Sometimes the urge to try something a bit different from the norm gets to be too much. This can vary from the relatively harmless - brown sauce on the bacon butty rather than red or re-tuning the radio for a different breakfast show - to the ones which have major lifestyle implications for the rest of your days - buying the car rather than the bus ticket or introducing ice cube insertion on those hot and sticky teenage days when you find yourself alone in the house with a need for release (if you know what I mean).

In spectrum terms, this meant that the games obsession began to take a back seat. I've mentioned our fascination with graphics before, and the Art Studio allowed us to take some major leaps forward in quality. We also dabbled in percussion with a SpecDrum, wrote letters and essays and even began the long haul to anal cataloguing of everything with the production of the embryonic lists of music. Which looked so much better on A4 from the Citizen than they had on Alphacom toilet roll.

For the companies that provided our entertainment back in the 8 bit days this was equally true. Not wanting to become pigeon-holed some of them tried branching out as well.

Amongst the budget dross that bore their name, Mastertronic had managed to produce one or two Spectrum Gems. Finders Keepers introduced us to Magic Knight, who in turn brought "Windows" into our home when he got Spellbound. And then there was Journey's End which was my first taste of an in depth strategy/rpg kind of title. But does anyone else remember them attempting to break in to the music business? I still have three of the MasterSound compilation tapes tucked away in the black ash cassette drawers now relegated to the back bedroom. Heat of the '50s, Heat of the '60s and Heat of Rock & Roll. Spot a trend in those titles there? If memory serves they were obtained by me through a buy 3 for the price of 2 offer in one of the magazines of the time. And they were still a bargain if that hadn't been the case as the standard £1.99 Mastertronic price applied to the music as well as the games. And some of the stuff on there was even worth listening to.

Also keen to expand were Newsfield publications. Horror mag Fear did fairly well for a time but it was with LM that I paid an interest. Named from the initials of the notoriously camera shy Lloyd Mangram (some might argue that he never really existed at all), the magazine tried to cover pretty much everything that didn't fit in the pages of Crash, Zzap and Amtix. I had all of the four or five issues that hit the shelves before lack of advertising revenue deemed it a failure, but the depridations of time have left only one of them in my grasp. That covers Star Trek, Aids, Tattoos, Music and also has Lloyd's wonderful agony column. I'd quote some sample problems but that would require going home to look them up and be a flagrant breach of Rule One. If nothing else, LM deserves to be enshrined for introducing me to Frank Miller and The Dark Knight Returns, which turned my view of Batman upside down.

I'm sure there were others. Perhaps you can name them.

Myself, I started branching out around the same time too. There had always been music in my life but now it started to take control and dominate over other activities. The Willard Price and 3 Investigators books gave way to Anne McCaffrey and William Gibson. Money began to come in as earnings rather than parental donations (my shoulder still winces as I recall those flats on the paper round). Girls became objects of desire and strange hormonal urges rather than irritations. And homework suddenly started getting a teensy bit more important.

Gradual transitions for sure, but one day I realised the keyboard and joystick were not getting the abuse they deserved. Time had to be made for high score breaking or new room exploring rather than these being fundamental everyday activities. If this was growing up then part of me wanted no truck with it, but the real world was always there increasing its demands and making the wait for tapes to load seem like an imposition on a time-limited activity rather than an orgy of anticipation. Games were no longer the dominating force and number one leisure pursuit that they had been for a number of years. They would always play their part, and this is not the last ramble by a long chalk, but from now on they had to fit in with the rest of life.

Simon

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