The Covertape Canon

For about a decade, the primary way software reached British teenagers was stuck to the front of a magazine with a blob of glue. This was not normal. American magazines mostly sold you words about games; British magazines sold you a plastic bag containing actual software, and the words were increasingly a delivery mechanism for the bag.

Amiga Format launched in August 1989 with a disk on the cover and became one of the biggest-selling computer magazines in the country. Commodore Format started its Power Pack with issue one in October 1990 and ran it to issue sixty-one. Newsfield put tapes on Zzap!64 and Crash; Your Sinclair did the same; every title in the market ended up mounting something, because the moment one competitor did it, a magazine without a tape was a magazine nobody picked up.

I bought a lot of these. The honest memory is that I read the tape and skimmed the magazine. So here’s the canon — the things that arrived free on a cover and mattered more than most of what people paid for.

Do the arithmetic from a teenager’s side and it explains everything. A magazine cost about £2.95 and came with software on it. A full-price game cost £24.99. If the tape contained one game you’d play twice, the magazine was the better purchase by an order of magnitude, and the writing was a free supplement to a cheap game. British publishers had accidentally built a system where the cheapest thing on the shelf was also the most software you could buy, and a generation of us shopped accordingly.

The ancestor: the type-in listing

The covertape replaced something, and the thing it replaced was work. Through the early eighties, magazines published programs as printed source code — pages of BASIC that you typed in by hand, checked line by line, and ran. Get a character wrong and it crashed with no clue where. I typed in a lot of these as a kid and finished perhaps half.

The type-in was a terrible product and an outstanding education, because you could not enter three hundred lines of somebody’s code without absorbing how it was put together. You saw the loop. You saw where the sprite data lived. The covertape solved the misery and removed the lesson in the same stroke — from 1990 a reader got working software and learned nothing about how it worked. That trade was obviously correct commercially, and something real fell out of it, because the generation of British coders who ran the industry in the nineties were largely people who had typed listings in.

The institution: the public domain library

Before the covertape there was the PD library, and the covertape is really the PD library going industrial.

The Fred Fish disks (from 1986). An American engineer named Fred Fish began collecting freely distributable Amiga software onto numbered disks and shipping them at cost. By the mid-nineties the library ran past a thousand disks. There was no company, no marketing and no curation beyond one man’s judgement, and for years it was the most complete software archive the Amiga had. Every serious Amiga owner in Europe knew what a Fish number was. That’s an extraordinary piece of infrastructure to have been built as a hobby.

17-Bit Software (Wakefield). A British PD library run by Michael Robinson and Martyn Brown, doing the Fish job for a UK audience — disks of demos, utilities and games, sold by mail order out of a shop. In 1990 it merged with a group of Scandinavian coders and became Team17, who went on to make Alien Breed and Worms. A mail-order disk library turned into one of the longest-lived studios in Britain, and it is still trading today. The full arc from Amiga shooters to Worms.

The games that only existed because of it

Llamatron (Jeff Minter, 1991). Minter’s Robotron tribute, released as shareware for a fiver, distributed through PD libraries and cover mounts, and one of the finest arcade games of the decade regardless of how you got it. Two-stick chaos, sheep, an unmistakable sensibility, and a business model that consisted of asking nicely. Minter had spent the eighties selling through the normal channels and concluded that going direct was better, and Llamatron is the proof he was right. Llamasoft and the psychedelic shooter.

Deluxe Galaga (Edgar M. Vigdal). A shareware Amiga game that took a 1981 arcade design and improved it — better weapon progression, better bonus stages, a smarter difficulty ramp. It circulated on coverdisks and PD compilations for years and was, straightforwardly, better than a great deal of full-price shooting. The shareware economics let one Norwegian programmer iterate on a design for as long as he felt like, which is a luxury no publisher of the era would have funded.

Total Wormage, which you know as Worms. Andy Davidson wrote a turn-based artillery game in Blitz Basic and entered it into a programming competition run by Amiga Format. It lost. He took the disk to the ECTS trade show in 1994, handed it to Team17, and the game shipped in 1995 and turned into a franchise that has outlived the entire platform it was written on. The magazine competition that rejected it was itself a covertape artefact — Blitz Basic reached most of its users as a cover mount.

That story is the whole model in one anecdote: the tools arrived free on a cover, an amateur used them, the judging panel got it wrong, and the thing still found its way out because the distribution channel had no gatekeeper worth the name.

The Power Pack model

Commodore Format’s Power Pack deserves its own entry as a piece of design. Each month the magazine licensed full C64 games — often a couple of years old, occasionally still current — and gave them away complete. For a machine whose commercial life was supposedly over by 1991, this kept a library circulating to a readership of teenagers with no money, and it is the single biggest reason the C64 stayed culturally alive in Britain years after Commodore had lost interest.

It also demonstrated something publishers hated to admit: a two-year-old game has almost no commercial value and enormous cultural value, and giving it away costs the rights holder nothing while buying the magazine a cover line. Nearly every “free game with a subscription” deal since is running the same arithmetic.

The curation problem

Amiga Power is the one to study here, because it took the mount seriously as editorial. The staff treated the disk as a curated object — demos chosen to make an argument, PD games they thought deserved an audience — rather than as whatever the publishers had sent in that month. That’s the difference between a covermount and a compilation, and it mattered, because the alternative model was a magazine handing over its cover to a marketing department for free.

Most titles took the second option, which is how coverdisks filled up with playable demos of games the same magazine was reviewing a few pages later. Nobody ever satisfactorily resolved that conflict. The reader got a free game either way, and the review got quietly harder to trust.

And the demos

The demoscene doesn’t need the covertape, and the covertape needed the demoscene badly. Cover disks were where most British teenagers first saw a demo — a few hundred kilobytes of someone proving the machine could do something the manuals said it couldn’t. That’s where a whole generation of coders learned that the hardware had a floor and the floor was negotiable. The demoscene’s long shadow over game design.

What it cost

The covertape was an arms race and it ended the way arms races do. The mount cost real money — duplication, licensing, the bagging — and once every magazine had one, nobody gained an advantage and everybody carried the expense. Editorial budgets got squeezed to pay for plastic. By the mid-nineties magazines were giving away full commercial games as a cover mount, which is a thing you only do when the alternative is not selling any copies at all, and it trained readers to value the bag over the writing. The magazines that survived the transition to the CD-ROM era were mostly the ones that had something to say.

The upside is a genuinely open distribution system that ran for a decade, and it explains why so much of the British industry came from nowhere in particular. There was no submission process. You wrote something, you put it in a library or a competition, and it either travelled or it didn’t. That’s closer to how the budget labels worked than to anything a modern publisher does, and the two systems were feeding the same talent pool from opposite ends — one charging £1.99, one charging nothing. What cheap games democratised.

The closest living descendant is the shareware model that carried Doom out of Texas: give away enough that the thing spreads on its own, and charge the people who want the rest. How Doom spread. The difference is that Doom’s channel was a modem and the covertape’s channel was a newsagent, and the newsagent reached the kids without a phone line. The covertape as a distribution model, in full, and the Amiga library it fed.

Most of this material is archived and freely available now — the Fish disks and a great deal of the PD catalogue have been preserved wholesale, which is a happier ending than the commercial libraries of the same era have managed.