Atari Club Magazin

Atari Club Magazin was the magazine of Atari’s members’ club in West Germany. This library holds seven issues, from 1982 to 1984 — small things, seven to twenty pages, addressed to liebe Clubmitglieder and written from what they call the Clubzentrale.

It is the earliest German title in this library, and the second manufacturer’s house organ in this Vault after Club Nintendo — which it precedes by seven years.

Selling E.T. in December 1982

The undated 1982 issue gives most of a page to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, cartridge CX 2674, with Spielberg’s earlier films listed in German to establish the pedigree and the film called the most successful in cinema history, having broken every American record in a matter of weeks. A December 1982 date is given for the cassette.

The value of that page is entirely in when it was written. This Vault already records the American side of the same product: Atari paid twenty to twenty-five million dollars for the licence in July 1982, gave Howard Scott Warshaw five weeks to finish it by 1 September for Christmas manufacturing, and the result became the emblem of the 1983 crash.

Here is the same cartridge, a few months later, being sold to German club members as an event. Nothing in the page suggests the writer knew anything was wrong. A house organ is a document of what a company was saying at a date, and that is the whole of its value as evidence.

⚠ The scan of that page is column-interleaved and the day of the December date does not survive legibly. Month and year only.

Research that happened to help

The January 1983 issue passes on findings from das BAT-Forschungsinstitut in Hamburg, from a survey it says was conducted in autumn 1982 on a representative sample of the population: video games “fördern die Kommunikation und bauen Aggressionen ab” — promote communication and reduce aggression — and 96% of video-game owners most like to play with family or friends.

That is a manufacturer’s own promotional magazine reporting research favourable to the manufacturer, and it should be read as exactly that. What it establishes is not that the finding was sound but that the argument was being had in West Germany in 1982, and that Atari thought its members would want ammunition for it.

A club, not just a magazine

The rest is club business, and it is the part that dates it most precisely. The January 1983 issue announces a relaunch — a new look for the new year, plenty of colour, more to read — and apologises that the rack for VCS cassettes has sold out, along with the shirts and the pullovers. A member writes in asking why there are no club badges or pins. There is a Freundschaftswerbung, a member-get-member scheme, with 1983 promised as the year of the Superpreise.

Does it fit the house-organ pattern?

Not quite, and the difference is worth stating rather than smoothing over.

Club Nintendo is a manufacturer’s magazine produced once and localised outward — the English, German and Dutch editions are the same twenty pages. Atari Club Magazin is a manufacturer’s magazine too, but this library holds no other national edition of it to compare against, and its contents read as locally made: the advertising campaign is placed in Stern and HÖRZU, and the editorial describes games its own staff were shown in America.

So the category manufacturer’s house organ contains at least two arrangements, and a first-party magazine is not automatically a centrally produced one. On the evidence here this is a German magazine written for German members by an American company’s German operation.

⚠ That reading rests on seven short issues and on the absence of a second edition to compare. If Atari ran the same club magazine in other countries, this library does not hold it, and absence here is not evidence it did not exist.

See also

• Club Nintendo — the other house organ, seven years later
• Magazines across borders
• Atari 2600
• Howard Scott Warshaw, the 1983 crash — the American side of the same cartridge
• Amiga Joker, PC Player — the later German titles here