Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens from Mars - tape inlay authentic?

SteveP

I have just come across ths tape inlay for the Matthew Smith game. Is it authentic, I can't find it on WOS. It looks very authentic, though the story is very convenient. What do you think? Worth archiving either way.

Story and inlay
http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/heights/5874/matthew.htm

WOS entry
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0009511
Magazine advert
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-adverts/a/AttackOfTheMutantZombieFleshEatingChickensFromMars.jpg

def chris

Not seen that inlay before and I've noticed there is extra text in the story but that isn't on the advert. Interesting but convenient story as you say

Antiriad2097

Looks fake to me. It doesn't seem to have any of the artefacts from the printing process you normally see on these things when zoomed in close, and its just a bit too clean for an ancient mock up. Other similar mock ups from the era were literal cut and paste jobs with paper and glue. If it had got as far as a final print as this suggests, I'd expect to have seen loads of them about given the notoriety of the title.

richl

I wasn't sure initially because it looked a bit too nice and clean for an average inlay scan from c2001 but if you do a quick curves adjustment to the images they do actually look more like scans that have had a bit of a clean up in the worst areas.

If you do a bit of a search for Keith Ainsworth and Bob Wakelin then you'll find his Facebook page so - if he's not a member on WOS - I'm sure someone could ask for more proof either way (I don't "do" Facebook myself). He seems pretty legit so maybe he'd be able to shed a little more light on it. A couple of searches linked him with Retro Gamer magazine and/or C&VG but I think the former is because of his Retrogamer fanzine he produced. As for C&VG then I dunno... at the very least he seems to own (or owned) some original Bob Wakelin artwork.

MartynC

It's legit. Keith Ainsworth is quite well-known and respected - he used to produce the Retrogamer fanzine (not to be confused with the later Retro Gamer mag) and as noted above, he used to write a retro page for C&VG in the 90s.

I once spoke to ex Software Projects programmer John Darnell about this - he was working on the C64 version of Zombie Chickens which eventually morphed into Star Paws.

John said: "The artwork was done, a name devised, and it was brilliant. 'Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens', I still have the cassette insert. But not very much game code ever got written. Basically Matthew lost interest. The cassette insert was produced as a means of putting pressure on Matthew to produce something. It didn’t work. No ‘game’ ever existed. An animated 'That’s all folks', and some dog type character running along was all that ever got to the screen."

So it seems that the inlays would have been binned, but some were clearly shared among the staff as John has one. I imagine another staffer had a clear out at some point and that's why one ended up in a charity shop.

The loading screen on WOS is also legit - it was drawn by Matthew's friend Steve Leyland.

SteveP

Martyn, do you think it would be acceptable to reproduce the page content here, as the original web site seems to have been deleted and this one appears to be a mirror archive that could be lost in the near future. The story and the pictures would make a fine addition to this story.

Antiriad2097

Fair enough, I stand corrected.

def chris

^ I also thought the scans looked a bit too clean tbh...

something that always seems to get lost amid the discussion of this game is that 'Star Paws' is actually really good! I think so anyway...

SteveP

I have a vague memory of Matthew Smith saying he wanted to recreate the Looney Tunes cartoon style on the ZX Spectrum. There is the anecdote about 'That's All Folks!', the larger than life graphics, the animal sprites akin to say Bugs Bunny. Perhaps he found himself buffering against the computer's limitations and became disaffected. Is there an interview with MS talking about Andre and Chickens and the aftermath of Software Projects rather than MM and JSW as I don't recall it being covered. It may be because it is a period he would rather forget.

I was a bit concerned with the tape inlay at first as it does not have obvious crease marks on the spine, but it looks like it has been inked in on Photoshop. What is unusual though is the new renditions of the cartoons in the instructions. Martyn's additional notes have helped confirm it.

merman

At the Classic Gaming Expo UK in 2004, Matthew Smith talked about spending a night sleeping on a pallet full of Chickens inlays. So Software Projects had printed the inlays before the game was finished.

As Martyn explains, it was originally going to be a Roadrunner license. When that fell through, Matthew came up with the wacky Chickens plot and began rewriting it. When he hit a dead end, the idea was reworked to become Star Paws.

I like Star Paws a lot, hoping to get its story told in Retro Gamer soon...

Mousey

Big fan of Star Paws too; nearly completed it back in the day, but on a "rival" machine.. :)

SteveP

Andre's Night Off is just as interesting to me – such a bizarre moment in the MS saga. If that can form part of the story, all the better.