>>Surely looking back, putting a mag together at that age, under that pressure and with those resources is something to be proud of, no? I'd have struggled putting together a half-decent newsletter, never mind a national mag.
You'd think so, but I actually regret it. I speak to ex-Future friends here in Bath, and I'm envious of the time they had to develop as writers. At Impact, as with many small publishing houses, the desire to write great copy was tempered by the need to fill pages: we had small teams, and no "real" freelance budgets. Moreover, there wasn't the culture of friendly competition that seemed to exist at Future. Reading the great Future magazines of their golden age - especially Amiga Power and Super Play - you got the impression that a natural "peer review" system had evolved: good copy praised, bad copy mocked, and people genuinely caring about what they (and their colleagues) wrote. There were some capable (even gifted) writers at Impact – Chris Haywood and Al Needham spring to mind, and Phil King, though far from ostentatious, deserved far more credit for his work; there were, of course, others – but these were spread between several magazines. I think the teams at Impact were big enough to get each issue out every month, but not much more.
Thinking about it, I’m not sure who Impact could have brought in to run Commodore Force. It almost certainly needed a real C64 aficionado with an interest in programming as well as experience in day-to-day editorial work. I’m almost positive that person didn’t exist. A more experienced, non-C64-savvy editor would probably have certainly tightened up the editorial, but not much else. Who knows?
>>I was Professor Brian Strain (real name Andrew Fisher, I think we talked on the phone a few times and wrote back and forth regularly).
Hey! Good to hear from you. Andrew Fisher: of course. My most humble apologies for not remembering your name.
>>What can I say, but with hindsight it *could have been better*. If we'd started more in-depth technical/utility stuff earlier, got better PD coverage in there earlier, avoided the covertape cr*p a bit better...
So why didn’t you suggest this at the time? Seriously, this was the problem: I think everyone knew that it needed to be better, but no one was willing (or cared enough) to stand up and do the whole “I’m Spartacus!” bit.
I wanted to do a whole two-tier approach to the tech side, with a “lite” tech column featuring type-in tricks and tips – easy sound coding, scrolling routines, clever effects, collision detection, tied together with some kind of running theme – along with a more in-depth section that would be accompanied by code on the covertape. However, this wasn’t something we could do in-house, and there just wasn’t a budget to pay anyone else to do it. I *did* ask, and I’m pleased to report that – at very least – the publisher was smiling as he told me to fuck off.
As for the covertape crap: a couple of grand a month – less as time went by – didn’t give us a great deal of bargaining power. Also, I was lumbered with around a dozen games that I really didn’t want to use from the original Beau Jolly deal. I tried to bury them, and was admonished by my publisher. What was I supposed to do?
>>I still have pride in what I did, but not always in what was published. (That sounds pedantic, I know, but I was only eighteen myself...)
Bitch.
I think that a different person gave your copy a once-over every month, hence the variable outcome. I vaguely remember feeling that your column featured too much foreplay, and not enough coding money-shots – I’m pretty sure I mentioned this at the time. The modular approach was fine, but we needed more type-in code, particularly fancy tricks; you know, little routines that would make people go “Woo!” and then try to incorporate them in their never-to-be-completed homebrew games. But hey: this was a *long* time ago, and we’d obviously do everything very differently now.
>>Are you in touch with any of the others? Miles, Steve, Ian, Rob? (I've e-mailed Ian Osborne recently, he's at Datel)
Miles and I were good mates before Ludlow (has anyone heard the story of how he applied to Impact? I can’t remember if we told it in the magazine), and he and I are still in regular contact. He’s currently editor of Cube magazine at Highbury Publishing (formerly Paragon). I completely lost touch with Steve “Geezer” Shields, sadly: a great bloke who taught me loads. I’ve not spoken to Rob or Ian since Impact closed.
James
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