Atari User

~ the last words ~

The first Atari User went into British newsagents in May 1985. I have handled exactly none of these, and everything below comes off archived scans plus a history page kept by the publisher that later bought the title. It arrived from Database Publications, a Stockport operation inside Derek Meakin's Europress group, and it did the thing every machine-specific magazine of the period did: picked one manufacturer and covered everything that manufacturer sold. That meant the whole 8-bit line from the 400 and 800 up through the XL and XE machines, alongside the Atari ST, which had only just launched. The relaunched 2600 and the 7800 turned up in the news pages too.

It was published monthly and numbered in volumes of twelve. The December 1986 cover is volume 2, number 8, a pound, and it shows you exactly what the magazine was: a Santa's Grotto type-in listing and a feature on fast disc copying sharing space with a flash in the top right corner advertising the Atari ST User section inside. Reviews, tutorials, hardware projects, programs you keyed in yourself.

English Wikipedia describes the look as conservative next to Computer and Video Games and the editorial style as restrained and formal, which reads like criticism and was really a market position. Database made magazines for people who wanted to use the machine rather than only play on it. Andre Willey came up from Technical Editor to edit it early on.

~ the record ~

~ the half they kept ~

The ST section started as a pull-out inside the parent. From the April 1987 issue, Atari ST User went out as a magazine of its own, and it outlived the thing it had been bound into by several years. What was left behind was almost purely 8-bit coverage, in 1987, for a line Atari was already treating as the cheap end of its range.

So the ending is less about a magazine failing than about a publisher doing arithmetic. Database had two titles where it used to have one, one of them attached to a platform with a future and one attached to a platform without. It kept the first.

~ volume four, issue seven ~

There is one detail that makes this better than a normal closure. Until late 1987, when Page 6 got itself onto newsstands, Atari User was the only British magazine with serious 8-bit Atari coverage sold over a counter. Page 6 had been going for years by then, but only as a subscription and mail-order publication. Whatever lead Atari User held over it came down to being the one you could pick up without writing a letter first.

Database discontinued the title in November 1988 with volume 4, issue 7, then sold the Atari User name and the subscriber list to Page 6 Publishing. It did not sell Atari ST User. Page 6 renamed itself Page 6 Atari User, then settled on New Atari User, and carried on being Page 6 with a different word on the cover. Wikipedia's line is that the new title had virtually no editorial continuity with the old one, which is the honest way to describe buying a name.

The scans are on the Internet Archive, filed by issue and month, which is how I can tell you what the December 1986 cover price was without ever having seen one on a shelf.

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