Commodore Force: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 7:23 pm
Off the top of my head, a few responses to questions/opinions I’ve noticed during my first visit to the site in ages.
COVERTAPES
The “at the printers” issue was going to feature, as Ian Osbourne correctly remembered, Laser Squad. I think we’d also persuaded Julian Gollop (the game’s creator) to let us include the separate mission pack, too. I can’t remember what else we had on there. I vaguely recall ongoing negotiations to publish Mayhem in Monsterland in some form, but I think the Apex boys were disappointed by the negligible sums of hard cash both Force and Format had to offer.
By the end, the covertape budget was tiny; I’m pretty sure it had been reduced to around a thousand pounds per month, maybe less. A significant amount of my time was spent tracking down people who owned the rights to old classics, then trying to persuade them that it was worth their while to accept five hundred quid in return for the non-exclusive right to publish Game X on the Commodore Force covertape(s). In the vast majority of instances, it wasn’t. I can remember trying to get Elite for months. I can’t remember who it was that I spoke to in the end, but he laughed long and hard when I told him how much I had to spend. This was a fairly typical response
Arranging covertapes was a soul-fucking, spirit-crushing chore: lots of tracking people down and, as we didn’t have email at Impact, endless phone conversations and bouts of “fax tennis”. Quite a few Commodore Force covertape games were bought in a deal Steve Shields arranged with Beau Jolly – remember their compilations? There were a few real gems, but many of the titles were substandard, and some were embarrassingly shite. I arranged to buy a few more of their (better) games when Steve left to launch Mega Machines. This deal included Barbarian 2, which seemed a bit of a scoop, but we discovered after the issue hit the stands that Kixx – US Gold’s budget label – was still selling it at retail. Moreover, Beau Jolly wasn’t technically in a position to sell it to us. Remember that abysmal Kixx advertorial? It was either that, or have the Barbarian 2 issue pulled from the shelves…
THE “AT THE PRINTERS” ISSUE
Can’t for the life of me remember what was in it, but it was definitely smaller: down to thirty-two pages, I think. A couple of weeks (or thereabouts) before Impact closed its doors, I was called into a meeting and told that I would, from that point forward, be editing Commodore Force on a freelance basis. I was to be given a modest copy budget every month, a reasonable boost to my salary – I crossed the 10k barrier! – and was told I’d have to do a fair amount of the work “in my own time”. Impact had bought Amiga Force back in-house from Computerfacts (the contract publishing firm, later known as Rapide, that had produced it for several issues), and I was given the reviews ed job in Nick Roberts’s new team.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but I’m pretty sure someone suggested that there was an issue “in production” in addition to the finished magazine at the printers. This isn’t strictly true: I hadn’t got around to starting it. Besides, I think we all knew that Impact was fucked by that point. I don’t think anyone really worked too hard over the last (very depressing) couple of weeks.
COMMODORE FORCE: “NOT VERY GOOD”
Agreed.
I joined Impact and worked on ZZAP! issue 90 at the age of seventeen, was promoted to deputy editor within seven or eight months (after a while writing for Amiga Force), then became editor while still just eighteen. I can remember Steve Shields was keen that I get the role, and I obviously represented a “cheap” option for the Impact management: bringing an editor in from outside the company would be expensive. I was obviously keen to get the promotion, too: it seemed like a great opportunity at the time.
Soon, though, I felt like a fraud, a textbook example of the Peter Principle: promoted to my level of incompetence. I just didn’t have sufficient experience or knowledge, and the gradual haemorrhaging of staff didn’t help. It was a struggle to put each issue together, hence the number of meaningless retrospective pieces.
It’s not that the team didn’t want (or couldn’t be arsed) to take the magazine in the direction in needed to go in; just that we didn’t have the time or resources. It’s really easy to look back now and say that we should have been covering homebrew games, software produced in other countries, the demo scene, and so forth, but we just didn’t have the contacts. We relied on Dutch contributor Remi Ebus – nice bloke, and certainly knowledgeable, but his written English was a nightmare to sub every month – for the PD/demo section every month, and Brian Strain (can’t remember his real name) for the tech pages. If so much was happening in the off-the-radar C64 world, why was no one getting in touch? Lacking internet access – we didn’t even have email at Impact – how could we find out? I’ll gladly hold my hands up in a “mea culpa” style and admit the absence of such content was ultimately my fault, but I really can’t see how a small and inexperienced team could have done more.
(Incidentally, we often lied on the flannel panel – I thought it important to indicate that more writers worked on the magazine.)
I can’t read Commodore Force: I threw my copies away a long time ago. It’s embarrassing to be reminded of how bad it (and therefore, I) was. For me, it’s akin to bumping into a drunk ex-girlfriend from my teens, and being loudly reminded of my nascent sexual development in front of family and friends, BUT WORSE. Some bits were okay, and it was better than the execrable Lucy Hickman-era ZZAP!, but not by an entirely comfortable margin. Compared to the “Star Wars” of the Rignall/Penn era, and the “Empire Strikes Back” of Gordo’s time in the chair, Commodore Force is a bit “Star Wars Holiday Special”, if you know what I mean.
Oddly enough, the magazine could have followed a very different path after the departure of Steve Shields. Stuart Campbell visited Impact and was interviewed for the role of Managing Editor for both Commodore Force and Amiga Force. I don’t think he really wanted the job; he was just shopping around. Still: I wonder how that would have worked out?
Any other questions?
James Price
COVERTAPES
The “at the printers” issue was going to feature, as Ian Osbourne correctly remembered, Laser Squad. I think we’d also persuaded Julian Gollop (the game’s creator) to let us include the separate mission pack, too. I can’t remember what else we had on there. I vaguely recall ongoing negotiations to publish Mayhem in Monsterland in some form, but I think the Apex boys were disappointed by the negligible sums of hard cash both Force and Format had to offer.
By the end, the covertape budget was tiny; I’m pretty sure it had been reduced to around a thousand pounds per month, maybe less. A significant amount of my time was spent tracking down people who owned the rights to old classics, then trying to persuade them that it was worth their while to accept five hundred quid in return for the non-exclusive right to publish Game X on the Commodore Force covertape(s). In the vast majority of instances, it wasn’t. I can remember trying to get Elite for months. I can’t remember who it was that I spoke to in the end, but he laughed long and hard when I told him how much I had to spend. This was a fairly typical response
Arranging covertapes was a soul-fucking, spirit-crushing chore: lots of tracking people down and, as we didn’t have email at Impact, endless phone conversations and bouts of “fax tennis”. Quite a few Commodore Force covertape games were bought in a deal Steve Shields arranged with Beau Jolly – remember their compilations? There were a few real gems, but many of the titles were substandard, and some were embarrassingly shite. I arranged to buy a few more of their (better) games when Steve left to launch Mega Machines. This deal included Barbarian 2, which seemed a bit of a scoop, but we discovered after the issue hit the stands that Kixx – US Gold’s budget label – was still selling it at retail. Moreover, Beau Jolly wasn’t technically in a position to sell it to us. Remember that abysmal Kixx advertorial? It was either that, or have the Barbarian 2 issue pulled from the shelves…
THE “AT THE PRINTERS” ISSUE
Can’t for the life of me remember what was in it, but it was definitely smaller: down to thirty-two pages, I think. A couple of weeks (or thereabouts) before Impact closed its doors, I was called into a meeting and told that I would, from that point forward, be editing Commodore Force on a freelance basis. I was to be given a modest copy budget every month, a reasonable boost to my salary – I crossed the 10k barrier! – and was told I’d have to do a fair amount of the work “in my own time”. Impact had bought Amiga Force back in-house from Computerfacts (the contract publishing firm, later known as Rapide, that had produced it for several issues), and I was given the reviews ed job in Nick Roberts’s new team.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but I’m pretty sure someone suggested that there was an issue “in production” in addition to the finished magazine at the printers. This isn’t strictly true: I hadn’t got around to starting it. Besides, I think we all knew that Impact was fucked by that point. I don’t think anyone really worked too hard over the last (very depressing) couple of weeks.
COMMODORE FORCE: “NOT VERY GOOD”
Agreed.
I joined Impact and worked on ZZAP! issue 90 at the age of seventeen, was promoted to deputy editor within seven or eight months (after a while writing for Amiga Force), then became editor while still just eighteen. I can remember Steve Shields was keen that I get the role, and I obviously represented a “cheap” option for the Impact management: bringing an editor in from outside the company would be expensive. I was obviously keen to get the promotion, too: it seemed like a great opportunity at the time.
Soon, though, I felt like a fraud, a textbook example of the Peter Principle: promoted to my level of incompetence. I just didn’t have sufficient experience or knowledge, and the gradual haemorrhaging of staff didn’t help. It was a struggle to put each issue together, hence the number of meaningless retrospective pieces.
It’s not that the team didn’t want (or couldn’t be arsed) to take the magazine in the direction in needed to go in; just that we didn’t have the time or resources. It’s really easy to look back now and say that we should have been covering homebrew games, software produced in other countries, the demo scene, and so forth, but we just didn’t have the contacts. We relied on Dutch contributor Remi Ebus – nice bloke, and certainly knowledgeable, but his written English was a nightmare to sub every month – for the PD/demo section every month, and Brian Strain (can’t remember his real name) for the tech pages. If so much was happening in the off-the-radar C64 world, why was no one getting in touch? Lacking internet access – we didn’t even have email at Impact – how could we find out? I’ll gladly hold my hands up in a “mea culpa” style and admit the absence of such content was ultimately my fault, but I really can’t see how a small and inexperienced team could have done more.
(Incidentally, we often lied on the flannel panel – I thought it important to indicate that more writers worked on the magazine.)
I can’t read Commodore Force: I threw my copies away a long time ago. It’s embarrassing to be reminded of how bad it (and therefore, I) was. For me, it’s akin to bumping into a drunk ex-girlfriend from my teens, and being loudly reminded of my nascent sexual development in front of family and friends, BUT WORSE. Some bits were okay, and it was better than the execrable Lucy Hickman-era ZZAP!, but not by an entirely comfortable margin. Compared to the “Star Wars” of the Rignall/Penn era, and the “Empire Strikes Back” of Gordo’s time in the chair, Commodore Force is a bit “Star Wars Holiday Special”, if you know what I mean.
Oddly enough, the magazine could have followed a very different path after the departure of Steve Shields. Stuart Campbell visited Impact and was interviewed for the role of Managing Editor for both Commodore Force and Amiga Force. I don’t think he really wanted the job; he was just shopping around. Still: I wonder how that would have worked out?
Any other questions?
James Price