Be Excellent To Each Other

Old news but something that had passed me by, some crazy loons have put together a new edition of Amstrad Action.

"We all hate the CPC" I hear you cry, "why would I be interested?". Well there's some nice interviews with a load of ex-Future bods that bring you up to date with what they are doing now. Check out pages 14-32 which features everyone from Chris Anderson (founder of the entire Future empire) through to people like Dave Golder.

Point your downloadatron at:

http://www.lulu.com/content/2685625

Outstanding, this should keep me pleasantly distracted for the rest of the evening.

This presumably is the updated version without the paedophile allegation?

Wot was that?

You see that [...] on page 16?

I want to state for the legal record it NEVER read...

Ironic given that the person saying all that was top banana at a large publishing firm and had acted as editor on numerous mags and therefore should have known better.

Just reading through, I just realised that if Amstrad Action hadn't had a covertape on issue 3 (which pushed up sales to make it profitable after a disastrous first two issues), there would have been no Future Publishing, no AP and in all probability none of us would be posting here today!

Lawks!

At last, we now know the one crucial event we need to change to undo all of this.

*hops in time machine, accelerates up to 88 mph*

But by the same token, had FP not existed, President Schwarzenegger would have invaded Turkmenistan, and they'd never have that mutated SARS outbreak that wiped out moon colony 4.

But the C64 would still have been the best home computer.

Is this why people's avatars have been disappearing?
Lave is currently running around in 1985 trying to persuade Chris Anderson that nobody has bought the first two copies of Amstrad Action and nobody will buy the third one either, even if they do put a covertape on it.

Bloody hell! Do you have a copy of the original, unedited version?

http://issuu.com/kachorro/docs/amstrad_action_tribute_magazine

Page 16 as Dudley said.

It's not a bad read but they've missed a trick in not finding out more about the mags end. It's known that AA closed on the first issue projected to make a loss but who made the decision, what were the circulation figures looking like (AA had long since ceased to publish up-to-date ABC's) and what was the logic behind it all? Although I think Steve Carey is probably right when he basically says nobody involved cared enough to fight for it. By the end it was pretty much entirely written freelance anyway. The mag pretty much lost it's identity the day Rod Lawton left although Dave Golder did a good job of swimming against the tide.

Yeah, I've been having disappearing avatars too. It's the digital equivalent of fading out of photographs.

It's hard to reach Anderson, because whenever I get close to him my mum tries to sleep with me. It pretty awkward.

Pretty good read. Chinny's criticism is what I thought too.

Wish the presentation was a bit neater too. A san serif font would've done wonders. Plus a little more proof reading.

Am I wrong in remembering that AA shared virtually the same staff as Commodore Format at the end of its life?

It did. In fact it also shared alot of people with YS as well thanks to them being in the safe office at Future.

Safe office? I remember the eight-bit mags being used as a training exercise for novice writers. The quality went down, but with the eight-bit era past its Autumn years and getting ready for Christmas, it was the right strategy.

Same office. Sorry, was abit groggy this morning.

I don't recall much of a writing decline in YS. The main problem with the later years of AA was most of it was freelanced out to people that were experts but not really writers. Likewise the in-house staff didn't really care about the machine itself either. It was old, unsexy and they had little working knowledge of it. Even when Jon Nash/Pillar (whatever he was that week) wrote for AA it was probably his worst work. His review of Crystal Kingdom Dizzy reads like the office cleaner knocked it up for him.

Additionally AA was always going to be on a downhill slope after the Lawton and Peters era. Both were excellent writers who knew the machine inside out. They also knew their audience. It's often forgotten that AA only became the market leading CPC magazine after Rod Lawton took charge. If you read AA's before about issue 50 you're never quite sure what the magazine wants to be. You had this mix of kids and adults reading the mag and they worked out that the mag could be fun without alienating anyone.

Having come to AA around the time it closed and almost read it in reverse order over the next decade I've come to the conclusion that while it was blessed with a lot of good people over it's 117, Rod Lawton WAS AA.