The 1980s was an exciting, formative era for videogames. It was the age of Donkey Kong and PAC-MAN, and a time when games started to move away from the arcades and into living rooms, via home computers such as the Atari 2600, ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro. And it was here, at the birth of this new entertainment medium, when Doctor Who games started to materialise.
The first Doctor Who title was actually printed as a code within Computer & Videogames magazine in March 1983. The publication featured an illustration of Tom Baker on its cover [see left] – despite the fact Peter Davison had been playing the Time Lord for two years – and readers had to painstakingly type the long code into their Atari computers to get the game working.