Ian Osborne wrote:
Safe office? I remember the eight-bit mags being used as a training exercise for novice writers. The quality went down, but with the eight-bit era past its Autumn years and getting ready for Christmas, it was the right strategy.
Same office. Sorry, was abit groggy this morning.
I don't recall much of a writing decline in YS. The main problem with the later years of AA was most of it was freelanced out to people that were experts but not really writers. Likewise the in-house staff didn't really care about the machine itself either. It was old, unsexy and they had little working knowledge of it. Even when Jon Nash/Pillar (whatever he was that week) wrote for AA it was probably his worst work. His review of Crystal Kingdom Dizzy reads like the office cleaner knocked it up for him.
Additionally AA was always going to be on a downhill slope after the Lawton and Peters era. Both were excellent writers who knew the machine inside out. They also knew their audience. It's often forgotten that AA only became the market leading CPC magazine after Rod Lawton took charge. If you read AA's before about issue 50 you're never quite sure what the magazine wants to be. You had this mix of kids and adults reading the mag and they worked out that the mag could be fun without alienating anyone.