History Magazine / AmigaPower

''Amiga Power'' (AP for short) was a monthly British video gaming magazine which ran from 1991 to 1996, covering games released on the Commodore UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} home computer (and later, the [[UsefulNotes/AmigaCD32 CD32]]).

''Amiga Power'' (AP for short) was a monthly British video gaming magazine which ran from 1991 to 1996, covering games released on the Commodore UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} home computer (and later, the [[UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} CD32]]).

Former staffer [[http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/ Stuart Campbell]] maintains a [[http://theweekly.co.uk/ap2/ historical fansite]] that gives a peek into the inner workings. An archive of its reviews is also available [[http://amr.abime.net/issues_5 here,]] and a full archive of issues can be found [[https://archive.org/details/amigapowermagazine here]].

* CloudCuckooLander: Jonathan Nash. If you ever read anything which entered into the world of the utterly bizarre, it was Jonathan Nash who wrote it. He also frequently avoided providing photographs of himself, instead preferring to present images of ''Animaniacs'' characters.

* EverybodyDiesEnding: In the final issue, the staff were 'killed off' one-by-one at the ends of their reviews or articles, as their way of bowing out. (Jonathan Nash described the deaths as a 'contractual obligation').

* LiteralMetaphor: The motorcycle racing game Prime Mover featured a bug on the Japanese circuit, in which a mountain is visible initally, but moves on the second lap and disappears completely by lap three. AP's review demonstrates this effect with a box-out titled "I Can Move, Move, Move Any Mountain", a play on a motivational hit song by dance-pop act The Shamen

* {{Satire}}: The magazine had a wicked satirical streak, and would occasionally devote features to pointing out the wrongs of gaming culture and industry. One of their more sardonic ones was 'Lest We Forget' -- a feature which 'celebrated' the phenomenon of games breaking immersion by showing massive pictures of floppy disks whenever they were loading. You can read this [[http://amr.abime.net/issue_49_pages here]] (click on pages 36 and 37).

* SpiritualSuccessor: Dave Golder left to start the sci-fi/fantasy magazine ''{{Magazine/SFX}}'', using much the same humour in the reviews and occasionally some of the old staff as reviewers. Stuart Campbell, for instance, did ''Series/TheXFiles''. It gradually [[SeasonalRot devolved]] into a "normal" mag, eventually even eliminating the [[CreditsGag different titles for the head editor]]. Thankfully, the honest reviews are mostly still there.
** Similarly, J. Nash and S. Campbell teamed up with P. Rose and K. Gillen to create [[Series/{{Digitiser}} Digi]]-o-spinoff Digiworld -- although both were regular columnists for the UsefulNotes/TeleText version anyway.
** And ''Amiga Power'' itself may be seen as a Spiritual Successor: several of the writers (including Golder, Nash, and Campbell) came from the classic UsefulNotes/ZXSpectrum magazine ''Your Sinclair'', which had a similarly zany style. ''Sega Power'' also took up the torch, though they tended to not so much walk the line of absolute lunacy as leap headlong over it while screaming incoherently about mackerel.
** A more obvious Spiritual Successor was ''Magazine/PCGamer''. Many AP writers moved onto PC Gamer (just as so many Amiga owners moved on to [=PCs=]) including such names as Jonathan Davies, Kieron Gillen (aka C-Monster) and Stuart Campbell. They brought to it many familiar in-jokes and running gags from their ''Amiga Power'' days.

* VapourWare: AP's "design-a-game" competition never produced a real playable game.
* WeAreNotGoingThroughThatAgain: Stuart Campbell's review of the Hit Squad rerelease of ''VideoGame/SimCity'' just said: "Look, I'm not reviewing ''Sim City'' again. No way. Forget it." Similarly, when both the A500 and enhanced A1200 versions of Sleepwalker were reissued simultaneously, Campbell reviewed the A500 version in detail, but the main text body for the A1200 version simply read "Exactly the same" (the Bottom Line section elaborated that it was slightly more colourful, but not to the point that it made a difference; both scored 77%)

** For a non-games example, they absolutely ''loathed'' ''Film/BatmanForever'' (Stuart Campbell remarked "I genuinely haven't felt this bad since my dog died" as he left the theater, and the staff subsequently nicknamed it [[Literature/NineteenEightyFour "Batman (Jackboot Stamping On A Human Face) Forever"]]). Much later, after the magazine's demise, ''Amiga Power 2'' declared ''Film/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' "a challenger to [the] misery crown".

* KillEmAll: In the final issue, the staff were 'killed off' one-by-one at the ends of their reviews or articles, as their way of bowing out. (Jonathan Nash described the deaths as a 'contractual obligation').
** Cam Winstanley was [[KillItWithIce frozen to death]] by some sabotaged air conditioning.
** Jonathan Nash actually managed to escape capture and death though some clever chicanery, only to be [[AnvilOnHead unexpectedly crushed by an anvil]] in the final summary panel.
*** Interestingly, the visual aesthetic of the scene he describes (a slow motion gun battle) predates ''Franchise/TheMatrix'' by three years.
** Stuart Campbell was tried by a kangaroo court, found guilty, and executed by a firing squad.
** Tim Norris' death is uncertain, but it's suggested that he was silently garotted by a [[GratuitousNinja stealth time-travelling assassin]].
** Jonathan Davies is murdered by the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse themselves, by being pushed off a building to his death.
** Martin Axford appears to have been kidnapped and murdered during the night under unknown circumstances.
** Rich Pelley was burned to death through unknown means (too quickly to indicate the nature of his demise, although it leaves some charred remains).
** C-Monster (Kieron Gillen) is killed by some kind of bird, implied to be one of the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse (it's mentioned previously that they can take the form of ravens).
** Reader Millington (Mil Millington) is killed by an exploding bomb.
** Of all the staff, only two make it out alive: Steve Faragher and Sue Huntley. They are finally seen on the back cover in a futile ''Film/ButchCassidyAndTheSundanceKid''-esque standoff against the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse.

The magazine's end came in 1996, around the same time as Amiga itself was pushed aside by the rise of the Windows PC era. Its popularity was such that it had managed to keep going even as the supply of Amiga games began to dwindle, but it was finally put to rest in issue 65, in a memorable issue that killed off most of the staff.

The magazine's end came in 1996, around the same time as Amiga itself was pushed aside by the rise of the Windows PC era. Its popularity was such that it had managed to keep going even as the supply of Amiga games began to dwindle, but it was finally put to rest in issue 65, in a memorable issue that killed off all most of the staff.

''Amiga Power'' made BrutalHonesty a core tenet of their philosophy, a move which frequently brought them to blows with the Amiga gaming industry itself -- at the time, print magazines were still the primary source of advice when it came to purchasing video games, and so an ''Amiga Power'' review could have a significant impact on game sales. Game publishers didn't appreciate anything less than a good review, and were not afraid to resort to such threats as withholding future games, pulling their advertising, and even legal action in some cases.

* SelfDeprecation: Aside from [[RunningGags]], this is probably the main other thing the magazine is known for, and probably one of the reasons AP is remembered so fondly.

* SpiritualSuccessor: Dave Golder left to start the sci-fi/fantasy magazine ''{{SFX}}'', using much the same humour in the reviews and occasionally some of the old staff as reviewers. Stuart Campbell, for instance, did ''Series/TheXFiles''. It gradually [[SeasonalRot devolved]] into a "normal" mag, eventually even eliminating the [[CreditsGag different titles for the head editor]]. Thankfully, the honest reviews are mostly still there.

** The magazine's credits page featured a comment by each staff member, which changed every month. In AP 39, Cam Winstanley's comment was: "I think it was Kurt, in the garage, with the shotgun." This was a reference to the then-recent suicide of Creator/KurtCobain. ''Amiga Power'' received a deluge of complaint letters over the next several months, although Cam remained unapologetic.

** The magazine's credits page featured a comment by each staff member, which changed every month. In AP39, Cam Winstanley's comment was: "I think it was Kurt, in the garage, with the shotgun." This was a reference to the then-recent suicide of Creator/KurtCobain. ''Amiga Power'' received a deluge of complaint letters over the next several months, although Cam remained unapologetic.
** In AP40, Andrés Escobar was the "guest star" for the magazine's Points of View section. Escobar, a Colombian footballer, had been murdered that month following his performance in the 1994 FIFA World Cup. Again, the magazine received a wave of complaints letters, and even the notoriously candid Stuart Campbell suggested that they might have gone too far this time. Nonetheless, the magazine doubled down on it by using Escobar as an occasional running gag in future issues.

''Amiga Power'' (AP for short) was a monthly British video gaming magazine which ran from 1991-1996 for 65 issues, covering games released on the Commodore UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} home computer (and later, the [[UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} CD32]]).

The magazine was well-known for having a unique, personable style, and approaching the practice of video game journalism rather differently to other publications of the time — which often led them into trouble with game publishers, for example for their use of BrutalHonesty. If a game wasn't good, they would say exactly what was wrong with it, and rate it accordingly. For rating games, the writers used what they claimed was the "entire range of the percentage scale"; for example, an average score was 50% rather than a typical 70%. For the time, this was surprisingly bold and confrontational. The internet wasn't around yet (or rather, wasn’t very widespread), so printed magazines were the only way to obtain information about new game releases — which meant that ''Amiga Power'''s opinions had a significant influence on game sales. Any negative review would certainly upset a game's publishers, which increased the risk of the publishers retaliating in some manner -- withholding future games, pulling advertising, threatening legal action, etc. (''Amiga Power'' was, indeed, threatened with all of these things over the course of their run.)

The core of ''Amiga Power'''s outlook, however, was an absolute passion for video games, which is why they went to such trouble in the first place. They claimed that if you allowed publishers to get away with producing poor quality games, that was all someone would have to play — and them being avid gamers, this wasn't viewed as an appealing prospect. The magazine would often devote huge features to the pleasures of gaming, the most well known being their yearly APATTOH (''Amiga Power'' All-Time Top One Hundred games), which featured not the most recent or the most popular releases, but simply the one hundred games that they, personally, loved to play. The list featured a wide mix of not just commercial releases, but even public domain and freeware games, reflecting their opinion that a game's enjoyability was more important than its heritage.

For most, ''Amiga Power'''s style is the most memorable thing about the magazine. The tone was highly conversational, as though the writer were talking directly to the reader, and reviewers allowed their own personalities to flourish, with the result that readers could get to know the magazine's staff over time. Any regular reader, for example, knew that Cam Winstanley liked guns, or that Jonathan Nash enjoyed ''WesternAnimation/{{Animaniacs}}''.

{{Running Gag}}s, references, and in-jokes were a staple of the magazine from start to finish, to the extent that it effectively developed its own vocabulary of oft-used phrases and jokes. Perhaps ''Amiga Power'''s most well-known repeated joke is the “Ed comment” -- a parenthetical comment supposedly from the editor which would be inserted into a review, usually to contradict whatever point the reviewer had just made.

Other memorable aspects of the magazine included their occasionally bizarre experiments in journalism, usually taking the form of the “concept review” -- for example, Stuart Campbell once protested against censorship by reviewing the mildly violent helicopter game ''Apocalypse'' and censoring half the review with absurd replacement words; Cam Winstanley tried to turn a review of ''Turrican 3'' into a series of reader-participation puzzles, and Jonathan Davies reviewed ''Woody's World'' as if the game were being interviewed on a British chat show.

The magazine ended in 1996, around the same time as Amiga itself was pushed aside by the rise of the Windows PC era, but people fondly remember it to this day; video game journalists will occasionally hark back to reviews from the magazine. Former staffer [[http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/ Stuart Campbell]] maintains a [[http://theweekly.co.uk/ap2/ historical fansite]] that gives a peek into the inner workings. An archive of its reviews is also available [[http://amr.abime.net/issues_5 here,]] and a full archive of issues can be found [[https://archive.org/details/amigapowermagazine here]].

Indicative of ''Amiga Power'''s enduring popularity is the fact that, in July 2020, it became the first video games magazine ever to have a tribute album released in its honour. Crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2019, ''Amiga Power: The Album With Attitude'' was an officially-licensed double-CD collection of Amiga game tune remixes, the first disc containing tracks nominated by former members of the AP team, and the second featuring pieces inspired by games and demos that appeared on the magazine's coverdisks. Taking the form of a small hardback book, the physical release also included a 100-page "Mighty Booklet" sandwiched between the discs, containing a variety of facts, features and anecdotes from the AP crew and the contributing musicians. Further information (including a full tracklist) can be found [[https://vgmdb.net/album/85988 here]].

!!Named the following trope:
* SlippySlideyIceWorld: A derisive term for a level in a PlatformGame in which the friction on the platforms has been artificially reduced, in a cheap attempt to add FakeDifficulty.

!!This magazine provides examples of:
* ActuallyPrettyFunny: One of the magazine's more prominent terms was appending "natch" to sentences (a contraction of "naturally"). Andy Nuttall, a writer from the competing mag ''The One'', parodied this by using "obv" in the same context. Johnathan Nash found this funny enough to use in ''Amiga Power'' proper, and ''AP2'' refers to it as [[TakeThat "perhaps the last funny thing The One did."]]

* CausticCritic: Stuart Campbell. He ''does not'' pull punches or soften blows, which has put him on the receiving end of a lot of hatred and personal attacks over the years. He is, however, scrupulously fair and pragmatic - all he seems to want is for things to achieve their full potential, which in the case of the Amiga, meant ''not releasing bad games''.

* ClusterBleepBomb: In the article "You Can't Say That!" in ''AP'' 38, Stuart Campbell's opinion on censorship, extracted after being forced to watch TV-edited versions of ''Film/RoboCop1987'', ''Film/RepoMan'' and ''Film/{{Aliens}}'', was, after the statement "I'll tell you what I think about censorship," mostly obscured by orange bars (like many other allegedly offensive phrases in the article), aside from the occasional preposition like "up their."

* DamnedByFaintPraise: Every review ends with a box summarising the "Uppers" (good features) and "Downers" (bad features) of the game - but if the game is ''really'' bad, sometimes the Uppers are so trivial as to be damning in themselves. In one case, a football game was praised for coming with a free, real football (because unlike the game, the real football actually worked).

* HurricaneOfPuns: In the 1992 All-Time top 100 list, the description for ''VideoGame/JamesPond 2: Codename Robocod'' read "If you ever haddock-raving for salmon-tertaining and rock-hard platform action but codn't find anything to fit the brill, Robocod whale mackerel change and sprat's a fact. The o-fish-ial sea-quel to James Pond is an a-fish-onado's bream come true. With it's whelk-ool look and fin-tastic sound, Robocod comes across as a gil-t edged con-sole p-rod-uct. Its swi-shark-ade action represents a trout-standing o-perch-unity for krill-ing time, so get your skates on and scampi on down to your local software aquarium to plaice an order for Robocod today". This is justifiably followed by an Ed Comment "we're really sorry about this"
* InTheStyleOf: A regular section. Beginning as a back-page feature, it later moved to the news pages where it became a reader competition, with readers being asked to make pictures of Amiga games in the style of other things (normally other games). ''AP'' awarded a score out of 10, with £20 worth of Amiga games for each point, but in a RunningGag, always found trivial or unlikely reasons to halve the point score.

** A recurring feature in the magazine's reviews was named after this - it examined one of the magazine's {{Berserk Button}}s, then found a way to execute the game for using it.

* NoteFromEd: ''AP'' called them 'Ed comments'. Used constantly throughout the magazine's entire run (possibly a trait inherited from ''YourSinclair'', a spiritual predecessor to ''AP'').

* ReviewerStockPhrases: Detested by ''AP'' to the point that they wrote a feature pointing several of them out to their readers. For example, "If you like X, then you'll like this."
* RunningGag: One of the main things the magazine is known for.
* {{Satire}}: The magazine had a wicked satirical streak, and would occasionally devote features to pointing out the wrongs of gaming culture and industry. One of their more sardonic ones was 'Lest We Forget' - a feature which 'celebrated' the phenomenon of games breaking immersion by showing massive pictures of floppy disks whenever they were loading. You can read this [[http://amr.abime.net/issue_49_pages here]] (click on pages 36 and 37).
* SelfDeprecation: One the other things the magazine is known for, and probably one of the reasons ''AP'' is remembered so fondly.

* TakeThat: Many, many examples over the course of the magazine's run. In keeping with their honest philosophy, they didn't exempt anyone from criticism - publishers, readers, and even the magazine's ex-staff were valid targets. The majority of their ire, however, was directed at other game magazines and game publishers, who were clearly benefiting from a symbiotic relationship, to the detriment of the Amiga games industry.

** In later issues, this became even more explicit: ''AP'' began to publish a table in each issue called The Disseminator, which simply listed the scores awarded to games by rival magazines, compared to AP's scores. This showed clearly just how overinflated review scores were in other magazines (''Amiga Action'' gave ''RiseOfTheRobots'' 92%, for example, compared to ''Amiga Power'''s 5%). It also occasionally pointed out games which hadn't yet been released (implying that the magazines were reviewing unfinished games in order to claim the exclusive, which is technically deception).

* VapourWare: ''AP'''s "design-a-game" competition never produced a real playable game.
* WeAreNotGoingThroughThatAgain: Stuart Campbell's review of the Hit Squad rerelease of ''VideoGame/SimCity'' just said: "Look, I'm not reviewing ''Sim City'' again. No way. Forget it." Similarly, when both the A500 and enhanced A1200 versions of Sleepwalker were reissued simultaneously, Campbell reviewed the A500 version in detail, but the main text body for the A1200 version simply read "Exactly the same" (the Bottom Line section elaborated that it was slightly more colourful, but not to the point that it made a difference; both scored 77%)
----

''Amiga Power'' (AP for short) was a monthly British video gaming magazine which ran from 1991-1996 for 65 issues, covering games released on the Commodore UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}}, and later, the [[UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} CD32]].

The magazine was well known for having a unique, personable style, and approaching the practice of video game journalism rather differently to other publications of the time — which often led them into trouble with game publishers, for example for their use of BrutalHonesty. If a game wasn't good, they would say exactly what was wrong with it, and rate it accordingly. For rating games, the writers used what they claimed was the "entire range of the percentage scale"; for example, an average score was 50% rather than a typical 70%. For the time, this was surprisingly bold and confrontational. The internet wasn't around yet (or rather, wasn’t very widespread), so printed magazines were the only way to obtain information about new game releases — which meant that ''Amiga Power'''s opinions had a significant influence on game sales. Any negative review would certainly upset a game's publishers, which increased the risk of the publishers retaliating in some manner -- withholding future games, pulling advertising, threatening legal action, etc. (''Amiga Power'' was, indeed, threatened with all of these things over the course of their run.)

*** Interestingly, the visual aesthetic of the scene he describes (a slow motion gun battle) predates ''TheMatrix'' by three years.

* HorsemenOfTheApocalypse: the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse were originally introduced in a special feature about joysticks, but soon became recurring characters. In the final issue, they are revealed to be the architects of ''Amiga Power''[='s=] demise.

The magazine was well known for having a unique, personable style, and approaching the practice of video game journalism rather differently to other publications of the time — which often led them into trouble with game publishers, for example for their use of BrutalHonesty. If a game wasn't good, they would say exactly what was wrong with it, and rate it accordingly. For rating games, the writers used what they claimed was the "entire range of the percentage scale" - for example an average score was 50% rather than a typical 70%. For the time, this was surprisingly bold and confrontational. The internet wasn't around yet, so printed magazines were the only way to obtain information about new game releases - which meant that ''Amiga Power'''s opinions had a significant influence on game sales. Any negative review would certainly upset a game's publishers, which increased the risk of the publishers retaliating in some manner - withholding future games, pulling advertising, threatening legal action, etc. (''Amiga Power'' was, indeed, threatened with all of these things over the course of its run).

The core of ''Amiga Power'''s outlook, however, was an absolute passion for video games, which is why they went to such trouble in the first place. They claimed that if you allowed publishers to get away with producing poor quality games, that was all someone would have to play - and being avid gamers, this wasn't viewed as an appealing prospect. The magazine would often devote huge features to the pleasures of gaming - the most well known being their yearly APATTOH (''Amiga Power'' All-Time Top One Hundred games), which featured not the most recent or the most popular releases, but simply the one hundred games that they, personally, loved to play. The list featured a wide mix of not just commercial releases, but even public domain and freeware games, reflecting their opinion that a game's enjoyability was more important than its heritage.

For most, ''Amiga Power'''s style is the most memorable thing about the magazine. The tone was highly conversational, as though the writer were talking directly to the reader, and reviewers allowed their own personalities to flourish - with the result that readers could get to know the magazine's staff over time. Any regular reader, for example, knew that Cam Winstanley liked guns, or that Jonathan Nash enjoyed ''WesternAnimation/{{Animaniacs}}''.

{{Running Gag}}s, references, and in-jokes were a staple of the magazine from start to finish, to the extent that the magazine effectively developed its own vocabulary of oft-used phrases and jokes. Perhaps ''Amiga Power'''s most well-known repeated joke is the 'Ed comment' - a parenthetical comment supposedly from the editor which would be inserted into a review, usually to contradict whatever point the reviewer had just made.

Other memorable aspects of the magazine included their occasionally bizarre experiments in journalism, usually taking the form of the 'concept review' - for example, Stuart Campbell once protested against censorship by reviewing the mildly violent helicopter game ''Apocalypse'' and censoring half the review with absurd replacement words; Cam Winstanley tried to turn a review of ''Turrican 3'' into a series of reader-participation puzzles, and Jonathan Davies reviewed ''Woody's World'' as if the game were being interviewed on a British chat show.

The magazine ended in 1996, around the same time as Amiga itself was pushed aside by the rise of the Windows PC era, but people fondly remember it to this day - video game journalists will occasionally hark back to reviews from the magazine. Former staffer [[http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/ Stuart Campbell]] maintains a [[http://theweekly.co.uk/ap2/ historical fansite]] that gives a peek into the inner workings. An archive of its reviews is also available [[http://amr.abime.net/issues_5 here,]] and a full archive of issues can be found [[https://archive.org/details/amigapowermagazine here]].