Magazine Articles

Telecomsoft was regularly featured in computer magazines throughout its short five year history. Thanks to the hard work of Mort and like-minded individuals, a large number of the old computer magazines have been scanned and are now available on-line or via mail order on CD and DVD-ROMS. Regular updates to this section of the site will feature articles, competitions and the like relating to Firebird, Rainbird or Silverbird. Enjoy!

Home Computer Weekly - July 1985

Home Computer Weekly was a weekly magazine that covered computing issues and new software releases. The following article was an interview with James Leavey, shortly after he left Telecomsoft.

Home Computer Weekly July Home Computer Weekly July

Popular Computing Weekly - February 1987

Popular Computing Weekly was (as the title suggests) another weekly magazine that also covered computing issues and new software releases. The following one page article was part article and part review for a number of Rainbird adventure releases, including the Amstrad PCW conversion of The Pawn, the ST version of Silicon Dreams and the Amiga version of Knight Orc.

Popular Computing Weekly Feb 87 - Rainbird article

Amtix! Magazine - Issue 17, March 1987

Amtix! was a UK 8-bit Amstrad CPC magazine published by Newsfield (who also published the immensely popular Crash! (for Spectrum) and Zzap! 64 (for Commodore 64). In March 1987, the magazine published a four page article that profiled Telecomsoft and some of the people who worked there.

Below you will find links to scans of each of the pages from the article. Many thanks to Lee Theasby and Mort for providing the original images.

Amtix - First page Amtix - Second page Amtix - Third page Amtix - Last page

In 1988, ACE Magazine published a one-page article which questioned whether having a large corporation like British Telecom in the games software publishing arena was good or bad for the market in general.

Ace - Who

ACE Magazine published this article in 1989 reporting the sale of Telecomsoft to MicroProse.

Ace - Immortal Prose?

Competitions

This first example was probably Firebird's first ever competition, as it was just as the Firebird Silver £1.99 range hit the shops in the run up to Christmas 1984. The prize was a Sinclair Microdrive and ten Firebird budget games for the Spectrum!

Crash Magazine Microdrive Competition Crash Magazine Gyron Competition Home Computer Weekly - Firebird Silver competition Computer and Video Games - Dont Buy This Competition ZZap!64 Rainbird - Karting Competition Crash Magazine - Jewels of Darkness compo Zzap!64 - Druid competition Crash Magazine Firebird T-shirt Competition

A few months later, in March 1985 saw the next competition to win a copy of the third Firebird Gold release, Gyron.

Home Computer Weekly celebrated the success of Booty in the Summer of '85 and had a Firebird Silver competion to win a number of budget releases from the Silver £1.99 range.

Computer and Video Games Magazine launched a competition in August 1985 to win copies of the worst games sent in to Firebird, bundled together as Don't Buy This! for the 48k Spectrum.

To help promote the new Rainbird label, Telecomsoft teamed up with Newsfields Zzap!64 magazine for a Go Karting competition in early 1986.

The summer of 1986 saw Crash Magazine run a Jewels of Darkness competition, to win H. Samuels Jewelry vouchers.

The next competition was published in October 1986, to win a personalised copy of the new Firebird C64 game Druid, and the runners up prize was the black Firebird World Tour 1986 T-Shirt. Amazingly enough, the same prizes (except this time the prize included the Spectrum version of the game) were also up for grabs in a Crash Magazine competition the same month.