Category Archives: OiNK Merchandise

OiNK Merchandise

PORCiNE PROMOS: OiNK’S MERCH ADS

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Right from the off OiNK was different in every way, even with its fan club. Older readers of this blog will have had (or will have known someone who had) the famous Gnasher furry badge as a child from Beano’s fan club. But OiNK went one better. Not only could we proudly display a piggy pink badge of Uncle Pigg (at a time when boys weren’t meant to like anything pink), we could own a lucky butcher’s foot too!

Throw in some funny stickers, a letter from the editor and a lucky number with which you could win a prize if it was selected in the comic, and the Pig Pack was born! Advertised from the very start in the free preview issue, it cost only £1.00 plus a whopping 12p for postage. Now don’t you feel old? Well, prepare for that feeling to return several times throughout this post as we take a look at the adverts for OiNK’s unique range of merchandise.

In the 80s our licenced (eg. Transformers) and action comics (eg. 2000AD) contained adverts for a plethora of related items to spend our parents’ money on, but humour comics didn’t really. Some had fan clubs or competitions for themed t-shirts, posters etc., but OiNK was determined to be unique. We weren’t limited to the usual stuff and, despite not actually joining the Pig Pack, by buying the comic and some merch I still felt I was in a special club! For the actual club, the comic would theme adverts to match the issues, such as the Skeleton Crew disastrously taking over the comic, or for issues based around crime, Hogmanay, Valentine’s and time travel.

I personally owned two pieces of merchandise back in the 80s and I’ve been lucky enough to obtain them again as an adult. Regular readers will know of the fate of my original OiNK mug (left behind when I was fired from a job at 19) and my OiNK 45 record (left under a skylight window on a hot day!) and how I came to acquire them again (through the very kind Helen Jones for the mug and eBay for the record).

The mug was first advertised in only my second issue as a child (#15) but I didn’t order one for myself until much, much later in the run, just before the comic turned monthly. I remember receiving it and suddenly the logo was different to the comic’s, although I always preferred the original one from the cup and I cherished it for years.

Above is the original mug advert, followed by the one that first appeared in #22, the Magic & Fantasy Issue, although it was also used in following issues. The one on the bottom-left was a one-off inside the second Holiday Special and finally Charlie Brooker’s Transmogrifying Tracey was the star (kinda) of the final advert style created and the one I believe I ordered from.

While the mug was available for the rest of OiNK’s run, the record only had a limited pressing and only available for a short time. There was a little mention at the bottom of a Grunts letters page in #36 telling us of a musical treat to come and on page three of #37 a little hype was built up. I actually own the original art of this thanks to it being part of a page Davy Francis gave me several years back.

This was a lovely additional treat when Davy handed me his classic ‘Neely Dunn’ Cowpat County strip (which you can read in #37’s review). Assembled by co-editor Patrick Gallagher, you can see those musical notes were just marker pen over the top of a photograph and how it was all assembled via various pieces of paper glued together.

The first advert, below, certainly grabbed my attention because I can remember pestering my parents with it! This was as different a piece of comics merchandise as you were ever likely to get and I just had to have it! This was the kind of thing you’d only have seen in OiNK, thanks to the musical talents of Marc Riley (Snatcher Sam), Chris Sievey (Frank Sidebottom) and co-editor and writer Tony Husband.

The same advert would appear the next issue in black and white with a different photograph, then two smaller ads followed before they disappeared from the comic forever. You can find out all about this exciting piece of merch in its own blog post, where you can listen to all three of the songs and even check out the recommended dance moves!

Two OiNK goodies I particularly coveted as a kid but never ordered for whatever reason were items of clothing. The t-shirt appeared very early in the run and would be available for purchase all the way to the end. Just like the club membership and the mug it also received a variety of adverts. Below is the original as it appeared in #8, as well as those from the War Special (#20) and the All-Electric Issue (#23). Bringing up the rear is the one from the final months of the comic and clearly Uncle Pigg wasn’t beyond using emotional bribery to make a buck.

With the gift of hindsight I see there were adult sizes and I curse myself! Not that I would’ve wanted to order an adult size back then, and I doubt my parents would’ve wanted to splash out for two different sizes for me to wear at different points in my life. I may not be able to walk the streets of Belfast proudly sporting that smile-inducing logo but thanks to a fellow pig pal I do finally have the version I wanted as a child, albeit to frame and hang on my wall. You can check that out in a post from Christmas Day 2025.

The t-shirt, pig pack and mug could be seen as the three main pieces of merchandise, seeing as how they were advertised more than any other. They’d often appear alongside each other and I’m sure the page below will be very familiar to any pig pal reading this. (Note the addition of a piggy pink comb now, too!) This was printed in almost every issue over the course of several months in 1987, during what I call the Golden Age of OiNK when it was at its height for me personally.

The second piece of apparel had the best tagline in a clothing advert ever in my opinion. “Get sweaty! Get shirty! Get this sweaty shirty!” is one of those OiNK lines that fans quote to each other today when reminiscing about their favourite comic (alongside, “And the dolphin’s name was Keith” and the OiNK Song chorus, among others). At over a tenner, in comparison to the rest of the items it was expensive for the 80s.

The first time I got to see what the OiNK sweatshirt actually looked like (since our ads were drawn rather than photographed, with the exception of the Pig Pack above) was during Christmas last year when I invited other fans to show off what they still owned. It’s a… unique fashion item. This full-page advert for it first appeared in #42, the Fantastic Fashion Issue funnily enough!

Despite the logo change with the first monthly issue the following year, the sweatshirt, t-shirt and mug would continue to be advertised as-is (the second advert above replacing the original for the sweaty-shirty), with no new merch for the new logo ever appearing. In fact, the final piece of merchandise we’d see popped (no pun intended) up in the final weekly just before the new look would make its logo redundant.

I never saw the bubblegum in my local sweet shop and, just like the sweatshirt, didn’t even see a photograph until that same post from last Christmas in which Patrick himself held up a surviving empty box. I can’t help but wonder, what if OiNK had remained as the popular fortnightly comic from its heyday and had continued on for more years to come. What other merchandise would we have seen Uncle Pigg churn out to fill his coffers?

The fact the Round the Bend TV series was originally planned as an OiNK show fills the imagination with what could’ve been. That was a quality, award-winning series and if it had been tied in with our comic as intended maybe this post would’ve ended up being twice as long! As it stands, there are still plenty of items I’m trying to get my trotters on, but for now I’ll just have to look at these adverts and dream.

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Christmas, OiNK Merchandise, Pig Pals

PRiME PORKY PRODUCTS: PiG PALS & THEiR MERCH

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Merry Christmas everyone!

A few Christmases ago now I received a shoebox in the post in shiny wrapping paper with strict instructions not to open it until Christmas Day. It was from Helen Jones, partner of the late OiNK co-editor Mark Rodgers. I remember my mum was also eager to know what she’d sent me and when I finally got to open it she laughed while I grinned from ear-to-ear. After decades I was the owner of an OiNK mug once more!

Helen knew of how I’d accidentally left my own OiNK mug at a previous workplace in my late teens and that I’d been hunting for a replacement for years. She still had Mark’s mug in a display cabinet and very kindly sent me it for Christmas! That and the OiNK 45 record were the only pieces of piggy pink merchandise I owned as a kid and the latter was warped by the hot sun very soon after I got it. Thankfully I was able to buy a mint condition replacement for the latter on eBay a couple of years back and there’s a blog post in which you can listen to all three of its songs.

Reading the comics again as an adult I’m surprised I never had more of Uncle Pigg’s bits and pieces. If it were today I’d definitely be lapping up everything I could get my trotters on (and there’s an exciting Christmas update further below!), but perhaps having to go through parents curbed that somewhat and then OiNK’s cancellation put paid to any more collecting. But earlier on this year I got to thinking about other pig pals who had been luckier. What if they’d held on to it all?

I reached out to some OiNK fans through social media and asked them if they’d like to show off their merch on the blog. It was a silly question! Who wouldn’t like to boast about having some of this stuff? First to reply was Neil Clarke who has kept a wealth of OiNK pieces in mint condition for three decades. This could be down to the fact that he was a bit older than the rest of us careless kids.

“I got into OiNK as I was a big fan of The Fall and Marc Riley played with them,” Neil told me. “I was into punk music when I was 12 or 13 and OiNK came out when I was 20ish!” Not only that but his brother was a bit of a pig pal too. “My brother Ian won a drawing competition in OiNK and received this bag (like you, I’m jealous of it), so I got him rummaging up in his loft.”

To make you just as jealous as me, here are some photos of Neil’s collection including said bag, his Pig Pack membership club pack (including the letter from Uncle Pigg) and even a photo of the time he met the creator of Harry the Head, Marc himself.

Not only that, as you can see from his not-at-all-smug photo he’s wearing the one-and-only OiNK sweatshirt! That’s the holy grail of OiNK merch right there. Who can forget the “Get sweaty! Get shirty! Get this sweaty-shirty!” advert? Looking back, I really can’t fathom why I didn’t ask my parents (or Santa) for the t-shirt. I’d have loved that! I still would. Hence my daily email from eBay updating me on anything in their clothing selection with the word “oink” included these past several years.

Neil wasn’t the only person to show off the latter piece of pig apparel. When Jackie McCree got back in touch with me she told me she had the t-shirt but during recent renovations it had been put into storage… somewhere! Bless you for going to all the trouble Jackie. Saying that, you can just tell she’s got a huge grin behind this t-shirt, can’t you? Show off!

“I was a big supporter of OiNK,” Jackie told me as a way of curbing my jealousy. “Bought the merchandise, joined the pig pals, and bought extra comics to give to people and leave in doctor/dentist waiting rooms. If I remember correctly my friend Aly Fell submitted a comic strip to OiNK and they used it. I didn’t know Aly at the time but we’ve been friends for decades.” Might have to look into that!

It’s at this point I’ve got that special Christmas Day update!! Jackie very (very, very) kindly packaged up her never-worn OiNK t-shirt and offered to send it to me! I couldn’t believe it! It even came gift wrapped. Naturally, given how much I love both OiNK and this time of year, I didn’t open it until today.

As a kid we received our presents from Santa first thing in the morning but presents under the tree never got opened until after Christmas dinner, and that traditional carries on to this day. So it’s been a long wait but after three-and-a-half-decades a few hours more were nothing. I can’t believe I’ve finally got it! I never, ever thought this would happen so thank you so much Jackie and Merry Christmas to you!

Okay, so I can’t exactly wear it (it’s a child’s small) but I’ll be sourcing a frame and getting this up in my writing room after the holidays, that’s for sure!

Next up is camera shy Steve Finch who has the mug, the pig pack paraphernalia and also a rare piece of OiNK memorabilia in the shape of the promotional folder used by IPC Magazines around the time of the comic’s launch. In fact, it was Steve’s folder that he kindly let me use in one of several posts on the blog detailing the pre-pig days.

Steve also has an original copy of the piece of OiNK gear that’s received the most coverage on the blog to date. Still in its box is his OiNK computer game from CRL. It’s even for the best computer of the 80s, the Commodore 64! (Even though I didn’t get my C64 until 1991. I’ve apparently always been a retro head, even when I was retro.) Now for any young readers that thing sitting in front of the box is called a ‘cassette’.

If there’s one OiNK-themed item even trickier, nay impossible, to get our hands on today it must surely be the bubblegum. What? OiNK had bubblegum? It did indeed. It was only ever seen in one issue as a competition prize in #62, the final weekly before the big revamp. This was a sticky treat with a use by date so you’re not exactly going to see any on eBay, but that’s not to say there isn’t a remnant of this particular piece of comic history somewhere…

That somewhere is the house of OiNK co-editor Patrick Gallagher. Thanks so much for taking part Patrick, I just hope all of the actual gum is long gone and there isn’t anything too scary growing inside that thing. Bright pink (of course) bubblegum and only 2p each? I know I’ve turned 47 four days ago but now I feel old.

“I need to find my Weedy Willy hat.” That’s what pig pal Sue Hall told me when she was rooting around her house looking for her Pig Pack membership goodies and her old school folder covered in one or two OiNK stickers. Sue’s handiwork has appeared on the blog before, when she somehow built the impossible-to-build cut-out Street-Hogs Road-Hogg from #11!

Kevin Tuson is a man who not only has a large OiNK collection to show off, he’s a man who knows exactly how to show it off. I asked everyone if they could supply a photo of them with their merchandise and Kevin certainly agreed! I’m not saying there’s a smugness to his pose but, well, there’s a smugness to his pose. With the complete comics collection, the free gifts, the Pig Pack membership goodies and more, including several letter correspondence from OiNK (which we’ll take a look at some point in the future), I can’t blame him.

That last photo is of Kevin’s son, Sacha. Taken about ten years ago when Kevin quickly needed someone who would actually fit inside the child-sized t-shirt for a photo, I’m sure the now-22-years-of-age Sacha will be ecstatic that his dad sent in this photo for publication on the OiNK Blog.

To round things off we move from OiNKtown to Beanotown with Danny Pearson, current writer for the legendary comic who reached out to me a while back to tell me he’d found a piece of merchandise for OiNK’s spiritual sequel, something I’d been trawling the auction site for to no avail. Created by OiNK’s Mark Rodgers, Patrick Gallagher and Tony Husband, TV show Round the Bend also had a one-off comic special. This is like hen’s teeth on eBay today, so cue a bit of well-deserved smugness from Danny. (Love the background too, bonus points for that.)

That’s us, folks. I thought having a little look at some of these items with fellow pig pals would make for a nice Christmas Day treat, given how some of us may have received these as gifts when we were children (or after I turned 40 in my case). I’d like to thank everyone who took part for showing us their OiNK merchandise and thereby sharing their personal memories.

I hope everyone reading has been having (or have had) a lovely day so far, that you’ll go heavy on the turkey and roasties, polish off at least three bottles of Schloer and enjoy your afternoon nap before your turkey sandwiches for tea. Come back in a few days for more Christmas-like feels when I take a look at the toys and games (real ones) advertised in OiNK. More 80s fondness to come!

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OiNK Merchandise

YOUR SINCLAiR #27: SLOW PORK

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There I was, thinking I’d pretty much covered the OiNK computer game as much as I could have when I spotted the name of our favourite comic on the cover of this issue of Your Sinclair from 1988. One quick eBay purchase later and here we are, exactly 36 years to the day of its release and ready to check out another contemporary review of the game.

Previously we’ve seen how Commodore 64 magazine Zzap!64 and multiformat magazine Computer + Video Games thought it was a fun game and represented good value for money, with three very playable mini-games for the price of one full game. The problem was that it basically had nothing to do with OiNK. However, reviews were still generally very positive and so was I when I eventually played it decades after its release. So how did the Sinclair Spectrum conversion released six months later stack up?

As you can see, YS’s design was a bit basic to say the least and it’s rather sparse in the screenshot department (even for games it rewards big scores to like Gryzor), but from this one uninspiring picture of Tom Thug’s game we can see it’s a million miles away from the original C64 version. It’s not just the graphics that suffer either, it runs very slowly by comparison and while the C64 version loaded everything in at once, here each of the mini-games needs a few minutes to load individually.

This continues the general feeling that it had very little to do with the comic but as a game in its own right it was fun to play

Duncan McDonald’s review was written when the game was first released at full price (usually a tenner on cassette, around five pounds more for disk). Like most games of the time on these machines it would be rereleased in a smaller cassette box as a budget game for a few quid about a year later. The main complaint here is that each of the games already feels like a budget game rather than part of a full price release, but bundled together it’s not bad and is quite fun, hence the decent score overall.

This continues the general feeling about the game, that it really had very little to do with the comic but as a game in its own right it was fun to play and good value for money. You’ll also see here that Andy Capp’s game was reviewed on the same page, which is quite fitting since he’s very loosely linked to OiNK. When Buster comic was first released the character of Buster was billed as Andy Capp’s son, and as we know OiNK merged with Buster when it was cancelled. Nice little coincidence there.

As normal when checking out these magazines I decided to take a look at the rest of the contents and this Street Life double-page was right up my alley. As well as the obligatory sales charts it also takes a look at the 80s culture readers may have been interested in. Yes, there are a lot of daft space filler things here too but there’s some interesting contemporary snippets.

There’s a comics chart, although it’s focussed on specialist stores importing American titles rather than UK comics. Alongside this is a chart of the most popular arcade games back when such venues were everywhere and a review of two new movie releases, one of which would go on to spawn two awful sequels, a television series I loved and a comic series which was printed in Havoc in the UK and reviewed right here on the blog.

“[The graphics] are simply amongst some of the best I have ever seen on the ol’ pregnant calculator.”

Tony Worrall

Two other pages which may interest comics fans are an advert and review for a Dan Dare computer game, Dan Dare II: Mekon’s Revenge. To say the screenshots on the advert are small is an understatement. Maybe they’d have been fine for me at the time but to these 46-year-old eyeballs they’re so tiny they tell me nothing about the game whatsoever, the details lost to me. I do like how the advert has a 1955 date and price as if it’s a Dan Dare comic cover.

It appears Tony Worrall is a bit of a fan of the game. It may not look like much compared to today’s graphics, or even those found on my beloved C64, but for the Spectrum (which a friend of mine owned at the time) it does look ace and sounds like it would’ve been quite fun to play. If you read the review and find the sight of thumb-sucking mini-Mekons a funny idea check out the first screen shot closely and look at the two cryogenic chambers, you should be able to make out the animation. Fun stuff.

When I looked back at my first ever magazine, namely Commodore Format #14, I showed you a large double-page advertisement from Datel Electronics, a company renowned for quality hardware accessories for the home computers of the 80s and 90s. The CF adverts were slick, the accessories wowed teenage me and I ended up collecting much of what they offered in just the first couple of years of my Commodore ownership. But a few years previous, the same couldn’t be said of their Spectrum ads.

That’s not really fair of me to compare the two, over the next four years new developments in Desktop Publishing saw leaps forward in magazine design and the advertisements changed with the times. For this fan of retro gaming and computing it’s interesting to see what the Spectrum range offered in terms of add-ons, although it does appear to be somewhat limited to devices which would give these British computers access to things their competitors already had built-in.

As the end of the 80s approached a new breed of 16-bit machines was beginning to make its mark, the Atari ST being the first. The Commodore Amiga would soon be advertised all over the magazines aimed at the 8-bit owners and many would be enticed away, so it was quite the feat that Future Publishing’s Your Sinclair (they bought the title in 1990 from Dennis) continued until 1993, Amstrad Action until June 1995 and Commodore Format until October 1995, just six months before the release of the 32-bit Sony Playstation!

I simply adored my Commodore 64. I also had great fun playing a friend’s Amiga, but it was always Atari’s machine which fascinated me the most out of the 16-bits. I think it’s a lovely machine and nicer aesthetically than the Amiga, but I think it was mainly due to a friend’s music set up that I rightly or wrongly thought the ST was the better computer.

He had a guitar, a keyboard and some massive speakers all hooked up to his ST and what he could do with it was phenomenal. This friend was a particularly adept musical genius as far as I was concerned, but the ST was known for its music creating abilities and what he produced in the 90s in front of us in no time at all thanks to that computer wowed us. Plus we played Worms and Lemmings afterwards. Some great memories thanks to the Atari ST.

John is being sarcastic, using the language of what we’d call ‘incels’ and ‘trolls’ today to take very deliberate aim at toxic male views of the world

Page 98 is the last before the back cover and it’s an article called Backstabbin’ by freelance writer John Minson about the subject of girl gamers. Firstly, remember this is in a magazine from 1988, a time when everything for children was very explicitly split between what was for boys and what was for girls, with no overlap. Thankfully that’s changed a lot but at the time computer games were seen (incorrectly) as the exclusive domain of boys.

When you start reading this article you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a patronising piece aimed at placating any female readers. However, keep reading and you’ll see John is being sarcastic, using the language of what we’d call ‘incels’ and ‘trolls’ today to take very deliberate aim at toxic male views of the world (in this case the world of home computing). The fact Your Sinclair was edited by a woman (Teresa Maughan) should tell you there’s more to this than you initially think.

It’s disappointing that something like this would ever have needed written in the first place, but at the same time it’s quite a delightful surprise to see it in Your Sinclair of all places, and way back in 1988. It rounds off a fun look at another retro computing magazine, a genre I never thought I’d be covering when I started this blog, but one I’m enjoying immensely. Don’t forget there’s a lot more coverage of the OiNK computer game on the blog already, just click on the link below to go to the full menu.

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THE OiNK! 45: THE ViNYL FRONTiER

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Back in 1987 a unique piece of merchandise for a comic was announced in the pages of OiNK. In issue #37 we were treated to this full page advertisement featuring Marc Riley as petty thief Snatcher Sam and Chris Sievey in his role as celebrity superstar Frank Sidebottom. They’d come together to record The OiNK 45, a single-sized vinyl record available only through mail order in the comic.

Back in the premiere issue OiNK had launched itself onto the unsuspecting public with a free flexidisc, a floppy piece of pink see-through plastic containing two songs, namely the imaginatively titled The OiNK Song and The OiNK Rap. Marc produced and performed both and they proved a hit with the kids and an annoyance to the parents of said kids, which I’m pretty sure was the idea. Now they’d been rerecorded at Drone Studios by Marc and Frank with engineer Paul Roberts, alongside a brand new song.

When I saw the advert for the first time I immediately begged my parents to write a cheque for the record. I remember the agonisingly long wait for it to arrive and then my mum and dad wished it hadn’t. I played it almost non-stop for a few days, being told several times to turn it down. Let’s just say it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. As I said, annoying readers’ parents may have been the idea behind the songs in the first place.

I’d missed out on the original flexidisc first time around so had no idea two of these were new versions of previous songs. I remember loving The OiNK Psycho Rap (as it was now called) as a kid on The OiNK 45, written by Tony Husband and Marc, and when I finally got my hands on #1 decades later for the blog with a mint condition flexidisc I’ll admit I was confused as to why I’d liked it so much! The answer is that the newer version here is completely different and a whole lotta fun. The words are almost the same but it’s more professionally put together. While I’m still not going to blast it at get togethers with friends, it may find its way on to my HomePod.

Fortunately for my parents, but heartbreakingly for me, just a few weeks after it arrived back in 1987 I ended up playing it for the very last time. I’d taken the record out of the hifi in my room and placed it on my bed without its sleeve while I listened to something else. It ended up being a sunny day so off I went outside to play with friends for the afternoon. When I came back I found out to my horror what happens when a vinyl record sits under a skylight on a day like that.

It was badly warped, looking like a disused napkin someone had tossed aside. I was crushed. My parents refused to buy me another, telling me it was a lesson to learn (in reality it had brought peace to the house once more) and, having not yet made a cassette recording so I could take the songs outside with me, that was the last I listened to it. Only now have I been able to hear these versions (and the third song) for the first time since then, 35 years later.

This past summer I was finally able to track down a copy of the record and I’ve waited until now to listen to it as a special festive treat for pig pals. This should be interesting with my now-adult ears! First up, the cover art was compiled by Marc Riley and the photographs on the back and on the adverts were taken by OiNK’s resident photographer John Barry under co-creator/co-editor of the comic and co-designer for the project (alongside Marc) Patrick Gallagher’s direction.

There’s a reference to Mike Gallagher brewing the tea too. This was Patrick’s brother who played sax at the studio sessions (he was also in Frank’s Oh Blimey Big Band) as well as making the refreshments, clearly. Patrick tells me altogether they recorded roughly 50 takes of all three tracks but ended up using the first of each! All that remains now is to place the vinyl carefully into my record player and crank the volume up. We’ll start with the new versions of The OiNK Psycho Rap and The OiNK Song (written by Mark Rodgers and Marc). You’ll be glad to hear the latter is still sung by high-pitched pigs.

The OiNK! Psycho Rap written by Tony Husband and Marc Riley

The OiNK! Song written by Mark Rodgers and Marc Riley

Lyrics page from #1 by Patrick Gallagher

Unfortunately there were no lyrics sheets with the record so young me had a hell of a time understanding those piggies, however the lyrics were printed in the first issue. Only a few words have been changed here and there for the rap, so feel free to use that photo above to follow along.

Apologies that I have no fancy equipment to record the songs in lossless quality (or whatever it’s called), you’ll have to make do with my video recording it with an ever-tiring outstretched arm.

“What the heck you think you’re doing, you?”

Frank Sidebottom, The OiNK Get-Together Song

On the B-side is the brand new song, The OiNK Get-Together Song. Chris sings along with Marc in the previous songs and Frank even makes a small guest appearance in The OiNK Song when he realises he’s on the wrong track and asks the listener to turn the record over. This next song is twice as long and sees him in his usual place as lead singer, with Little Frank constantly asking when he’ll get to contribute. It’s billed as a song starring characters from the comic, however the reality is much different (and funnier) than you might expect.

The OiNK! Get-Together Song written by Frank Sidebottom (Chris Sievey)

In my head this song had included various impressions of characters but instead we’re introduced to them playing instruments or making lots of loud background noise. Of course it would be this! Highlights include it descending into chaos on more than one occasion, especially when Billy Bang and the Street-Hogs get involved, Frank and Little Frank’s arguments getting more and more aggressive and there are cameos from some long forgotten characters such as Billy’s Brain and ‘Ed Banger.

My own personal favourite moment is when Frank messes up and just readily admits it right there in the song!

It’s a genuinely funny record and I’d heartily recommend splashing out the few quid it costs on eBay when it pops up, but let’s just say I think I can understand where my parents were coming from when they refused to buy a replacement once they’d escaped it. Brilliant stuff and very typically ‘OiNK’. No other comic could’ve done this. If you do decide to buy it for yourself just be warned, the sax in The OiNK Get Together Song will be stuck in your head from now until the end of time, whether you want it in there or not.

Above you’ll see Mike Gallagher as part of Frank’s band in a photo Patrick sent me, alongside an image of the original test pressing of the vinyl shared by Tony Husband on the OiNK Facebook Group. The final photo features the children of the studio owner and a very tanned/rosy/burnt Marc Riley and Patrick Gallagher, who may have just come back from holiday according to Patrick himself.

The OiNK 45 and the mug were the only pieces of merchandise I had as a kid so it’s great to own them both again. This has genuinely been a whole lot of fun to revisit. It was another contributing factor to what I refer to as the Golden Age of my very favourite comic of all time.

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Commodore Format, OiNK Merchandise

PiG TALES PART TWO: COMMODORE FORMAT #3

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Last month I got to show you how Future Publishing’s superb Commodore 64 magazine, Commodore Format gave away a game on its covertape called Pig Tales, and how this game was actually the OiNK computer game, which had originally been released in 1987 across all 8-bit formats (image below from an eBay seller). Despite not having much to do with the comic, its playability and value for money was generally praised at the time but it just didn’t sell. So a short three years later it was a freebie on the cover of CF.

In case you haven’t seen the previous post, it contained the full instructions for the OiNK game and one month later Commodore Format was back with a guide for those stuck in the misadventures of some of the comic’s most popular characters. So that’s what this post is all about. Plus, just like last time I’m throwing in some contemporary features and adverts from the magazine to place it in its time, just for fun.

Every month our computing and videogames magazines would contain hints, tips and cheats for a huge variety of games. Without search engines, if you were stuck you just had to sit tight and hope your monthly read contained some help for you. Today I stay away from such websites that offer things like this, but the younger target audience of these magazines lapped these things up, as did I at the time. Some of the most popular forms of help were game maps.

In the section of the mag called GameBusters, staff writer Andy Dyer and editor Steve Jarrett painstakingly compiled detailed maps for the Tom Thug and Rubbish Man sections of the OiNK game respectively, which in turn were drawn up by designer Lam Tang. There was no need for help with the Pete and his Pimple section, it was a bat and ball game. It just required practice. So if you’ve got a copy of the game and would like to get that bit further (and have no patience) here are the full guides from this issue.

Ignore those black and white maps down the side, those are for a different title altogether. As you can see Tom’s zombie crushing section is all one big area to traverse while Rubbish Man’s is divided into six increasingly difficult zones. (Also, see the rather self-congratulatory game programmer include his name in a level!) Throw in Pete’s game and it’s a bit of a miracle it was a single load, not taking up any more than the computer’s measly 64k of memory (actually less when system memory is taken into account). For contrast the images on this blog are 1Mb on average, roughly sixteen times that size.

I’d actually like to give that Rubbish Man section a go again!

You can’t fault the team’s work here. Every little detail is included and not one screenshot is used, it’s all been drawn from scratch from playing the game themselves. No, the team didn’t receive a copy of the maps from the game publisher, at the time writers of these kinds of magazines had to basically play these games for hours and hours and assemble the guides themselves. Given how this issue contains eight pages of such help for the young players it’s an insane amount of work every month.

I’d actually like to give that Rubbish Man section a go again! If you’ve missed any of the coverage of the game on the blog you can check out a retrospective from Retro Gamer, a preview from an issue of Zzap!64 containing a cameo by Snatcher Sam, a special interview with OiNK’s editors in Crash magazine which also came with a special free edition of OiNK, there’s a full review of the game from Zzap and of course the previous issue of Commodore Format. Now let’s have a quick retrospective look over some things that caught my eye on other pages of this December 1990 issue as I prepared the above scans.

Back in the early 90s when other computer companies such as Sinclair and Amstrad found their 8-bit systems struggling the Commodore 64 was still selling well as an entry level computer. In the back of it was a cartridge port which had been underused throughout its already lengthy lifetime. New cart chip technology now enabled developers to use extra memory along with their ability to instantly load to produce advanced graphics, sound, more content and more complex gameplay. Commodore even released a console version of the 64.

With these the Commodore could easily contend with new kids on the block the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System. I often found (and still feel the same) that my favourite games on the 64 were miles better than the (admittedly great) console games. But Commodore, in their infinite wisdom, weren’t exactly marketing geniuses and the only places you’d see these advantages of cartridge technology detailed were in Commodore 64 magazines, read by people who already owned the machines. Without the manufacturer doing a good job the game publishers’ flash adverts above looked the part but had minimum impact.

Don’t get me wrong, gaming technology began changing very quickly in the 90s and incredibly the C64 still continued to sell very well for another couple of years. Commodore Format itself was eventually cancelled in 1995 only a few months before the first PlayStation magazine began! But with these advertising spreads above Commodore wasn’t exactly inspiring excitement, were they? In fact, they would go bust in 1994, taking the Amiga and its ever-developing range with it.

“You can hold conversation with people who may choose to help you or decide to chop your head off”

‘Going On-line’, Andrew Hutchinson

I always felt there was real potential to stave off the fate of the C64 if the company had really got behind the cartridge format on the proper computer instead of that silly console idea. Nintendo and Sega didn’t have to worry. The big push never came and when the console failed (as anyone could’ve predicted) publishers left the entire format in droves. Oh well, this short period of time still produced some of my very favourite computer games of all time and that’s not just the rose-tinted glasses talking.

Finally for this post there’s a feature I just had to show you all, written by future CF editor Andrew Hutchinson. Given this issue was published in 1990 and was for the Commodore 64 it might surprise you to see an article about going online! It would be the late 90s before our household had access to the Internet via AOL and a PC, but we were still in time for the extortionate monthly fees and even more extortionate per-minute charges mentioned below. Ah, the old days, eh? Yep, they very much were not better.

That pullquote on page 61 was about playing RPGs online, but could easily apply to Twitter today.

The excitement around the ‘Information Superhighway’ was intense in those years and looking back on it now it’s all very quaint of course, but every big revolution has to start somewhere. It’s strange to think how dependent our everyday lives have become on the technology that back then was seen as an expensive luxury only. Aside from the brilliant writing and the fact it was a damn fun magazine, the enthusiasm is another reason why reading actual retro magazines will always be superior to those from today that look back. It’s a lot cheaper too!

Anyway, that just about wraps up the OiNK Blog’s coverage of the OiNK computer game. I’ll take another look at Commodore Format next year when I reread the first magazine (of any title) I ever bought for myself, #14, which coincidentally enough is the same issue number of OiNK that had been my very first comic. Look out for more OiNK merchandise posts in the future.

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