In October 1998, readers of CU Amiga opened their magazine to a message few wanted to see. Editor Tony Horgan told them to make the most of the issue because it would be the last one they would ever receive. After years of covering games, hardware, graphics, music, productivity software, programming, expansion cards, CD-ROMs, and the uncertain future of the Amiga itself, one of Britain’s most important Amiga magazines was closing.
The circumstances made the ending especially bitter. CU Amiga was not disappearing because another Amiga publication had overtaken it. The magazine said that the latest circulation figures still made it the world’s best-selling Amiga magazine. The problem was that being first in a shrinking market was no longer enough. Sales and advertising could not support the cost of producing the kind of magazine that EMAP and its editorial staff wanted to publish. Rather than strip the publication down until little remained, the company chose to end it.
That October issue ended CU Amiga, but the history behind the title reached much further back. The magazine had spent roughly fifteen years following the changing fortunes of Commodore computers, beginning before the Amiga was even commercially available. Its story began with the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, survived the rise and fall of Commodore International, passed through the golden years of British Amiga culture, and ended as the Internet was beginning to replace some of the functions that computer magazines had performed for more than a decade.
Before CU Amiga There Was Commodore User
The roots of CU Amiga reached back to 1983 and a magazine called Commodore User. A pilot issue appeared in June of that year in connection with the Commodore Show at the Cunard International Hotel in Hammersmith. The first regular monthly issue followed in October 1983 under the Paradox Group, with Dennis Jarrett as editor.
It was a different computer world. The Commodore 64 was rapidly becoming one of the most important home computers of the decade, while the VIC-20 still had a substantial audience. The early Commodore User reflected that environment. Programming, hardware, business applications, utilities, and practical computing occupied a much larger place than the games-heavy approach that would become familiar later.
The connection with an even earlier publication was visible on the magazine itself. Commodore User incorporated Vic Computing, helping move readers of the older Commodore machine into a publication that could follow the company’s expanding range of computers.
The Paradox period did not last long. By the October 1984 issue, Commodore User identified itself as an EMAP publication. EMAP Business and Computer Publications was also involved with other important British computer magazines, placing Commodore User inside a growing publishing operation that understood the expanding home-computer market.
For much of the 1980s the Commodore 64 remained central to the magazine, but the technology surrounding it was changing. The Amiga offered graphics, sound, multitasking, and multimedia possibilities that were dramatically different from the eight-bit machines that had defined the earlier home-computer boom. As Amiga ownership increased, its presence inside Commodore User became increasingly difficult to treat as merely another section of the magazine.
Eventually, the magazine itself began changing around the new machine.
From Commodore User to CU Amiga
The transformation did not happen in a single month. The surviving covers show a publication gradually changing its identity as the Amiga became more important to its readers.
At the end of 1988 it was still recognizably Commodore User, covering both the Commodore 64 and Amiga. In early 1989, the branding increasingly emphasized the initials CU and the words Amiga and 64. By July 1989 the title had become CU Amiga-64, a name that revealed exactly where the magazine stood. It had one foot in Commodore’s extraordinarily successful eight-bit past and another in the company’s 16-bit future.
By March 1990, the decision had effectively been made. The 64 disappeared from the title and CU Amiga emerged as a magazine devoted to the Amiga.
Steve James became editor during the transition. He was followed by Dan Slingsby, Alan Dykes, and finally Tony Horgan. Although those editors brought different personalities and priorities to the publication, the changes in leadership occurred alongside a much larger transformation in what owning an Amiga meant.
Calling March 1990 the beginning of CU Amiga is therefore accurate, but it tells only part of the story. It was not a completely unrelated magazine suddenly appearing on British newsstands. It was the latest stage of a publication that had been reporting on Commodore computers since 1983.
That long lineage became one of CU Amiga’s unusual strengths. The magazine did not simply observe the rise of the Amiga from outside. It changed alongside Commodore’s users.
More Than a Games Magazine
Games were an essential part of CU Amiga, and the magazine covered many of the titles that came to define the machine. Yet reducing it to a games magazine misses much of what made it valuable.
The Amiga existed in an unusual space between home computer, games machine, creative workstation, and enthusiast platform. CU Amiga reflected all of those identities. Readers could encounter game reviews alongside articles about graphics packages, animation, music, modems, hard drives, programming, video production, public-domain software, and new hardware.
Issues from the middle of the 1990s could move from games into subjects such as LightWave, Deluxe Paint, CD-ROM technology, graphics hardware, desktop video, communications, and the Amiga 4000. The magazine’s long-running art coverage also showcased work created by Amiga users rather than treating readers only as consumers of commercial software. The surviving Amiga Graphics Archive preserves examples from the magazine’s Art Gallery section, including work from throughout the early and middle 1990s.
That broader approach became increasingly important as the commercial games market weakened. A reader who kept an Amiga because it remained useful for graphics, music, productivity, programming, video, or experimentation still had reasons to buy CU Amiga even when fewer major games were appearing.
By the magazine’s last years, technical material had become one of its defining strengths. In the final issue, the Techno Tragedies column argued that under Tony Horgan the magazine had moved closer to becoming the technically authoritative publication the Amiga community needed. The same retrospective remembered its enthusiasm for do-it-yourself electronics and even noted an issue that had carried a printed circuit board on the cover.
For a machine with an unusually dedicated enthusiast community, that mattered. CU Amiga was increasingly not just telling readers what to buy. It was helping them find new things to do with computers they already owned.
The Cover Disk Becomes Part of the Magazine
One of the clearest ways to see the changing economics of British computer magazines is to look at what was attached to their covers.
In May 1990, only a few months after the new CU Amiga identity appeared, the magazine began an all-Amiga cover disk program. The first collection included the complete games ST Bash and Gravattack. The magazine promised that Amiga cover disks would continue each month.
They did, and the ambition soon increased.
By 1991, issues could arrive with two disks. Demos sat beside utilities and complete programs. Commercial software that had once been sold separately could eventually appear as a magazine freebie. By February 1995, CU Amiga was celebrating its one hundredth cover disk, with Directory Opus 4 among the attractions.
The surviving physical media demonstrates how extensive the program became. The Centre for Computing History preserves a substantial sequence of CU Amiga disks, including the early collections and long runs of later numbered releases.
These disks changed what readers expected from a computer magazine. Purchasing an issue was no longer only a way to obtain information. The magazine itself could provide software that went directly into the reader’s machine.
That relationship helped computer magazines become unusually tangible parts of gaming and computing culture. A review might be read once or twice, but the disk taped to the cover could remain in a box beside the computer for years.
CU Amiga at Its Peak
By the early 1990s, the Amiga magazine market had become fiercely competitive. Britain supported numerous publications devoted wholly or partly to the platform, and they competed not only on writing and reviews but also on page counts, cover disks, exclusives, design, and increasingly elaborate giveaways.
CU Amiga prospered in that environment.
In October 1993, the magazine announced what it described as its highest ever ABC figure, with audited circulation reaching 111,408 copies per month. For a publication devoted to a single computer family, the figure demonstrates just how large the Amiga audience had become.
At that level, an Amiga magazine was not an obscure enthusiast newsletter. More than one hundred thousand copies could be moving through the market each month, with each issue connecting software publishers, hardware companies, retailers, developers, advertisers, and readers.
The pages themselves now form a remarkable record of that economy. Advertisements reveal what systems and upgrades cost. Reviews document games at the moment of release. Editorials capture the expectations surrounding new machines. Reader letters preserve arguments that mattered to the community before the outcome was known.
Looking backward, it is easy to treat the decline of Commodore and the Amiga as inevitable. Reading CU Amiga chronologically produces a different impression. For years, the future remained open.
Then Commodore collapsed.
The Magazine Outlives Commodore
On April 29, 1994, Commodore International announced that it was going out of business and beginning an orderly liquidation. For Amiga owners, the collapse created immediate uncertainty over new computers, software support, replacement parts, and the future of the platform itself. Contemporary reporting described users turning to electronic bulletin boards to ask whether anyone would rescue the technology.
For CU Amiga, this created an extraordinary problem. It was a magazine built around a computer whose manufacturer had effectively disappeared.
Yet the Amiga did not disappear with Commodore.
German computer company Escom acquired key Commodore assets in 1995 and established Amiga Technologies. Amiga 1200 production returned, giving supporters reason to believe that the platform might have another life. Escom itself then entered bankruptcy in 1996, once again leaving the Amiga’s future uncertain. Gateway 2000 announced its acquisition of Amiga Technologies assets in 1997, including patents, trademarks, and trade names.
Each ownership change created another cycle of optimism, speculation, delay, and uncertainty.
Throughout it, CU Amiga continued publishing.
This is one of the most remarkable parts of its history. The magazine ultimately survived Commodore itself by more than four years. During that time, the publication increasingly chronicled not a normal mass-market computer platform but a community trying to sustain a machine through upgrades, third-party hardware, independent software, public-domain programs, Internet resources, and repeated promises of a successor.
From Floppy Disk to CD-ROM
The magazine’s physical format changed with that community.
By the middle of the 1990s, CD-ROM drives were becoming increasingly important, and CU Amiga began moving beyond the capacity limits of floppy disks. The November 1995 issue represented a major step. Readers could purchase a CD-ROM edition containing an Aminet CD with more than 600 MB of Amiga material, alongside software, demos, images, music samples, and other files.
Six hundred megabytes was an enormous amount of material compared with the capacity of the floppy disks readers had been receiving only a few years earlier.
The CD approach continued and became a regular part of the magazine. The Centre for Computing History preserves numerous CU Amiga Super CD-ROM releases from 1997 and 1998. Its collection includes discs associated with issues from August 1997 through September 1998, covering games, utilities, mods, websites, demos, and specialist software.
The final issue looked back on that experiment with pride. Its retrospective claimed that CU Amiga had been the first magazine to carry a regular CD-ROM cover disk. Whether encountered as games, graphics, utilities, Internet files, or software archives, those discs extended the magazine beyond printed pages and made it a distribution system for the Amiga community itself.
CU Amiga Meets the Internet
There was another transformation taking place at the same time, one that would eventually change computer magazines far beyond the Amiga market.
CU Amiga went online.
Its surviving website provides a snapshot of how a print magazine approached the web during the late 1990s. There were areas for news, the current issue, back issues, staff information, subscriptions, artwork, features, and help with cover CD-ROMs. Readers could use email and mailing lists to communicate with the magazine and with one another.
For much of the home-computer era, magazines had served as communication networks. Developers announced products through them. Readers asked technical questions through letters. Companies advertised hardware and software in their pages. Reviews helped people decide what to purchase, and public-domain sections helped users discover programs they might otherwise never encounter.
The Internet could perform many of those functions far more quickly.
The final CU Amiga demonstrates that the staff understood the transition. Neil Bothwick, who worked on the magazine’s CDs and communications material, wrote that online forums and the CU Amiga mailing list provided immediate feedback from readers. He described the loss of the magazine partly as the loss of a communication channel between users, developers, dealers, and others in the Amiga world, while encouraging readers to remain connected online.
In that sense, the end of CU Amiga belonged to two overlapping historical changes. The Amiga market was shrinking, but the role of computer magazines was changing too.
Why CU Amiga Closed
The final collapse was not mysterious.
On August 17, 1998, CU Amiga announced through its website that the October issue would be the last. Tony Horgan explained that the magazine had recently become unprofitable and that EMAP saw little prospect of an immediate recovery.
The timing carried a painful irony. According to the magazine, official circulation figures released the same day continued to show CU Amiga as the world’s best-selling Amiga magazine. Being the leader, however, did not matter if the overall market had become too small to support the cost of publication.
EMAP could theoretically have reduced those costs. The magazine could have lost pages, staff, disks, investment, and production quality. Horgan’s closure FAQ made clear that the publisher and editorial team rejected that approach. They believed that continuously reducing the magazine would eventually produce something no longer worth its cover price.
Nor did EMAP intend to sell the name to a smaller publisher prepared to operate it on a minimal budget. The company chose instead to close the magazine while it could still produce an issue the staff considered worthy of the title. Subscribers were promised refunds for issues they would no longer receive.
The wider numbers tell the rest of the story. In the final issue, one retrospective estimated that Amiga-magazine readership had fallen to roughly one tenth of its peak. Publications including Amiga Computing, Amiga User International, Amiga Shopper, and Amiga Power had already disappeared. CU Amiga was joining them.
The machine still had devoted users. It still had developers. It still had software and hardware projects. What it no longer had was a mass market large enough to sustain the publishing industry that had grown around it during the early 1990s.
The Final Issue
The October 1998 issue consequently reads as both a normal computer magazine and a historical document.
Games were still previewed and reviewed. Technical subjects remained. Advertisers were still selling Amiga hardware and software. Yet throughout the issue there was an awareness that an era was ending.
Horgan thanked readers and described editing the magazine as a privilege. Elsewhere, contributors looked back at the publication and at the repeated crises that had struck the Amiga. Commodore, Escom, Gateway, software piracy, disappearing developers, publishers, and changing users had all been blamed at different points for the platform’s difficulties.
The final writers resisted reducing that complicated history to one culprit.
Most importantly, they did not declare the Amiga dead.
The magazine was closing because its economics no longer worked. That was different from saying every Amiga in the world had suddenly become useless. The closure FAQ reminded readers that their computers and software would continue working after CU Amiga disappeared from newsagents. Horgan described the magazine as a point of contact for the community, but not the community itself.
That distinction proved important.
Why CU Amiga Still Matters
Today, CU Amiga is valuable for reasons that extend well beyond nostalgia.
Its issues preserve the history of a computing platform month by month. They record games when they were new rather than classics, hardware when it was expensive rather than collectible, companies when they were still operating, and predictions before anyone knew whether they would come true.
They also document something broader about computer culture.
The magazine began in an age when home-computer owners often typed programs from printed pages. It lived through the rise of increasingly sophisticated games, affordable multimedia hardware, graphics packages, cover disks, CD-ROMs, electronic bulletin boards, and eventually the World Wide Web.
Its own identity changed along the way. Commodore User had begun with the VIC-20 and Commodore 64. The publication followed its audience toward the Amiga, slowly changed its name, abandoned the 64, expanded its cover-disk operation, embraced CDs, and finally established an online presence.
Even the surviving physical objects tell that story. Museums and private archives now preserve issues, floppy disks, CDs, advertisements, artwork, and other materials that once seemed disposable. The Centre for Computing History holds examples of both CU Amiga magazines and their accompanying media, while large digital collections allow readers to explore much of the publication again.
Tony Horgan later returned to the story in interviews about his years with the publication, including a 2019 episode of The Retro Hour devoted to the magazine’s rise, successful years, and closure. These firsthand recollections complement the surviving issues, but the magazines themselves remain the richest record because they capture the Amiga world while it was still happening.
When CU Amiga disappeared in October 1998, it closed a publishing history that had begun with Commodore User fifteen years earlier. During that span, Commodore machines had moved from the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 to the Amiga, from cassette tapes and floppy disks to hard drives and CD-ROMs, and from printed listings and reader letters toward online archives and instant communication.
Few publications followed that entire transformation from inside the community.
That is what makes CU Amiga more than another discontinued computer magazine. Its pages preserve the story of how one generation discovered home computing, watched a machine become a cultural phenomenon, survived the company that created it, and continued using it long after the rest of the technology industry had moved on.
The magazine ended.
The history inside it did not.
Sources & Further Reading
CU Amiga. August 1991. Issue 18. London: EMAP. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/CU_AMIGA/PDF_TXT/CU_AMIGA_Issue_018_1991_Aug.pdf.
CU Amiga. August 1994. Issue 54. London: EMAP Images. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/CU_AMIGA/PDF_TXT/CU_AMIGA_Issue_054_1994_Aug.pdf.
CU Amiga. November 1995. Issue 69. London: EMAP Images. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/CU_AMIGA/PDF_TXT/CU_AMIGA_Issue_069_1995_Nov.pdf.
CU Amiga. February 1996. Issue 72. London: EMAP Images. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/CU_AMIGA/PDF_TXT/CU_AMIGA_Issue_072_1996_Feb.pdf.
CU Amiga. January 1997. Issue 83. London: EMAP Images. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/CU_AMIGA/PDF_TXT/CU_AMIGA_Issue_083_1997_Jan.pdf.
CU Amiga. October 1998. Final issue. London: EMAP Images. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/CU_AMIGA/PDF_TXT/CU_AMIGA_Issue_104_1998_Oct.pdf.
Commodore User. November 1984. Issue 14. London: EMAP Business and Computer Publications. https://electronicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/Magazine/C/Commodore%20User%20UK/Commodore%20User%20Issue%2014%201984%20Nov%20c20090623%20%5B112%5D.pdf.
Internet Archive. “CU Amiga Magazine.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine.
Internet Archive. “Commodore User Magazine.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://archive.org/details/commodoreuser-magazine.
Horgan, Tony. “CU Amiga Closure FAQ.” CU Amiga. 1998. https://www.cu-amiga.co.uk/edit.html.
Horgan, Tony. “CU Amiga Magazine: The Inside Story with Tony Horgan.” Interview by Dan Wood and Ravi Abbott. The Retro Hour, episode 155. January 2019. https://audioboom.com/posts/7140093-cu-amiga-magazine-the-inside-story-with-tony-horgan-the-retro-hour-ep155.
Horgan, Tony. Interview by Amiga Addict. YouTube video, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRHeUYt2DHs.
Total Amiga/Clubbed. Issue 1. 1998. https://www.totalamiga.org/pdf/totalamiga_1.pdf.
Code Like It’s 198x. “CU Amiga.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://code198x.com/vault/magazines/cu-amiga/.
Code Like It’s 198x. “EMAP.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://code198x.com/vault/companies/emap/.
Out-of-Print Archive. “The Rise and Fall of EMAP’s Videogame Magazine Empire.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.outofprintarchive.com/articles/features/out-of-print/emap.html.
Centre for Computing History. “DB007 CU Amiga Coverdisks.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/55181/DB007-CU-Amiga-Coverdisks/.
Centre for Computing History. “CU Amiga Magazine 1995.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/sec/29812/CU-Amiga-Magazine-1995/.
Centre for Computing History. “CU Amiga Magazine April 1993.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/66194/CU-Amiga-Magazine-April-1993/.
Centre for Computing History. “CU Amiga Magazine Super CD-ROM 24.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/71719/CU%20Amiga%20Magazine%20Super%20CD-ROM%2024/.
WorldCat. “CU Amiga.” OCLC 1063925313. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://search.worldcat.org/title/CU-Amiga/oclc/1063925313.
Datassette. “CU Amiga.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://datassette.org/pt-br/revistas/informatica/uk-reino-unido/cu-amiga.
Abandonware France. “Commodore User / CU Amiga.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.abandonware-france.org/bibliotheque/magazines/commodore-user-cu-amiga-163/.
Amiga Graphics Archive. “CU Amiga.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://amiga.lychesis.net/publications/CUAmiga.html.
RetroMags. “CU Amiga.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/cu-amiga/.
Napieralski, Mikolai. “10 Forgotten Gaming Magazines That Are Worth Remembering.” Time Extension. June 10, 2024. https://www.timeextension.com/features/best-of-2024-10-forgotten-gaming-magazines-that-are-worth-remembering.
Associated Press. “Commodore Bankruptcy.” April 29, 1994. Reproduced by Commodore.ca. https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/commodore-bankruptcy-associated-press-1994/.
Stets, Dan. “Attempting a Comeback for the Amiga.” The Washington Post, June 26, 1995. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/06/26/attempting-a-comeback-for-the-amiga/be9bc705-920a-4c83-a85c-7333797429c9/.
Gateway 2000. “Gateway 2000 Acquires Assets of Amiga Technologies GmbH.” Press release. March 27, 1997. Reproduced by the Champaign-Urbana Computer Users Group. https://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1997/at970327.
Lazarus, David. “Amiga Fans Buoyed by Pending Gateway Deal.” Wired, March 28, 1997. https://www.wired.com/1997/03/amiga-fans-buoyed-by-pending-gateway-deal/.
VIC-20 Listings. “Commodore User.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.vic20listings.freeolamail.com/mag_commuser.html.