I read every issue of Bad Influence! magazine
...both of them.
There’s a moment in episode two of Yorkshire Television’s videogames show Bad Influence! when presenter Violet Berlin explains how the software is reviewed. Magazines use a percentage system, she says. The problem is that nobody thinks 50% is an average game. This teatime broadcast would make things simple: every game got a rating out of five.
The decision didn’t make it from the studios in Leeds over the Pennines to Europress Impact in Macclesfield, where the show’s spinoff magazine was being made. Issue one (Christmas 1992) rated games using the broken percentage system.
In fact, the first Bad Influence! mag is like two different titles glued together. The first few pages are what you’d expect: hello, Violet and Andy Crane off the telly! Hello, weird Humanosaurs who rate the games out of five (except not here in the magazine)! There’s American correspondent Z (that’s “Zee”, we’re aggressively reminded) and a tips section with Nam Rood, a sort of train station drunk who was famous for gluing cheat codes to his forehead.
But the remaining pages have strong panic vibes. It looks like they were thrown together before anything was known about the show, using whichever poor bastards were in the office. The reviews of Mario Kart, Lemmings and Xenon 2 are a bunch of boxes with scatty information puked into them. It’s difficult to read. A wild credits list thanks everyone from the staff of Sega Force to Gameboy Action, and the magazine’s voice swings from page to page as a result.
You know what, though? Meditate on this thing and you’ll find a few interesting, infuriating and downright LOL moments. As a time capsule of late 1992, it works. ACTIVATE LIST MODE!
The Datablast was made on an Amiga
At the end of every Bad Influence!, fifty pages of information flashed up on the screen in twenty seconds. If you played it back on a VCR using the jog wheel a “free magazine” with tips and news would reveal itself. The Datablast was made by Amiga Action’s Peter Lee using Commodore’s 16-bit machine running Easy Amos (Peter had originally tried using Deluxe Paint, but it sucked at text).
The thing is, most people didn’t have a jog wheel. That left the pause button, which couldn’t catch every page and the freeze quality was poor (that’s the reason the text is so big. Yorkshire Television realised that most people would be trying to read through thick snow).
Still, there was a buzz about about the Datablast. It was the “magazine of the future”, which could be “prepared seconds before transmission”. It’s a reminder of how unexpected the explosion of t’internet was just a few years later. You’re still thinking about jog wheels, aren’t you?
Joysticks were always awful
Look at these sticks. Just look at them. A horrifying hybrid of ‘70s vibrator and dog chew. Get in the sea, call the coastguard, get pulled out and then get in the sea again.
We’re still waiting for VR to be everywhere
It feels like we’ve been on the cusp of a virtual world for over thirty years. These days it’s the creepy goal of Mark Zuckerberg, but back in 1992 the major player was Leicester’s W Industries. They’re the ones whose massive Virtuality helmets and gloves were on telly all the time, but very rarely spotted out in the wild. In London, Virtuality was two quid a pop and you could be dead in seconds. Bad Influence! worked out that a whole day of gaming would cost you about four hundred notes (and a lifetime of neck problems). The chat with W Industries’ CEO sounds very much like the Facebook overlords today, discussing the sort of virtual worlds that the public “demands”.
By issue two (January 1993), somebody’s tuned in the telly and made the magazine a bit more Bad Influence!-y. Every game is reviewed by “Andy” and “Violet” and scored out of five, but there are still panels all over the shop and it’s tough to know where to focus. Still…
The world was a bigger place
The TV crew went over to Japan to be shown Sonic 2 at the end of 1992, and the mag carries some Actual Journalism here. Sonic was designed by a 20-year-old Sega employee who won a competition, it says. He was called Mr. Needle Mouse (the character, not the competition winner). Violet spied a “girl Sonic” in some drawings which were quickly removed from the room, and they get a first look at Night Trap (it gets compared to a semi-nude Cluedo).
But it’s the wide-eyed look at Not Britain and the thinly veiled rage at some of the trip’s events that’ll have you snorting coffee through your nose as you read this. On the plane, they “ran out of Western food” and were instead presented with “squidgy things”. Japan – a country which retains the death penalty – is described as having “no crime” because Violet doesn’t have her makeup stolen when she leaves it in a taxi. Later, Sega’s President is described as “the most approachable man we met in Japan” (almost everyone else is described as “The Japanese”).
It’s easy to forget how big the world once was. This trip is reported like they’ve fallen through a wardrobe and woken up in Narnia. Still, to come away with “moving screens” of Sonic 2 for the TV was quite a coup. The report’s here, minus the bitching of the magazine (it’s really good):
Bloody hell
As anybody who was actually there will remember, loads of girls were playing games in the ‘90s. It still kept surprising software publishers, though. “Girls are generally thought to be less competitive than boys” drones this piece on “Game Girls”, inaccurately. It then sticks up for females who want to play games and rounds off the swerving, slow-motion car crash with a box about Barbie for the NES. It’s like the whole Bad Influence! mag experience in one 500 word piece, really: well-intended, low-key bigoted and absolutely all over the place. Into the sea with those joysticks you go, la.
Nam Rood was the most popular part of the show
But let’s not end on a low, eh? A few times on every show, the screen would be hijacked by Nam Rood (“Back Door”, anoraks), the train station drunk we mentioned back up there. He did the cheats bit and was played by actor Andy Wear. Andy got picked up after Yorkshire Television advertised for a “computer games boffin”. “I thought I could do that”, he remembered. “We’d owned a Spectrum”.
At the casting, Andy had to read a nerdy script and type on four keyboards at the same time. Finding it both hard and uninteresting, he instead channeled a “clog dancing hooligan” he’d played in a few bits of theatre, shouting at the camera and disrespecting everybody in the room. With the latest Sonic cheat code Pritt Sticked to his temple, he got the gig. Months later, Andy was being stopped in the street by kids eager for Streetfighter II cheats. He ended up wearing a wooly hat wherever he went for years, and later went on to be in pretty much every soap opera your Mum ever loved.
Sleep wiv da angles
It’s clear that the Bad Influence! mag was a last minute deal. The parts of it that look like the show are fine, but most of it is too generic and lacks the identity which made us fall in love with the cheeky TOTAL! or Future’s grimy and industrial Gamesmaster, which utterly lived the TV show’s brand. Bad Influence! magazine doesn’t seem to know who its audience is, and does a decent job of alienating the one it has (girls, The Japanese, etc). With games mags at the peak of their powers in the early ‘90s, there was never gonna be room for one that didn’t know who it was talking to. Issue 3 never happened, but the show went on until January 1996.
Summing up? You know when you asked your Dad to get Amiga Format but he came home with something else but you had better enjoy it because it was expensive? That crushing experience is Bad Influence! magazine.
Enjoyed that Neil, I remember seeing the first mag on the shelves and was tempted to get it - but thankfully didn't :)
Great read. I hope you cover CPC Attack at some point in the future. Their first issue was hilarious.