Amiga Format

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Amiga Format
The cover of the final issue of Amiga Format (May 2000)
Editor	Ben Vost (At Closure)
Categories	Computer and video games
Frequency	Monthly
First Issue	July 1989
Final Issue — Date — Number	May 2000 136
Company	Future Publishing
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Website
ISSN	unknown

Amiga Format was a British computer magazine for Amiga computers, published by Future Publishing. The magazine lasted 136 issues from 1989 to 2000.

The magazine was formed when, in the wake of selling ACE to EMAP, Future split the dual-format title ST/Amiga Format into two separate publications (the other being ST Format). The magazine was edited by Bob Wade, Damien Noonan, Marcus Dyson, Steve Jarratt, Nick Veitch and finally Ben Vost. At the height of its success the magazines sold over 170,000 copies per month, topping 200,000 with its most successful ever issue.

Amiga Format can be thought of the "mother" or "big sister" magazine of the more infamous magazine Amiga Power, which it both predated and outlived. Whereas Amiga Power was strictly games-only, Amiga Format covered all aspects of Amiga computers, both hardware and software, both productivity and gaming uses. A further spin-off was Amiga Shopper, which dealt purely with the hardware and "serious" software side of the Amiga scene.

The magazine offered various multi-issue tutorials on different productivity software, such as C programming or LightWave graphics rendering. The last tutorial was cut short in the middle because of the cancellation of the magazine.

Amiga Format pioneered the concept of putting complete productivity software on a magazine coverdisk as a response to a moratorium on complete games titles being cover-mounted.

Amiga Format was the second-to-last regularly issued print magazine about the Amiga in the United Kingdom. The last was Amiga Active, which ran for 26 issues from October 1999, although Amiga Format was the only such magazine after CU Amiga Magazine's closure in October 1998 until the launch of Amiga Active.

[edit] Amiga Format features

A notable regular feature in the later stage of the magazine was Readers' Games. Here readers of the magazine could send in games they had programmed themselves, and the magazine staff would then publish a brief review of them. In the CD-ROM edition of the magazine, all the Readers' Games were also included on the covermount CD-ROM. Most of the games were written in AMOS BASIC or Blitz BASIC.

In one issue a competition was run to find the best game developed by a reader using a previously covermounted version of Blitz BASIC. A game called Total Wormage was entered by Andy Davidson but did not win – this game was later further developed and published by Team17 as the successful game, Worms.