Amstrad Action
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Amstrad Action was a monthly magazine, published in the United Kingdom, which catered to owners of home computers from the Amstrad CPC range. It was the first magazine published by Chris Andersen's Future Publishing, which with a varied line-up of computing and non-computing related titles has since become one of the foremost magazine publishers in the UK.
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Lifetime
Amstrad Action, known in the CPC community as AA, had the longest lifetime of any Amstrad magazine, running from October 1985 until June 1995 and producing 117 issues in total (although Issue 117 features a "Next Month" box which suggests that the decision to end the magazine was a last minute decision). The magazine was still being published long after the CPC had ceased production and games were no longer available in the shops. This is believed to have been due mainly to the fondness with which the title was regarded by its publisher.
The End
As the demand for the CPC and the magazine steadily dwindled over the years, AA was forced to slim down. It dropped many features it had become famous for as advertising declined and the covertape holders were replaced with cardboard boxes as opposed to 'proper' plastic cassette boxes. In the production's last handful of editions the total page count of an issue was just 24, a far but inevitable cry from the glory days of 80+ pages. Even in these tough times, the unique editorial style and design tendencies were never sacrificed.
Cover-cassettes and disks
AA was the first magazine in the world to covermount software cassettes, beating Your Sinclair to the honour by a matter of months. The cover-cassettes (and, later, cover-disks) featured game demos, miscellaneous free software and, in some instances, complete games. Due to the low quality of the cassettes used many Amstrad owners found them to be unreliable, something which was commonly reflected in the letters pages. One solution to fixing the unreliable tapes as posted to the letters section was to unwind the tape and put a warm iron on it!
Editorial staff
Memorable staff included Rod "The Beard" Lawton, James Leach and Adam Waring. Adam had written several games himself, for which, if one came up for review upon re-release, he would gracefully be allowed to write a second opinion. Later editorial staff included Simon Forrester, whose magazine nickname/handle was "The Hairy One", "The Hairy Happening" or often just "Hairy". Simon had written various programs himself for the platform and was known to jump down the throats of people who didn't agree with his fondness for the computer game Chuckie Egg.
Features and editorial style
Long-running features included Forum, for technically-minded CPC users; Action Test, for games reviews; and Cheat Mode, containing walkthroughs, hints and cheats. A game rated 90% or more in Action Test received the award of AA Mastergame, 80-90% an AA Rave. Publishers of CPC games such as Activision, Ocean and Infogrames proudly mounted these awards on their packaging to promote their games to potential customers.
Interactive fiction was covered by "The Pilgrim" and, later, "Balrog". As activity in the Amstrad world declined, the editorial staff were reduced to three and the magazine adopted an increasingly eccentric style, with one edition in particular featuring an eight-page script for a Christmas pantomime. The magazine is also notable for pioneering the kind of responses - sometimes dry, sometimes surreal, usually humorous and mildly rude - to readers' letters of a form now seen throughout UK gaming magazine culture. These characteristics, for many readers, added to AA's charm.
One popular feature of AA was the Type-In section. This itself split the readership over whether the programs should be put on the covertape instead. Over a six month period this is what happened, until this practice (and ultimately the Type-Ins section) was abandoned due to space restrictions.
Street Fighter 2
One particularly amusing long running joke was the news that the popular Street Fighter 2 was due to be released on the Amstrad CPC. The saga ran for many months in AA and, with no sign of the game coming, references to the game were dropped and ultimately it turned out to be a marketing error on the part of the copyright owners of the game. AA even made a special feature about the game in Issue 95.
Toot
A mysterious blob with legs called Toot lived in the page margins of early issues of AA, surfacing sometimes to comment on the contents of the magazine or play with a page number. His or her whereabouts are unknown.
See also: CPC Attack, Amstrad Computer User, Amtix!