Commodore Format

~ the obituary ~

Future Publishing launched a monthly about the Commodore 64 in October 1990, which was eight years after the machine went on sale and several years after the industry had decided its future was elsewhere. The timing was not a mistake. There were millions of C64s in British bedrooms and their owners were not going to throw them out because the trade press had moved on. Somebody was going to sell those people a magazine. Future, which was building an empire on that arithmetic from an office in Bath, got there first and stayed.

Steve Jarratt edited the launch issue, with Sean Masterson as deputy. What they were running was in part a software distribution business. Commercial C64 software stopped being available in shops well before Commodore Format stopped covering it, so the cassette stuck to the cover, the Power Pack, became the way a reader got new games at all. For the last few years the magazine was effectively the platform's retail channel in the United Kingdom.

The editor's chair turned over roughly once a year after that. Collin Campbell, Trenton Webb, Andy Hutchinson, Dave Golder, Tim Norris, Karen Levell, Rebecca Lack and finally Simon Forrester all held it.

~ the case file ~

~ the numbers on the way down ~

The half-year circulation record is a clean graph of a platform dying under a magazine that refused to. 50,135 copies a month over the first six months of 1991, then 55,178, then 60,045 for the opening half of 1992, which is the peak. After that: 44,442, then 41,626, then 25,063 in the closing half of 1993. The readership did not drift away so much as fall off a table, losing well over half its mass inside eighteen months.

Turkish 8-bit owners got their machines and their software through importers and copied tapes rather than through a newsagent with a Future distribution deal, so an English monthly with a cassette glued to the cover never entered the picture here. My own computing in those years happened on other people's hardware, with no phone line attached to any of it. The monthly that was keeping the C64 fed in Britain was, from where I sat, not visible at all.

~ twenty four pages ~

The final stretch of Commodore Format runs to 24 pages an issue with Simon Forrester as the only full-time member of staff, which means one person was largely writing a national monthly. Future kept it in the schedule because the arithmetic still worked at 25,000 copies, right up until somebody in Bath decided that it did not.

~ issue sixty one ~

Issue 61 went out in October 1995, five years to the month from the launch, with two games by Jon Wells on the Power Pack. Fan archives put the print run at 5,000 copies. The writers working on issue 60 were never told by Future that the next one would be the last, a complaint they made on message boards years afterward and which Wells repeated separately, so no farewell was planned into the schedule and no retrospective was commissioned.

It took the format down with it. Commodore Format was the last commercial micro magazine in Britain to carry a cassette, so October 1995 is also the month the covertape stopped being a thing that existed.

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