Amiga Computing

~ the eulogy ~

Issue 1 is dated June 1988 and the masthead gives the publisher as Database Publications Ltd of Europa House, Adlington Park, Macclesfield, with Derek Meakin as managing editor. The Amiga 500 had reached British homes the year before, cheap enough to be a games machine and capable enough to be sold as something more serious, and the magazine covered it in exactly that split: a Workbench 1.3 preview in the first issue, a games section a few pages later.

The games section was called Gamer, a name it kept for most of the run. Later the publisher folded its separate games monthly, Amiga Action, into this title and let the acquired name take over the back half of the book. That is a move publishers make when two titles are chasing one shrinking audience and only one of them has to survive.

British computer monthlies of this period were a national arrangement rather than an international one. Priced in sterling, sold through newsagents on a distribution contract, aimed at readers who could get to a shop on the day it arrived. I was thirteen when the final issue shipped and a year away from owning a modem, so this title reaches me as scans. Reading a magazine that way is not the same as standing at a rack with your own money in your hand.

~ the dossier ~

~ four names on the same masthead ~

The company that printed it kept renaming itself. The imprint on issue 1 is Database Publications, which lasted until March 1990. Interactive Publishing carried the title for the next fourteen months, and from June 1991 the same firm was calling itself Europress Publications. One house in Macclesfield with one editorial staff under all of those names, accounting for the first 80 issues. At Christmas 1994 the title was sold to IDG, which published it for the remaining 37.

The timing of that sale is worth a second look. Commodore's liquidation had begun in April 1994, so IDG was buying a monthly about a computer whose manufacturer had been gone for eight months. The bet was that the installed base would keep buying. It did, for nearly three more years.

~ what got buried with it ~

Escom had bought the Amiga name out of Commodore's liquidation, and by 1997 it belonged to Gateway 2000, with very little hardware reaching shops under it either way. Amiga Computing stopped at issue 117 that October. Amiga Format, the other big British monthly, held on until May 2000, and when that one closed the British Amiga press was finished as a commercial proposition. Commodore had stopped building the machine six years earlier.

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