MikroBITTI (since '84) and its commodore-only sibling C=lehti (since '87) which were really good and perhaps slightly Zzap inspired in some regards. They had cartoons, legend status quirky authors and trustworthy honest reviews,. In April's day '89 they published a made up first look preview for a game called Illuminatus, which got out of hand as foreign magazines flooded their phone lines trying to get a copy of it and publishers trying to get publishing rights, some mail order shops even started listing it for sale in advance. Unlike Zzap, those magazines also had some really really good programming tutorials, not just silly little basic programs, but advanced assembly language ones, teaching stuff like how to create parallax scrolling on C64. We also had a C64 disk based publication called "Floppy Magazine" (since '85) which had articles, utilities, small games, cartoons and stuff like that.
Awesome job on this, Perifractic. I wish we had that mag over here in the states then. Back then I never knew of its existence. My staple subscriptions were COMPUTE!, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, Run and of course LOADSTAR. Thanks to the modern age I can read all those Zzap issues now. Good stuff.
I learned about Zzap!64 when I lived in Australia for one year in 1987, and bought several issues. I also got a couple issues of C+VG. Neither was available here in my part of Canada.
Great memories. I almost regret selling about 40 issues of Zzap64 a couple of years ago for few hundred quid. Although I’ve still got the first 10 issues of The Games Machine. I also did a fanzine at school which got me my first job at 16
Thanks for doing this! As you know I love the old games mags hence ao many interviews with writers. Thank you so much for wanting to use some of the Jaz interview👍-Paul
I had Crash for ZX Spectrum and Zzap64 for C64. Oliver Frey is an incredible artist. Still got loads of them in my loft, wonder if they are worth much?
Crikey! Slow down on that review of The Eidolon - I wanted to read that! And 24:53 - Silent Service!! OMG the nostalgia is strong this episode... I must have spent dozens upon dozens of hours playing that! It seemed sooo complicated when I first got it!
I wasn’t around for the likes of Zzap 64, but grew up on the likes of Sega Power & CVG. I still have plastic storage containers full of old magazines and still try to support this dying medium, which is near impossible to do in New Zealand.
What a wonderfully entertaining video. I sadly seemed to miss all this excitement because I was a Your Sinclair reader mainly because it had program listings. Then i migrated to Amiga Action and Amiga Power mags. Wonderful colour magazine was Amiga Action!
Great vid, 48, 64, 128k of goodness oh zap just remembered going to pay and noticed the cover tape missing oh crash! We seem old but man they where the good old days, before 2.4 children!😉
Puppyfractic is, as always, good girl. And given I really came of age in the 90's getting this look at the decade before when I was just a wee nerdlette is rather soothing. I was born the same year as the c64.
I still remember buying my first copy, it was issue 2 and it was so good I went back to the shop and bought issue 1. For some reason they had both on the shelf. I don't have my original mags, I threw them out thinking 8-bit was dead and moved onto the Amiga. But I've collected a few copies since, including issue 1 and 2 which are harder to get. My issue 1 is autographed as well.
I also remember going to a kart meeting at Clay Pigeon which was near Yeovil. Newsfield were there originally, I remember wishing I could call into the office (I was about 11 though).
Elite was a nightmare to get started on, the manual docking was stupidly difficult, the first item everyone bought was the docking computer if they managed to get far enough to get the 1500 credits together. Dont know why its such a revered game really
I was in issue 92 of Crash with my high score on Outrun which I completely forgot about until the magazine scans appeared online a few years ago. The latter issues of Crash including issue 92 had incorporated Sinclair User magazine into the publication
I have one memory of a comic in a C64 magazine with a military figure shoving a gun in the mouth of an alien and saying "eat this". This was obviously a reference to a scene from the movie Aliens with the same quote by Hudson. Don't know if it was Zzap but I'd like to track it down someday for old times sake, see if the magazine brings back anything for me. Memory is not a strong point of mine.
When I was a kid, way back in the latter half of the 1900s, I never heard of ZZAP 64. For a short time we had a subscription to Compute!, and Run magazine if I remember right, but honestly I couldn’t afford to get a lot of publications for my C64. It was hard enough to scrape together enough pocket change to go buy a real OEM non-bootleg game. Luckily a lot of those various old magazines are archived online somewhere. I still have those old magazines in a box somewhere, so I’ll have to get them out and go through them sometime.
Awesome video, the Magazines we had here in the US that where close where mostly on the console side of gaming more towards the 90's with ones like GamePro, EGM(Electronic Gaming Monthly), EGM II, and GameFan, and while Nintendo Power, and SEGA Visions where good, they where of course mostly(sometimes something really honest would sneak in) bias being ran by the companies themselves. on the PC side we had Maximum PC Magazine which is somehow still going, and it was awesome back in the day talking about things like early do it yourself water cooling, then turning around, and reviewing a new PC game while ripping it a new one, and giving you CD chuck full of free full games, game demos, and other Windows 9X/DOS based software in a time of dial-up internet, which would have taken you hours, or days to download the software on the disc.
In the US, the only specialized mags I remember in the 80's were ANALOG Computing and Antic (after the ANTIC chip) for Atari 8-bit enthusiasts, STart for Atari ST enthusiasts, and Compute!'s Gazette for Commodore 64 enthusiasts. I remember seeing a few others that were in more of a newsletter or mini-book (folded landscape letter) format. Other than that, it was general computing mags like Compute! (all 6502-based), BYTE and Family Computing. I know there are some Antic and STart issues (as well as a lot of ST Format ones) in my parents' attic and I intend to get them sometime.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, a couple of times a year I would end up with quite a few UK game magazines when my mother returned from seeing her family in Scotland. Looked forward to the magazines, some comics, and of course the candy (Smartees, yum!). While we didn't have too much like Zzap!64 over here when it came to computer magazines, I think a few of the early-ish multiformat console magazines had, at times at least, a similar spirit. Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) and DieHard Gamefan were great during their prime and I anxiously awaited each new issue in those dark days before the internet had the chance to ruin print. Gamefan was especially dependent on its personalities which led it to a few (mostly pretty silly) controversies. Anyone who lived through Nick Rox will know what I mean. Those were indeed the days!
Just had a nostalgia flashback i swear one of my friends had one of your mags i vaguely remember it his dad travelled alot . Back in day i tried making my own dizzy style game but it never worked out i just drawed the levels on paper . Shame i could have not made it in a game creator then.
@@RetroRecipes I remember one of my student friends even managed to bring the "Amigans" into the Swedish Television once back in the days. :) My grandfather gave me an old B&W valve driven TV he throwed out from the attic when they bought a new one and i mananged to fix it reasonably so i could watch those American action series in my room at night i was usualy forbidden to watch when my father was occupying the TV for the news and weather... But when i tould him about my friend he even called in my mother and the whole family watced that episode, even if my parents did not understood much i think... ha ha :)
Awesome video guys . Great ti learn about it . I fell over down that street in ludlow inthe 80s whilst on a school outing i was looking in the windows and fell over a pebble lol
I remember as a tiny lad, buying the very first issue and religiously checking my local convenience store every month afterwards. I met the team at a C64 show, back when Julian Rignall was with them.
I was in 3 issues of ZZAP!64 with various cheats, I was super popular at school amongst the nerds when they saw my name printed there. Some cheats were tiny machine code loaders that broke into the game loader allowing people to apply pokes for whatever cheat they wanted before starting the game. One cheat was for The Human Race by Mastertronic which amongst other things allowed you to skip to what-ever chapter you wanted, this game incredibly cost just £1.99 with 5 chapters, each with it's own unique mini game & Rob Hubbard soundtrack, the problem was it was so frustratingly difficult that many people couldn't get past the 1st or 2nd chapter & without the cheat never ever got to enjoy those later chapters and soundtracks.
I'd say Zzap64 seems singularly British. Publishing especially in the US has always been unwilling to seem all that enthusiastic one way ore the other about things, while so much in the UK revels in enjoying the punchy flavor. The most enthusiastic computer publication I ever got into was Amiga Info, but it certainly was more just enthusiastic about the platform, not taking the piss.
