Well, i'm not sure if it's really back or not but another issue has been released after 8 years away. For those that don't know, Zzap! 64 was THE commodore 64 mag back in the 'golden era' and anyone who had a c64 should have read it at some point. Go on, get some nostalgia into you and download the mag in pdf format from here .

AHHHHAHAHahaha Zzap was for amateurs, real men bought Commodore User, which outsold zzap in heinous amounts, as did C&VG (back then).

Julian Rignall ... rooooofl. He's now heading up Virgin Interactive or summat.

gah, hardly! zzap was the true c64 mag :) The only one with personality and soul.

NO WAY!

Of all the UK mags from C64 through the Amiga era up to early PC gaming days, Zzap was so WEAK :P C&VG wasnt much better mind, but at least it was multi-format.

Vic User-Commodore User-C64 User-Amiga User-The One (remember that?) alllllllllll spanked zzap's ass. Which is why half of Zzap ended up working for Emap, cos they couldn't haaaaang baby.

To put things in a different light, Zzap was the pcpowerplay/hyper of c64 mags - trashy, ill informed and plagiarist city :P

DISCLAIMER: the distortions contained within are all intentional.

C&VG was ghey. Sorry, is ghey.

Zzap64!! was where it was at.

I wish i hadn't thrown out my collection.

It depends on whether you're talking about the pre-overhauled c&vg, which was rad, or the current model, which is not rad.

Either way, zzap EARNED it's nickname, 'zzcrap'. The retro mag issue is a nice touch though.

To put it YET another way:
zzap was the kind of mag that would use words like 'sif', 'saw', and 'ghey'.

COMMODORE USER FOR LIFE

That's a low blow.

Next you'll be saying it's the kind of magazine that would focus on CounterStrike.

Zzap's big plus, as far as i was concerned, was that each review had several reviewers opinions in them, it was easy to see who's opinion it was, and made reviews balanced because you learnt the bias of the reviewers.

Actually the CS analogy would be fair, cept zzap sold not nearly enough to justify it :P

What I liked about Commodore User was the fact that its writers seemed to have a better sense of humour, weer more professional in a time that professionalism was thin on the ground; plus while they didnt have the zzap main review/side opinion boxout by another writer routine, the CU writers had their own distinct styles.

Ken McMahon - aka 'Mister Crackdown on s*** software', who reviewed Tetris as a mildly addictive, obscure puzzle game.

Eugene Lacey - wry, thoughful, always very clear on his points.

Mike Pattenden - enthusiastic, get-up-and-go type writer

You get the picture. I preferred CU's quirk-factor too, Zzap lookeds more exciting, but was a lot like EGM trashy yank style mag.

One thing both mags had goign for them was a lot of inventiveness and style, and a willingness to not just write to formula. Something regrettably lacknig nowadays in print.

And just to show that even dodgy 'GameFan' type mags had a following, Click here to read about the Zzap team!.

Zzap 64 was a great mag, especially towards the end, when every issue had a complete game on the cover cassette (hahaha s*** that sounds funny these days), but lets see who is really old here, who can remember Micro80 for the TSR80/Dick Smith System 80, or even ZX Computing quarterly inspiration. Ahhh thoses were the days Z80 assembler in 4k, coding was an art form for real men, not cut and paste for kiddies.

Hahah I only admit to going back as far as Vic computing, which was early 80's!

Typing in listings at the back of mags was the extent of my 'coding', and when I would spend 3 hrs typing in 400 lines of code only to have it not work because ONE f***ING NUMBER was mis-typed, I would throw a 'tantrum'.

Oh yeah, where poking your memory address was fun.

AMIGA POWER FOR LIFE!!!!

*cough pc format cough* yewd prolly still ask what an atari st is

520 or 1040, or TT (no not an audi, its an atari, way before audi).

Ah the Atari ST. Gee that sure got owned by Amiga didn't it?

I\'ve got some links somewhere to a few sites that had scans of Amiga Power (i still have my big collection of em) and Zzap!. One place had heaps of coverdisks from AP in adf format and it was great to see all the old games and demos that i got from the mag, oh how i struggled to get some of them to work in my failing disk drive.
There is even an Amiga Power 2 site around with some behind the scenes stuff and all sorts of rants from stuart campbell, google for \'em.
yeah zzap held on for AGES, long after the c64 died for me. Funny how a relatively primitive (now) bit of silicon and metal can have such a loyal following. Zzap was good for me coz it had a personal touch, all the reviews weren\'t like formal bits of writing - they sounded like real people trying to talk to you about the game. All the little classic regular bits were great and you really had a feel for the people involved in the mag. Hehe, the little rockford cartoons around the edges of the pages were great.

I remember the ST fan boy in Wibble World Giddy, LOL.
I remember the day I got the first AP, the coverdisk had a full game on it but then fags said that putting full games on the cover of mags caused piracy??? so issue 2 was the last to carry one, the rather weird Kid Gloves.

Heh, I remember zzap. Some of you guys have f***ing good memories, there is no way I could remember thier staff.

Arr went through storage/stuff everything i there room last night and dusted off the ole C64, still works, got to love the graphics and sound, played Blue Max for 10mins. Also fired up the ole Dec Rainbow 10, with dual boot Dos 3.3 and CPM. Anyone a sparky, as the ST540 doesn't seem to be fireing at all, could use some help.

i'll bu your C64

Sorry Llama not 4 sale. I have about 100 51/4 floopies (double sidded) full of software, if someone has an old floppy could convert to emulator roms.

When I was getting ZZap and whatnot not, I didn't too much of what was in them I just wanted the demo tapes hahah :D

You've got like a 99% chance of getting a .d64 or .t64 image of your game at many LEGAL SITES such as lemon or the popular arnold archive - don't bother working out how to dump your games (unless you can't find an image of course). Most of my games have rotted, the disk has actually rotted or something, and don't work anymore but i can relive them in winvice. Just as good when in fullscreen except for not having a half broken joystick to play with and not hearing the classic chunking of the crappy 1541 (or whatever) disk drive.

The sad thing is that ALL the games they have on both sites still add up to less than 1 cd zipped. There you go, the entire history of c64 games on a single CD. I dare say much more playability on that one disk than many games coming out on multiple cds today.