C&VG News article from Feb 1985 edition

Did you ever lose something only to stumble across it again after many many years ? Well that happened to me this week.

Around 10 years ago, I mislaid what was an important item in my midnight collection - a copy of the Computer & Video Games magazine from 1985 which had in it a news item about Doomdark's Revenge.

The images in that news item were the gateway to the icemark for me, they weren't the traditional loading screenshot that you see in many articles about DDR, they were different scenes taken during the day and night unusually, and fired up the expanse of the icemark in my imagination.

I kept a very close eye on the magazine for many years, but then when I pulled it down from the loft one day, after a few weeks it went missing, probably thrown out with the trash as the cover had become detached

With todays internet archives, I have many times scanned back for the magazine and article which for some reason I remembered being in a xmas issue of a crash magazine. But of course I could never find such article as it was in C&VG! I don't know why, but this week it suddenly dawned on me that perhaps it wasn't in the Crash collection after all. C&VG came to my mind as the next possible contender. And lo and behold, after about 10 mins searching, there it was in the Feb 1985 issue on P.17, and although I struggled to remember the exact format and content of the article, I knew immediately once I saw those pictures that it was the one.

So one of those lost items is now resolved in my mind...

“The Lords of Midnight” and “Doomdark’s Revenge” have been a massive part of my homebrew coding hobby over the years.

I have many fond memories of playing the games, times which don’t seem to be 28 years ago at all. Since those early days I attempted to produce an updated version of Lords on the ZXSpectrum, then AtariST, then Amiga500, and then PC, which finally resulted (with some help from Chris Wild and Wayne Britcliffe) in the production of my remake “War of the Solstice”.

A memorable highlight for me was when an email from Mike appeared from nowhere in my Inbox whilst he was working in California some years ago. It was only brief to say that he liked the look of my remake and would have a closer look when he got a bit more time. I was touched by the fact that he had bothered to make contact with me like that.

The current work on the iOS version and the prospect of Eye of the Moon actually happening was something that I was very much looking forward to.

On 10th October 2012, the gaming industry indeed lost a true legend.