From the forum issue 96

[Darran@Retro Gamer]

What was your favourite free cover tape/disc game

[rossi46]

CU Amiga gave away Doom levels and my A1200 with lowly spec played it with a frame rate marginally better than a slide show and with postage stamp size resolution, but I was in heaven. Great days.

[joefish]

Batty, for the ZX Spectrum, from Your Sinclair.
The most playable Arkanoid clone there's ever been, and all given away for free. Two-player simultaneous mode was a masterstroke.

[thevulture]

Tape: Operation Wolf demo. (Cannot recal which mag.it was on now, think it was Zzap 64).Played that to death before purchasing it on C64.

Disk: Zero had exclusive (?) Lords Of Chaos level for ST/Amiga.

[The Laird]

I am very tempted to say Batty as that was brilliant and another one that comes close is A Whole New Ball Game that cam free on a Crash tape but the one I actually spent the most time with was a really good footy manager game that came free with ST Action. It was called The Manager (great original title there) and me and my best mate spent hours upon hours playing it.

[DreamcastRIP]

Another vote for Batty. One of the best ever Speccy games, imho, and it was free!

[Smurph]

Not a game as such, but the Official Playstation mag gave away a demo dics that had rather awesome music visualisers on them.

Game wise it would have to be Batty, which was even better than Arkanoid on the Speccy.

[DreamcastRIP]

Game wise it would have to be Batty, which was even better than Arkanoid on the Speccy.

Not all that difficult it has to said as Arkanoid on the Speccy was a load of tosh!

As ever, Crash called it right: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag. ... 900022.jpg

[Mayhem]

Commodore Force gave away some pretty heavy hitting games in its last issues, such as World Games and Impossible Mission 2, so it's probably one of those. Didn't have a 16-bit machine, so I can't comment on 3.5" disks, but if you can label Golden Disk as essentially having "cover disks", then I'd certainly mention Enforcer as the best thing to get offered as part of that (Manfred Trenz's C64 swan song).

Tape: Operation Wolf demo. (Cannot recal which mag.it was on now, think it was Zzap 64).Played that to death before purchasing it on C64.

Commodore User actually. I went to have a look and couldn't find the tape to tell you which month it was, wonder where that has got to...

[Doddsy]

I remember a magazine giving away a tape of coin op soundtracks that had ninja warriors and shinobi; that was pretty cool back in the day.

[Bub&Bob]

The Zzap Sampler from issue 26 - Last Ninja was my very first wow moment when I saw the first screen render.

(which may have been one of the first tapes on the cover I believe?)

[Morkin]

Most definitely the Rasputin demo that came with Your Sinclair Issue 1. I can quite clearly remember (like it was yesterday) when my brother brought me home that first issue with the demo & was gobsmacked that it was free. FREE!! And the classic line, "Russian And Read The Review" on the front cover. I still giggle at that to this day.

[Antiriad2097]

Discounting rereleases of commercial titles, I'll go with Starball on the Atari ST. A shareware title released on an ST Format coverdisk, its reminiscent of Devil Crash. Sure, the ball physics are a little shonky at times, but it amused my sister and I for a significant period following an unscheduled return to living at home.

[ipmarks]

Amstrad PC User had a free 5.25 floppy on the cover, and they gave away an excellent Space Wars DOS clone that I played more than any other PC Game. If only I could remember it's name I could download it off the interweb, and it would also have made this post more interesting.

[themightymartin]

PC Zone once did a CD which featured the shareware version of Doom along with about ten Doomclones (as people called them at the time). It included some real classics such as Rise of the Triad, the original System Shock, Dark Forces and... er... Operation Bodycount.