Amiga Power is the magazine that made me want to write about videogames for a living. I’ve since changed my tune, but it’s hard not to read stuff like this and not think to myself, “Man, that sure sounds like fun.”
Disk Editing For Fun And Profit
Easily the most harrowing aspect of AMIGA POWER, the universally hated though vitally important task of organising games (as opposed to physically compiling the disks) fell to anyone who wasn’t icy enough not to care.
Ten rubberingly-stretched days of crushing desperation would then happen to the hapless individual, on top of their usual duties of writing the mag, or subbing it, or being the Editor, with no safety net of a humorous feature to put in instead and everyone else treading round them carefully as you’d do with someone due to be executed on Thursday, at the end of which a set of games would appear as if wrought from the air by sheer mental effort.
These would then be sent off to Kenny The Disk Compiler and by noon he’d have called back to report four of the games had custom loaders that would need two days to crack, three were A1200-only, one of the others needed 6mb of memory and anyway there was only room for that PD version of Pacman, provided we didn’t mind it split across both disks.
Shouting would occur while everyone else ran away, and four days later the finalised disks would arrive with the duplicators, who would then lose the labels or spontaneously forget how to work their machines. Eventually, samples would be returned to the office, where they’d fail to work on at least the two most popular of the 790 models of Amiga currently on sale, and weeping would result, and kicking in of photocopiers.
Finally, the okay would be given to copy thousands of disks, and with only a few days’ delay while the duplicators neglected to examine the fax or spontaneously forgot how to read, the issue and its shiny game-packed coverdisks would appear on the shelves.
The pallid wretch who had pulled this off would then swear on the eyes of the orphan children of the world never to do it again until it was his turn.
And why did we go through this stomach-clutching terror month after month? Because we cared. Do you see? Do you get it yet? We cared. Because we cared. That was the point. Because we cared. Do you understand? Is it clear? Because we cared. It was because we cared that we did it. Have you grasped that thought and do you hold it in your head, that we cared?
Gagh. (Dies.)