Games That Weren't^®

1984 Mikro Gen

Platform: BBC Micro

Dave Moore from Retro Software has recently informed us of a long lost BBC micro conversion of Cruise Attack by Mikro Gen being found safe and well.

This was sold to Dave Moore back in Sept 2010. The ZX Spectrum version has been around for some time, but no-one was aware of the BBC Micro edition. How did the game come about? Dave shed some light by giving us the story from the Ebay sellers site:

The story behind this tape is as follows: about 2 years ago I bought a batch of tapes from a seller on eBay that turned out to have a lot of cassettes with labels on them saying “Master”. All of them were Mikro-gen tapes and so I emailed the bloke back asking where he had obtained them; his reply was as follows:

“I used to work in a photo studio next door to a computer software development workshop in Bracknell, Berks. We did a lot of advertising for them, but they went bust during the last recession, and we were given some stock towards their outstanding account. I seem to remember the rest was skipped and crushed.”

That makes this a rather unique item – an in-house “master” tape that was (I’m guessing) used for duplication purposes when they had to run off another batch of games to sell. There is no inlay for this item. The tape is labelled on one side as “BBC Cruise Attack original MASTER 26.4.84”; there is no label on theother side. The spine of the case reads “BBC Cruise Attack”. It is interesting that this tape is labelled both “original” and “master”. None of the other MASTER tapes that I have use the word “original”.

So, here is the chance to own a BBC curiosity salvaged from the ashes of Mikro-Gen. As ever, I can’t tell if this tape will still load since I don’t have a BBC. All I can tell you is that the Spectrum masters that came in the same batch all worked perfectly.

Luckily everything did work perfectly, and the game was in the process of being made available. Unfortunately, that was in 2011 and Dave got caught up with other things. Thankfully, in October 2024 – he’s now preserved the game and made it available for download. So here it is – a neat Missile Command clone.

We hope to learn more about it soon! With huge thanks to Dave Moore for recovering the game.

Download

• Game_CruiseAttack

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