Europress

Europress was a British publisher based at Europa House, Adlington Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire. It is not a name that appears in most accounts of the British games press, and it should: it owned two of the four magazines this Vault treats as defining, for the last stretch of their lives.

Two routes into the same story

Europress reaches the games press twice, from different directions.

The first is quiet and early — earlier than its games titles suggest. Database Publications Ltd, of the same Macclesfield address, was publishing The Micro User for the BBC Micro from March 1983, and launched Amiga Computing in June 1988. Seven issues later the colophon spells out the relationship — “Database Publications is a division of Europress Ltd” — so by early 1989 Europress had been publishing a substantial Amiga monthly for a year.

The second is the one people remember. When Newsfield collapsed in 1991, CRASH and ZZAP!64 went to Europress. The corpus dates the arrival precisely enough on its own: the word Europress appears on 12 pages in 1990, 151 in 1991 and 515 in 1992.

Put together, those two routes correct a common impression. The Ludlow titles were not rescued by an outsider who wandered in. They were bought by a publisher that had been in British computer magazines since 1983 — before CRASH existed — and that had started on Acorn machines.

It kept them in Ludlow

The detail worth having is in the small print of CRASH issue 94, December 1991 — the first issue under the new owner. Readers with a faulty covertape are told to write to:

EUROPRESS IMPACT LTD, CRASH TAPE CLINIC, Ludlow, Shropshire SY8 1JW

Not Macclesfield. Ludlow — Newsfield’s own town, the address the magazine had always used. The acquiring company set up a subsidiary, Europress Impact Ltd, and ran the titles from where they already were.

A staff writer in the same issue gives the other half of it, in an aside about his workload: “as CRASH work isn’t all I do at Europress.” The masthead had changed, the postbox had not.

It sold them all in 1994

Amiga Computing reported the end of the arrangement in its own news pages that Christmas, under the heading “AC joins IDG”: the magazine “has been part of the Europress magazine empire for the last six years”, and “along with 10 other magazines published by the group, it has been sold to IDG, the US-controlled multinational that forms the world’s largest computer magazine publisher.”

Derek Meakin — named in The Micro User’s first issue eleven years earlier as managing editor of Database Publications, and here called the founder of the Europress Group — put the buyer’s case:

“IDG is pre-eminent all round the world, with more than 220 publications in 64 countries. One significant gap in this global network has been the UK.”

Europress had done to Newsfield’s titles in 1991 what IDG now did to its own: bought them and left them where they were. The Christmas 1994 colophon reads “Published by IDG Publications” at the unchanged Adlington Park address, with the same telephone number and the same staff.

So the Europress era of Amiga Computing is 1988 to 1994, not 1988 to 1997, and Amiga Action’s last months belong to IDG too.

⚠ This entry describes Europress only where it touches the games press. The company published well beyond that, and this library holds its computing titles rather than its business.

See also

• Newsfield — where CRASH and ZZAP!64 came from
• CRASH — Europress from issue 94
• ZZAP!64 — continued under Europress into 1992
• Amiga Computing — the title Europress already had
• The Micro User — Database Publications from 1983, the earliest of them
• Atari ST User — the middle title, from 1986, closed October 1994
• IDG — bought the titles at the end of 1994
• Amiga Action — acquired from Gollner around mid-1991