Amiga Power

Amiga Power

Amiga Power #65, September 1996, the final issue
Editor	Matt Bielby (May '91 - Jul '92) Mark Ramshaw (Aug '92 - Mar '93) Linda Barker (Apr '93 - Jan '94) Jonathan Davies (Apr '94 - Jun '95) Cam Winstanley (Jul '95 - Dec '95) Tim Norris (Mar '96 - Jun '96) Steve Farragher (Jul '96 - Sep '96)
Categories	Video game magazines
Frequency	Monthly
Circulation	55,173 (Jul-Dec '91) 60,184 (Jan-Jun '92) 50,222 (Jul-Dec '92) 54,184 (Jan-Jun '93) 54,124 (Jul-Dec '93) 48,147 (Jan-Jun '94) 46,326 (Jul-Dec '94) 30,486 (Jan-Jun '95) 18,704 (Jul-Dec '95)
First issue	May 1991
Final issue — Number	September 1996 65
Company	Future plc
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
ISSN	0961-7310

Amiga Power (or AP for short) was a monthly magazine about Amiga video games. It was published in the United Kingdom by Future plc, and ran for 65 issues, from May 1991 to September 1996.

It was in many ways the spiritual successor to Your Sinclair, which shared many of the same staff and had a similar sense of humour, amassing a loyal body of fans, some of whom still reminisce about the magazine and attempt to keep its spirit alive.

Amiga Power had a number of principles which comprised its philosophy regarding games. Like almost all Amiga magazines of the time, they marked games according to a percentage scale. However, Amiga Power firmly believed that the full range of this scale should be used when reviewing games. A completely average game, neither overly good nor bad, on this scale would therefore be awarded 50%. Stuart Campbell offered some rationale for this in his review of Kick Off '96 in the final issue of the magazine:

"Giving something like SWOS [Sensible World of Soccer] 95% is utterly devalued if you also give, for example, Rise of the Robots [a famously overhyped fighting game, rated 5% by the magazine] 92%. Percentage ratings are meaningless unless you use the full range, and you can't give credit where it's due if you're pretending that everything's good. What encouragement does that give developers to produce quality? They might as well knock it out at half the cost and in a third of the time if they're only going to get another 3% for doing it properly. Of course, the market will die much faster if people get continually stiffed by crap games, but hey - there's always another machine to move to and start the cycle again."

Amiga magazines at the time (as with most games magazines right up to the present day) tended to give "average" games marks of around 70%, and rarely below 50% except for very poor games. Because most people - including game publishers - were used to this method of grading, AP gained a reputation among publishers for being harsh and unfair. AP occasionally hinted that game reviewers were being given incentives by game PR divisions to mark games highly.