Amiga Joker

~ the eulogy ~

The first issue reached German newsstands in November 1989 at six marks fifty, with a laughing jester holding a playing card beside a wordmark in blue and orange and a promise running the full width of the cover: Das Computer-Magazin der neuen Generation. Inside were Shadow of the Beast and Battle Squadron, plus a feature asking whether the Amiga or the games consoles would win. The cover also advertised a page written specially for Computer-Ladies. The magazine was called Amiga Joker and it lasted seven years.

Joker Verlag was not really a publishing house. It was Michael Labiner, trading as a sole proprietor, who had been editing Amiga Special and started his own title with his then wife Brigitta. He was the publisher and for the early years the editor-in-chief as well, operating out of Haar outside Munich and from 1993 out of Grasbrunn. One account of the launch says fifty thousand copies were printed and barely fifteen thousand sold, though that figure appears in only one place and carries no citation.

It recovered from that and then some. The IVW audit figures printed in the magazine's own masthead each month tell the arc cleanly. Distribution was 102,966 copies per issue in the second quarter of 1992 and peaked at 105,565 in the third quarter of 1993, by which point the print run had touched 140,500. In October 1992 the magazine ran an advertisement asking which Amiga magazine other than the Joker still sold more than a hundred thousand copies an issue, and printed the audited quarterly figure underneath it as the answer.

Then Commodore went bankrupt in April 1994 and the supply of things to write about began drying up. By 1996 the German Amiga press was reviewing an increasingly thin trickle of releases, and the Joker filled the gap with something that reads as either desperate or very funny depending on the day: it printed reviews of Amiga games that had never been made, alongside advertisements for products in the same condition. The final audited circulation, for the second quarter of 1996, was 76,880.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the ratings meant ~

There was no overall score. A Joker review ended in six separate percentages, running from Grafik and Animation through to Handhabung and Dauerspaß, and readers learned to read the last of those as the verdict because nothing else aggregated. Capital Punishment took 92 for Dauerspaß in the final issue. Tin Toy Adventure took 69.

The other structural decision was the cover disk, or rather the refusal of one. Its competitors taped a floppy to the front; the Joker never did, across its whole run. It sold Cheatdisks by mail order through its own shop instead, three of them between 1992 and 1995, along with a branded wristwatch called the Jotch. When Computec launched Amiga Games out of Nuremberg at the end of 1992 with a disk on the cover, that was the difference between the two magazines, and the competition for German Amiga readers got hard from there.

~ the covers came from istanbul ~

The covers were the magazine's signature, painted rather than assembled, and the man painting them was Celâl Kandemiroğlu. He was born in Turkey in 1953 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. In Germany he drew comics for Bastei before switching around 1988 into the German games industry. He worked for Rainbow Arts and Thalion before spending his last six years as creative director at Ascaron. By his own count he illustrated the boxes of more than eight hundred games, Turrican among them, and he drew the covers of PC Player as well. He died on 11 March 2022, back in Turkey, where he had been living.

I had to go digging before any of that surfaced, which is roughly how credit for cover art travels. The Amiga was never the machine around me and German was never a language I read, so a Munich monthly about Commodore hardware sat well outside anything an Ankara dial-up connection in 1998 was going to surface. The artwork that made it recognizable on a newsstand in Bavaria was made by someone who studied in Istanbul and went home to it.

~ the issue that announced a schedule ~

The last one was a double, numbered 10/11 and cover-dated October/November 1996, and it did not say goodbye. Labiner's editorial, signed Euer Michael, explained that the Joker would appear every two months from now on, because the readership was shrinking and there was no longer enough software to fill a new issue every four weeks. He set out the alternative plainly, that the other option was stopping altogether, and said that could hardly be what readers wanted. He pointed out that the whole publishing house had been founded on this title, so nobody should accuse him of treason for economic reasons, and added that if the new owners at VIScorp managed to restart the Amiga then nobody on earth would be happier and the magazine would go straight back to monthly. Then he signed off on a joke. The only thing that could prove them wrong about the schedule, he wrote, would be sales suddenly shooting up, so perhaps readers should start buying two copies at the kiosk. The masthead in that same issue had already been rewritten for a bimonthly schedule, with a yearly subscription priced for six issues.

None of those six were printed. Joker Verlag put everything into the surviving PC Joker, which ran on into the new century, and gave the Amiga Joker its obituary four years late, as a six-page retrospective in the November 2000 issue of its sister title. The name has been taken out twice since, both times as a one-off sold at an Amiga collectors' meeting, in 2017 at Neuss and again in 2019 with Richard Löwenstein and much of the original team. Neither was a return to publishing.

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