David Hayward recalls those tapes and floppies on the front of magazines
Cover media (or covermount, as it’s known in the industry) is when a magazine packages some extra form of hard media with their publication. Sometimes that media can be found on the cover of the magazine; other times it can be found hidden in a sleeve within the magazine itself. Either way, you get digital content that works alongside the content in the magazine.
From our perspective, the covermount was either a tape from 80s magazines for 8-bit computers, a floppy disk for the 16-bit home computer era, or an optical disk for more modern PCs and games consoles.
Our lasting memory started with Crash, around issue 65 (that’s the earliest tape we own, but Crash did earlier tapes), when a tape suddenly appeared that contained a copy of Dizzy – The Crash Edition, Micronaut One from the ever-talented Pete Cooke, MoonCresta, Sanxion, Wanted: Monty Mole and a selection of pokes that could be loaded up to cheat and crack various games. It was utterly amazing, despite cover tapes being nothing new (A.C.E. magazine had been doing them since its early issues a couple of years beforehand).
After that, of course, the idea of media-loaded magazine covers took off. Floppy disks containing shareware, freeware, the first level of a game and even full programs for you to install and use were soon littering the shelves of the newsagents.
As time went on, multiple floppies started to appear, and eventually CDs were devilishly cellotaped to the cover, and removing them would rip most of the front cover in two.
Its history
According to the internet, the covermount first appeared on Private Eye magazine, in the form of a 7” floppy vinyl back in the 1960s.
Various audio recordings were pressed on to the flimsies, but it wasn’t until the NME started to knock them out with music on the vinyl that it really took off.
Apparently, the UK was quite infamous for its use of the covermount. Other countries favoured a mixture of covermount and access to extended content via a BBS login or some form of subscription, where the tapes, disks or whatever else were sent separately from the magazine.
Obviously, the biggest flaw in delivering cover mounted media was theft. If the magazine offered an exclusive program or game, you would often find some unscrupulous individual had already flexed their thieving digits and removed the disks prior to you buying the magazine.
Cover media was also prone to the spread of viruses, long before the internet claimed that crown.
These days the covermount is still alive and well. There are a collection of computing magazines that still have a cover disc, loaded with Linux distros and so on. However, like the magazines themselves, the internet has done a fine job of slowly pushing this form of delivery from the shelves.
The Good
You got free games and programs, demos and music! You could stick some tissue in the tape write hole and use it as a normal tape.
The Bad
They didn’t always work. They were mostly gone by the time you got to the newsagents. They could spread viruses and other malware.
Conclusion
Covermedia was and still is a great form of media sharing.
Did You Know?
• A.C.E. issue one had a cover tape, with the Ocean game Gift from the Gods on side A for the Spectrum and Blue Max on side B for the C64.
• The first Crash tape was issue 45, we think, with demos for Driller, Mean Streak and Trantor on one side and Athena and Ikari Warriors on the other.
• Many magazines provided the code listing on their tapes, so the reader didn’t have to type in pages of BASIC or Assembly. Where’s the fun in that?
• Most of the cover media from computing magazines can be found on the Internet Archive, at goo.gl/V1uHPi.