For eight years the letters page of CRASH was “Lloyd Mangram’s Forum”. Lloyd opened the post, printed the best letters and argued with readers. He was listed on the masthead as a staff writer, answered the letters in ZZAP!64 as well, and had a magazine named after his initials. He was not a real person. Lloyd Mangram was a name used by Newsfield’s staff, and the magazines never said which of them was writing as him at any given time.
The Forum
Lloyd was there from the start. In the first CRASH, dated February 1984, he introduced the Forum and promised to send the writer of the best letter each month £12 worth of software: “I’ve had to grovel on bended knee to the editor for this, so you’d better be grateful!” Letters went to “Lloyd Mangram, CRASH” at PO Box 10, Ludlow. From the April 1984 issue the masthead listed him as “Staff writer”, above the contributing writers, and he was still there in October 1991, in the last issue Newsfield published.
The Forum mixed real questions and complaints with long-running jokes. One was the Ludlow gibbet, where staff who made mistakes were threatened with hanging. Another was Lloyd’s typewriter. In October 1985 the contents page promised “Your views become public, courtesy of Lloyd’s Hermes”, and that month Lloyd wrote of “the shaky carriage of my 1922 Hermes schreibmaschine” (German for typewriter). Replies were signed “LM”.
The Hall of Slime, the tips and the previews
In July 1984 Lloyd opened “Lloyd Mangram’s Hall of Slime” for readers who wanted to boast about their high scores, with a warning that the scores had to be honest. It ran for nearly three years, until the May 1987 Forum announced that it was “being rethought, and takes a holiday this issue after three years of hard work”.
That same May 1987 issue shows how much the name was expected to carry. Lloyd was credited with a 32-page Playing Tips Supplement, and “Merely Mangram” returned to write the previews, and the Forum admitted that “was quite enough Mangram for one month”. When CRASH looked back over its tips pages in its last issue, in April 1992, it named Lloyd as their first editor, “the forefather of faulty POKE listings”, succeeded by his “helper”, Robin Candy, then Hannah Smith, then Lloyd again for a while, and then Nick Roberts.
ZZAP!64 and Amtix!
When ZZAP!64 moved its editorial office to Ludlow in the summer of 1985, Lloyd took over its letters page, ZZAP! Rrap. He introduced himself in the August 1985 issue: “To anyone who has read CRASH Magazine, I probably need little introduction, being none other than Lloyd Mangram.” He added that he had edited the CRASH Forum “since it started in issue 1” and that his qualification for the new job was “one and a half years playing Commodore 64 games (don’t tell a CRASH reader)”. The first issue of Newsfield’s Amstrad magazine, Amtix!, in November 1985, mentioned Lloyd’s Hermes and his work on the letters pages of CRASH and ZZAP!, but Lloyd had no column in Amtix!: its letters were answered under other names, and by 1987 readers addressed them to Saffron.
LM
With its Christmas 1986 issue CRASH gave away “Issue 0” of LM, a new Newsfield magazine that covered music, films, video and comics. CRASH’s back-issue list described that Christmas issue as including a look behind the scenes “where they make the magazine that bears Lloyd’s initials”.
Did he exist?
Readers wondered. In November 1986 one wrote to ZZAP! Rrap that “there has been a lot of controversy about Lloyd Mangram’s existence”. LM replied: “of course I exist”. In the same issue ZZAP!’s high-score keeper, the Scorelord, remarked that “the so-called Lloyd Mangram” might have some connection with golf. The golf joke fits a claim made in public sources since, that the name was borrowed from the American golfer Lloyd Mangrum, but none of those sources gives a first-hand account.
When the magazines showed Lloyd, they hid him. A ZZAP! team photograph in March 1989 includes “Lloyd (with paper bag)”. CRASH changed publisher after Newsfield collapsed in 1991, and its December 1991 issue announced that Lloyd had gone on a world cruise “with a massive supply of paper bags”, leaving the letters page, renamed “Lucy’s Letters”, to the new editor, Lucy Hickman. By 1993 he was back as “our man of letters” in Europress’s Commodore Force, “what with that bag on his head and all”, and told a reader who asked to see his face that he had “a severe aversion to photographs”: “The paper bag stays, pal.”
Roger Kean, CRASH’s first editor, kept up the story. Asked in 1998 who had thought up “the staff member who didn’t actually exist”, he answered: “Of course Lloyd Mangram existed. He was as real as anyone — the paper bag is still in a special case in the Ludlow Museum.”
Who wrote as Lloyd
The only first-hand account comes from Matthew Uffindell, who joined the Ludlow business at 17 and reviewed games for CRASH from the start. Writing in Retro Gamer in 2004, he said the early reviews were written by three people, “Roger Kean, myself and the legendary Lloyd Mangram”, and went on:
Lloyd was a character, well, sort of. A little, if at all known fact was that he never existed! Lloyd’s input was the joint combination of text and opinion from both Roger and myself. I don’t think anyone else has ever admitted to that before.
Uffindell was describing the early reviews. He does not say who wrote as Lloyd later, in the Forum, the tips or ZZAP!, and no public source names everyone who did. The magazines sometimes played with the arrangement in print: in August 1984 CRASH ran a look back at old reviews under the byline “MATTHEW UFFINDELL and LLOYD MANGRAM”.
The name outlived the magazines. In Edge’s 100th issue, in 2001, one of the contributions on the future of games was signed “Lloyd Mangram, industry veteran”, and the first issue of Retro Gamer, in 2004, ran a history of video games as “Lloyd Mangram’s Videogames History Lookback”.
Sources
- CRASH issue 1, February 1984: the Forum’s introduction and prize, and the letters address.
- CRASH issue 3, April 1984: masthead, “Staff writer Lloyd Mangram”.
- CRASH issue 6, July 1984: the first Hall of Slime.
- CRASH issue 7, August 1984: the retrospective by “MATTHEW UFFINDELL and LLOYD MANGRAM”.
- CRASH issue 21, October 1985: contents (“courtesy of Lloyd’s Hermes”) and the Forum (“my 1922 Hermes schreibmaschine”).
- CRASH issue 39, April 1987: back-issue list, “the magazine that bears Lloyd’s initials”.
- CRASH issue 40, May 1987: contents (Playing Tips Supplement; “Merely Mangram returns”), the Forum (the Hall of Slime’s holiday; “quite enough Mangram”) and p. 129 (the previews).
- CRASH issue 93, October 1991: contents (“Lloyd’s Forum”) and masthead with Lloyd Mangram as staff writer.
- CRASH issue 94, December 1991: contents and letters page (the world cruise and “Lucy’s Letters”); issue 93, October 1991, masthead (Lucy Hickman).
- CRASH issue 98, April 1992, p. 36: Playing Tips Special, the history of the tips pages.
- ZZAP!64 issue 4, August 1985: ZZAP! Rrap, Lloyd’s introduction.
- ZZAP!64 issue 19, November 1986: ZZAP! Rrap (the question about Lloyd’s existence and the reply) and the Scorelord’s page.
- ZZAP!64 issue 47, March 1989: staff photograph caption.
- Commodore Force issue 8, August 1993: editorial (“our man of letters”) and letters page (“The paper bag stays, pal”).
- Amtix! issue 1, November 1985: editorial; issue 18, April 1987: letters addressed to Saffron.
- Edge issue 100, August 2001: contributions on the future of games.
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: “Lloyd Mangram’s Videogames History Lookback”.
- Retro Gamer issue 2, 2004, p. 46: Matthew Uffindell, “Inside Crash Towers”.
- Philip Bee, “Interview with Roger Kean”, May 1998, World of Spectrum (web, secondary): https://worldofspectrum.net/interviews/KeanRoger.htm
- Wikipedia, “Crash (magazine)” (web, secondary): the claim that the name came from the golfer Lloyd Mangrum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_(magazine)