Be Excellent To Each Other

I'd forgotten about this YS cover that got the mag pulled from the shelves of WH Smiths:



So what are your memorable computer magazine covers?*





* First person to wet themselves over Oliver Frey gets locked in a cupboard with Dimrill for 3 hours.

I like these two from Amstrad Computer User. Not iconic or well known by any means but I remember liking them at the time. They were also done in an era before Photoshop or any kind of digital manipulation. In the first someone has spent time setting up that entire shot including the laser effect (probably a bit of plastic with some light shone on it). In the second someone has probably spent ages taking the photos of the workers, cutting them out and then sticking them onto the background photo.

He did all the memorable ones for me though. As I pretty much bought only Speccy magazines (with the occasional C&VG and Ace), there was either the garish Sinclair User covers, the generally good Your Sinclair covers and Crash. A quick skim over those links just reinforces my view that the Crash ones were better.

Crikey, it's amazing how many of those I immediately remember, despite having not seen them for nearly 25 years

Crash and Zzap64 had the best covers, everyone knows that.

I always thought Frey was over-rated. His sci-fi space scenes were always great, but alot of his other stuff just looked average. His domination of the Zzap and Crash covers meant they were always drawn rather than photographed. And when pushed YS could do hand drawn covers that were fantastic, perhaps not so much in the skill of the artwork but in the imagery it counjored. I think this is genius for example:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=YourSinclair/Issue83/Pages/YourSinclair8300001.jpg

Davros in a YS T-Shirt. What's not to love?

Future Publishing: "Your guarantee of Value"

Don't think they'd be able to publish the list of promises they used to put in the flannel panel these days.

Who was the guy who did a lot of the YS covers? Nick Davies? I liked a lot of his stuff.

The cover of the first issue of Super Play, illustrated by Wil Overton deserves a mention. In the early '90s, Japanese-style illustration wasn't a common sight. A magazine cover so bold and un-western really stood out amongst the newsagents shelves. The cover art itself wasn't W. Overton's best work, but is noteworthy as another sign of the gradual shift towards greater acceptance of Japanese art styles by the western gamers.

Amstrad Action, never knowingly worried about sticking the staff on the cover. It hadn't really occurred to me until I started scanning through their covers just now. Didn't seem odd at the time as I had most of these mags when they came out.


Adam Peters


James Leach


Adam Wareing (if you notice the covertape contents, he is also the author of Lost Caves!)


Steve Carey


Ollie Thingy the art editor.


Rod Lawton (I think)



There are more. Most of those people should be familiar to readers of most Future publications from that era.

YS, also not above sticking staff members on the cover.



Linda Barker, Jon Pillar/Nash & Andy "Hutch" Hutchinson.

I had all of those. They were giving away a SNES controller free if you subbed. Sadly they went under before the year was up and so they sent me something else. Shame, very Japanese styled mag. I used to enjoy it muchly. Mind you, shortly afterward I hung up my SNES pads and got a Neo Geo.

Man, the early Amiga Power covers were awful. Like reject New Computer Express cover designs, basically.

I was gonna say a Super Play cover. They were great.

If you combine early AP and how ACE was pre-buyout, you have much of the blueprint for Edge.

This man has a mini-gun. And Air Taxi was ace, but I aware that's not the point.

How do magazines have a letters page in Volume 1 Issue 1?

Because Issue 0 was the first one, given away free in Amiga Format.

They either make them up or there was a free edition given away.

Although given the lead times time was always tight to get a letter into the next edition of a magazine. Most mags of that era went to press a couple of weeks before publication. By the time an issue went on sale the next issue would be half finished. My appearances in YS and AA were always not in the next issue but the issue after.

I think Crash has to win on the covers. I have a soft spot for early Sinclair User covers as they're crap in that serious home computing kind of way. I quite like the serious nature of early SU even though it was still rubbish. There's a certain atmosphere about it, the unknown... I think some mid period SU was quite good too.

YS was more friendly and seemingly aimed at younger readers by the looks of things. Yet the content was wonderful (apart from some dodgy reviews).

I don't think AP's covers were really much cop but still YS and AP are the magazines that made me.

AP's covers were mostly shit. And anyone who thinks putting pictures of programmers on the cover of a games magazine needs shooting.

Or massive interviews with them inside. Or on websites. I really don't give a flying shite about what Game Developer A was thinking when he chose the colour palette of his shotting game.

I remember the cover of Amiga Computing Issue 71 (no pic unfortunately) as it had a feature in it about pornography on the Internet, and I was an impressionable teenager.

Honestly, did you use it for a desperation wank?

That's what weather forecasts are for.

It would be a very desperate wank indeed.

Yeah... cover your eyes... yeeeeeeeaaaaaah.

I always suspected you had a thing for Michael Fish.

http://amr.abime.net/amr_popup_picture. ... ize=358567
http://amr.abime.net/amr_popup_picture. ... ize=375117
http://amr.abime.net/amr_popup_picture. ... size=36372

Amiga action had cool covers, after changing their logo that is.

Those links aren't working.

bah. I can't remember which ones I picked, other than this one: http://amr.abime.net/issue_123
(Which was handily on the frontpage)

I think the first issue of Your Spectrum's cover is quite good. It seems to convey the mystery and excitement of computing at the time. And the girl is hott.