CU Amiga

» see cu-amiga.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

This magazine changed its name more often than most magazines change editors, and the rebrands are why it is hard to find. It started as Vic Computing in 1981. It became Commodore User in October 1983, published by the Paradox Group for twelve issues before EMAP took it over. At issue 65, cover-dated February 1989, the masthead turned into CU Commodore User Amiga-64, which is a title designed by a committee that could not agree. The words Commodore User dropped off within months, and in March 1990 the 64 went too and the issue numbering restarted at one.

Underneath the name changes it was one continuous magazine, which the ISSN register confirms by binding both titles into a single serial history. The games section was called Screen Scene and it survived every rebrand from 1984 to the last issue. The Commodore 64 coverage was secondary from 1989 and gone by 1991, and from then on CU Amiga fought Future's Amiga Format for a readership that was itself running out.

The ABC figures show the last three years cleanly enough. It had 36,856 for the first half of 1996 and 28,161 for the second. The two 1997 periods came in at 27,391 and 24,358, and the first half of 1998 at 21,599. That is a magazine losing two fifths of its buyers in two years while it was still the biggest title in its category anywhere in the world.

On 13 August 1998 Tony Horgan put the closure on the website. EMAP had looked at the financial performance and the absence of any short term recovery and decided to stop. Issue 104, cover-dated October 1998, ran to 108 pages and came out almost exactly fifteen years after the first issue of Commodore User.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what EMAP decided ~

The interesting part of the announcement is not the closure, it is the refusal that came with it. Asked whether somebody else might take the title on, the magazine's own closure page said EMAP had decided it wanted to close CU on a high rather than sell the name and let another publisher exploit it. Asked whether CU Amiga would be turned into CU PC, the answer was a single word: no.

Publishers normally sell a tired masthead to whoever will pay for it, and the buyer runs it into the ground on a platform the original readers never wanted. EMAP took the magazine off the board instead. A successor did appear, but as a new title rather than a continuation: Amiga Active, launched in October 1999 by former CU deputy editor Andrew Korn, which ran until November 2001.

~ the upside down cover ~

The Amiga was over in Turkey well before it was over in Britain. By 1999 it belonged to the part of the hobby people spoke about in the past tense, and what I knew of the machine came secondhand from people a few years older who had owned one and would not shut up about it. That is roughly the standard Amiga experience outside Britain and Germany.

The last issue had a joke in it that the staff had to half-commit to. The cover was printed upside down with the logo flattened under a replica of the Monty Python foot, an obvious homage, done without permission because permission had been refused.

Then there is the site. cu-amiga.co.uk still answers today, serving the frameset exactly as it stood in 1998, with August 1998 listed as the current issue and the newest news item dated the first of that month. Whoever kept it running added a line at the top explaining that the page is preserved for historical purposes and that they have no connection with CU Amiga or EMAP. The closure editorial is still sitting on it, and that page is why the magazine's own account of its death can still be read.

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