Saltimbanco

AMIGA POWER did not stand alone in the field of Amiga games magazines. Well, yes, it did, but you know what we mean.

When gentleman editor Jonathan Davies left to introduce the concept of humour to PC Gamer, we thought at least he'd be happy to have a worthy opponent in the extremely silly PC Zone. AP's direct rivals, after all, were ("Currant Bun" - Ed), which, agonisingly, was once an amusing and honourable foe, but which had decided to be lazy and slightly dim instead, and ("Michael Jackson" - Ed), which was crap. If you looked at the Amiga from a global perspective we were also scrapping for hearts and minds with France's Amiga Concept, which fought dashed underhandedly, the dizzyingly successful Amiga Joker from Germany, America's endearingly clubby Amiga Game Zone and Amiga User International as based, well, everywhere.

Technical rivals (in the sense they covered games as well as unspeakably tedious technical things - clever wording, we know) included the consistently mediocre CU Amiga and Future's own Amiga Format, but our hand was steady. We had Ask AP, after all.

But that's enough about Amiga mags. What about AP2, eh? Or Private Eye? The famous satirical mag has been running for 35 years or so, and was clearly read religiously by Future's founding fathers. Witness, for example, (You've done that. - Ed) or, indeed, (That's enough about X. - Ed) - the mag practically invented the Ed Comment. Pity they're all dying off, really.

AMIGA POWER, however, owes a greater debt to possibly the most famous computer mag of all time. The crap - the funky - the skillo in a sort of way Your Sinclair! Bless it. Vast herds of AP people started on YS, and the mags were certainly closer than any two others ever in the history of all things, except Sega Zone and Game Zone, and Sega Zone and AP, and Game Zone and YS, and Super Thriller and Western Super Thriller, but that was because they were the same comic, merely changing names after issue 34 to reflect the tastes of its readers and not strictly relevant, but adds local colour.