A4 OR NOT A4?

Dear Lloyd,

Here I am sitting with issue 4 in my hand and I can read about it in the letters section of issue 5. I tend to forget what I'm doing so it will be a heartwarming moment of intense reading. Or I will say “I didn't write that”. Anyway. Cold and dark time of year now but all I can think about is the release date of The Wild Wood. It's getting nearer each day. Stunning looking preview and I can't wait to buy it and play it. This year's annual will also reach me soon.

I've ordered both A4 and A5. I have some decisions to make about this. The annuals before the triumphant return of the Zzap! 64 magazine were all in A4, but the new annuals to come are companions to the A5 format of this magazine. I don't know. I might go mad deciding what format to go for next year but I am confident I will make the right one. Can't be buying both formats each and every year. Wish me luck. Bye for now and thank you. Regards,

Bjørn Melbøe

I am told that A5 is the way — this is the way (sure I have heard that somewhere before!). I, just like the editor, am holding my breath to see what the A4 version looks like this year.

LOST BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Dearest Lloyd,

I made a game for ZZAP! 64 called Drive way back in the now far too distant year of 1991. ZZAP! had asked for contributions to the cover tapes, offering £1000 for any games published with an issue of the magazine.

I immediately put the game I had been making on hold and spent the next 7 months making a puzzle game inspired by a PC shareware title called Super Pipeline. Drive replaced the aforementioned game's oil with a car driving around a racing track that you built with corners, straights, and jumps.

The game had 12 levels in total, an animated intro sequence, a separately-loaded game-complete animation that saw your vehicle flying through space, and a demo that I asked ZZAP! to extract the music from if they could (I didn't know how to handle sound — I found out years later that the demo used Matt Gray's music from the game Driller so there would have been an issue with using that music but I'm sure they could have found something suitable).

I sent the bundle to ZZAP! 64 and some months later received a lovely reply from Commodore User to say that they loved the game but couldn't use it because it was too similar to a commercial Amiga game that had just been published (I see a bunch of similar games on Lemon Amiga though none look like the offending usurper — I'm pretty sure it had “Gold” in the title).

I lost my copy of the game in the intervening years. I have kept an eye out, thinking it might pop up on a Commodore 64 site somewhere, but it stubbornly remains one of those “lost” games. What I wondered is whether you might include this admittedly long letter in an issue of new-ZZAP! and perhaps it'll twig a memory of someone once associated with old-Zzap. And maybe — just maybe — someone will have Drive sitting in a collection of 5 and a quarter inch disks somewhere.

Gracias,

Rowan Crawford

Here is hoping someone reads this Rowan and can help you out! If they do (fingers crossed), this would make a great feature in a future issue of the magazine.