ST Format

» see stformat.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I missed the Atari ST completely. The machine was finished as a product in 1996, a couple of years ahead of my first dial tone in Turkey, so this magazine had already closed before I had any way of knowing it existed.

ST Format was born out of a split. Future had been publishing ST/Amiga Format, one magazine for two machines, and when the sale of its sister magazine ACE freed up the staff to do it, the company cut the title in half. Issue 13, July 1989, was the last dual one. ST Format issue 1 appeared that August at £2.95 and 116 pages, edited by Richard Monteiro, with a cover disk carrying a fully working copy of GFA Basic 2 and a playable chunk of Bloodwych.

The shape of the next seven years is written in the page counts. It reached 220 pages at the turn of 1990 into 1991, which is a phone book. By February 1993 it had dropped from perfect-bound Super A4 to a smaller stapled format at 116 pages. The final issue was 52 pages and cost £4.50.

~ the record ~

~ ten sectors to the track ~

The cover disk ran from issue 1 to the end, and for plenty of readers it was the actual purchase. Future formatted it with ten sectors per track instead of the standard nine, which is a small act of engineering vandalism that bought them extra capacity every month. Later issues shipped a backup program on the disk so readers could copy it before the magazine got eaten.

The contents went well past demos. A fully working GFA Basic 2 came free on issue 1, and STOS and Protext turned up as commercial giveaways later. By 1992 there were two disks, one of them carrying a Steinberg sequencer, and by 1996 the disks were being split into STE and Falcon only sections because the installed base had fragmented. Reviews ran as percentages with a FORMAT Gold award at the top.

~ 53 percent ~

In June 1994 the magazine printed its own ABC share as a news item: 53 percent of the British Atari magazine market, while ST Review and Atari ST User both fell. Six months later it reported one of their deaths. ST User closed after 106 issues, and ST Format noted in its news pages that the decline had been long and then suddenly fast. ST Review went two months after that, and ST Format spent nearly all of its remaining time as the dominant Atari title in British newsagents.

~ the STE fiasco ~

For a magazine dependent on one manufacturer it was remarkably willing to say that manufacturer had made a mess. Issue 4 broke the STE story in November 1989 and issue 7 reported that STOS would not run on the thing. By March 1990 issue 8 was running a feature asking what had gone wrong with the STE, and calling the enhanced ST the biggest turkey of Christmas 1989 in Future's own pages.

The Falcon got the same treatment in reverse. ST Format revealed the secret project in August 1991 and covered the launch in October 1992, and then in June 1994 it printed a news item saying Atari was not supporting the Falcon at all. Writing a monthly magazine about a computer company that had stopped caring about its computers is a specific kind of job, and the archive shows them doing it for about four years.

~ half way through issue 86 ~

The closure leaked onto CIX and the BBS networks before anyone announced it, with users reporting that ST Format would end at issue 86 and that this was the biggest blow the Atari market had taken. Inside the office the staff were already making that issue when they were told. One writer described sitting there producing a third of the pages for a magazine he now knew was the last one. Future's reasoning, as relayed by the staff, was that the title was no longer a viable proposition given its shrinking size against its rising cover price.

Issue 86 came out in September 1996 with a cover line about all good things, and inside it a feature on Atari's downfall and another in which former writers said goodbye. The last news item was a rumor that Atari was about to make a statement about the end of the Jaguar. Some of the staff went on to found Atari Computing, a smaller magazine funded by readers putting in a minimum of a hundred pounds each. The domain stformat.co.uk is gone, but stformat.com now hosts a fan-built shrine with every page of every issue scanned, last updated in March 2016.

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