Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCcnuZVsFLk
Checking Out A 1989 ST Format Magazine Promo Copy - What’s It All About?
Introduction
ST Format was a British computer magazine published by Future Publishing, and covered all things Atari ST. It began life as ST Amiga Format in 1988 before splitting into 2 separate publications the following year, and then ran until late 1996. Here I take a look at a promotional copy that was given away with Atari ST computers in autumn of 1989!
Script
Hey everyone, Rees here, and welcome back to ctrl-alt-rees.
Now, you’ve probably spotted that this is slightly different to my usual filming setup and the reason for that is because I wanted to take a close look at something that’s been sent in by a viewer of the channel - and in fact a patron of mine - a guy called Woz Brown.
And it turns out that he is the Group Art Director of Future Plc, who are a magazine publisher.
You’ve probably heard of them - they publish a magazine called Retro Gamer - which is probably what they’re most famous for within this particular community, but they do publish a wide range of magazines covering various hobbies and interests, and they’ve actually been going since 1985.
They started with a magazine called Amstrad Action and they can actually trace their lineage all the way back to that original company - they are actually the same company - which is fantastic.
So, he knew that I collected these ST Format magazines - I used to read it as a kid - my dad used to buy them from the newsagent occasionally and bring them home, and I still have some of my original magazines and coverdisks in my collection, and he contacted me and said “do you have this particular issue?” and I hadn’t.
In fact I’ve never even seen it before, and the reason for that is because this was a promotional copy that was given away with brand new Atari ST computers back in 1989 - the date on this is Autumn 1989 - and as far as he knows this was one of two different versions - I think that’s what he said to me - which were designed specifically to be given away for free not only to help brand new Atari ST users get to know their new computers, but also to act as a promotional thing for ST Format magazine.
So I’m going to very briefly just go over the history of the magazine. This is something I’m going to cover in a lot more detail in a future video and hopefully sit down with Woz and actually have a proper proper chat, because I know he’s kind of the archivist and the historian over at Future as well as being the Art Director.
And he has been collecting a lot of their old magazines and a lot of their old stuff to try to build up a complete collection of all of their output dating back to back to 1985, which is fantastic. He’s also a fellow Atari ST fan so evidently a man of great taste.
But yes, ST Format magazine started back in 1988 as ST Amiga Format, covering both the Atari ST and the Amiga of course. That’s the complete collection of 13 issues of ST Amiga Format magazines before they split into two separate magazines, around the time that this was published, in fact - in autumn 1989.
So I guess it’s also a good promotion for the new separate machine specific formats as well.
So I’ll start by taking a look at the cover, that seems like an obvious place to start. This didn’t come with a coverdisk, it actually says “free two issues of Britain’s leading magazine plus disc”, and the big thing that Future Publishing did, and apparently, I’ve read were actually the first publisher to do this, the thing about all of their magazines that they published in the 80s and the 90s was they came with a coverdisk on the cover.
So - in fact you can see here where one would have been attached - and I have a bit of a collection of those as well. Well, I say “a bit of a collection” - it’s actually all of them for ST Format and ST Amiga Format, and I have lots of duplicates too.
This is one of a few boxes so just to- we’ll just have a little flick through these and see the kind of stuff that would have been on these disks. So we’ve got Grav II, Insecticide - these are like public domain games, obviously given away for free, and then you’ve got demos of stuff like Nigel Mansell’s Grand Prix and some more public domain type games on there as well. So these were demos of commercial games. I’ve got a demo of Chaos Engine on there - “a complete playable level of this brilliant arcade blaster”.
Some of these were actually exclusive to these magazines - the games’ developers and publishers would kind of put together exclusive demos, particularly for the bigger magazines like ST Format.
“Civilization - huge playable demo”.
“Zool”.
So yeah, obviously in the days before the internet this is how we got hold of our game demos and checked out the latest games. They also often gave away free complete versions of utilities and games as well, particularly older stuff, so they were always really great.
The very first thing you’d do before you even read the magazine is rip the disk off the cover and stick it in the drive and see what’s on there - or at least I certainly did as a kid.
Now anyway, back on to this cover. So we have our typical Atari ST user here with his MIDI keyboard - of course we were all bedroom music producers back in the 80s because of those MIDI ports - every single one of us without exception.
We’ve got some early Atari ST games here - we’ve got Terrorpods and Deep Space. But mostly kind of old… Driller there - classic. But mostly kind of productivity software and office type stuff. He also has his box of ST Format cover disks and his dot matrix printer there as well.
So, uh, yeah, and two very nice joysticks. I wonder what model of joystick they are?
I’m not quite sure what they are - let me know down in the comments if you owned either of these classic joysticks.
But anyway, so open it up and typically there’s always a big colorful advert just inside the cover. This one is for U.S. Gold, that well-known U.S. game publisher based in Birmingham pushing all of their latest releases.
So we’ve got the Indiana Jones RPG, a point-and-click graphic adventure game. Fantastic game that, released on various different platforms of course. We’ve got Red Lightning which I haven’t heard of - that looks like some kind of military simulation type thing. “Face the fearsome power of the soviet army in an explosive collision between the forces of NATO and the warsaw pact” …Yes.
…and Demon’s Winter, which looks like a dungeon crawler. We’ve got Battlehawks 1942, a combat flight simulator of course, and The Games: Summer Edition, which is an athletics, uh, track and field type game, and Forgotten Worlds which is a bit of a classic.
I think that’s a side-scrolling shootery shoot-‘em-up type - I don’t know how to describe that - platform type game?
Yeah so onto the next page just quickly flicking through, and I’m not going to bore you to death by reading every single word on every single page, I just kind of want to give you a general overview of what this was all about.
So we’ve got Fiendish Freddy’s Big Top o’ Fun, that’s another game that I’m not familiar with. I don’t know that game…. It was released on the Amiga, the ST, IBM and compatibles, Commodore 64, Amstrad and Spectrum. So yeah, let me know down in the comments if that’s one of your favorite games.
But like I say- alright I’ve just spotted there are a few on here that I definitely am familiar with. Bubble Bubble - one of my favorite games of all time on the ST and in fact on any any platform. Outrun of course, and we’ve got some more screenshots… What’s this? What’s that doing in an Atari ST magazine!
So, introductory paragraph. “Congratulations, your choice of machine will not disappoint. Powerful hardware and plenty of sophisticated software to go with it. There’s even a magazine to help you get the best out of your new ST…” and here it is “…in this special edition of ST Format you’ll find pages devoted to games, music, graphics, hardware, hints and tips, and much more. The monthly edition of ST Format stretches to over 100 pages and contains similar sections packed with the latest product details, exclusive reviews, and helpful tips. But there’s more! ST Format comes with a cover disk every month…” so obviously I’ve just had a look at those “…and crammed onto the disk are usable demos of the latest software utilities and much more. ST Format will help you interact with your ST that bit better.” That certainly was the case at the time. Published by Future Publishing Limited, originally based in Bath.
So the first proper article that we have in here - quite rightly - is a “getting started” kind of guide for the ST. It just goes over the GEM desktop, the keyboard shortcuts, how to interact with GEM using the keyboard rather than the mouse if that’s what you want to do.
It covers all of the ports on the back - I did enjoy this “Jargon Busters” section here that covers stuff like CD-ROM and hard drives and laser printers and modems, which of course none of us would have had back in the day because they were very expensive and exotic things. Well, certainly not the CD-ROM because that actually was never released for the ST.
“Congratulations, your choice of computer won’t disappoint you. The ST is unlike any computer you might have used before…” and the reason for that is because it has the desktop user interface on it, one of the very first home computers with a point-and-click interface and not one of the things- not something that most users will have been familiar with.
So yeah, it just explains how it works, how the GEM desktop works, a very quick introduction to the the drop down menus and all of the different screen resolutions and that kind of stuff.
So very useful to a brand new user of the ST, and of course the ST came with that famous introduction disk as well with all of the various mouse-based activities and the introductory tour and all that kind of stuff.
So we’ll just continue onwards.
So we have that- “Story Time” here, and this is a basically a very quick overview of the history of Atari. “In late ‘71, Nolan Bushnell, then a product engineer for an arcade game manufacturer left his job to start his own company Syzygy…”
Now if you’re an Atari fan you probably know this story, and it’s probably outside of the scope of this video, but one thing that I really loved about this page was this awesome setup here with the Atari laser printer. These of course are very rare nowadays. £1300 - I will look up how much that is in today’s money and put that up on screen, but I think for 1989 that’s pretty insane.
We’ve got the colour monitor, the black and white monitor, the external disk drive, and all of the lovely accessories there, so I think you would have been the envy of all of your friends if you had this kind of setup at home.
So next page is your typical software publisher advert - they took out these full page adverts in these magazines. So we’ve got “New High Quality Software From HiSoft” - HiSoft C of course, famous C compi- C interpreter to use for the Atari ST if you wanted to program it in C.
Of course the Atari ST came with various BASIC programming utilities over its lifetime but if you were a serious developer who wanted to work on games and stuff then C was where it was at.
Tempest 2, which is a screen editor - “…lets you edit up to four files at a time with optional word wrap, structure check, cross reference wildcards in search and replace strings…”
“Twist allows up to 14 programs in memory at once. Twist at the press of a key from the twister” that would be fun to check out wouldn’t it? So that’s obviously like a multitasking utility for GEM which of course didn’t really support multitasking out of the box, and yeah, so you could actually fill in - you know - order the software directly from here. You could cut this out, stick this in an envelope with a cheque and then they would post the software to you.
So to continue to flick through here, we just have the usual competition - “Win a year’s supply of software” I have got some good questions here, some Atari trivia: “Who founded Atari? Jack Tramiel- Tramiel sorry, Nolan Bushnell or Jack Nicholson?” “Maximum number of colors the ST can have on screen when running in low resolution?” and “In which game do you control a Ferrari?” and if you can answer those three questions and post your answers off to ST Format headquarters in Bath then yeah, you could win a year’s supply of software.
I’m not really sure what a year’s supply of software would consist of…
“Over £500!”
So yeah, it should keep you entertained for a year.
Some interesting historic prices on this page. “Cavendish Distributors”.
So we have various printers here, all the way from the super cheap and cheerful Star LC-10 mono at £179 and the color version £239 - that seems quite reasonable actually - all the way up to the Atari laser printer which we saw before which was over £1000. Um, yes, in 1989 money!
And of course we’ve got the classic Atari monitors here - the SM124 and the SC1224, so the monochrome and the color monitors. The Philips 8833, famous monitor there, various disk drives, the computers themselves…
So you could buy an Atari 520STFM with 1MB of RAM from Cavendish back in Autumn of 1989 for £259, which seems very reasonable. You could buy floppy disks from them as well.
This is something I wanted to have a bit more of a detailed look at, and this is an advert for Micronet which is an early BBS service. So bear in mind this is 1989 - so 30 years ago - 32 years ago in fact - and this is an online service.
If you subscribed for a year they would send you a free modem, which would be a 1200 baud modem, download software, and you can chat with people and, yeah, basically essentially a predecessor to the modern internet.
If you’re not familiar with BBSes or Bulletin Board Systems - and I remember it’s something I remember reading about in the ST Format magazines back in the day and thinking “wow, you know, it’s fantastic that you can plug your computer into the phone line and kind of dial up this thing and, you know, communicate with other people”. But my parents quite rightly didn’t, uh, didn’t let me get on board with that action as I imagine it probably would have ended up costing a fortune.
But yeah, a really great example of an early dial-up service there.
So on the next page we just have an article all about drawing packages - art packages - on the Atari ST. So, you know, we’ve got DEGAS Elite, I think was the most famous one that most people used. We’ve got Spectrum 512, I think that was another quite popular one, Cyberpaint 2 and Hyperdraw, and there is this nice tips and tricks section at the bottom here, and my favourite one out of all of these tips and tricks was about the GEM desktop.
“Normally the GEM desktop will appear with a sickly green colour in the background. It’s actually possible to change this colour…” Which a lot of people don’t know. So there were desktop utilities included with the Atari ST’s Language Disk that actually let you change the colour of the desktop so you didn’t blind yourself with that amazing in-your-face green.
Personally I am a fan of the green, but I know most people aren’t. In fact you can just see it just peeking through there on this one.
…and an advert for Microprose - so this is just a mail order form for their various games that they were pushing at the time. Just a few examples here. So just looking through here most of these are not overly well known- we’ve got Gunship, Pirates!, Microprose Soccer - that was quite a big football game back in the day - so we have Virus here which was of course known as Zarch on the Acorn Archimedes, and it’s interesting to see that actually that was included on the very first issue of ST Amiga Format as well as a demo.
So yeah, a mouse-controlled game that was quite a lot of fun I had that back in the day.
Just looking through the rest of this list, they have Rainbow Islands here, which is a really great arcade conversion on the ST, and yeah, same again as with the other adverts in the magazine - you could just cut this out, stick it in an envelope with a cheque and they would post the games off to you.
So this section is game cheats - which they’re called “Game Busters”, and these are cheats for some of the bigger games on the ST. Interesting to see Outrun and Starglider here.
Obviously quite big games - Double Dragon, and I noticed that this actually gets cut off, and the reason for that is because we have pages missing, and I wasn’t going to point this out actually when I sort of first flicked through this magazine and I was first sort of putting this video together in my head because it I thought it might seem a bit ungrateful.
But actually it does give me an opportunity to talk about something that was quite big and quite well known back in the day with these magazines, and that was the centre pullout poster.
Quite a lot of these old computer and gaming magazines had a - you know - the centre pullout was a poster of a game advert or something like that. I’m not quite sure what it would have been in this, probably a quick reference thing for the ST or something like that I’m guessing.
But if you do own this particular issue I’d love to know. It’d be interesting to see what I’m missing out on. Obviously there’s the rest of this Game Busters thing, which I guess continued on to the next page. Then it would have been a poster and probably an advert on the back of that.
But yeah, it’s just an interesting little piece of history there.
So just moving quickly along, the next thing that we have is this advert for Virgin Games. Just their latest releases. I love this old classic Virgin Games logo here, that’s quite cool.
So we have Silkworm, that’s quite a classic on the ST. Scrabble Deluxe, Shinobi, in fact they’re all quite well known, quite big titles. As was the kind of style for Virgin at the time.
Coming soon we’ve got Ninja Warriors, Double Dragon 2 and Continental Circus, and yeah, so all titles £19.99 each… and uh just uh yeah it’s a good, good lineup of Atari ST games there.
So these are the pages that I used to love really sort of flicking through and really spending my time on when I was a kid - oddly enough - not the game reviews and the stories and that kind of stuff but these adverts for all these weird bits of hardware that you could buy for your ST.
So we have, uh, you know, got the typical Sampler Studio for all the music production types that were buying the ST at the time and the Trackmaster which is…
…what is that? Is that perhaps a piracy type thing? Something to do with disk duplication? I don’t know. Let me know down in the comments if you know what that particular piece of hardware was for.
But yeah, so we’ve got the 1MB internal drive upgrade - so that would have been a double-sided high-density drive, 1.4MB, and that would have come- “…replace internal 500K drive with a full 1MB unit”
…or is that an upgrade from a 360K to a 720K and they’re actually just trying to round the numbers up and pull the wool over our eyes a bit - I wouldn’t put it past them.
We’ve got an EPROM board that uses the cartridge port, useful I know, these have been used for diagnostic utilities and that kind of stuff but obviously more for kind of perhaps software and hardware development, that kind of thing.
A barcode reader - I suppose if you’re using the ST in like a point of sale kind of setup in a shop that kind of thing.
They’ve got a video cable - “1M long open-ended” - the video output on the ST was full RGB so you could put a SCART cable or whatever you want onto the end of that to make your own video cable, it’s quite useful.
Disk drive lead, disk drive socket..
“The Total MIDI Music Package” which includes a keytar of all things!
Obviously ST owners being keen keytar players back in the 80s. Yeah, I would love to have owned one of those back in the day. That’s quite an impressive piece of kit isn’t it?
…and, uh, yes, moving on to the second page.
So we have a mouse, and of course “high quality and direct replacement mouse” obviously made by Genius so imagine that would have been quite high quality.
External floppy drives, switch boxes…
“ST timekeeper real real-time clock” - obviously there wasn’t really all that much released that actually used the cartridge port on the ST. We do have two good examples on this page - one of them being this real-time clock. The Atari ST didn’t have a real-time clock so the time was just reset back to 1985 every time you switched it on, so if you did a lot of work with documents and files and stuff where you wanted the date on those files to be accurate obviously it was quite important to have a real-time clock, otherwise you’d have to set the time on the computer every single time it booted up, which it wasn’t that wasn’t unusual for computers of the time. It just meant that you could have that option if you were willing to pay for it.
The other thing that plugged into the cartridge port that was quite popular back in the 80s and the 90s was a hand scanner, of course, and I did very briefly feature one of these in one of my Projects & Pickups videos a while back, and it’s something I do want to revisit at some point.
So yes, the hand scanner, which was incredibly slow, usually black and white, and uh yeah. This one comes with the software. “Save images, scan images and text into the ST”, and it comes complete with the software for £189. Oh, and OCR software as well, which based on my experience that early OCR software was quite bad. OCR being Optical Character Recognition of course. So it’s for scanning text, and it would turn it from an image into actual text which you could edit. Of course still a thing today but it happens pretty much in real time these days on a device that fits in your pocket. So yes, the inevitable march of technology.
So a very basic advert here for a company called Arnor Ltd, never heard of those. Based in Peterborough, and these are word processor software and a database software, quite popular that all these these small businesses writing and releasing their own software and then advertising it in the magazines and attempting to sell it, and I’m sure a lot of small businesses were probably run on this very software back in the day.
So we also have- oh! Just spotted on this page we’ve got Trip-a-tron, so this is non-game, non-business software. They’ve mentioned just a few other interesting things that you can do with your ST. The Trip-a-tron by Llamasoft - of course, Jeff Minter, very famous Atari ST programmer still going today, still making games today, including some quite cool and interesting VR games for modern consoles and stuff. I loved his stuff back in the day - he had Llamatron and Revenge of the Mutant Camels and that kind of stuff.
…and then down the side here…
…in that vein we have K-Spread 3, a quite popular spreadsheet software, and Datafax “computerized Filofax, you can store names and addresses” so that’s some basic phone book software.
Superbase Pro “complete database software and personal tax planner”
Because a lot of people bought these computers, um, you know, intending to use them to manage their own finances and whatnot at home back in those days, so just uh, a mention here of some of the various programming environments that were available for the ST. Software development tools. So you’ve got BASIC of course - a power BASIC, GFA BASIC… GFA BASIC was quite a big one for writing games and also public domain.
A lot of public domain software was written in GFA BASIC. I remember back in the day. C interpreters of course. Assembly language, Hisoft Devpac ST.
If you want to program in 68000 assembler on the ST, the Motorola 68000 CPU of course.
So obviously kind of getting towards the end now, but one thing that is kind of emerging is that this covers a really good spread of - you know - Atari ST users: we’ve got some music stuff in here, we’ve got some office stuff, we’ve got some home accounting and a database and that kind of stuff in there, programming stuff, so whatever you bought the computer for there’s something in this magazine to cater to you which is really cool. It’s obviously very well thought out - very good of them to cover all of the various use cases of this machine.
So this is talking about public domain software. So probably domain software - something I mentioned a few times in this in this video so far - public domain software, software that was free so it was in the public domain, a lot like kind of open source stuff nowadays, although the source code wasn’t available for public domain stuff typically.
A lot of it was like donationware - so if you enjoyed using the software you could send off a cheque or some cash on over to the author of said software to show your appreciation, but I don’t think there was any obligation to do that.
People just wrote this stuff out of the goodness of their own hearts, or perhaps to promote their other more commercial commercial software that they were writing, and there were lots of good public domain tools - that’s probably a good topic for a future video, in fact.
So anyway, yes, I was talking about programming a second ago and STOS. You may be familiar with STOS, which is the game creation software for the ST. There was a version called AMOS which was released on the Amiga which is quite famous as well, and this is just your typical BASIC-based game creation software, but the cool thing about STOS is it came with all sorts of interesting things, like a music editor and a sprite editor and animation, and there were various somewhat complete versions of STOS included on various ST Format cover discs over the years as well which I used to enjoy playing with as a kid - mainly the animation things and the music things rather than actually attempting to write games.
But yeah, big big game development, and of course you have the STOS compiler which could compile BASIC games into- I think that could actually compile them into a certainly more efficient format. I don’t know if they actually compiled them into proper proper assembly but, um, yes. They could compile your BASIC games and make them run even faster and yet again - how do you order it?
By sending a cheque off to Mandarin Software in the post. They’re based in Ellesmere Port South Wirral so there you go. I have some friends up that way in fact, I’m sure they’ll be pleased to see that.
So finally, another article here “Expanding Horizons” which is all about various hardware add-ons for the ST. So we have the Replay 4 Sound Sampler, which here is being marketed towards game programmers. It’s made by Microdeal - of course, a big publisher back in the day. Robokit, which was the cartridge port based robotics kit for the ST. So you could use that to control your own robots and like home automation stuff and that kind of stuff, so that was a really cool piece of hardware and one of the few things to actually use the cartridge port as well, other than those real-time clocks and hand scanners as I mentioned before.
This is a touchscreen for the ST - you know, not something that was unique to the ST. I think IBM made a touchscreen a few years before this, and obviously if you were using any kind of point of sale environment or something like that quite a handy handy piece of kit.
I noticed that’s £458.85 which is more than double the cost of the actual computer itself so pretty amazing how that technology has advanced over the years. I imagine there probably weren’t- “…transparent conductive layer sits in front of the monitor, when you press the screen signals are sent to the computer…” I know there were a few different types of these early touchscreens, some that actually worked on touch, so you actually basically touch the screen and some that had like a laser type arrangement as well that detected where the beam was broken. It looks like this is, uh, this is the, uh, the first kind. Similar to the uh to a modern touchscreen.
So we have vidi hair rumbo productions “grabbing everyday images for storage inside the computer” a video digitizer. OK, so uh yeah, plug your VCR or whatever into your ST and capture video footage “pictures in low resolution… low resolution” 16 color or 16 shades of grey? Fantastic.
Expect to Spectrum128 - “if your ST wasn’t enough to be getting on with this device makes it possible to emulate the Apple Macintosh” so there you go, a hardware Apple Mac emulator and “do note that for serious use, the emulator requires a hard drive and 1MB of RAM” I’m not quite sure what that includes - perhaps that plugs into the cartridge port?
“So good is the emulation that Mac software runs faster on the ST than it does on a Mac Plus”.
So there you go. That’s PC speed that’s a pc uh internal upgrade lets your st run pc software four times faster than a 4.77MHz XT, so that’s a hardware PC emulator that fits inside the ST. I imagine that probably includes a CPU
“Four times faster” it’s probably 286- maybe 286 or 386 based. Um yeah, memory upgrades, and just a little thing about there how you can upgrade the ST to a maximum of 4MB of RAM.
We have another hand scanner here and this- “Under the Baud Walk” - looks like it is to do with modems, Bulletin Board Systems. Indeed it is, “Just four things are necessary: computer, a modem, software, and a BT phone socket” “…nothing particularly mysterious about communication” so “your computer transmits information down and receives data from the telephone line” so yeah, even back in 1989 people were talking about getting online and connecting and communicating with other computers.
So finally we just have an advert here for K-Spread3, Cube Software of course, K-Spread3 and K-Graph3 business graphics. K-Spread being one of the early spreadsheet packages which was available on the ST. I remember my dad actually using that for various business uses on our ST at home, and I actually should have mentioned actually, at the beginning of the video - this is my original childhood Atari STE which we got in 1991. So yeah, this is the actual machine that I was using and running a lot of this stuff on back in the day.
So that’s just ad advert for GFA made by Data Media UK. So you could send off for that and buy the GFA BASIC programming environment and all the BASIC- all this stuff that kind of plugs into it offers various add-ons and things to allow you to develop your software in GFA BASIC “read all the bits the manuals try to hide”
So this is uh stuff- “…how to use an ST with a single disk drive…” uh stuff like swapping between the two floppies and copying files from one to the other which is perhaps not well known, and you know, just a few tips and tricks for new users of the ST as per earlier in the magazine.
So some useful stuff in there.
Oh this page also has a list of file extensions here as well which I imagine is very useful, and the .PRG of course being the executable format on the ST.
So finally, I’ll just flick through to the very last page, and this is just a continuation of that previous article - “how to rename a file” - I’m not quite sure why that gets a half a page uh “GEM is a TOSser” interesting.
…and “how to transfer files between the ST and the PC” - of course the Atari ST uses PC formatted disks so no problems there copying files between the two operating systems, and finally just a couple of adverts - we have an advert for Psygnosis - the Psygnosis games at the time. So we’ve got Menace, we’ve got Tetris and we’ve got Baal, and all the various reviews there.
So yes, before the days of Lemmings although - I might - so I imagine they would have been pushing that if that was the case…
…and finally just my favorite thing about this, or one of my favorite things, is this really cool full page advert for Xenon 2 which has obviously got the box art, and a quite an enthusiastic description of the game there. So yeah, famous Bitmap Brothers game, a big system seller on the ST and the Amiga. One of my favorites and yeah, just kind of rounding off the whole thing quite nicely.
So thank you very much for watching, and thank you for sticking with me if you made it to this point - I hope you enjoyed this very quick look through this magazine. As I said, in future I am going to be putting together a video just on the- you know, the history of Future Publishing and of ST Format in particular, but yeah, so hopefully that’s- hopefully that was a very interesting look into British computer magazines of the 80s and the 90s and specifically ST Format.
So thank you very much for watching, and hopefully I’ll see you again next time.
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