Amiga Power

Please tell me somebody went even lower than that because I can feel it coming.

Amiga Power did.

That was Futures Amiga Games magazine launched in May 91 and it always used the full percentage range.

So an average game got 50.

How big did the marketing get while everyone was waiting?

Huge.

Amiga Power said there was a multi-million pound campaign behind it.

There was a novel from Penguin.

Amiga Format from May of '95 gave it a 50.

Uh, and, uh, Amiga Power, number 50 of June, or, uh, June of '95, dropped the hammer, the golden hammer, on this game with a whopping 10%.

They killed this game dead.

What is it with Amiga Power picks? They hate everything.

I, I, you know, I love Amiga Power.

It had, had style, it had grace, but- There's definitely times where it's like, uh, I think if you've fallen out with these developers or whatever.

Yeah.

[laughs]

"'Cause that will be interesting." And my test for that was Amiga Power issue one, where I think the top-scoring game is Exile and the lowest-scoring game is Moonshine Racers.

Um, and I actually didn't do this till years later when I did the show, but no one particularly committed to or people were interested and never did anything about it, and eventually I was, uh, somewhere in early 2019 I was just like, "I could make an episode about this."

Mm-hmm.

So that was always...

And it was always a sign that a magazine is going down the tubes if they couldn't sell that back page advert.

Um, the famous example being Amiga Power, who couldn't sell it one month, made up a fish-based energy drink-

[laughs]

Amiga Action gave it 96.

Amiga Power, uh, Future's more hard-nosed, uh, Amiga title, still handed it 90 and, uh, called it the yardstick other platformers would be measured against.

CU Amiga, EMAP's Commodore and Amiga magazine, scored it 91.

The One Amiga, uh, EMAP's glossier sister title, was the coolest of the bunch at 87.

Sweet World looks like a sweet shop exploded.

Music World has pianos you can stamp on, and the scrolling stays smooth even when the sprites pile up.

Amiga Format and Amiga Power both sold it on that speed.

speed.Speed was the whole sales pitch against Sonic.

I know everyone loves Crash, but I was always a Your Sinclair boy.

Um, and then the writers, they went on to do Amiga Power, which is my other love.

Well, after Amiga Power, a lot of people don't realize this, quite a few of the key writers like, um, Stuart Campbell and, uh, Jonathan Davies and people, they went on to do a magazine which a lot of people don't...

You, you'd never heard of it, have you, Kingy?

No.

And I kind of started with looking at that, and then going through the reviews of that, and then suddenly, like, this whole thing then kind of then ex- it, it expanded from there to then cover the kind of war, so to speak, between Amiga Format ...

No, between Team17 and Amiga Power, which actually also incorporated Amiga Format versus Amiga Power, and a whole load of magazine-related w- you know, duking it out on newsgroups.

And then it's like, oh, my word.

And it just started from, oh, I just wanna cover The Killing Grounds just 'cause-

Did anyone land in the middle, or was it just two camps, uh, shouting at each other?

Amiga Power, which Future, um, had only started that May, uh, landed on eighty-two, and the one eMap's sixteen-bit games mag said eighty.

But the Commodore 64 is where it really falls apart.

YC, uh, which used to be called Your Commodore, gave it eighty-nine percent in what turned out to be its very last issue.

Except for Joker, that's a high score.

Amiga Power gave it an 89.

Dator Magazine gave it an 85.

We got a magazine here I've never heard of.