Behind the serious name “studio” there were often yesterday’s schoolkids. Usually it was a team of two or three people. Games were mostly copied from other studios or from crackers they knew. Only rarely did they make their own adaptations.

When enough games had been collected, a compilation was put together. Artwork was drawn for it — usually right on a Spectrum. They launched Art Studio, picked a splash screen from a commercial game with a large, recognizable character, and added the studio name and the game list.

Then the picture was printed on a dot-matrix printer in graphics mode, which was rather slow. Luckily the paper came in rolls, so you could print a hundred copies unattended.

The cassettes themselves were duplicated on domestic tape decks, somewhere in a parents’ flat. Again a Spectrum was used: game blocks were loaded from disk and fed to the tape output, from which the sound went to several household recorders. After recording, the tapes still had to be taken for sale to a kiosk or a stall at a radio market — not easy either. A bag with a hundred cassettes weighed close to 10 kg.

But there were also studios that worked on a completely different level. They had money, equipment, wholesale contacts and the ability to produce really large runs. Covers for such studios could be made by experienced artists and designers. Layouts were created on an IBM PC and finished images were printed at a press. The result was quality print at high resolution, sometimes even in colour.

Recording could also be done to a much higher standard. Instead of ordinary Soviet decks they used Japanese gear, and for duplication — good foreign blanks. In rare cases tapes were pressed at a factory, for example at the Melodiya studio. These studios often also issued booklets with each cassette, describing the games. In the end such products stood out clearly from ordinary home studios, approaching Western commercial quality.