Amiga Format

» see amigaformat.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

amiga format peaked in the first half of 1992, when i was eight and six years away from a modem. the machine itself was not unknown in turkey. the british monthly that served it was, because a uk newsstand magazine at a uk cover price plus import is not a thing that lands on a bayi shelf in ankara. by the time i was reading computer magazines they were turkish and they were about pc parts.

so this is reconstruction rather than memory. future publishing had been running a combined title called st/amiga format, covering the atari st and the amiga in one book, and in 1989 it split the thing in two because the two audiences had stopped overlapping. amiga format took the amiga half and ran its first issue in august 1989. every issue came with a floppy disk stuck to the cover, which was the format's entire commercial logic.

it worked better than anyone planned. through the first half of 1992 the magazine averaged 161,256 copies an issue, which made it the biggest-selling amiga title in the world and one of the biggest computer magazines in britain full stop. that is a circulation number for a single platform that no longer existed as a going concern two years later.

~ the record ~

~ the cover disk ~

the disk was the product. it carried demos and public-domain software, which meant buying the magazine was the cheapest legitimate way to acquire anything for a machine whose retail distribution in most countries was thin. in july 1991 they went further and gave away wordworth, an entire commercial word processor, at no extra charge. archipelagos and vaxine went out the same way, complete.

publishers did not enjoy this. giving away a full retail product on a cover mount undercuts everybody selling one, and the practice ended in an industry agreement to stop doing it. the magazine kept escalating in the direction it was still allowed to go, and with the january 1997 issue it became the first uk computer magazine to attach two cover cds to a single copy.

~ after commodore ~

commodore filed for bankruptcy in april 1994. amiga format then spent six years as a magazine about a computer nobody manufactured, which is a genuinely strange editorial position to hold every month. the brand passed to escom and then onward through a sequence of holders who each announced a revival, and the magazine covered every announcement, because covering them was the job.

the circulation came down the whole way. the readership that stayed was the part that had already decided, people maintaining hardware and chasing accelerator cards for a machine that was ten years old and still theirs. a magazine can serve that audience for a long time without ever growing on it.

~ the last issue ~

issue 136 went out in may 2000, eleven years after the first one. the cancellation landed inside the production cycle rather than at the end of it, so the last tutorial in the last issue breaks off partway through, having been written on the assumption that part two was coming.

future publishing carried on and is still publishing, having moved the whole business to pc and console titles years earlier. the amiga format archive is scanned and online now, disks included, which is a better afterlife than most magazines get and roughly the one its readers would have built anyway.

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