A few years ago I was asked to write a bit about my time at CU Amiga for the Amiga History Guide website. I thought this would be a good place to repurpose the content... I was Editor of the magazine from September 1996 until its closure in August 1998. I joined as Staff Writer in September 1991, and prior to that wrote a number of audio-related features for the mag as a freelancer. I dont have much in the way of hilarious anecdotes to relay (sorry!), but I can tell you a bit about how the magazine was when I started, and then Ill have a go at discussing the issues that I edited. So children, are we sitting comfortably? Then well begin. Enter stage left I was interviewed for the Staff Writer job in the summer of 1992. That year Id been freelancing for CU Amiga, doing a regular feature called Sound Check (later to become Sound Lab) in the Blue Pages section at the back of the mag. Nick Veitch, then Technical Editor, commissioned the articles. Id met Nick and his friend John Kennedy a couple of years before, when they were freelancers working for Amiga User International, where I was Staff Writer at the time. At the time I joined, CU Amiga was run by a two-man team: Dan Slingsby and Steve James, the Editor and Managing Editor respectively. Dan was the young ideas man, while Steve, having recently relinquished his editorship of the mag, lent his experience, providing a steady hand on the tiller. For reasons unknown to me, they found themselves having to hire three editorial staff at once, so there was quite an influx of new faces at the time. CU Amiga was published by EMAP, and their Farringdon Lane office was somewhere Id wanted to work for ages, as it was the home of some of the best games mags of the era, including Computer and Video Games, Sinclair User, The One, ACE, and also around that time, console mags such as the Official Nintendo Magazine, Mean Machines and Maximum. It was the games mag capital of the world, although Future Publishing would no doubt disagree. For me, it represented the spiritual home of computer and video games magazines. At the back of the CU Amiga office we had a little room where all the technical stuff happened. You could mess around with hardware without incurring the wrath of the Health And Safety-conscious HR Manager, and make a racket without annoying the rest of the office. Needless to say, I spent most of my time in there, much to the exasperation of Dan. Sorry Dan! Time marched on and people came and went (but mostly went). Nick was eventually lured down to Bath by Amiga Format, which in time set up a great friendly rivalry between the two of us. Dan departed a short time after, also poached by Future Publishing, to edit Amiga Formats sister publication PC Format. With the Eds chair vacant, the popular vote from the team was for regular freelancer John Kennedy to take the helm, but John declined, preferring to stay a free agent. And so it was that Alan Dykes (Dykesy, we called him - what a crazy bunch we were!) stepped across from one of EMAPs PC mags and ushered in a new era. The Dykes Dynasty Dykesy had more of an affinity with the games side of things than the serious subjects, and was keen to advance the games coverage in the mag, which was quite a challenge given that by the mid-90s all of the big game publishers had cut the Amiga loose to concentrate on the PC and consoles. While there were still plenty of decent graphics and audio products coming out, games-wise it was getting a bit desperate, and I felt it had become almost impossible for us to review Amiga games honestly without upsetting the fanatical Amiga purists, who by now were feeling threatened and didnt want to read anything negative about the format, especially from a magazine that in their eyes was supposed to be supporting the platform. I saw the magazines purpose as servicing Amiga users, which is somewhat different. On the games front we were forced to settle for whatever Team 17 put out and a few scraps from the PC table. Ultimately, it was the Amigas inability to handle 3D graphics that killed it as a games machine. Compared to the PlayStations Ridge Racer, the Amigas Alien Breed 3D was a joke. It was a good job I was Technical Editor by then, so the dirty work of reviewing substandard beat em ups and ageing adventure games fell to other members of the team. After Dykesy left to head up PC Gaming World, joining a number of former EMAP games mag staff, I got the big chair. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with the mag, but it was a difficult time. When I joined CU it was at its peak, selling over 100,000 copies every month. Thats a lot of magazines, and it made a lot of money for the company from copy sales and advertising. In contrast, the mag I took over was selling about a quarter of that, supported by a much smaller pool of advertisers with a lot less money to spend. Editing a magazine thats making lots of money is fun. The bosses have plenty of time for you. They know your name. They take you and your team go-karting in the name of team-bonding, and throw little parties to celebrate hitting sales targets and setting up lucrative promotional deals with big companies. The downside to that situation is that where theres a lot of money at stake, theres a lot of pressure to succeed, and all your bosses and their bosses have an opinion on how things should be done. When youre editing a magazine thats on an unstoppable descent into oblivion, as CU was (and had been since the early 90s), things are rather different. Its not hard to imagine the downsides, but there are positives too. If no one above you really cares about the mag (which is understandable if its only breaking even at best), its a lot easier to just get on with the job in hand without having to filter everything through focus groups and board meetings. Fortunately we did have a very good Publisher (by which I mean the editors direct boss, as opposed to the publishing company) towards the end, who let us get on with things. Just as importantly, Andy McVittie (for it was he) also allowed us to close the magazine properly, rather than following the publishing convention of pulling the plug on a dead magazine without first informing either the magazines staff or its readers. Ill add some more posts about the issues I edited when I get a moment.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 07:07:14 +0000
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