Amiga Survivor

» see amiga-survivor.uklinux.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Amiga Survivor was a monthly Amiga magazine published out of Leeds by Crystal Software, with a first issue dated June or July 1998, depending on which line of its Wikipedia entry you read. That disagreement is a fair measure of how well this title is documented.

The name meant what it said. Commodore went into liquidation in 1994 and the platform changed hands twice afterward, so by 1998 the Amiga belonged to whoever was still willing to buy for it. Those people are who the magazine was for.

Robert Iveson edited it. CUCUG's Amiga news archive has the announcements as they landed: Crystal Software announcing a new Amiga magazine in June 1998, the first issue going to distribution in July, a report of early success and a new look in October. In December 1999 the same archive carries a note that issue 8 was out and that Iveson had decided to pass the reins entirely to Crystal Interactive Software.

~ the chronicle ~

~ photocopied first ~

Before it was a magazine it was The Domain, a black and white A5 fanzine run off a photocopier, which is the standard origin for this kind of publication and usually the end of it too. Amiga Survivor is unusual in having climbed out of that format into A4 and full color.

A fanzine that goes professional in a shrinking market is betting that the readers who are left will pay more per head than the ones who went. That bet held for about two years.

~ who was still buying ~

What I had in 1998 was a PC in Turkey and a dial-up account. The Amiga belonged to childhoods in other countries, a secondhand curiosity here rather than a platform anyone was joining. A British Amiga monthly launched that year was addressed to a few thousand holdouts, and nothing in that description fits me.

The readers who stayed were serious about it, and that seriousness is what kept any specialist press alive. After buying the title, CS&E talked about a print run near fifteen thousand. Six years past the manufacturer's liquidation, that is a lot of copies.

~ february, if the advertisers came ~

CS&E bought Amiga Survivor in April 2000, reported by amiga-news.de on the 19th. What followed was an announcement of a media division and a relaunch, with the magazine going out to distributors in February subject to a couple of advertisers committing. That conditional clause is the whole story.

Then it stopped. No final issue number is recorded, no farewell editorial is quoted anywhere, and the official site at amiga-survivor.uklinux.net is flagged as a permanently dead link. The Amiga History Guide lists the title among the commercial Amiga magazines and puts the end at 2001. No month, no issue number, no notice.

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