Back In
Time Live London - Photos Page 1

Friday morning, and
preparations were well underway.  This shot shows the box of freebies
Guildhall Leisure very kindly gave us (cheers guys) and just to the right is the
c64audio.com car, Mikie, guarding all the prizes.  The carrier bags are
full of prizes for the highscore competitions, namely a copy of Blitz Basic,
various other Guildhall games, signed copies of Back in Time 1 and 2, Back in
Time 3 T-shirt and poster.  Wow!  Well worth entering the competition
to win all that little lot methinks.

Of course, the C64 games
selected for the highscore competition needed road-testing to ensure that they
would load correctly, as well as be fun to play.  One of the two breadbin
C64s (mine, actually :) is used here along with the C2N tape deck.
Alistair Bowness (Boz) has a trusty Competition Pro 5000 in hand and he is
playing Oh No!, one of the games we'd use on the night.  Within a few
minutes Boz had got the hang of things nicely and really liked the game and the
inertial control system, so that was good.   Result!
Incidentally Chris Abbott and Boz between them posted a score which would have
_easily_ won the high score competition on the night, but it was not to
be...

At around 4pm, time to set off
to Central London from Chris Abbott's place in Bromley.  The hired estate
car is duly loaded up with all the goodies we needed to take with us, including
Back in Time CDs, Nexus 6581 CDs, posters, T-shirts, and computers for the high
score competition.  Not just two breadbin C64s incidentally, but also an
Atari 800XL.  Jason Mackenzie (Kenz) would also be bringing with him a
Spectrum 48K for people to have a general play with.  There was another
reason for bringing the Speccy as you will see later :)

We got to the club about
5-45pm to set up stuff.  The club had several TV screens which we could
use, and no less than this very nice 40 inch widescreen beastie was
present.  We soon decided that this was the one to show off the beat em ups
for the high score competitions (where we would play "winner stays on", an idea
thought of the night before.)  You should be able to just make out the C64
screen in the background in its power up state, and showing off how big the TV
screen actually is, are no less than Stephen Stuttard (Mort of Zzap64.co.uk) and
good old Boz.  You might just notice the cream 1541 drive Mort is holding -
he got it from Computer Exchange whilst in London during the day
:)

Mike Legg (Lando or Llando as
Jeff Minter calls him :) with the now infamous llama jacket that Jeff Minter
gave him at Back in Time Live Birmingham.  We'd had problems loading Way of
the Exploding Fist up until Llando suggested the time honoured technique of
turning the azimuth screw a quarter turn.  And eureka - loaded first
go.  I actually got this pic on the loading screen at the exact point where
the loud sample plays of much kung-fu action.  And there was going to be
plenty of those shenanigans on the night let me tell you.

You want more?  Well, time to move on to the
next page then :)

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