Amstrad Semanal
A weekly Amstrad magazine, and the longest weekly run in this library
Hobby Press published Amstrad Semanal in Spain from 3 September 1985, weekly, and this library holds a hundred consecutive issues to 1987 — more day-dated issues than any other title held, including Britain's Personal Computer News. Its first cover analyses Knight Lore as the number one program in the world.
Amstrad Semanal — Amstrad Weekly — was published in Spain by Hobby Press, S.A., beginning on 3 September 1985. This library holds a hundred regular issues, running to 1987, plus a run of Amstrad Especial specials.
Weekly, and demonstrably so
Most magazine entries take a publishing frequency from the masthead. Here the filenames carry it: the first five issues are dated 3, 10, 17 and 24 September and 1 October 1985 — seven days apart, four times over.
The weekly computer magazine was rare. Counting titles in this library whose issues are dated to the day rather than the month, Amstrad Semanal’s hundred issues is the largest such run held — just ahead of the Italian PAPERsoft at ninety, and far ahead of Britain’s Personal Computer News at twenty-three.
The two longest weekly runs in this collection are Spanish and Italian, and the British one is a distant third. PAPERsoft also came first, in June 1984, fifteen months before this.
What a weekly puts on its first cover
Issue one leads on three things: machine code taught bit a bit, an assessment of the newly announced CPC 664 — “¿Qué aporta el nuevo Amstrad?”, what does the new Amstrad bring — and a review headlined:
“KNIGHT LORE — Analizamos el programa n.º 1 en el mundo”
We analyse the number one program in the world. This Vault dates Knight Lore’s British release from simultaneous multi-title advertising; here it is nine months later on the cover of a Spanish weekly, described without qualification as the best game there is.
The advertising is the other thing worth reading. Games are sold on being “íntegramente en castellano” — entirely in Castilian — and on having already succeeded elsewhere: Beach Head is pitched as “por fin para tu Amstrad el juego que mayor popularidad alcanzará en Commodore y Spectrum”, at last for your Amstrad the game that reached greatest popularity on the Commodore and Spectrum. A market being supplied second, and told so plainly in the copy.
⚠ This entry is built from the first issue and from the dates across the run. This library holds two years of Amstrad Semanal and no account of it from elsewhere, so nothing here describes its reviewing, its circulation, or why a weekly was viable in Spain when it mostly was not in Britain.
See also
- Amstrad CPC, Knight Lore
- Amstrad Action — the British monthly, launched a month later
- Club Commodore — the other Spanish title here