Amiga Computing
Macclesfield's Amiga monthly, and the house that later took CRASH
Database Publications' Amiga magazine ran from June 1988 to October 1997, through three owners. Its own small print traces a line most histories keep separate: Database was a division of Europress, the publisher that picked up CRASH and ZZAP!64 when Newsfield collapsed — and that sold the magazine on to IDG at the end of 1994.
Amiga Computing was a British Amiga monthly published from June 1988 to October 1997, 154 issues of which are held here. It is the second-largest body of Amiga writing in this library after CU Amiga, and like that title it had no entry in this Vault until the holdings were counted rather than read.
The colophon is the interesting part
Issue 1 names the publisher as Database Publications Ltd, of Europa House, Adlington Park, Macclesfield. Seven issues later the same small print adds a clause:
“Database Publications is a division of Europress Ltd.”
That is a line worth following, because Europress is the company that took CRASH and ZZAP!64 out of the wreckage of Newsfield in 1991. This Vault dates that handover to CRASH issue 94, and issue 94 — December 1991 — happens to contain a staff writer’s aside that settles it from the inside: “as CRASH work isn’t all I do at Europress”.
So the Macclesfield house that had been quietly publishing an Amiga monthly since 1988 was, three years later, the one holding the two most-loved 8-bit magazines in Britain. The Ludlow titles did not go to a stranger; they went to an established competitor that had been in the market the whole time.
Three publishers, one address
The colophon changes twice more, and the magazine reported the second change itself. Its Christmas 1994 news pages carry the item “AC joins IDG”: Amiga Computing “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 same issue’s colophon already reads “Published by IDG Publications”; by 1995 it is styled IDG Media Ltd.
| Publisher | |
|---|---|
| June 1988 | Database Publications Ltd |
| by January 1989 | a division of Europress Ltd |
| Christmas 1994 | IDG |
Europa House, Adlington Park, Macclesfield SK10 4NP throughout — the same address, the same telephone number, the same staff list across the last change. The magazine’s final three years are IDG’s, which is the part most easily lost: nothing on the page announces a new owner except the small print.
The American edition
From June 1995 the magazine also appeared as Amiga Computing US Edition, renumbered from 1. The library holds fourteen of them, running to issue 20 in March 1997.
The renumbering hides the relationship, but the first US issue is filed here against British issue 87. This is not the arrangement Newsfield had in Milan, where a local publisher licensed a title and staffed it; it is the same magazine carrying a different number on the cover for a different market — the British subscription rates are still printed inside.
What it was for
Where Amiga Power was a games magazine with opinions and Amiga Format was a general monthly with cover disks, Amiga Computing carried the word computing in its title and meant it — the Amiga as a machine to work on as well as play on. Its issue 1 contents run to adventure tutorials alongside hardware news, and the masthead sat beside Database’s other computing titles rather than beside the games press.
⚠ That characterisation is drawn from the issues held here rather than from any statement of editorial policy, and the balance shifts across nine years.
See also
- CU Amiga — the larger holding, and the other unwritten one
- Amiga Format, Amiga Power — the Future rivals
- CRASH, ZZAP!64 — what Europress acquired in 1991
- Europress — Database Publications’ parent
- IDG — the last owner, from Christmas 1994
- The Micro User, Atari ST User — the earlier titles in the same sequence
- Newsfield — the publisher they came from
- Commodore Amiga