In the early 1990s, owning an Amiga meant entering a world that existed partly on floppy disks and partly on paper. Games arrived through computer shops and mail order, but information about them came from magazines. Before online videos, review aggregators, downloadable demos, and social media, a handful of writers could have an enormous influence over which games players bought and which ones they avoided.
Into that crowded British magazine market came Amiga Power, a publication from Future Publishing that quickly developed a reputation unlike almost anything else covering the Amiga. It was funny, argumentative, sometimes deliberately ridiculous, and unusually willing to tell readers that an expensive new game was terrible. Where other magazines could seem enthusiastic simply because a game was new, Amiga Power built much of its identity around suspicion of hype.
That philosophy was there almost from the beginning. Future already published Amiga Format, a broader magazine covering the Amiga as both a computer and gaming machine. Amiga Power would concentrate on games. Its first numbered issue was cover-dated May 1991 and reached shops on April 25, following a free Issue Zero preview distributed with Amiga Format. The new magazine promised extensive reviews, covermounted software, guides, tips, and a willingness to look critically at practically everything being released for the machine.
Over the next five years, that simple idea developed into something much stranger and more influential. Amiga Power became a magazine in which the staff themselves were characters, running jokes could continue for months, job titles could turn into nonsense, readers were expected to understand an expanding private vocabulary, and software companies sometimes found themselves openly fighting with the people reviewing their games.
It was games journalism with a personality, but beneath the jokes was a remarkably serious belief that a review should mean something.
Issue Zero and the Birth of Amiga Power
Before readers could buy Amiga Power, Future Publishing gave them a preview of what it intended to do.
Issue Zero appeared as a supplement with the May 1991 issue of Amiga Format. Rather than simply filling the preview with advertisements for the forthcoming magazine, the staff constructed an All-Time Top 100 Amiga Games list. The panel included editor Matt Bielby, staff writer Stuart Campbell, and contributors associated with other Future titles. The exercise immediately displayed one of the characteristics that would define the magazine: disagreement was not something to conceal.
Rainbow Islands, the Amiga conversion of Taito’s arcade game, finished at number one. The ranking provided an early indication that Amiga Power would not necessarily treat technical spectacle or commercial importance as the same thing as quality. Games were supposed to be enjoyable, playable, and capable of surviving more than a few minutes of initial excitement.
The first proper issue followed shortly afterward. It cost £2.95 and carried a complete copy of Bombuzal on its coverdisk, a game that had appeared in the magazine’s Top 100. The early masthead named Matt Bielby as editor, Mark Ramshaw as production editor, Stuart Campbell as staff writer, and Gary Penn as consultant editor. Penn already had considerable experience in British games journalism, while Bielby brought with him some of the irreverent mentality associated with Your Sinclair.
Even in that first issue, Bielby resisted making grand promises about what the magazine would become. After introducing various features, he essentially told readers that they would have to judge the publication by what it actually did.
That attitude became important because Amiga Power quickly decided that one of the things it would do differently was review games without pretending most of them were good.
When 50 Percent Actually Meant Average
Magazine review scores had already become a problem by the beginning of the 1990s. If publications routinely gave respectable games scores in the seventies and eighties, the usable part of a 100-point scale became remarkably small. A score of 50 percent might mathematically suggest an average product, but to readers accustomed to inflated marks it could look disastrous.
Amiga Power attacked that convention directly.
Its early review material warned readers that they should not expect “every game gets 80%” scoring. The magazine argued that if almost everything received marks in the seventies or eighties, percentages became nearly meaningless. Starting with its earliest issues, it explained that readers would see games receiving scores in the thirties, forties, and fifties as a normal part of the system.
This mattered for more than presentation. It changed the relationship between the magazine, readers, and publishers. If 50 percent was genuinely available for mediocre games, then 30 percent was available for bad ones, 10 percent was available for dreadful ones, and the very bottom of the scale could be used when the staff thought something was almost irredeemable.
At the other end, an 80 or 90 percent score meant considerably more.
The review structure reinforced the approach. Games received a percentage score along with concise summaries of their strengths and weaknesses. When another writer strongly disagreed with the main review, the magazine could print another opinion rather than pretending that criticism was mathematically objective. Its continuing “Bottom Line” feature also allowed readers to compare games against titles that had already been reviewed.
The resulting scores sometimes looked brutal beside those appearing in competing magazines, but brutality was not supposed to be the objective. Consistency was.
This philosophy would eventually be expressed even more clearly in what the magazine called the “Amiga Power Policy of Truth.” In a 1993 subscription advertisement, the publication promised that it would not review unfinished games merely to obtain an exclusive, would not pander to game publishers, would use experienced reviewers, and would take games seriously because its readers did too.
For all the magazine’s absurdity, this was the serious core beneath it.
More Than Reviews
If Amiga Power had simply been a magazine that awarded unusually low scores, it probably would not still inspire such affection decades later. The harder reviewing system attracted attention, but the personality surrounding it created the readership.
The magazine increasingly behaved as though readers had wandered into an ongoing conversation among the staff. Writers developed recognizable personalities. References reappeared. Names were altered. Captions became opportunities for jokes that sometimes had very little to do with the image sitting above them.
Eventually even the masthead became part of the comedy. Ordinary editorial titles could be replaced by deliberately ridiculous descriptions. By November 1993, Linda Barker was being presented with the nonsensical title “Memorable fighting she-monkey,” while Stuart Campbell became a “Rapid crazy reusable police clown.”
The humor could be surreal, sarcastic, childish, clever, irritating, or all of those things within a few pages. Some jokes were understandable immediately. Others depended on references that had appeared several issues earlier. The longer someone read the magazine, the more of its internal language they understood.
Former writers Jonathan Nash and Stuart Campbell later created AP2 partly to document this strange culture after the magazine disappeared. Their retrospective contains explanations of staff members, recurring phrases, arguments, jokes, disputes, and incidents that would be almost impossible to reconstruct by simply reading conventional histories of video game journalism. AP2 described itself as something created because its writers missed Amiga Power, and its existence demonstrates how much the magazine had become a community built around a particular editorial voice.
Modern writer Lewis Packwood has described much the same effect from the reader’s perspective. When researching a retrospective for Retro Gamer, Packwood recalled how the magazine’s in-jokes and letters pages made readers feel as though they belonged to a special club. For his 2019 feature he interviewed former staff including Cam Winstanley, Stuart Campbell, and Jonathan Davies.
That sense of belonging helped distinguish Amiga Power from magazines that simply delivered information.
Coverdisks and the Battle Over Free Games
The floppy disk attached to a computer magazine could be nearly as important as the magazine itself.
Future Publishing had already helped establish the covermount as an important part of British computer publishing. With Amiga Power, the first issue went further by offering the complete commercial game Bombuzal. For a reader standing at a newsstand, receiving an entire game along with a magazine made the £2.95 price considerably easier to justify.
Software companies were less enthusiastic about where the practice might lead.
The concern was that magazines could begin giving away games that publishers still expected to earn money from through budget rereleases or compilations. The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association became involved in the debate, and the controversy appeared in the pages of contemporary magazines.
Amiga Power ultimately announced that complete commercial games would no longer appear on its coverdisks for the foreseeable future. Demos, public-domain software, shareware, and other material continued to make disks an important part of the package, but the brief period in which full commercial releases could be attached to magazines demonstrated how rapidly the economics of computer publishing were changing.
The coverdisk nevertheless remained part of the ritual of buying an Amiga magazine. Readers were purchasing printed criticism, entertainment, screenshots, hints, and software all at once.
Editors, Writers, and a Changing Magazine
Although Amiga Power maintained a recognizable identity, it was not produced by one unchanging group.
Matt Bielby guided the launch before Mark Ramshaw moved into the editor’s position. Linda Barker followed, then Jonathan Davies, Cam Winstanley, Tim Norris, and finally Steve Faragher during the magazine’s last months. Stuart Campbell occupied several important positions without serving as editor, moving from staff writer to reviews editor and deputy editor during different periods.
The changes mattered because each editor inherited a publication that already possessed a strong personality. Instead of erasing that personality, successive teams added new layers to it.
Under Linda Barker and others, the internal jokes and bizarre masthead material became increasingly visible. Jonathan Davies presided over some of the magazine’s most memorable confrontations with heavily promoted games and software companies. By the later Cam Winstanley and Tim Norris periods, the Amiga market itself was shrinking, which gave the magazine a different challenge. It had to continue producing a monthly games magazine for a platform receiving fewer major commercial releases.
Rather than becoming more restrained as conditions worsened, Amiga Power often seemed to become stranger.
That willingness to treat the magazine itself as entertainment helped it survive creatively even while the commercial world around the Amiga was deteriorating.
Rise of the Robots and the Value of Saying No
Few reviews demonstrate the difference between Amiga Power and some of its competitors better than Rise of the Robots.
The fighting game arrived surrounded by enormous publicity. Its rendered visuals looked extraordinary in screenshots, and the project received extensive coverage before release. The danger for magazines was obvious. A game that looked impressive and carried a major advertising campaign could acquire momentum long before reviewers had enough time to determine whether it was actually enjoyable.
In its January 1995 issue, Amiga Power gave the Amiga version 5 percent.
The number becomes even more striking when placed beside contemporary competitors. Amiga Action, for example, awarded the same game 92 percent. That produced an 87-point difference between the two publications.
The disagreement was not merely amusing. It demonstrated why Amiga Power believed its scoring policy mattered. Screenshots, marketing, expensive production, and commercial expectations were not supposed to determine the final score. If the reviewer believed that playing the game was miserable, the magazine was prepared to print a number that looked almost absurdly low.
Years later, the review remains one of the clearest examples of the magazine’s reputation for resisting hype.
The Team17 War
The most famous conflict surrounding Amiga Power was not with a single game but with one of the Amiga’s most important developers.
Team17 produced some of the platform’s most recognizable titles, including Alien Breed, Project-X, Superfrog, Arcade Pool, and eventually Worms. Amiga Power did not simply dislike Team17. In fact, it awarded strong scores to several of the company’s games. AP2’s later accounting of the supposed feud noted scores above 80 and 90 percent for titles including entries in the Alien Breed series, Apidya, and Arcade Pool.
The problem was that Amiga Power was equally willing to criticize Team17 games it considered disappointing.
The relationship became increasingly antagonistic. Team17 inserted references to the magazine into its games, including an Alien Breed 2 message aimed at Amiga Power and computer-controlled opponents named after magazine staff. What might have remained an entertaining rivalry became more serious during 1995.
Amiga Power awarded ATR: All Terrain Racing 38 percent and Kingpin: Arcade Sports Bowling 47 percent. According to former staff interviewed by Ars Technica, Team17 responded with legal action demanding that reviews be retracted and the issue withdrawn. The dispute did not produce the result Team17 wanted, but the developer stopped supplying Amiga Power with review copies. Jonathan Davies later recalled that the magazine sometimes had to buy Team17 releases from shops in order to review them.
For Amiga Power, the dispute became evidence supporting its image as an independent critic willing to upset important companies.
For Team17, the magazine could appear unfairly hostile.
The argument continued into retrospectives long after both sides had moved beyond the original dispute, which is precisely why it remains so useful for understanding the unusual power relationship between game publishers and specialist magazines during the 1990s.
Actually Playing the Games
One of Amiga Power‘s recurring claims was that reviewers needed enough time with games to discover what players would encounter after the opening levels and attractive screenshots had lost their novelty.
A useful example appeared in 1995 with the adventure game Flight of the Amazon Queen. Jonathan Nash reportedly progressed to around 60 percent of the game before discovering a bug that prevented further advancement. The publisher had been preparing to release the game, but the discovery forced the software back for correction.
It was exactly the sort of incident that supported Amiga Power‘s criticism of reviewing unfinished software.
A reviewer who played only enough of a game to understand its basic mechanics could easily miss a serious problem buried hours later. A magazine chasing an exclusive review might have an incentive to accept unfinished code and publish before competitors. Amiga Power‘s stated position was that being first mattered less than giving readers a verdict based on the product they would actually be asked to buy.
This did not make its reviews infallible. No critic is. It did, however, give the magazine a clearly articulated standard against which readers could judge it.
The Amiga Market Begins to Collapse
The world in which Amiga Power launched in 1991 did not last.
During the early 1990s, the Amiga remained one of the most important home gaming computers in Britain and Europe. That supported a large ecosystem of magazines, software houses, retailers, demo creators, and enthusiastic users. As the decade progressed, DOS and Windows PCs grew more capable as gaming machines while consoles such as the Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, PlayStation, and Saturn competed aggressively for players.
Commodore’s collapse in 1994 accelerated the uncertainty surrounding the Amiga.
Magazine circulation reflected the changing market. Amiga Power had sold in substantial numbers during its early years, with its own published circulation material recording more than 50,000 copies per issue during parts of the early 1990s. By the middle of the decade, the audience for dedicated Amiga gaming publications was contracting rapidly.
Future Publishing itself was moving into new markets. The same company that had built an important part of its identity around home-computer magazines was launching publications connected to newer platforms. The Official PlayStation Magazine became an enormous success after appearing in 1995, demonstrating where much of the games business was heading.
Amiga Power increasingly found itself documenting a platform whose commercial future was disappearing.
That could have made the magazine depressing.
Instead, it became increasingly absurd.
The Last Issue
By 1996 there was no realistic way to ignore what had happened to the Amiga market.
Amiga Power reached Issue 65 in September 1996. It would be the last.
The magazine did not disappear quietly. The final issue openly acknowledged that the end had arrived and looked back across its history. Future’s later company retrospective remembered the goodbye issue as an elaborate send-off in which the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse descended upon the magazine and writers were progressively killed off as the issue continued. Editor Steve Faragher and art editor Sue Huntley were ultimately left for the final confrontation.
It was an appropriately ridiculous conclusion to a magazine that had spent years refusing to behave like a conventional consumer guide.
The final issue also directed readers toward Amiga Format, Future’s longer-lived Amiga publication. Amiga Format survived into 2000, but Amiga Power belonged particularly strongly to the earlier period when the Amiga had supported an enormous and competitive gaming press.
There had been 65 numbered issues.
For a magazine that had begun with a promise to judge games honestly, the farewell did not abandon the personality it had developed along the way.
Why Amiga Power Still Matters
The practical purpose of a game magazine has changed enormously since 1991.
A modern player can watch hours of gameplay before purchasing anything. Reviews appear online almost immediately. Developers communicate directly with audiences. Digital storefronts contain thousands of user ratings. Bugs can be shown through videos within minutes of release, and arguments over review scores spread through social media before many people have finished playing the game.
In Amiga Power‘s world, the monthly magazine occupied a much more powerful position.
That made editorial independence important. A review could influence whether a reader spent money on a game they might not otherwise have an opportunity to play first. Advertising from software companies appeared in the same magazines whose writers were expected to judge their products. Publishers wanted favorable coverage and early publicity. Magazines wanted screenshots, preview code, interviews, advertising, and access.
Amiga Power made the tension visible rather than pretending it did not exist.
Its answer was sometimes confrontational, sometimes self-righteous, and frequently wrapped in jokes, but the underlying idea was remarkably modern. Reviewers should serve the reader rather than the company supplying the product.
The magazine’s influence also extended beyond individual scores. Its conversational writing, self-aware humor, bizarre features, recurring jokes, and treatment of writers as recognizable personalities anticipated parts of the internet culture that eventually replaced publications like it. Readers were not merely buying information. They were returning to spend time with a particular group of voices.
In 2024, Guardian games writer Keith Stuart placed Amiga Power among Britain’s greatest video game magazines, describing its anarchic culture, surreal reviewing, industry arguments, and determination to continue making jokes even as the Amiga market faded around it. Stuart had his own connection to the magazine, having interviewed for a job there during its original run.
Lewis Packwood has similarly recalled that reading Amiga Power helped inspire him to become a writer. Former staff members continued preserving its stories through AP2 and later interviews. Decades after the final issue, readers still discuss individual reviews, jokes, writers, controversies, and covers.
That is an unusual legacy for a monthly magazine devoted to games on a computer platform whose commercial peak ended more than thirty years ago.
The Magazine That Said What It Thought
Perhaps the easiest way to remember Amiga Power is through the spectacular things.
There was the 5 percent review of Rise of the Robots. There was the Team17 feud. There were absurd masthead titles, strange running jokes, coverdisks, arguments with readers, ridiculous features, and finally an apocalyptic farewell issue that killed off its own staff.
Yet those things worked because something more serious held them together.
From its earliest issues, Amiga Power told readers that percentages were supposed to have meaning. A mediocre game should be allowed to receive a mediocre score. A famous publisher should not automatically receive favorable treatment. An unfinished game should not receive a finished review merely because being first might sell magazines. If another reviewer disagreed, that disagreement could be printed instead of hidden.
The magazine did not always make friends by following those principles.
That was partly the point.
For five years, from the launch issue of 1991 to the final issue of September 1996, Amiga Power turned criticism itself into part of the entertainment. It demonstrated that a games magazine could be useful without being obedient, funny without abandoning criticism, and deeply attached to a gaming platform without pretending every game released for it deserved praise.
The Amiga eventually lost its place at the center of the games industry, and the enormous British computer-magazine culture surrounding it faded as well.
Amiga Power left behind something more durable than buying advice for games released in 1991 or 1995. It left an argument about what game criticism ought to be.
A reviewer should play the game.
A score should mean what it says.
And if the game is terrible, somebody should be willing to say so.
Sources & Further Reading
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, Issue Zero. May 1991. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1991. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/AMIGA_Power/PDF_TXT/Amiga_Power_Issue_00_1991_May.pdf
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 1. May 1991. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1991. https://archive.org/details/Amiga_Power_Issue_01_1991-05_Future_Publishing_GB
Future Publishing. “Amiga Power.” Launch advertisement. Amstrad Action, no. 68, May 1991. https://acpc.me/ACME/LITTERATURE/REVUES/%5BENG%5DENGLISH_UK/%5BENG%5D%5BAMSTRAD%5DAMSTRAD_ACTION/AMSTRAD_ACTION_068%5BOCR%5D.pdf
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 16. August 1992. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1992. https://electronicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/Magazine/A/Amiga%20Power%20UK/Amiga_Power_Issue_16_1992_Aug.pdf
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 26. June 1993. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1993. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/AMIGA_Power/PDF_TXT/Amiga_Power_Issue_26_1993_jun.pdf
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 27. July 1993. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1993. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/AMIGA_Power/PDF_originals/Amiga_Power_Issue_27_1993_jul.pdf
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 30. October 1993. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1993. https://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/ap27th/Amiga%20Power%20Issue%2030%20%28Oct%201993%29.pdf
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 32. December 1993. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1993. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/AMIGA_Power/PDF_originals/Amiga_Power_Issue_32_1993_Dec.pdf
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 38. June 1994. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1994. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/AMIGA_Power/PDF_originals/Amiga_Power_Issue_38_1994_jun.pdf
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 64. August 1996. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1996. Abandonware France. https://www.abandonware-france.org/bibliotheque/magazines/amiga-power-28/numero-64-4279/
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 65. September 1996. Bath, UK: Future Publishing, 1996. “Amiga Power.” Code Like It’s 198x. https://code198x.com/vault/magazines/amiga-power/
Nash, Jonathan, and Stuart Campbell. “What Is AP2?” AP2. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/AP2/Exciting_Home_Version/what_is_AP2.html
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Wall, Darren. “Appearances.” Darren Wall. Includes information on The Amiga Power Reunion, produced with The Guardian, 2016. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://darrenwall.co/appearances
Packwood, Lewis. “The Making of Amiga Power.” Retro Gamer, no. 195 (2019): 48–53.
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Parkin, Simon. “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/ Ars Technica
Stuart, Keith. “The 15 (ish) Greatest UK Video Game Magazines of All Time.” The Guardian, May 10, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/may/10/the-15-ish-greatest-uk-video-game-magazines-of-all-time The Guardian
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ISSN International Centre. “Amiga Power.” ISSN 0961-7310. ISSN Portal. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/0961-7310
Code Like It’s 198x. “Amiga Power.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://code198x.com/vault/magazines/amiga-power/
Code Like It’s 198x. “Cover Tapes.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://code198x.com/vault/distribution/cover-tapes/
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Centre for Computing History. “Amiga Power, May 1991.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/34627/Amiga-Power-May-1991/
AmigaPD. “Amiga Power Cover Disks.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.amigapd.com/amiga-power-cover-disks.html