THE HISTORY OF BENNY BUNNY
One day a little rabbit hopped from the pages of a Spectrum magazine. Curious readers bent their fingers as they looked at the rat-a-tat of data. And, once they’d worn their digits to mere stumps, they did one of two things: played the resulting game they’d taken an age to type in or spent even more time trying to debug the code.
As anyone who has ever attempted to type a program listing printed in a magazine or book will know, the endeavour was rarely a smooth one. A printing error or a mistype could wreak havoc, leading to syntax errors and afternoons or even days dedicated to finding a fix.
Yet sometimes it was worth persevering, and that was definitely the case for a series of games published in Sinclair Programs and Sinclair User magazines in 1985. Written by a “T Sherwood of West Bromwich, West Midlands”, they came to be known as the Benny Bunny collection since each one featured a cute-looking rabbit. Both magazines were popular. Published by ECC Publications, then EMAP, Sinclair Programs ran between May 1982 and September 1985, specialising in type-in listings. Sinclair User, from the same companies, ran from April 1982 to May 1993, and sold in excess of 100,000 copies per month at its peak.
Readers were enthusiastic and a good number looked to showcase their own talent. “We used to get 15 or more cassettes in a day and they’d sit in a massive mail sack that I’d work through one-by-one,” recalls former Sinclair Programs editor Rebecca Ferguson.
