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In November 2014 Steve agreed to give us an interview of sorts about his time at AA, Amstrad generally and a few other bits and pieces from those days...

Of course I'd be happy to do an interview. Let me know when & how. Hey, I remember writing what I think was actually a rather good profile/history of Amstrad and got some good inside info. But I remember it because I made a muck-up and my captions referred to someone by the wrong name - I think I was interviewing Roland Perry and referred to him by another name or vice versa or something else entirely... Does this ring any bells at all?

Onto the questions:

It seems like a million years ago! Another lifetime, perhaps – another millennium, certainly.

Birmingham.

I did my Doctorate at Jesus College, Oxford on Comedy in James Joyce’s Ulysses – ideal preparation for a career in magazine publishing! Actually I saw a job ad in PC Plus and Editor Matt Nicholson decided that someone who didn’t know about computers but could spell might make a good copy-editor. And at the time Fewtch was growing so fast I soon got plucked to be an editor.

It was bloody fantastic, actually. Chris Anderson was a visionary and my boss Greg Ingham was supersmart (and a super smart arse too, just like me). And the people at Fewtch were young and fun. It was the best of times, it was the best of times. As for deadlines? Goes with the territory. Never met a journo yet who wasn’t inspired to do his/her best work by a looming deadline!

Were there others? I guess there must have been. But we were the best, no doubt. And one thing that Future always used to do was to have audited circulation figures (ABC, they were called, Audit Bureau of Circulation), which meant there was an objective measure of how many copies we sold. So when we said we were number one, we could prove it!

We had some terrific letters, some of them even written by readers.

I wasn’t much of a gamer myself, frankly. No good at them at all.

I did use an Amstrad for a while and at the time they were terrific, they really were.

Sometime last century.

Nope.

The Future ones, of course. Ones from other magazines – well everyone knew Gary Penn and Ciaran Brennan. They were far bigger names than I ever was among the gaming/computer community. Gary came to Future a little later, I believe.

Working with Ollie Alderton. He was – and still is – such a great fun bloke to spend time with. Give him my love if you see him. He used to do this thumbs up thing and go, ‘Brilliant!’ with that stupid big grin on his face. God love him to bits.

Saw Ollie and Matt Bielby back in the UK earlier this year. Otherwise a bit of Facebook. Still very fond of Trev Gilham, one of the Future first generation – he did the Future Publishing logo, indeed.

Better weather! It’s funny, as you’d know, if you say you came to Straya for the weather and you’re in Melbourne they think you’re daft – but they never had a few dozen British winters to contend with. I love Melbourne, it’s a fantastic place. I came here to work for Kerry Packer’s ACP originally in 1998, but now I’m well away from the world of magazines. Actually I run a training academy teaching people to become Clinical Hypnotherapists. As you do.

and specific questions from other Forum users:

Great question – and yes! That really was a very live issue. US Gold I remember in particular were shockers, because they spent a lot on advertising and produced some sh*t games. One of the truly great things about Future was that Chris Anderson was absolutely adamant that readers came first and that if you really didn’t rate a game you had to say so and hang the consequences. And that culture permeated the place – it probably reached its apotheosis in the person of Stuart Campbell on Amiga Power, the funniest and most scathing writer I can recall. I loved that. It put readers first, and was actually very smart commercially, because readers can smell bullsh*t and they really don’t like the smell of it. And besides, how can you sing the praises of a great game if you’re nice about everything? Readers need to know they can trust you.

I wish I could remember, sorry.

Never met Lord Sugar himself, I have to say. But I did write a pretty good Amstrad history feature for AA actually. I went along to see Roland Perry who was very forthcoming. I was quite proud of that piece, it seemed to have a lot of really good info about Amstrad and the CPC project.

Oh I really do think they were very proud of it at the time. It was a real breakthrough, I think. But Amstrad weren’t like an Apple or a Sega or a Commodore – computers weren’t their reason for existing, they would sell anything that they could. Is that fair?

Electronic Arts were pretty switched on and professional. US Gold were big and the quality of their stuff was pretty patchy.

Well I have to admit that the CPC wasn’t exactly at the forefront of publishers’ minds, so they usually took decisions like that on other platforms and didn’t even do a version for CPC if it wasn’t going to go well. That’s my recollection anyway.

Oh God you’ve just reminded me! The Infogrammes PR girl was absolutely gorgeous! Er, what was the question again? No I really don’t think we had it in for the French or the Europeans, I’ve no idea why it would be that we seemed biased. Perhaps for many of them – apart from Infogrammes and their gorgeous PR girl – they didn’t have a big presence in the UK, so they didn’t have anyone going round demoing the games and talking them up.

Yes indeed we did. When I joined in 1987 (is that right?) we were just going over to Macs. But I do recall Pat McDonald in particular, and maybe also Trenton Webb, were real CPC users.

We kept them in the office as a games library. I guess staff used to take ones they really wanted.

Some and some. Usually as I recall it was the finished product.

As the editor, I used to think they spent far too long playing on them! But I do have to admit they were thorough and actually really and truly honest about wanting to give games a real chance. It’s the flip side of what I said before about reviewers being given the freedom to speak the truth, that actually means you have a real responsibility. From what I recall, if there was going to be a stinking review, the reviewer would often get someone else to play it and see that they were being fair.

Not that I recall, ever. We previewed unfinished games and reviewed finished games. I think getting into NDAs and all that would have been a real conflict of interest, wouldn’t it? No, I don’t think that happened on magazines I edited.

Can’t recall, sorry.

- Were there any cases where reviewers would leak games to hacker groups?

I don’t believe so. I really think that would have been an instant sacking offence.

I recall Pat McDonald worked very hard on them. I may be misremembering, but as I recall it I actually asked him if it would be possible to include some kind of checksum things that would validate the type-ins… and he said yeah, sure! As if this wasn’t something we should already be doing. But do please forgive me if I’ve got that wrong – it was more than a quarter of a century ago, remember!

You gotta fill the mag, you know! I daresay there were type-ins that, how shall we put it, weren’t from the absolute top drawer. But what do you do when that’s all you got?

Well I hadn't thought about it in 20 years... but then it was showed it to me (without warning, I have to add), so my answer now would have to be: it does now!!!!

Great question. I think by the mid 90s a lot had changed at Future. Chris had sold the business, for starters, and it was getting to be very big and not perhaps quite so personal. AA certainly deserved a decent burial, rather than being allowed to fade away.

They did that, seriously? That’s f*cked. And so stupid, too – as if you think your readers are dumb or will forgive that kind of rubbish easily! Ha, if I’d known we had such idiots for competitors I mightn’t have tried to hard!

I’m sure that’s a great question, just I’m the wrong guy. I’ve got no idea, I’m afraid! I never claimed to be a techie, that’s for sure.

A couple of AA stories for you.

Anyone remember Emma Broadley? (I think it was Emma.) She had a column for a few months called Broadley Speaking. Well, she didn’t exist – or rather, I nicked the idea from the Broadley Arms I think it was called, a pub in Bath that allowed me to have the Broadley Speaking column name. Actually now I think about it my wife Helen wrote some of it.

And then we started a thing called Absolute Beginners for CPC novices (the David Bowie movie Absolute Beginners was around this time). I remember taking the team to the printers to see the mag being printed… and seeing the column titled Absolute Beginers (with only one N in Beginners) flying through the machine, the same dumb mistake being repeated and repeated. Aargh!

Another time the printer couldn’t find a page, so we ended up with a whole page of type-ins repeated. I was beside myself, but Ollie was just doing his usual two thumbs up routine, shrugging it off, saying ‘It’s not that bad! It’s not that bad!’ That became a bit of a running joke whenever things got really, really terrible… It’s not that bad!

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