Amiga Joker | Code Like It's 198x

In November 1990 Amiga Joker threw itself a birthday party. “Ein Jahr Amiga Joker,” the editorial began, one year of Amiga Joker, and the party ran to 114 pages, 20 more than usual, with a double poster, a new layout and a list of every game the magazine had tested so far. Its editor, Michael Labiner, was already calling it one of the most-read Amiga magazines. Within two years it was printing 132,000 copies of every issue for readers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It reviewed games, but it also reported every month on the crackers who copied them and the demo groups that grew up beside them, and it went to interview the programmers behind the games.

Fast facts

Publisher: Joker Verlag, owned by Michael Labiner, of Haar near Munich; later of Grasbrunn.
Editor: Michael Labiner, publisher and editor-in-chief from the start; Oskar Dzierzynski, his deputy in 1990, was editor-in-chief by 1994.
Published: November 1989 to the autumn of 1996.
Schedule: ten issues a year, on the last Friday of the month before the cover date, with double issues for June/July and August/September.
Price: DM 6.50 in 1990 (6.50 Swiss francs, 52 Austrian schillings); DM 60 for a year’s subscription.
Print run: 132,000 copies at the turn of 1991–92, 142,000 in April 1992.
Sister title: PC Joker, on sale by late 1991.

The magazine and its makers

Labiner ran the whole operation. The masthead of April 1990 names him as publisher and editor-in-chief, and the publishing house as “Joker Verlag Inh. Michael Labiner”, Joker Verlag, proprietor Michael Labiner, at Untere Parkstraße 67 in Haar, on the eastern edge of Munich. His deputy was Oskar Dzierzynski. The editorial staff that month were Werner Hiersekorn, Max Magenauer, Uwe Rönitz and Brigitta Labiner, with more than a dozen freelancers behind them. Later mastheads add Joachim Nettelbeck in 1991 and Richard Löwenstein from 1992. By May 1994 Dzierzynski had become editor-in-chief. The readers treated them as characters: a letter in June 1993 asked, among ten questions, whether Brigitta was ill or divorced from Michael, and got a joking answer in reply.

The masthead promised ten issues a year: “AMIGA JOKER erscheint monatlich, zum jeweils letzten Freitag des Vormonats. Doppelausgaben: 6/7 und 8/9.” The magazine came out monthly, on the last Friday of the preceding month, with double issues for June and July and for August and September. The covers bear this out: the summer issues are dated “August/September ’90” and “Juni/Juli ’91”.

The distributor, Verlagsunion of Wiesbaden, took the magazine to newsagents, station bookstalls and wholesalers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so the market was the German language rather than one country. By December 1995 the list had grown to include Sweden and the Netherlands.

The print run was printed in the masthead. Around the turn of 1991 into 1992 it stood at 132,000 copies, and the April 1992 issue gave 142,000. By 1993 the covers called the magazine “Die Nr. 1 in Sachen Amiga-Entertainment”, the number one for Amiga entertainment; asked by a reader whether that was official, the editors replied that they would hardly print unofficial titles on the cover. In December 1995 the masthead gave a circulation of 101,470 for the November issue.

The scene in a games magazine

The most distinctive pages were about the people who copied the games. In April 1990 the scene reporter, writing as Dr. Freak, explained to readers how the Amiga’s cracking groups ranked. At the top were the “big three”, Vision Factory, Paranoimia and Quartex: they had the best crackers and originals and put out the lion’s share of new releases, and a well-known program that appeared anywhere could be had within a week “von Flensburg bis zum Bodensee”, from one end of Germany to the other. Groups bought and poached crackers from each other, he wrote, much as in the football Bundesliga, while the police had been hunting pirates harder for some years. The August/September issue of 1990 carried the column’s first interview, with an ex-cracker called only “Mr. X”.

Dr. Freak kept charting the groups. In June 1992 he put Skid Row at the top again, and in October he reported its break-up. Readers were not all admirers: in October 1993 one mocked the pirate with 300 disks who loaded each game, watched the crack intro, played for three minutes and left it to gather dust.

Demos got their own page. The April 1990 issue opened a reader gallery for “Demos, Gedichte, Zeichnungen oder andere Wunder der schönen Künste”, demos, poems, drawings or other wonders of the fine arts, which took turns with the magazine’s pin-up “Girl” page. From 1992 a “Demo-Galerie” reviewed the scene’s productions properly. It made a Melon Dezign production its demo of the month in August 1992, reported from The Gathering in Norway in June 1993, where it counted about 1,800 visitors, and gave Sanity’s Arte extra room in March 1994. That spring it also reported on the Radwar party at Heinsberg, whose organisers included Tristar & Red Sector.

Talking to the programmers

The magazine also went looking for the people who made the games. In February 1992 it interviewed Factor 5, the Cologne team behind the Amiga Turrican games. In March 1992 Dr. Freak got an exclusive interview with Rob Northen, whose Copylock system protected hundreds of Amiga games, and in 1994 Martin Edmondson of Reflections talked about how Shadow of the Beast began. News pages followed German musicians such as Chris Hülsbeck, whose move to independent work it reported in December 1994.

Going bimonthly, and the end

Joker Verlag grew with the magazine. By November 1991 it was also publishing PC Joker, and some Amiga readers wrote in to protest about it. There were special issues on themes such as role-playing games and adventures, and by 1996 the company had moved to Bretonischer Ring 2 in Grasbrunn, south-east of Munich.

The Amiga market did not last. In the autumn 1996 issue Labiner broke what he called “die traurige Nachricht”, the sad news: Amiga Joker would appear only every two months until further notice. The potential readership was shrinking as players moved to the PC, he wrote, and hardly enough new software appeared to fill an issue every four weeks. The alternative was to close the magazine. If the new owners of Amiga Technologies at VIScorp revived the machine, he promised, it would go monthly again. According to public reference works, no bimonthly issue followed: that issue was the last, and Joker Verlag carried on with PC Joker.

Sources

Amiga Joker, April 1990: Impressum (publisher, staff, printer, distributor, schedule, price); Dr. Freak’s scene column (the “big three”, the police); reader gallery (“Girl” or “Galerie”).
Amiga Joker, August/September 1990: cover date; the first interview in the “In-Szene” column, with “Mr. X”.
Amiga Joker, November 1990: anniversary issue, editorial “Happy Birthday! Ein Jahr Amiga Joker”, 114 pages; Ocean preview referring to the first issue a year earlier.
Amiga Joker, June/July 1991: cover date; masthead with Joachim Nettelbeck.
Amiga Joker, November 1991: readers’ letters about PC Joker.
Amiga Joker, December 1991 and January 1992 (print run 132,000); April 1992 (142,000).
Amiga Joker, February 1992: interview with Factor 5. March 1992: Dr. Freak, interview with Rob Northen.
Amiga Joker, June 1992 and October 1992: Dr. Freak’s scene column (Skid Row). August 1992: “Demo-Galerie”, Melon Dezign.
Amiga Joker, June 1993: readers’ letters (“Die Nr. 1 in Sachen Amiga-Entertainment”); “Demo-Galerie”, The Gathering ‘93. October 1993: readers’ letters (the cracker intro).
Amiga Joker, March 1994: “Demo-Galerie”, Arte; report on the Radwar party. May 1994: masthead, Oskar Dzierzynski as editor-in-chief; interview with Martin Edmondson. December 1994: news of Chris Hülsbeck.
Amiga Joker, December 1995: masthead (circulation 101,470; distribution countries).
Amiga Joker, autumn 1996 (the October issue): editorial by Michael Labiner on going bimonthly; masthead with the Grasbrunn address.
Wikipedia (German), “Amiga Joker” (web, secondary): first issue November 1989, the last issue in the autumn of 1996, PC Joker afterwards. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Joker