Guess what Xeno, Double Take, Nightmare Rally, Basket Master, Renegade and Trap have in common

[PeteProdge]

[XTM]

No mention of Star Wars, World War 1, The Tube, Black Lamp, Romulus, Dark Empire, Legions of Death, Lands Of Havoc, Legend of the Sword ...?

[DouglasReynholm]

Dunno what I'm missing here, but from the video I can see Little Computer People and Maniac Mansion..?

Joke's gone right over my head.

[Stefan]

The Renegade poster is still in active memory and directly associated with Queen, but I’d never seen the spines of all those game tapes.

[stupidget]

Dunno what I'm missing here, but from the video I can see Little Computer People and Maniac Mansion..?

Joke's gone right over my head.

At the beginning of the vid there is a quick view of a shelf with Speccy tapes on it.

Surely in 1989 Queen, with all their millions, would have had an Amiga and disks ‘n what not rather than Speccy tapes.

[+3code]

At the beginning of the vid there is a quick view of a shelf with Speccy tapes on it.

Looking the sizes, and compared with the flying 5'25 yellow disk, probably they aren't tapes.

[XTM]

Hard to say what formats these game cases are but I don't think they are 5.25" disks. They are clearly not the smaller "single tape" ones, but the "double tape" ones that Ocean (and apparently many other companies) used for a lot of their games around 1987 or so. They are 14 cm high and a 5.25" disk is 14.4 cm so it wouldn't fit in these. Also, the object seen in the video might not be a real disk, you can't even properly see it due to the motion blur at the time it is ejected from between the other games.
By the way, Nightmare Rally was only released for the Speccy, and only on cassette and not disk, which further cements this "theory".

The games on the shelf may also not all be Speccy versions, as at least the (unreadable) two lines of text at the bottom of the Xeno inlay seen in the middle (next to Arkanoid) do not match what you see on the Speccy inlay.

[cmal]

Interesting find! It makes me wonder which other music videos inadvertently feature Spectrum related stuff. Are there any others out there?

[SteveSmith]

Maybe the song is actually about the Spectrum, and how it was so cruelly set aside by '89 in favour of consoles and 16-bit computers?

[bluespikey]

Yay for Legions Of Death !

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... s_of_Death

[MarkRJones1970]

Some screen grabs in the Ocean FB page:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 454&type=3

[XTM]

Oh hi Mark
Yes, we had discussed this Video in a thread in 2022 after Mark had linked to something unrelated on his Twitter
viewtopic.php?p=84260&hilit=xeno#p84260

[Vampyre]

Is that Daniella Westbrook as the sister? Made the mistake of Googling her name... Jesus! She should be a Faces Of Meth poster child.

[PeteProdge]

Is that Daniella Westbrook as the sister? Made the mistake of Googling her name... Jesus! She should be a Faces Of Meth poster child.

It is, according to Wikipedia and some Queen fan sites. (An old boss of mine knew her as a friend and pointed out the septum problem to me at a time when it wasn't well-known.)

Anyway, yes, there are many other computer games in there, but I didn't want to have the topic title end up being too long and so I went for the really obvious Spectrum-related ones. There's one poster there with the word Microdeal on it, and that's a software house that barely touched the Speccy and I can't really make out what the game is. I reckon a few games there don't have a Speccy connection.

Also, the fake computer game made for the video, it does look like something on an Apple Macintosh art package of the time (just my guess) and pixelated in places to give it that 8-bit home computer game feel.

And it's quite telling that I can't see Ocean's Highlander there. I mean, it's got a definite Queen connection, but maybe best if we forget about that game's quality.