The trio had met the previous year when they were working for newspaper publisher Alan Purnell, learning how to write and produce a magazine from scratch.

[3] Though he had regularly played video games throughout the 1970s, the middle-aged Kean realised that the target market for the magazine was teenagers and young men, and the writing needed to accommodate this.

Consequently, he hired teenage staff writer Matthew Uffindel and the pair recruited local schoolchildren to review the games, including Ben Stone and Robin Candy.

[13] In 1986, Gremlin Graphics published a compilation, Four Crash Smashes, which featured Spy Hunter, Alien 8, Dun Darach and Night Gunner.

[16][17] By 1989, rival Spectrum magazine Your Sinclair regularly came with a free cassette attached to the cover that contained a complete game and various demos.

[19] In 2017, the magazine was commemorated in a special exhibition in Ludlow Buttercross Museum documenting Newsfield's contribution to the local industry.

[23] The cover of issue 18, July 1985, which depicted a scantily clad sorceress with a man on his knees in collar and chains, was considered provocative by some shops who moved it to the top shelf.

[24] Issue 31 in August 1986 was criticised for the front cover featuring staff writer Hannah Smith in a swimsuit mud wrestling with an alien.

[25] He was created by the team simply to make the magazine look more important and professional by appearing to have a greater number of writers, and named after golfer Lloyd Mangrum.

[1] On one occasion, Mangram was depicted visually in the magazine by a sketch of a man wearing a paper bag over his head with holes cut for eyes,[26] and was reported to work on a Hermes typewriter.

[28] Following Candy's departure, Hannah Smith ran the section as a self-styled "girlie tipster", establishing a rivalry with fictional Melissa Ravenflame from Computer and Video Games.

[1][29] Nick Roberts began his role in the magazine editing this section after Smith, and stayed for the remainder of its run, working out POKEs (alterations to the game's machine code in memory that allowed a player to cheat) using a Multiface, a Spectrum hardware add-on.

[34] Later years would see a brief revival of The Terminal Man, as well as Mel Croucher's comic story Tamara Knight, both of which ended mid-run.

After the closure of Newsfield's short-lived lifestyle magazine LM, Crash inherited its video reviews for a short period.