ST Review

~ the last words ~

This magazine launched when I was eight, in a country where the Atari ST was never a machine I got near, so everything here is read rather than remembered. What makes it worth reading is that it was written for the unglamorous half of a home computer. The ST shipped with MIDI ports on the back as standard, which no other machine of its price did, and that one decision gave Atari a second audience of musicians and small studios who did not care about games at all. ST Review was the magazine aimed at them.

EMAP had just closed ACE at issue 55 in April 1992 and decided to put its money into dedicated 16-bit titles instead of multi-format ones. Atari ST Review launched in May 1992, and when The One For ST Games closed its games coverage was folded into the new magazine. So the thing was a hybrid from the start: a serious title with the games section of a dead one bolted on.

It did not sell the way EMAP wanted. The title went to Europress Enterprise, which ran it on three people, with Vic Lennard editing freelance and Tony Kaye as the full-time deputy, the third being a designer. Freelancers filled the rest of the pages. That arrangement lasted close to two years. Issue 35 is dated January 1995 and was the last.

~ the record ~

~ the serious end ~

You can tell what the readership was from what the advertisers thought of them. The back of the final issue is Gasteiner selling hard drives at £169 for 40Mb and £699 for 1.8 gigabytes. Inside, Cubase Audio at £550 and Calamus SL for page layout at £175. These are not pocket-money prices. The cover disk that month shipped a file editor written specially for the magazine and a program for recording animated sequences out to a VCR, which it did by having you unplug the rooftop antenna lead and put the computer's TV output there instead. That is an article written for somebody who owns a VCR and expects to wire a computer into it.

The title kept moving. The March 1993 cover says ATARI ST REVIEW in full. By the January 1995 issue the magazine calls itself ST Review in its own pages, and Wikipedia files it under that shorter name, so the word Atari came off the masthead somewhere in the Europress years. A small change to a masthead, and it says the thing the articles never would: the brand on the front had stopped helping.

~ the falcon that did not arrive ~

Atari's answer to the aging ST was the Falcon 030, and the magazine's survival was tied to a machine that did not arrive in the numbers anybody needed. The ads in the last issue are still quoting Falcon prices alongside ST ones, and still listing accelerators and extra RAM for both, which is what a market looks like when it has stopped growing and the remaining customers are upgrading instead of buying. Falling sales and a PC market pulling readers out from underneath finished it, and Future Publishing, which published ST Format, took the name.

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