Amiga Power (AP) was a monthly magazine about Amiga video games. It was published in the United Kingdom by Future Publishing and ran for 65 issues, from May 1991 to September 1996.
History
The first issue of Amiga Power was published in May 1991 after Future Publishing decided, in response to feedback from readers of its magazine Amiga Format, to launch two further magazines with narrowed interests, the other being Amiga Shopper. Whereas the latter would focus on the "serious" side of Amiga computers involving programming and productivity, Amiga Power would be wholly tailored to the gaming audience. Joining the magazine were Matt Bielby and Gary Penn, previously editors of Your Sinclair and The One, respectively, with Bielby being its first editor and Penn as a consultant.
Early in the magazine's history, from its inception, Amiga Power supplied copies of each issue with a coverdisk containing a full game, distributed to the reader free of charge. Future Publishing pioneered the concept of attaching disks to covers of Amiga Format. However, software publishers complained that people were disincentivised from purchasing their games, and Amiga Power, along with other British computer magazines, soon abandoned the practice in favour of "public domain" (i.e. free-of-charge) software, shareware, and demos.
Philosophy Amiga Power had several principles which comprised its philosophy regarding games. Like almost all Amiga magazines of the time, it marked games according to a percentage scale. However, Amiga Power firmly believed that the full range of this scale should be used when reviewing games. A game of average quality rated on this scale would therefore be awarded 50%. Stuart Campbell offered some rationale for this in his review of Kick Off '96 in the final issue of the magazine:
Amiga Power had a section at the front of each issue listing other magazines' scores for games, some with a star next to them indicating that they "appear[ed] as an exclusive, cover disk or a cover", the purpose of the section being to dissuade their readers from subscribing to those magazines concurrently. According to Campbell, those magazines tended to score games along the pattern of "70%, 70%, 70%, 99%". Amiga Powers methodology proved controversial amongst game publishers, including, in particular, Team17, who would withdraw their advertising and refuse to send them review copies of their games in advance. The magazine found that its competitors' reviewers were influenced by the publishers' campaigns to offer incentives such as perks and free trips in exchange for marking their games highly.
Style Amiga Power reviews were often written in a very personal, informal manner. The writers often used in-jokes, obscure references and running gags. Writers would sometimes embark on anecdotes of recent happenings in the AP office, or of their interactions with the other AP staff. This contributed to AP reputation for self-indulgence, but it also created a sense of familiarity.
Writers Many prominent video game journalists, such as Kieron Gillen and Stuart Campbell used AP as a first step in their career. Gillen, now a successful writer for Marvel Comics, was one of several writers who started off as an AP reader and letter-writer (under the name "C-Monster") before being employed by the magazine as a freelance contributor. Another was Mil Millington (known to AP readers as "Reader Millington"), who would go on to become a successful novelist, selling over 100,000 copies of his debut Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.
Throughout its 65 issues, AP went through several editors. The editors, ordered by time, were: Matt Bielby, AP first editor (issues 1-15) Mark Ramshaw (issues 16-24) Linda Barker, AP only female editor (issues 25–26; issues 27-36 were edited by Stuart Campbell after Linda fell sick, although he never held the title of editor) Jonathan Davies (issues 37-50) Cam Winstanley (issues 51-55) Tim Norris (issues 59-62) Steve Faragher (issues 63-65)
Issues 56-58 were published with no designated editor.
Concept reviews A concept review is a review conducted in an abstract manner - basically, any review which deviates significantly from the usual practice of describing a game and analysing its strengths and weaknesses. Usually, it takes the form of a work of fiction (often a screenplay) which indirectly reviews the game through allegory. Amiga Power featured concept reviews on a regular basis. The term itself (never actually used in the magazine) was an ironic play on the "concept albums" released by prog rock bands of the 1970s.
Competitions Competitions were also run in AP distinctive style, often challenging the readers' wit or creativity. AP frequently provided strange additions to the usual competition rules, such as making peculiar threats to people who were ineligible to enter the competition if they tried to, or specifically disallowing reader Stuart N. Hardy from entering the competition.
Characters Like its spiritual predecessor, Your Sinclair, Amiga Power had several joke characters who would make irregular appearances in reviews and features. These included Uncle Joe Stalin, who made occasional Ed Comments in an attempt to erase Stuart Campbell from history; The Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse, the only minor deities committed to rigorous consumer testing; Doris Stokes, who returned from the dead as an even worse medium than before, and several others besides.
Amiga Power regular features
Oh Dear One of the earliest Amiga Power features which appeared in True Stories was Oh Dear, a small monthly feature showcasing poorly rated Amiga games. Oh Dear was removed very early on in the Amiga Power series.
Kangaroo Court A regular feature which presents a so-called video game "crime", followed by the "case for the prosecution", which is a section illustrating why the crime is a negative thing. The penalty was usually an execution. In reflection of the nature of a real kangaroo court, there is no "case for the defense".
In The Style Of An "In The Style Of" is, as the name implies, a depiction of a game in the style of something else, most often another game. It started out as a Back Page feature but was soon thrown open to readers as a kind of competition and moved to the news section.
Readers could send in floppy disks containing their In The Style Of drawn in Deluxe Paint, and every month Amiga Power would select the one they liked best and feature it in the magazine.
The Disseminator This feature appeared toward the end of AP life. It was simply a table of recent games, and the percentage scores that they received from Amiga Power and the two main competing Amiga games magazines of the time: The One Amiga and Amiga Action. It also contained annotations on some of the games.
Just Who Do We Think We Are? While other magazines used at most a modest box (the "masthead") to introduce their reviewers, Amiga Power dedicated a full page to their staff, with photographs and short sections for each member.
Points of View Points of View was a table summarising each AP reviewer's opinion of the main games reviewed that month, if they had played them. The reviewers had room to make a short comment and give their personal score from one to five stars.
Do the Write Thing "Do the Write Thing" (an obvious pun on the movie Do the Right Thing) was the magazine's letters page. One distinguishing feature of the letters page was that the magazine gave the letters titles by taking excerpts of the letters' contents out of context, often by going across sentence boundaries or cutting in the middle of a clause.
Amiga Power irregular features
APATTOH APATTOH, meaning Amiga Power All Time Top One Hundred, was a yearly feature. It originally started in AP issue No. 0 (a special "preview issue" of Amiga Power given away as an addition to an issue of Amiga Format), and later appeared approximately in every issue whose number was divisible by 12, plus 1.
APATTOH ranked games depending on how the staff liked them. This meant that games that got good press at the time when they came out could end up very low (or entirely absent) on the list. A notable example is Frontier, which most other magazines of the time reviewed positively, but Amiga Power ranked #100 in their top 100 list (emphasising the point by placing it one place below a public-domain version of Pong).Amiga Power All-Time Top 100 Games for 1994, Amiga Magazine Rack. Accessed on 2 August 2021.
There were two games that held an iron grip on the #1 spot in the list. The first was Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2, a coin-op conversion platform game that the magazine controversially deemed their favorite Amiga game for the first two years of its existence. The second was Sensible Soccer, which took over the top position in the first AP Top 100 after its release (the game came out too late for the 1992 chart), and never relinquished it (except to its own sequel Sensible World Of Soccer) for the rest of the magazine's existence.
FirstAmiga Power magazine issue 0, Future plc, May 1991NumberFinalAmiga Power magazine issue 64, Future Publishing, August 1996Rainbow Islands1Sensible World of SoccerLemmings2Gravity PowerSpeedball 23Guardian CD32Sim City4Sid Meier's ColonizationZarch5Dyna BlasterPopulous6Cannon FodderKick Off 27SyndicateFalcon8ExileIndianapolis 500: The Simulation9Speedball 2Stunt Car Racer10Knights of the SkyBuster Bros.11Chaos EnginePrince of Persia12Alien Breed 3DSpindizzy Worlds13Slam TiltNebulus14Micro MachinesCarrier Command15Rainbow IslandsDungeon Master16Rod LandRick Dangerous 217Zeewolf 2Ultima 518GloomNew Zealand Story19Monkey Island 1 & 2The Sentinel20Shadow FighterDamocles21Dune IIParadroid '9022Super Tennis ChampsPlotting23Pinball IllusionsTyphoon Thompson24Super SkidmarksLaser Squad25SettlersKlax26Super StardustSWIV27F1GPIndiana Jones and the Last Crusade28Jetstrike CD32F-19 Stealth Fighter29Stunt Car RacerE-Motion30OverkillCaptive31WizkidPowermonger32Head Over HeelsXenon 233Sim CityPuzznic34Super Foul EggSuper Off Road35Car-VupF29 Retaliator36Empire SoccerVaxine37No Second PrizeInterphase38Tetris ProCastle Master39BansheeCar-Vup40D/Generation
F-Max In its later years, Amiga Power started advertising a fictional refreshment beverage called F-Max, the lightly sparkling fish drink, with the slogan an ocean of refreshment.
Amiga Power: The Album With Attitude In early 2019, an Amiga Power fan launched a Kickstarter campaign to create an officially licensed AP tribute album containing remixes of assorted Amiga game tunes, accompanied by a booklet featuring contributions from former members of the magazine's team. The campaign was successful, and in July 2020 the finished album was officially released.
Most of the remixes were created by the original composers; among those who contributed to the album were Alistair Bowness, Allister Brimble, Fabio Cicciarello, Mike Clarke, Adam Fothergill, Olof Gustafsson, Jon Hare, Chris Huelsbeck, Carl Jermy, Barry Leitch, Jogeir Liljedahl, Alex May, Anthony Milas, Jason Page, Matthias Steinwachs, and Tim Wright.