Incentive Software were shaking up the industry and living up to their name in ’85 by offering unique reasons to buy their games. More often than not this was by offering cash prizes for being the first to complete their games, such as the fantastically titled ’My Name is Uncle Groucho, You Win a Fat Cigar’. But when they released the excellent puzzler Confuzion, they decided to include a free musical track by the little known band Private Property.

The game itself was unique (for the time) where you had to join pieces of fuse wire in a similar style to the later and much better known Pipe-Mania. The music track, though featuring some slightly dodgy vocals, was a competent Indi styled ditty that is reminiscent of The Mighty Lemondrops (’who?’ I hear you ask!) though I am sure they would rather be compared to Echo and the Bunnymen. To fuse the two artforms a re-working of the tune by Rob Hubbard was also used as the games title tune. But far more interesting is the fact that the songs lyrics were written by one Matthew Smith.

1985 was also the year that Virgin Software did their bit to support Sir Bob in his crusade against famine in Ethiopia by releasing their Soft Aid compilation. As well as games from some big names of the day, they also gave you the Band Aid song ’Do They Know its Christmas’, which given that the game was released in July makes it a very strange ’gift’. But it was for charidee, so I suppose they can be forgiven.