Jonathan Nash

We've often been accused of inventing the secret game in Theme Park (that turned it into a hybrid of Theme Park and Syndicate, with your cyborg agents replacing the teddy men and clumping around mowing down overly-long queues with miniguns) and, in a sense, we did.

That month, Cam was on coverdisk duties, and in ringing round the software publishers found that Bullfrog planned a silly little Jurassic Theme Park demo for Christmas. (The film, obviously, was really big at that point.)

Cam told the rest of AP the news, but we decided against the demo because Bullfrog were going to give it to everyone they could think of.

(One of the unwritten rules of compiling the coverdisk was that if a demo was going to someone else as well, you compelled the software company to make the AP one different - usually, of a later level. But Bullfrog's demo would be the same for every Amiga mag.)

We wondered why they had to stick with Jurassic Park at all, and - ta-daaa! - realised what a tremendous idea it would be to have a Theme Park In The Style Of... Syndicate - a Sinister Theme Park!

Excitedly, Cam rang Bullfrog. Yes, they liked the idea. Yes, there was no problem (they'd written Syndicate as well). But it would take a lot of work - certainly more than the two weeks to coverdisk deadline.

Sensing an opportunity for some sly publicity, Sinister Theme Park became AP43's Back Page. As the demo was some months away, Cam doctored pictures from the original game as illustrations.

Then - disaster! We learned that Bullfrog liked the idea of Sinister Theme Park so much, they'd decided not to give it to us, but to put it in version two of the game (a minor bug-fix, or something) as a hidden option. To activate it was so complicated (we eventually gave the method away in the Scum cheats feature, only to learn it was different for the CD32 version) that literally no one managed it, holding us responsible.

We didn't get the Jurassic Theme Park demo in the end, either. Sigh.