Which games didn't make the YS Top 100 because they came out too late?

[RWAC]

The preposterousness of Deathchase being #1 makes this angle completely irrelevant.

The very next issue, Deathchase appeared on the YS Covertape. Yes, they had secured the best spectrum game in the world! A cynical person might raise an eyebrow at this. Not me though, I believe in the integrity of Your Sinclair and Mr Campbell.

[Audionautas]

"Classic" just means "a great game that would have been in the chart if it had been released in time".

"COMMERCIAL" means "released by a company who were making games as a business, not somebody who wrote a game for fun 20 years after the Speccy died but happened to make a print run of 50 copies on tape".

But it's clearly far too late to explain that now

Ultrasoft in Slovakia made games as a business until 1995. They also published a magazine called BIT and were distributors in Czech Republic and Slovakia of Ocean, U.S. Gold, Domark and some others, but there business was by mail-order only. I read somewhere that several of their games sold hundreds of copies. Maybe you should check their catalogue, there's a couple of gems hidden there.

On the other hand if you're looking for "COMMERCIAL games" that also were considered "CLASSICS" between 1991 and let's say 1993 good luck! Today I've been reviewing 1991 just to check what it was released that year and the amount of crap games is considerable (Pit Fighter, Final Fight, Cisco Heat, Hydra, Mercs, Out Run Europa, Terminator 2, Skull & Crossbones just to name a few calamities), even if in some cases they were praised by magazines at the time. Those ratings were not real anymore, you just can't compare a 1985 or 1986 Crash Smash to a 1991 or 1992 Crash Smash. Sadly the vast majority of the best Speccy games released in 1991-93 have never been considered "classics" because the Speccy had lost a big part of its fanbase by that time and a huge number of people didn't played those games until emulators popularised in the 90s, so the people never knew those games existed back in the day. Sales were getting lower. Also, a lot of the games were simply ports of 16 bit titles, not designed with the Spectrum in mind, or they simply were budget games for children with an easy and repetitive gameplay seen on previous games a hundred of times. So, very few chances those games became "classics".

IMHO in 1991 you can still find some really good games: Extreme, Battle Command, F-16 Combat Pilot, Heroquest, The Light Corridor, Lone Wolf, Navy Seals, Night Shift, North & South, Pick 'n Pile, Rod Land, SWIV, Switchblade or Zona 0. There were also some OK games like Back to the Future III, Alien Storm, Super Monaco GP, Darkman, Exterminator, Gauntlet III, Hudson Hawk, Lemmings, Loopz, Shadow Dancer and a few others. By 1992 the number of games released dropped dramatically. So, according to your conception of "Commercial games" is not easy to find any "classic game" in the "twilight" years of our beloved machine.

All the best!

[RWAC]

The very next issue, Deathchase appeared on the YS Covertape. Yes, they had secured the best spectrum game in the world! A cynical person might raise an eyebrow at this. Not me though, I believe in the integrity of Your Sinclair and Mr Campbell.

I can categorically assure you that nobody but me had any input into the Top 100 and the decision to get Deathchase for the covertape was only taken AFTER I'd made it No.1. As a freelancer I had nothing to do with any of that stuff.

Good to know!

Incidentally, whose idea was it to print the feature in black and white? A lot of the games had vibrant graphics and black and white doesn't really do them justice.