Your 64

~ the obituary ~

Issue one is cover dated April/May 1984 and priced at ninety five pence. The logo reads "your 64" with "& VIC 20" tucked underneath, under a strap along the top saying THE ONLY MAGAZINE FOR THE COMMODORE 64. The photograph is two men leaning over a C64 as though it had just said something to them. Sportscene Specialist Press of London put it out as a sister title to Your Spectrum, bi-monthly at first and monthly afterward.

Inside it split the difference between serious and leisure, which was the standard British formula of the period. The launch cover alone promises machine code and a look at the SX-64 portable, with a competition to win a fortnight in Florida running down the corner. Bruce Sawford is the editor Wikipedia records. The circulation number that comes attached to the article is 38,012, dated circa 1985, with no source behind it.

Fourteen issues came out and then the title stopped, which is eighteen months on the shelf for a machine that stayed on sale until Commodore itself collapsed in 1994. Nobody has scanned a closing editorial, because there does not appear to have been one. What is left is fourteen covers and a line on somebody else's magazine.

~ the case file ~

~ the arithmetic of fourteen ~

Bi-monthly for the first stretch and monthly later, fourteen issues between April 1984 and October 1985 means the schedule never held a full year at monthly pace. The subtitle on the launch cover stopped being true six months in: Your Commodore arrived in October 1984 from Argus Specialist Publications at eighty pence, calling itself the best independent Commodore magazine, and the shelf now had two titles chasing the same reader at roughly the same price.

One of them was coming out every other month. That one lost.

~ incorporated ~

From its November 1985 issue, Your Commodore carried the Your 64 name. That is the entire ending. English Wikipedia says incorporated and C64-Wiki says integrated, and neither one records who sold what to whom, or whether money changed hands at all.

What makes the ending odd is that the two titles came out of different houses. Your 64 belonged to Sportscene Specialist Press. Your Commodore belonged to Argus. The name was not folded into a sibling down the corridor, it went across to the competition, and the competition kept it on the cover through a January 1990 relaunch as YC and on to the last issue in October 1991, eighty four in all.

Your Spectrum, the sister title launched three months earlier out of the same office, had the opposite life: it became Your Sinclair, moved to Dennis Publishing in 1987 and to Future in 1990, and ran until September 1993. Two machines out of one office: nine years for one of them, fourteen issues for the other.

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