Now here’s a publication, and indeed a specific issue of said publication, that I have a huge soft spot for. It’s my first ever magazine, on sale today 32 years ago. In the summer of 1991 when asked what I’d like for Christmas, and having spent a lot of time playing on my friends’ Spectrum and Amstrad computers, I really wanted something to play computer games on. My parents made me a deal: I could get a computer, not a console. I had to have something I could use for school too.
My mum handed me her Littlewoods catalogue and despite the new, more powerful Atari ST and Commodore Amiga computers on the page I was instantly drawn to the Commodore 64, mainly due to it having accessories I recognised such as cassette players and external disk drives. I’d heard of the machine and knew it was more powerful than the ones I’d been playing with friends so that’s the one I chose.
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I knew of a magazine called Zzap!64 and decided I wanted to check it out but couldn’t find it at the newsagent. However, I did see Commodore Format and, even better, it had a cassette on the cover full of games, which reminded me of the Story Teller partwork I’d collected years before. I went back the next day to buy it once I’d got my pocket money and it was gone, but I knew from years of buying comics this could mean the new one was due. It was.
The next day #14 of CF (as readers called it) arrived and featured the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles on the fantastic Paul Kidby cover, which just excited me further because I was a fan. I devoured the issue, reading it over and over, excitedly anticipating the machine which was still a couple of months away. I’d definitely made the right choice of present! So to mark this issue’s anniversary I wanted to write a special retrospective and explain why I loved it so much.
Edited at this stage by Steve Jarratt, in later years CF would go on to influence me in a key way. It was instrumental in my development in those important teen years, making as big and lasting an impact on me as OiNK had a few years previous, hence its inclusion here. I’ll get to that in a future post, but for now let’s go through what is personally a very special issue. This most superb of 90s magazines had 76 pages packed full of content. There was no filler in sight and every page was rammed full of great writing, information, loads of hype for me while I awaited my computer and a feeling of being part of a form of club, a sense of the magazine talking to me directly. Plus, it had a cracking sense of humour. (Check out the bottom of most pages below for example.)
I also couldn’t believe what was on the tape stuck to the cover! I’d loved playing my brother-in-law’s Turtles game on his Nintendo NES, now it was coming to the C64 and this issue’s tape had a free level to play. But better than that was the full Aliens game that had terrified my friends and I so much when we played it late one night in the dark on a mate’s Amstrad. Here I was getting it free with this superb magazine. I was sold on CF within its first few pages.
I have distinct memories of playing this over the Christmas holidays that year; waiting until it was dark I’d turn the lights off and the sound up on my 12” Pye portable TV. I never lasted long before I had to stop! Fast forward 31 years and this year I’ve struggled to play Alien Isolation on the Nintendo Switch for any longer than an hour at a time for the exact same reasons.
Among the impressive previews there was also a unique page called the Early Warning Scanner which summed up all of the forthcoming releases in a neat radar-type image; the closer to the centre each game was the sooner they were due to arrive. It was so much better than a boring list and kept readers up-to-date on their hotly anticipated games. As a new reader and (almost) owner, I looked at this page and was almost drooling at some of the games to come.
While some people in school mocked me for picking a C64 instead of a more powerful computer, within these pages I was in awe at the graphics this allegedly dated machine could produce. Also, to me the scanner dispelled any notion the format was in its final days. Most importantly, my choice also meant I met a fellow C64 owner in school who became a lifelong friend. (Hi Colin!) Back to the games, and even today something like First Samurai is still impressive when you know it’s running on an 8-bit machine. It played brilliantly too. (I also loved the programmers’ reason for the name, in the preview below.)
The Turtles arcade conversion may not have been the best example of what the Commodore could produce graphically but I did have fun with the demo although ultimately passed on paying for the full game. The same could not be said of Hudson Hawk. Based on the apparently terrible (I’ve never seen it) Bruce Willis film it looked a lot like the console games I’d played and proved to me this computer could have all the fun of those games at a fraction of the cost. Plus the 64 was so much more than just a games machine at the time, of course.
Commodore Format’s scoring system did away with the clichéd scores for graphics, gameplay, sound etc. and instead replaced them with a simple run down of the game’s main good and bad points at opposite ends of a scale, with the score being where they met. (Games with a score of 90% and higher were awarded the prestigious “It’s a Corker!” award.) It was a sleek design by art editor Ollie Alderton and made for some funny comments during the magazine’s lifespan. When racing game Cisco Heat was so atrocious it received 12% the ‘Uppers’ was just large enough for one comment: “Erm… it comes in a nice box.”
Commodore Format was different to Zzap in other ways too. While that magazine focussed almost exclusively on games, CF followed in the footsteps of its stablemates like Amiga Format, ST Format and PC Format and contained technical features such as an ongoing series of readers’ programming and hardware questions and loads of tips and tricks for the more established coders. For me, I was glad to see Phil South‘s tutorial series for complete newbies. With games on the cover and games all over the inside of the magazine, I made sure to show my parents these pages to prove I wasn’t just getting a games machine.
While naturally my focus was on the games to begin with, I was surprised how quickly I wanted to start digging a little deeper into the computing side of things. Commodore Format was a key part of this and the first three issues I owned before that Christmas were fascinating. I may not have fully understood these tutorials but I read them just as much as the rest, over and over. I was just as excited about that aspect of my new machine as any other.
Speaking of games being a fraction of the cost of their console counterparts, the Roger Frames Buys Budjit Games section collected together all the £2.99/£3.99 cassette games (originals and rereleases of former full-price games) in a handful of funny mini-reviews every month written by the fictional Roger Frames, a tight-fisted miser of a child who detested parting with his pocket money. Accompanied by brilliant comic-style misadventures you can check out this issue’s instalment in the review for OiNK #10. Why? Because Roger was drawn by that issue’s brilliant cover illustrator Mike Roberts, and I’d wanted to show off an example of his CF work I enjoyed so much. Off you pop and check that out before we go on.
Commodore Format led me to Edge and Cube magazines over the years via a detour to the equally fantastic 3DO Magazine
Welcome back. Anyway, Commodore Format also spoiled me for life when it came to review magazines of any kind, from games to movies and everything in-between. Below is a review from this issue for Robozone and by all measures it should be a terrible game that no one would want to spend their pocket money on. But the score is just the opinion of the writer, not a fact, and I always felt the way CF’s reviews were written was more important than the number at the end. Context was key.
In the case of Robozone it was clear why staff writer Andy Dyer personally didn’t enjoy the game but something from his review told me I might. So I bought it a few months later and yep, I did enjoy it. It wasn’t superb, and if I hadn’t got it from a bargain bin maybe I wouldn’t have purchased it, but it was fun for a few weeks. CF’s writers never tried to tell people that their opinions were facts. Throughout my gaming hobby I’ve come across magazines I felt were above their station, who thought what they opined was gospel (a bit like internet comments sections today). CF was never like this.
Commodore Format led me to Edge and Cube magazines over the years (also from Future Publishing) via a detour to the equally fantastic 3DO Magazine. Many others were tried but failed to talk to me on a level playing field like CF did. I’ve actually begun subscribing to Edge again last year for my Nintendo Switch. That’s the legacy of Commodore Format. It never spoke down to us. It never pretended to be anything other than a group of friendly people passing on advice. Well, perhaps one ‘person’ had a bit of an ego…
There were a whopping four pages of letters in each of these issues, hosted by The Mighty Brain, a ‘B’-movie star who knew everything in the knowable universe (and beyond). I mean, who better to answer readers’ questions, right? Even though these pages would be answered by different people as the magazine changed over time, his persona never changed and his cocky nature reminded me of the sassy letter answerers in childhood comics such as OiNK and Transformers. Great fun.
Zzap64’s publisher was going through administration at the time (hence the blurb at the top of the cover) and for a few months CF’s competitor didn’t appear. It worked out perfectly for me because I’d discovered this superior magazine instead and inside a regular feature from the abruptly (and temporarily) cancelled competition made its transition to CF. The Clyde Guide was a Making Of series about the upcoming Creatures II: Torture Trouble, a game that’s still in my top five games of all time on any platform to this day.
A cute and cuddly looking game with devious puzzles, huge boss fights and gorgeous animation, it had a hilarious sense of humour with over-the-top gore that would surprise players when things went wrong. All cartoony and ridiculous gore splashed all over the cute graphics of course, this was still a basic machine compared to today’s after all. The Rowlands brothers John and Steve gave a fascinating insight into the creation of a brand new game, month-by-month. This wasn’t a look back at how a game was made, this was happening in real time.
On a side note, I contributed to Bitmap Book’s Commodore 64: A Visual Compendium for their Creatures II spread
I was hooked from this first chapter (CF’s first chapter but obviously the game was a long way into development by this stage) and it would often be the first thing I’d read in subsequent months. Later in the magazine’s life the brothers would also create the incredible Mayhem in Monsterland game which they’d chronicle in the pages from the very beginning. I’d never read anything like these diary entries before and was amazed at the access the magazine had. On a side note, a few years back I contributed to Bitmap Book‘s Commodore 64: A Visual Compendium for their Creatures II spread.
That Christmas I finally received my C64 with a cartridge full of games, a few joysticks and a cassette deck. The following Easter my dad was made redundant and with his payoff I was promised something for my computer. I chose a disk drive after seeing it advertised every month in these Datel Electronics adverts. The following Christmas I also added the printer shown here along with the mouse and art package, all set up on a desk made by my dad in the alcove in my bedroom.
Some friends may have thought the C64 was past it but I was using it for everything! Writing my own stories and magazines, a diskzine (more on that in the specific post I mentioned, coming next year), homework, running a Public Domain software library, making games… In fact, I was using it for a lot more than my friends were using their more powerful machines for. Oh man, the memories are flooding back as I read through this issue again. Those were such enjoyable years thanks to that machine and this magazine.
CF eventually succumbed to a loss of sales only six months before the release of the first Sony Playstation!
Commodore Format was created by Future Publishing when they saw an opening in the market. The C64 was still selling really well as an entry-level computer, while also being handed down to younger siblings. CF was an instant success and soon became the biggest selling C64 magazine in the world! Deservedly so. It would last right up to #61, eventually succumbing to a loss of sales only six months before the release of the first Sony PlayStation! That’s incredible for a machine which people told me was on its last legs before I even got mine.
Regular blog readers may have noticed the issue number for my first ever magazine is the same as that for my first ever comic, #14 of OiNK. With that tenuous link I’ll wrap up this retrospective with an advert for an upcoming game pig pals may have been particularly interested in. After OiNK was cancelled the creative team of Tony Husband, Patrick Gallagher and Mark Rodgers went on to create a certain TV show that shared many familiar aspects with our piggy publication.
The game already looks like it’s closer to its inspiration than the OiNK game. Round the Bend would get reviewed in #17 of Commodore Format, so in keeping with the real-time aspect of this blog I’ll show you that very review and take a look at the game itself on Tuesday 16th January 2024.
I feel like I’d need to show you every single page of this issue over a series of posts in order to fully get across just what an impact it had on me and how formative it was. I hope I’ve been able to do it justice. I have an almost complete set of the magazines here at home, despite not owning a Commodore 64 anymore and I’ll never get rid of them; I love to dip in and out and I’ll forever treasure them and the memories they contain.
In the days of magazine contributors being named and photographed for the editorial pages, over time it felt like we’d grown to know these people and we trusted them as a result. This was a key component in that club feeling and later in its lifespan Commodore Format would be instrumental in my life and the person I became! Really. That’s a whole other story for another time, but for now I just wanted to concentrate on a retrospective look at this beloved issue of a beloved mag.
Commodore Format has featured elsewhere on the blog already. The cover cassette of its second edition contained the OiNK game in its entirety as you can see in a post from the game’s coverage. Then in their third issue the team produced maps to help people struggling with the game and I’ve included them on the blog as well. Both posts also take a look at some of the other articles and contemporary adverts featured in those early editions. Finally, the Roger Frames Buys Budjit Games section was a favourite feature of every issue for me and was illustrated by Mike Roberts, a brilliant illustrator who also produced the cover to OiNK #10, and in that OiNK review I’ve included Mike’s art of Roger’s misadventure from this issue of Commodore Format. Enjoy.
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