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| From: Richard Atkinson
Date: 2002-03-03
Subject: RE: Plus 4 1541 disk drive
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On Sun, 3 Mar 2002, Richard Faulkner wrote:
> here it was £7 for tape, £15 for disk!!!
"Full-price" games started out (in about 1982) at 5.50 GBP. They then crept up to 5.99, 7.99, 8.99 and 9.99. Quite often the Spectrum version would cost 7.99, the Amstrad version 8.99 and the Commodore version 9.99.
In the meantime, from about the 7.99 era onwards, "budget" games became available, at 1.99, 2.99 and 3.99 over a period of many years. Some of them were actually very good (and some were awful, of course). The firm Codemasters started out selling Spectrum, Commodore and Amstrad tape games for 1.99. One such game was Dizzy. Treasure Island Dizzy (its sequel) came out at 2.99. I forget when the prices went up to 3.99 but a lot of extremely good games (including budget rereleases of older full-price titles) were sold at 1.99 and 2.99 GBP. The two price-points were maintained simultaneously by several software labels for a few years and frequently "original" budget titles would be 2.99 while rereleases stayed longer at 1.99. Sometimes the price reflected the manufacturer's perception of a game's quality, sometimes it was part of a standard pricing scheme.
1541 disk drives were available from the beginning, but as the C64 itself was perceived as being "expensive" people were very reluctant to cough up the same amount again for a "slow" storage device. Spectrums didn't get official disk support until 1988, so the Amstrad computers probably had the biggest percentage of users with disk drives (CPC664 and 6128 from
1985 I think) but then they were the smallest community of the three anyway.
Really it was the 16 bit generation that introduced Britain to disk storage. Much of the marketing for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga emphasized the large memory capacity and fast-loading disks.
Richard
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