When the first issue of Amiga Format appeared in the summer of 1989, editor Bob Wade welcomed readers to a publication caught in an unusual position. It was, he explained, the first issue of a new magazine that already had thirteen issues behind it.
The contradiction made perfect sense to anyone who had been following Britain’s rapidly expanding computer press. For the previous year, Future Publishing had served owners of two of the era’s most important 16-bit computers through ST/Amiga Format. By 1989, however, the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were developing large enough audiences, distinct enough identities, and passionate enough communities that putting them together in one magazine increasingly made less sense.
Future divided the publication. Atari owners received ST Format. Amiga owners received Amiga Format.
What followed was much more than another computer magazine. Over the next eleven years, Amiga Format would chart almost the entire commercial life of the Amiga as a mainstream home computer. It grew from an audited circulation of about 40,000 copies per month to more than 161,000, helped turn the floppy disk attached to a magazine cover into an important part of British computer publishing, witnessed the collapse of Commodore, adapted to the CD-ROM era, and continued publishing long after many observers had declared the Amiga finished.
By the time Issue 136 appeared in May 2000, Amiga Format had become something more unusual still. It was not simply a magazine covering the Amiga. It had become one of the surviving institutions holding the Amiga community together.
A New Magazine With Thirteen Issues Behind It
The story began with ST/Amiga Format, launched by Future Publishing in July 1988. The magazine tried to serve users of both the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, two machines that shared similarities but were becoming fierce competitors in the European home-computer market.
The experiment lasted thirteen issues.
In the July 1989 edition, Future announced that the combined magazine would be divided. Publisher Greg Ingham argued that separate publications would allow owners of each machine to receive more relevant articles and more software on the disks supplied with the magazines. Amiga Format was scheduled to reach shops on July 13, carrying an August cover date, with ST Format following shortly afterward. The complete thirteen-issue run of ST/Amiga Format survives in archival collections, making the transition unusually well documented.
The first Amiga Format immediately made its ambitions clear. Its introductory editorial promised coverage of graphics, music, games, desktop publishing, hardware, video, and essentially every other major part of the Amiga world. Bob Wade served as editor, Greg Ingham as publisher, and specialists such as Jon Bates and Brian Larkman contributed expertise in music and graphics.
This breadth was important. Amiga Format was never intended to be only a games magazine.
The Amiga could play Kick Off, The New Zealand Story, and the latest arcade conversions, but owners were also using the machine for animation, music production, desktop publishing, programming, video work, and experimentation with hardware. The magazine tried to reflect that identity. Its first issue even arrived with 880K of Amiga programs on its cover disk, presenting software as part of the magazine itself rather than merely something discussed inside its pages.
More Than a Games Magazine
That decision to cover nearly every side of the Amiga became one of the defining characteristics of Amiga Format.
Games remained enormously important. Reviews used percentage scores and considered elements such as graphics, sound, the amount of thought required, and how compelling a game was to continue playing. Exceptional releases could receive the magazine’s Format Gold award. In the launch issue, Anco’s Kick Off received 91 percent and a Gold award, a verdict that immediately demonstrated another enduring part of computer-magazine culture: readers were perfectly willing to argue with the reviewers.
By Issue 3, one reader was already objecting to the score.
Yet a typical Amiga Format could take readers far beyond the latest games. A single issue might move from an arcade conversion to memory expansion, then to animation software, MIDI equipment, a graphics package, programming advice, public-domain software, printers, desktop publishing, or some unusual peripheral that promised to stretch the Amiga into another field.
This gave the magazine a broader identity than some of the publications that later shared Future Publishing’s Amiga market. It could speak to someone who had bought an Amiga primarily to play games and to someone trying to create artwork, write software, produce music, or use the machine for work.
Future later summarized its own publishing philosophy in promotional material with promises of stronger reviews, clearer design, useful advice, relevance, and interaction with readers. Those ideas were visible throughout Amiga Format. It was colorful and energetic, but it also expected the reader to actually do things with the computer.
The Cover Disk Becomes Part of the Experience
Perhaps nothing symbolized Amiga Format more effectively than the disk attached to its cover.
Cover-mounted software was not unique to the magazine, but Future embraced the concept aggressively. Instead of buying a magazine only to read about software, readers could take something home and immediately load it into their machines. Demos allowed them to try games before buying them. Utilities gave the magazine practical value. Public-domain programs exposed readers to software they might never encounter in a shop.
The January 1991 issue offered an especially memorable combination. Its disk included a playable Lemmings demo as well as the complete commercial game Interphase.
Giving away full commercial software, however, created an obvious problem for the companies trying to sell games at retail.
When Amiga Format looked back on 1991 in Issue 30, the magazine acknowledged the tension. If magazines could give readers software worth the equivalent of a full-priced game simply for buying an issue, publishers worried about what that would do to the normal software market. An agreement was eventually reached that restricted the practice, and Amiga Format recorded the result plainly in its retrospective: magazines would no longer keep giving away commercial games in the same way.
The episode showed just how influential the cover disk had become. It was no longer a novelty tucked onto the front of a magazine. It had become important enough to cause friction between the computer press and the software industry.
The disk also helped transform magazines from passive reading material into something closer to monthly software packages. A reader could study an article, load the accompanying program, experiment with it, and then write to the magazine about the experience. In an era before fast home internet connections, that relationship was enormously important.
From 40,000 to 161,256
The circulation figures printed in Amiga Format provide one of the clearest measurements of just how quickly the Amiga market expanded.
For July through December 1989, the magazine recorded an audited average monthly sale of 40,371 copies. During the first half of 1990, that figure climbed to 57,123. By the second half of the year it had reached 81,234.
Then the growth accelerated.
The first half of 1991 produced an average of 115,158 copies. The second half reached 130,143. During the first half of 1992, Amiga Format reached its extraordinary high point: an audited average circulation of 161,256 copies per issue.
That meant the magazine had approximately quadrupled its circulation from the figure reported for its first months on sale.
The staff knew they were publishing something unusually large. In Issue 30, the magazine looked back on the moment its sales had passed 115,000 and described itself as the world’s best-selling Amiga magazine. By September 1992, with circulation around 160,000 per month, Amiga Format compared its readership with that of Q, one of Britain’s best-known music magazines.
For a publication devoted to one model family of home computer, that scale was remarkable.
The numbers also demonstrate how central magazines were to computer culture before the web. Amiga owners looking for news, reviews, demonstrations, technical support, advertisements, mail-order companies, programming instruction, and information about new hardware could find much of that world gathered between the covers of a monthly magazine.
A Family of Amiga Magazines
The success of the Amiga market eventually allowed Future Publishing to divide its readership even further.
Bob Wade, who had edited Amiga Format from its beginning, moved to a new Future publication called Amiga Shopper. A preview issue distributed with Amiga Format in 1991 presented Amiga Shopper as the serious Amiga magazine, concentrating more heavily on hardware, productivity, programming, and technical subjects. Amiga Power, launched during the same period, moved in the opposite direction by concentrating on games.
That left Amiga Format occupying the broad middle.
It was still interested in games, but it did not surrender graphics, music, hardware, desktop publishing, or serious software. Rather than being weakened by the specialist titles, its enormous early 1990s circulation suggests that there was a large audience for a general Amiga magazine.
The arrangement also showed how large the market had become. Future could support a general Amiga magazine, a serious Amiga magazine, and a games-focused Amiga magazine at the same time.
Such abundance would not last forever.
The Editors Behind Amiga Format
Although the magazine maintained a recognizable identity, its editorial leadership changed repeatedly.
Bob Wade remained through the early years before Damien Noonan took over in March 1991. Marcus Dyson, who had worked his way through the magazine from its art side, became editor in March 1993. Steve Jarratt was introduced as the new editor in June 1994. Nick Veitch assumed the position in March 1995 and stayed for several years, while Ben Vost eventually became editor during the magazine’s final period.
These changes mattered because British computer magazines of the period often reflected the personalities of the relatively small teams producing them. Editors had to manage reviews, features, reader relationships, cover disks, deadlines, freelancers, design decisions, industry contacts, and the constant pressure to produce another issue only weeks after finishing the previous one.
Jarratt later offered an unusually candid assessment of his own period at Amiga Format. He recalled taking over a successful publication with a stable readership and recognized that an incoming editor had to be careful not to destroy what the previous team had built. He also admitted that he was not as devoted to the Amiga as he believed an editor of such a specialist publication needed to be, and felt the magazine may have suffered during his tenure.
That reflection reveals something important about the specialist press. Readers were not simply buying pages of information. They expected the people producing those pages to understand their machine and their community.
The Magazine That Helped Lead to Worms
One of Amiga Format’s strangest contributions to video game history began with a programming competition.
The magazine encouraged readers not only to consume software but to create it. During the early 1990s, a young programmer named Andy Davidson entered a game called Total Wormage in an Amiga Format coding competition.
It did not win.
That losing entry eventually became Worms.
Davidson later demonstrated the game to Team17 at the European Computer Trade Show. The company recognized its potential and signed the project, eventually releasing Worms in 1995. Team17’s own history confirms that Total Wormage had originally been submitted to an Amiga Format coding contest before Davidson took it elsewhere.
The connection became even more direct when Team17 temporarily lost Davidson’s contact information. According to later accounts from the company, staff contacted Amiga Format, the magazine that had received his competition entry, to find him again.
It is difficult to find a better illustration of the role a magazine could play in that era. Amiga Format did not develop Worms, and its competition did not even select Davidson’s game as the winner, yet the publication had created a pathway through which an unknown home programmer could put his work in front of people connected to the industry.
A discarded competition entry became one of the most enduring British game franchises of the 1990s.
Commodore Collapses, Amiga Format Carries On
The greatest challenge came not from another magazine but from the company that made the computer.
On April 29, 1994, Commodore International announced that it was entering liquidation. Contemporary reports described a company unable to continue normal operations, leaving Amiga owners worried about future machines, software, replacement parts, and support. The Washington Post captured the immediate uncertainty among users who suddenly found themselves wondering whether the technology around which they had built their computing lives still had a commercial future.
For an Amiga magazine, the implications were obvious.
The computer it covered had lost its manufacturer.
Yet Amiga Format did not close.
Its audited circulation for the first half of 1994 remained 132,137 copies per issue, an impressive number but already below the 1992 peak. For July through December 1994, circulation dropped to 108,144. During the first half of 1995, it fell more sharply to 75,854.
The decline reflected a market facing extraordinary uncertainty, but the continued publication of the magazine also demonstrated the resilience of the Amiga community. Commodore’s disappearance did not instantly make millions of existing computers stop functioning. Owners still wanted software, upgrades, technical advice, games, and information about what might happen to the platform.
German computer company Escom eventually purchased Commodore’s core assets and Amiga technology in 1995 and attempted to restart production. The ownership story would remain turbulent, but for Amiga Format there was still a readership to serve.
From Floppy Disks to CD-ROM
The changing magazine also reflected changes in computing technology.
For years the floppy disk had been central to the Amiga Format experience. By the middle of the 1990s, however, CD-ROM offered vastly more storage. Software collections, demonstrations, graphics, multimedia material, and other files that would have required stacks of floppy disks could fit onto a single disc.
Issue 85, published in June 1996, introduced an Amiga Format CD-ROM edition alongside the traditional floppy version. The staff described the first CD as an experimental project.
The transition represented more than a bigger cover-mounted storage medium.
By 1996, the Amiga existed in a very different market from the one Amiga Format had entered in 1989. PCs were becoming stronger gaming and multimedia machines. New consoles such as the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn had transformed consumer expectations. CD-ROM had gone from exotic technology to an increasingly normal way of distributing large quantities of digital material.
Amiga Format adapted by giving readers more software and data through the same basic model it had used from the beginning: put something useful on the cover and give the owner another reason to keep using the machine.
For Amiga users without reliable internet access, those discs could function as substantial monthly deliveries of software and information.
The Long Decline
Survival did not mean that the market had recovered.
The circulation figures became a record of contraction.
The magazine averaged 75,854 copies during the first half of 1995. By the first half of 1996, the number was 42,655. In the first half of 1997 it fell to 28,325. During the second half of that year, it stood at 22,175.
The first half of 1998 produced an average of 19,220. For the final six months of 1998, the audited figure was 14,644.
Those numbers tell one of the most important stories in Amiga history more effectively than nostalgia can.
The community had not disappeared, but it had become smaller.
By the late 1990s, publishing an Amiga magazine required serving enthusiasts who were increasingly maintaining and upgrading an aging platform rather than participating in a mass consumer market. Every surviving developer, dealer, hardware company, user group, and magazine mattered more because there were fewer of them.
Competitors disappeared. Amiga Power ended in 1996. Amiga Shopper followed. By the end of the decade, the newsstands that had once supported a crowded field of Amiga publications looked very different.
Still, Amiga Format continued appearing every month.
That persistence became part of its identity.
The Last Issue
In March 2000, editor Ben Vost informed readers that Amiga Format was coming to an end.
His message conveyed both frustration and sadness. The Amiga community still existed, but the commercial base supporting a professionally produced monthly magazine had become too small. In the final issue, Vost wrote that the Amiga market was “no longer strong enough to support a magazine like AF.”
Issue 136 appeared with a May 2000 cover date.
The magazine announced its final CD, its final floppy disks, and its farewell. The Centre for Computing History catalogs the May 2000 publication as Issue 136, providing an institutional record of the end of the original run.
There was an unavoidable symmetry to the moment.
In 1989, Amiga Format had arrived because the Amiga market was becoming too large to share a magazine with the Atari ST.
In 2000, it disappeared because that same market could no longer sustain the kind of publication that its success had once made possible.
Between those two moments sat eleven years of dramatic technological change.
Why Amiga Format Matters
It is tempting to treat an old computer magazine simply as a collection of obsolete reviews.
That misses what publications like Amiga Format actually preserved.
Its pages document what Amiga owners knew at particular moments, what hardware they could buy, which games were being promoted, what developers promised, what software was considered important, what problems users were trying to solve, how much equipment cost, and what the industry believed might happen next.
A modern history can explain that Commodore eventually collapsed. An issue of Amiga Format from before the collapse shows a world in which readers did not yet know what would happen.
That distinction makes magazines valuable primary sources.
Advertisements reveal what companies were selling. Letters reveal what readers were angry or excited about. Reviews preserve contemporary reactions before decades of nostalgia changed reputations. Cover disks preserve software culture. Editorials show how journalists interpreted crises while they were unfolding.
The circulation figures are equally valuable. The rise from 40,371 copies in late 1989 to 161,256 during the first half of 1992 captures the Amiga boom in numbers. The descent through 108,144, 75,854, 42,655, 28,325, and finally fewer than 15,000 by the end of 1998 charts the contraction of the commercial community with unusual clarity.
The magazine also reflects the character of the Amiga itself.
It was never entirely a games machine, never entirely a productivity computer, and never entirely a multimedia workstation. Its enthusiasts used it for all of those things. Amiga Format succeeded because, at its best, it understood that mixture.
Issue 137 and the Return of Amiga Format
The original story ended in May 2000, but the name did not disappear from Amiga culture.
Twenty-five years later, in November 2025, Amiga Addict worked with Future Publishing on an officially licensed tribute designed to recreate the appearance and spirit of Amiga Format. Amiga Addict Issue 40 was also presented as Amiga Format Issue 137, a deliberate continuation of the numbering that had stopped with Issue 136.
The project brought back an extraordinary collection of people associated with the original magazine. Bob Wade contributed reflections on the launch years. Marcus Dyson, Steve Jarratt, Ben Vost, Tim Smith, Maff Evans, Sue White, Jason Holborn, and other former contributors returned through articles, interviews, and a staff reunion.
Even the cover-disk tradition returned, with X-Copy Professional available as part of the tribute package.
That revival would have been difficult to imagine when the last original issue appeared.
Yet it makes sense.
For the generation that owned an Amiga during its peak, Amiga Format was not merely reporting on computer culture. It was part of that culture. Readers loaded programs from its disks, argued with its scores, followed its hardware recommendations, learned techniques from its tutorials, discovered games through its demos, and watched the fortunes of their computer rise and fall through its pages.
The magazine survived Commodore itself by six years.
Its memory lasted considerably longer.
When those familiar words, Amiga Format, appeared again on a magazine cover in 2025, the significance was not simply that an old publication had been remembered. It was proof that the community documented in those 136 original issues had never entirely gone away.
Sources & Further Reading
Amiga Format. No. 1. August 1989. Bath: Future Publishing, 1989. FlipHTML5. https://fliphtml5.com/aolnc/wjdz/
ST/Amiga Format. No. 13. July 1989. Bath: Future Publishing, 1989. Atarimania. https://www.atarimania.com/magazines/76
Amiga Format. No. 10. May 1990. Bath: Future Publishing, 1990. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 18. January 1991. Bath: Future Publishing, 1991. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 20. March 1991. Bath: Future Publishing, 1991. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 30. January 1992. Bath: Future Publishing, 1992. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 38. September 1992. Bath: Future Publishing, 1992. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 44. March 1993. Bath: Future Publishing, 1993. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 60. June 1994. Bath: Future Publishing, 1994. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 72. June 1995. Bath: Future Publishing, 1995. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 85. June 1996. Bath: Future Publishing, 1996. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 102. October 1997. Bath: Future Publishing, 1997. Retromags. https://www.retromags.com/files/category/136-amiga-format/
Amiga Format. No. 121. March 1999. Bath: Future Publishing, 1999. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 125. July 1999. Bath: Future Publishing, 1999. Internet Archive, Amiga Format Magazine collection. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatMagazine_201902
Amiga Format. No. 136. May 2000. Bath: Future Publishing, 2000. Centre for Computing History. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/25316/Amiga-Format-May-2000/
“ST/Amiga Format to Split.” New Computer Express, no. 27, May 13, 1989, 5. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/
“From the Makers of Amiga Format.” New Computer Express, no. 118, February 9, 1991, 5. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/NH2021_New_Computer_Express_Issue118.pdf
“The Power and the Format.” Amiga Shopper, no. 1, May 1991, 6. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/
Schofield, Jack. “Discs That Make the Magazines’ Front Page.” The Guardian, October 10, 1991, 35. The Guardian archive. https://www.theguardian.com/
Burgess, John. “Adios, Amiga and Commodore.” Washington Post, May 9, 1994. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1994/05/09/adios-amiga-and-commodore/eb099967-0bc6-47bd-aac5-b0068ac58a23/
“Commodore Gets a Buyer.” Washington Post, April 23, 1995. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/04/24/commodore-gets-a-buyer/0f15fc27-edc2-435b-9631-e92e0a1dbca9/
Stets, Dan. “Attempting a Comeback for the Amiga: German Company Plans to Renew Production.” 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/
Jarratt, Steve. Interview by Out-of-Print Archive. “Steve Jarratt Interview.” Out-of-Print Archive. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://outofprintarchive.com/articles/interviews/out-of-print/Steve_Jarratt_interview.html
Out-of-Print Archive. “Retro Future.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://outofprintarchive.com/articles/features/out-of-print/Retro_Future.html
Team17. “Team17’s 100 Games, Part Four: 1995, Worms, Alien Breed 3D & More.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.team17.com/news/team17s-100-games-part-four-1995-worms-alien-breed-3d-more
Stuart, Keith. “Worms or Bust: The Story of Britain’s Most Tenacious Indie Games Company.” Ars Technica, June 2016. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/history-of-team17-and-worms/
Code Like It’s 198x. “Amiga Format.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://code198x.com/vault/magazines/amiga-format/
Code Like It’s 198x. “ST Format.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://code198x.com/vault/magazines/st-format/
Centre for Computing History. “Amiga Format.” Collection catalog. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/16411/MAG93-Amiga-Format/
WorldCat. “Amiga Format.” OCLC 225912747. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://search.worldcat.org/title/225912747
Cox, Howard, and Simon Mowatt. Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. https://academic.oup.com/book/2276
Retromags. “Amiga Format.” Magazine database. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/amiga-format/
Atarimania. “ST / Amiga Format.” Magazine archive. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.atarimania.com/magazines/76
Amiga Addict. “40 Years of Amiga, 40 Issues of AA, and a Return for a Classic.” November 1, 2025. https://amiga.simulant.media/40-years-of-amiga-40-issues-of-aa-and-a-return-for-a-classic/
Amiga Addict. No. 40, “Amiga Format Issue 137 Tribute.” 2025. Addict Media. https://www.addict.media/digital-amiga-addict-issue-40-2025