Amiga Power

Amiga Power

Amiga Power #65, September 1996, the final issue
Editor	Matt Bielby (May '91 - Jul '92) Mark Ramshaw (Aug '92 - Mar '93) Linda Barker (Apr '93 - Jan '94) Jonathan Davies (Apr '94 - Jun '95) Cam Winstanley (Jul '95 - Dec '95) Tim Norris (Mar '96 - Jun '96) Steve Farragher (Jul '96 - Sep '96)
Categories	Video game journalism
Frequency	Monthly
Circulation	55,173 (Jul-Dec '91) 60,184 (Jan-Jun '92) 50,222 (Jul-Dec '92) 54,184 (Jan-Jun '93) 54,124 (Jul-Dec '93) 48,147 (Jan-Jun '94) 46,326 (Jul-Dec '94) 30,486 (Jan-Jun '95) 18,704 (Jul-Dec '95)
First issue	May 1991
Final issue Number	September 1996 65
Company	Future plc
Country	United Kingdom
Based in	Bath
Language	English
ISSN	0961-7310
OCLC	1063474423

Amiga Power (AP) was a monthly magazine about Amiga video games. It was published in the United Kingdom by Future plc, and ran for 65 issues, from May 1991 to September 1996.

It was in many ways the spiritual successor to Your Sinclair, which shared many of the same staff and had a similar sense of humour.

Philosophy

Amiga Power had a number of principles which comprised its philosophy regarding games. Like almost all Amiga magazines of the time, they marked games according to a percentage scale. However, Amiga Power firmly believed that the full range of this scale should be used when reviewing games. A completely average game, neither overly good nor bad, on this scale would therefore be awarded 50%. Stuart Campbell offered some rationale for this in his review of Kick Off '96 in the final issue of the magazine:

"Giving something like SWOS [Sensible World of Soccer] 95% is utterly devalued if you also give, for example, Rise of the Robots [a famously overhyped fighting game, rated 5% by the magazine] 92%. Percentage ratings are meaningless unless you use the full range, and you can't give credit where it's due if you're pretending that everything's good. What encouragement does that give developers to produce quality? They might as well knock it out at half the cost and in a third of the time if they're only going to get another 3% for doing it properly. Of course, the market will die much faster if people get continually stiffed by crap games, but hey - there's always another machine to move to and start the cycle again."

Amiga magazines at the time (as with most games magazines right up to the present day) tended to give "average" games marks of around 70%, and rarely below 50% except for very poor games. Because most people - including game publishers - were used to this method of grading, AP gained a reputation among publishers for being harsh and unfair. AP occasionally hinted that game reviewers were being given incentives by game PR divisions to mark games highly.

In fact, fairness was a central part of their philosophy. They despised cheating, and frequently berated their own readers for using cheats to gain advantages in games. (They also believed that this applied in reverse; that games should not be allowed to cheat the player, either.)

They also believed that above anything else, games should be fun to play, and that if this criterion could be met, other factors such as graphical quality, age or heritage were unimportant.

Style

Amiga Power developed and maintained a familiar style throughout its six-year run. The writers were very fond of in-jokes, obscure references and running gags.

AP reviews were written in a very personal, informal manner. Writers would sometimes even embark on anecdotes of recent happenings in the AP office, or of their interactions with the other AP staff. This contributed to AP's reputation for self-indulgence, but it also created a sense of familiarity.

Writers

Unlike many games magazines, AP policy was to hire people on the basis of their writing skills, rather than their aptitude for or knowledge of games, on the premise that it was easier to learn about games than to learn to write. Many video game journalists like Kieron Gillen and Stuart Campbell used it as a first step in their career. Gillen, now a successful writer for Marvel Comics, was one of several writers who started off as an AP reader and letter-writer (under the name "C-Monster") before being employed by the magazine as a freelance contributor (retaining the "C-Monster" name even in his professional capacity). Another was Mil Millington (known to AP readers as "Reader Millington"), who would go on to become a successful novelist, selling over 100,000 copies of his debut Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

Throughout its 65 issues, AP went through several editors. The editors, roughly ordered by time, were:

1. Matt Bielby, AP's first editor, whose career was remembered (sarcastically) throughout the magazine as the "Matt Bielby Golden Age" (issues 1-15)
2. Mark Ramshaw (issues 16-24)
3. Linda Barker, AP's only female editor (issues 25–26; issues 27-36 were edited by Stuart Campbell after Linda fell sick, although he never held the title of editor)
4. Jonathan Davies (issues 37-50)
5. Cam Winstanley (issues 51-55)
6. Tim Norris (issues 59-62)
7. Steve Faragher (issues 63-65)

Issues 56-58 were published with no designated editor.

Ed Comment

One of the most recognisable AP devices was the Ed Comment, which, although not invented by them nor indeed used exclusively by them, was employed extensively and inventively. Over time it evolved into a multi-purpose review device.

An Ed Comment is intended to be an interjection from the editor, inserted into a body of text as if spoken in real-time. The comment is italicised and bracketed, and the suffix - Ed is attached to the comment to show that it is from the editor. For example, the comment "This is a comment." would appear as (This is a comment. - Ed).

Characters

Like its spiritual predecessor, Your Sinclair, Amiga Power had several joke characters who would make irregular appearances in reviews and features. These included Uncle Joe Stalin, who made occasional Ed Comments in an attempt to erase Stuart Campbell from history; The Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse, the only minor deities committed to rigorous consumer testing; Doris Stokes, who returned from the dead as an even worse medium than before, and several others besides.

Concept reviews

A concept review is a review conducted in an abstract manner - basically, any review which deviates significantly from the usual practice of describing a game and analysing its strengths and weaknesses. Usually it takes the form of a work of fiction (often a screenplay) which indirectly reviews the game through allegory. Amiga Power featured concept reviews on a regular basis. The term itself (never actually used in the magazine) was an ironic play on the "concept albums" released by prog rock bands of the 1970s.

House ads

Like most magazines, AP was required to put advertisements in its sister publications. Unlike most magazines, it eschewed the traditional, half-hearted splash page with pictures of video game characters. Instead, it came up with bizarre, sometimes interactive, ads that were rarely to do with the Amiga itself. The most memorable of these was the O.J. Simpson guilt game, which allowed readers to select OJ's verdict at random.

Competitions

Competitions, a regular feature in practically all games magazines, were also run in AP's distinctive style, often challenging the readers' wit or creativity. AP also frequently provided strange additions to the normal competition rules, such as making peculiar threats to people who were ineligible to enter the competition if they tried to, or specifically disallowing reader Stuart N. Hardy from entering the competition.

Amiga Power regular features

Oh Dear

One of the earliest Amiga Power features which appeared in True Stories was Oh Dear, a small monthly feature showcasing truly terrible Amiga games. Oh Dear was removed very early on in the Amiga Power series.

Kangaroo Court

A regular feature which presents a so-called gameplay "crime", followed by the "case for the prosecution", which is a section illustrating why the crime is a bad thing. The penalty was usually an execution. In reflection of the nature of a real kangaroo court, there is no "case for the defence".

In The Style Of

An "In The Style Of" is, as the name implies, a depiction of a game in the style of something else; most often another game. It started out as a Back Page feature, but was soon thrown open to readers as a kind of competition, and moved to the news section.

Readers could send in floppy disks containing their In The Style Of drawn in Deluxe Paint, and every month Amiga Power would select the one they liked best and feature it in the magazine.

The Disseminator

This feature appeared toward the end of AP's life. It was simply a table of recent games, and the percentage scores that they received from Amiga Power and the two main competing Amiga games magazines of the time: The One Amiga and Amiga Action. It also contained annotations on some of the games.

Just Who Do We Think We Are?

While other magazines used at most a modest box (the "flannel panel") to introduce their reviewers, Amiga Power dedicated a full page to their staff, with photographs and short sections for each member.

Points of View

Points of View was a table summarising each AP reviewer's opinion of the main games reviewed that month, if they had played them. The reviewers had room to make a short comment and give their personal score from one to five stars.

Do the Write Thing

"Do the Write Thing" (an obvious pun on the movie Do the Right Thing) was the magazine's letters page. One distinguishing feature of the letters page was that the magazine gave the letters titles by taking excerpts of the letters' contents out of context, often by going across sentence boundaries or cutting in the middle of a clause.

The letters, and the magazine's replies to them, started out fairly normal in style, but later became more and more bizarre. Readers even started writing in about things that had nothing to do with video games, to the point that the magazine once had to specifically ask for letters on appropriate topics. AP philosophy was that a magazine's letters pages defined both its character and its relationship with the readers, and it therefore devoted more space and attention to the letters pages than most magazines, often in the form of lengthy responses to more serious letters, explaining and justifying issues of policy.

The Back Page

The back page was traditionally reserved for something fun and irreverent, or at least, less reverent than all the preceding pages. In the first third of the magazine's life it featured profiles of Amiga game characters, interviews with people in the Amiga games industry, In The Style Ofs and other random articles of interest.

Midway into AP's run, the Back Page tended toward articles that blurred the boundary between Amiga games and real life. For example, there were a series of "Wish You Were Here" articles, which were written as holiday guides to famous Amiga game locations (such as the Rainbow Islands, or SimCity). These articles often lampooned games and mixed them other culture, for example, one issue contained the classic opening scenes of light-hearted comedy Monkey Island done in the style of a John Woo film, complete with excessive violence.

Next Month Strip

Nearly all games magazines, AP included, have a Next Month page, which offers a brief insight into the contents of next month's issue. However, for AP's first 30 issues or so, they had a thin strip on the back cover upon which they wrote a few lines on next month's issue, and included a very small screenshot of an upcoming game.

Amiga Power irregular features

APATTOH

APATTOH, meaning Amiga Power All Time Top One Hundred, was a yearly rather than a monthly feature. It originally started in AP issue No. 0 (a special "preview issue" of Amiga Power given away as an addition to an issue of Amiga Format), and later appeared approximately in every issue whose number was divisible by 12, plus 1.

APATTOH, true to the Amiga Power philosophy, ranked games depending on how the staff liked them, not on how well they were selling or how much advertising spend the publisher lavished on them. This meant that games which were massively hyped at the time when they came out could end up very low in (or entirely absent from) the list. A notable example is Frontier, which every other magazine touted as the greatest space flight game ever, but Amiga Power ranked #100 in their top 100 list (emphasising the point by placing it one place below a public-domain version of Pong).

There were two games which held an iron grip on the #1 spot in the list. The first was Rainbow Islands, a coin-op conversion platform game which the magazine controversially deemed the Amiga's finest game for the first two years of its existence. The second was Sensible Soccer, which took over the top position in the first AP Top 100 after its release (the game came out too late for the 1992 chart), and never relinquished it (except to its own sequel Sensible World Of Soccer) for the rest of the magazine's existence.

Listing

First	Number	Final
Rainbow Islands	1	Sensible World of Soccer
Lemmings	2	Gravity Power
Speedball 2	3	Guardian CD32
Sim City	4	Sid Meier's Colonisation
Zarch	5	Dyna Blaster
Populous	6	Cannon Fodder
Kick Off 2	7	Syndicate
Falcon	8	Exile
Indianapolis 500: The Simulation	9	Speedball 2
Stunt Car Racer	10	Knights of the Sky
Buster Bros.	11	Chaos Engine
Prince of Persia	12	Alien Breed 3D
Spindizzy Worlds	13	Slam Tilt
Nebulus	14	Micro Machines
Carrier Command	15	Rainbow Islands
Dungeon Master	16	Rod Land
Rick Dangerous 2	17	Zeewolf 2
Ultima 5	18	Gloom
New Zealand Story	19	Monkey Island 1 & 2
The Sentinel	20	Shadow Fighter
Damocles	21	Dune 2
Paradroid '90	22	Super Tennis Champs
Plotting	23	Pinball Illusions
Typhoon Thompson	24	Super Skidmarks
Laser Squad	25	Settlers
Klax	26	Super Stardust
SWIV	27	F1GP
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade	28	Jetstrike CD32
F-19 Stealth Fighter	29	Stunt Car Racer
E-Motion	30	Overkill
Captive	31	Wizkid
Powermonger	32	Head Over Heels
Xenon 2	33	Sim City
Puzznic	34	Super Foul Egg
Super Off Road	35	Car-Vup
F29 Retaliator	36	Empire Soccer
Vaxine	37	No Second Prize
Interphase	38	Tetris Pro
Castle Master	39	Banshee
Car-Vup	40	D/Generation

Whatever Happened To...

Usually a two-page feature printed on black pages, which discussed something that was in one state in the past and is now in a different one. The subject would vary, but it was not always about video games.

Diary of A Game

There were four instances where a series of consecutive issues of AP had a feature called Diary Of A Game, where the development of a new game in progress was monitored in the form of a diary, written by the game's programmers. The games were:

• Mega-Lo-Mania 2: This was the sequel to the original Mega-Lo-Mania. This game never seemed to progress beyond several possibly mocked-up screenshots and was quietly dropped.
• Spodland: The winner of AP's earlier "Design A Game" competition, where readers were asked to send in concept ideas for a new game, with the winning idea actually getting implemented as a real game by a programming group called The Hidden. The game reached a semi-playable prototype stage, but was never finished and never released.
• Cannon Fodder: This became the best-rated (although not best-ranked) game ever reviewed in AP and was a huge success.
• Sensible Golf: This was a golf game based on the Cannon Fodder engine.

F-Max

In its later years, Amiga Power started advertising a fictional refreshment beverage called F-Max, the lightly sparkling fish drink, with the slogan an ocean of refreshment.

Amiga Power: The Album With Attitude

In early 2019, an Amiga Power fan launched a Kickstarter campaign to create an officially-licensed AP tribute album containing remixes of assorted Amiga game tunes, accompanied by an extensive liner notes booklet featuring contributions from former members of the magazine team. The campaign was successful, and in July 2020 the finished album was officially released.

The physical album took the form of a small hardback book, with two CDs attached to the inside of the front and back covers, and the 100-page Mighty Booklet sandwiched between them. The first CD – subtitled AP's Pick Of The Pops – featured remixes of tunes personally selected by AP team members (including former editors Matt Bielby, Mark Ramshaw, Linda Barker, Stuart Campbell, Jonathan Davies, Cam Winstanley, Tim Norris and Steve Faragher, plus others), while the second CD – subtitled The AP Bonus Coverdisk – featured remixes inspired by games and demos that appeared on the magazine's cover-mounted disks over the years.

Most of the remixes were created by the original composers; among those who contributed to the album were Alistair Bowness, Allister Brimble, Fabio Cicciarello, Mike Clarke, Adam Fothergill, Olof Gustafsson, Jon Hare, Chris Huelsbeck, Carl Jermy, Barry Leitch, Jogeir Liljedahl, Alex May, Anthony Milas, Jason Page, Matthias Steinwachs and Tim Wright.

The Mighty Booklet, meanwhile, contained detailed information about each of the tracks featured on the album, including interviews with the musicians, behind-the-scenes facts, anecdotes and asides from the AP team and full song lyrics; a special The Last Resort section written by Rich Pelley; adverts for F-Max and a Canoe Squad movie; a feature entitled The 'Bum Line, based on The Bottom Line, listing other albums of interest; and an ongoing storyline (following on from the events of AP65) in which the AP team are restored to life by The Four Cyclists Of The Apocalypse so they can attend a concert in their honour.

As of August 2020, the album remains available to buy via the original Kickstarter homepage and also on the websites of C64Audio.com and 010101 Music.

See also

• Amiga Force
• Amiga Survivor
• Digitiser

External links

• AP2 - An Amiga Power information site created by AP writers Jonathan Nash and Stuart Campbell, with a wealth of behind-the-scenes stories about the magazine.
• World Of Stuart - Stuart Campbell's extensive website, which includes an archive of Amiga Power and other articles.
• House of Nash - Jonathan Nash's website, which included a selection of Amiga Power and other articles, now taken down, but which may put back up in the future.
• Digiworld - Short-lived attempt at reviving Digitiser on the Internet, with Stuart, Jonathan Nash and "Mr Popular", aka Kieron Gillen.
• Need to Know - The fortnightly tech update for the UK, co-written by AP Production Editor, Dave Green.
• Games Press - A one-stop PR resource for the games industry run by AP's Gentlemanly Editor, Jonathan Davies.
• The Weekly - Created by Jonathan Nash and Mil Millington. Now ceased, though a return is promised.
• Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About - The website which would later give its name to Millington's first novel.
• Kieron Gillen's workblog - By AP's Walking Tips Machine, C-Monster, which previously existed here
• Amiga History Guide: Amiga Power - an alternative history of the magazine.
• "It's a skull", a famous OctaMED music file sent to the magazine by a reader
• Interview with Amiga Power staff, May 2016
• Archived Amiga Power magazines on the Internet Archive