Proof that you don't need to be a great programmer to be fondly remembered by retro games addicts comes in the form of Chris Sievey, better known as Frank Sidebottom - a jobbing comedian and musician who, on more than one occaision, turned his hand to the 8-bit gaming scene.
Camouflage
Chris' first computing venture was Camouflage, a 7" single with some ZX81 software on the B side. The following news article was taken from Issue 1 of Personal Computer Games.
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Sinclair Pop
Chris Sievey
Who would have thought that Clive Sinclair could affect the pop music world? Chris Sievey and Pete Shelly are two musicians who have turned to his micros.
Mancunian Chris Sievey is the man behind the world's first computer-game pop single. The game was released in May by EMI, and the cassette in June. It features a song called 'Camouflage' on the A-side, and three programs for the ZX81 on the B-side.
When you play the B-side, all you hear is a series of bleeps. When you play it into a ZX81, the program will load into the computer's memory.
Once loaded, you can play the A-side. The lyrics to 'Camouflage' and various graphics will be displayed on your TV in sync with the song.
An arcade-type video game called Flying Train is also on the B-side, in both 1K and 16K versions.
With 750,000 ZX81s sold in Britain, EMI have obviously realised that the people who 10 years ago provided the biggest market for pop records are now buying computers and computer games.
'Camouflage' sells for about one fith of the price of games cassettes. EMI hopes that Sievey's efforts will 'revolutionise the music and home computing industries'.
Pete Shelly's XL1 Plus Dub Mix album is for the Spectrum. Working in one of the top computerised recording studios in this country gave him the idea of writing a program on one of his albums.
When the music for XL1 had been recorded, Shelly and a friend worked out a program for the 48K Spectrum. They put it on the last track of the album. This is loaded in a similar fashion to Sievey's record.
The album is also sold with a cassette.
'People are very scared that the music may be copied,' said a spokesman from distributor Island. 'We are not suggesting that.
'We are suggesting that they actually buy the cassette.'
The cassette was released at the end of June. It sells at approximately £5, the price varying regionally.
xl1.zip- (17.26 KiB) Downloaded 188 times
'We did it because the artist wanted to do it,' replied the spokesman when asked about future plans for more albums.
'But we would not be against doing it in the future.'
And, yes, the Pete Shelley mentioned in the story above is the bloke from The Buzzcocks
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The Biz
The Biz was a management game set in the music industry released by Vigin Games for the Spectrum. The B-side featured a number of audio songs, including a guest appearance by Frank Sidebottom. Although it was written in BASIC, the game appealed to many - devoted pockets of fans that can still be found lurking around the darker corners of the internet.
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http://web.archive.org/web/20000312210733/http://arrgh.co.uk/people/chrissievey.html
