TOTAL! recall: how the '80s shaped one of the '90s greatest games magazines - part one
Future's Nintendo mag was like your best mate. It nods firmly to the best of the '80s, when one editor rebelled against the boring status quo and changed games magazines forever.
In 1984, a young magazine editor called Chris Anderson was at the summer home of Paul Daniels. The famous British magician and television star was promoting his Atari game, Paul Daniels’ Magic Adventure. A BBC interview from around the same time makes it sound like Paul had written it himself, and although that isn’t really true (they’re his ideas, but it was coded by Gil Williamson) Daniels was a computer fan. He’d taught himself BASIC on an Atari 800 by inputting a line of code then typing RUN to see what it did. There was a good reason for this. The magazines of the day, he said, were “not understandable” (“full of gobbledegook”, he’d later sigh to the BBC).
This resonated with Anderson deeply. Messing about on computers was fun, but what was on offer in WHSmith didn’t reflect that. Even the better publications like Computer & Video Games could be sniffy in those early days (“is Raid Over Moscow suitable content for a game?”), and the assumed knowledge in the serious sections of stuff like Commodore User was uninviting for noobs.
Chris’s Personal Computer Games magazine was an attempt at replicating the fun a computer really was and, bluntly, to not be so fucking boring. There were large screenshots and the information was split up in a way that avoided reams of text. The friendly interviews were like Sunday supplement features. Anderson didn’t want his readers to be on the outside looking in: he wanted to draw them towards the fantastical, never-ending possibilities of the computer games world. PCG spoke to you, not at you from on high. It was your friend, and it didn’t have a neck beard.
Chris’s work caught the attention of anarchic upstart publisher Newsfield. Having blitzed the Spectrum market with Crash, they hired Anderson in late 1984 for a new Commodore 64 mag that they’d codenamed Bang (leaving Wallop to the unfortunate Amstrad CPC world, you’d suspect). The first thing he did was rename the project to Zzap! 64 (Wallop never happened either – it became Amtix).
Chris wanted Zzap! to be even more accessible than PCG. He made a list of ten things to include in the magazine that had never been done before. One of those was the drawings of reviewers either rejoicing or recoiling at the software. The idea here was to make information immediately easy to understand, but it had another – perhaps unintended – consequence. Over a few issues, it became obvious which reviewers loved what style of game (or, even better, which ones they hated). Very quickly, readers identified and built up a relationship with iconic writers like Julian Rignall who’d been hired as hardened gamers first, journalists second.
Zzap! became more than a magazine: it was a world in itself. Every seen schmup, referring to shoot ‘em ups? That’s a Zzap!-ism, that is. Kids couldn’t get enough of being in a gang with these older, smarter lads: Ludlow became the unlikely dominator of British computer games, able to make or break software publishers with a single review. Its competitors, notably the Chief-In-Snooze Commodore User, limply tried to fire back. They said Zzap! was for kids (um, yeah?) and called it a “fluffy lollipop magazine”. The next month, Zzap!’s cover cover looked like this. ZFG.
After just twelve weeks, Newsfield’s owners reneged on a deal that had let Chris set up office remotely in Yeovil. They wanted to take full control of Zzap! at Ludlow HQ.
”I objected, and was fired”, Anderson told a 2005 Zzap! special. “But it was the best thing that happened to me, because it spurred me to start Future Publishing”.
The now-legendary publisher started in Chris’s house. He’d managed to get a £15,000 bank loan, which was enough to cover two issues of Amstrad Action. The first came in October 1985, and was aimed at “ordinary, non-boffin users” [quote and bank loan figure from Future’s 30th Anniversary mag, 2015]. Sounds familiar, huh?
Issue 1 only sold 14,000 copies. Chris stood to lose his house. Happily, a Christmas issue cover tape featuring Ocean Software games saved the venture. In 1986, 8000 Plus (later PCW Plus) and PC Plus were both instant hits.
By the end of 1989 Future was doubling in size every year. An expansion of its Bath offices at the start of 1990 was supposed to house years of growth. The space was full in under twelve months. Staff were working in its narrow corridors. The secret to Future’s titles was always the same: whether it was ST Format, S: The Sega Magazine (later Sega Power) or Amiga Format, Future’s editors looked hard at who the readers really were and spoke directly to them about the stuff they cared about - a far cry from the finger-wagging drones of the early ‘80s.
After buying Your Sinclair from Dennis Publishing in early 1990, there was only one microcomputer that Future didn’t have a magazine for: the Commodore 64. Anderson brought in former Zzap! man Steve Jarratt to edit a new title, Commodore Format. Steve in turn employed Andy Dyer as a staff-writer. It was Andy’s first writing gig, but he’d grown up loving the Spectrum (gamers before writers, remember). “He had so much enthusiasm [for computer games] we thought he might die if he didn’t get the job”, Steve told me back in 2013. A killer double act was born.
Commodore Format tore Zzap! to pieces from a standing start. It was outselling the former market leader within months, and forced the once unstoppable Ludlow outfit to drop its Amiga coverage to try and win back C64 readers. But it was more than exclusive coverage of the Commodore that CF had. Zzap! had “lost a lot of the things that made it great”, Steve told me. A high churn of writers had broken the relationship it had built with readers. At the same time, CF created its own consistent world to get drawn in to. Like early Zzap!, it had become as important to the readers as the games themselves.
Commodore Format had two strongly defined characters. It’s in this glorious pantomime that TOTAL!’s story really begins. There was Grumpy Steve, the man in charge (mainly grumpy because he was only in charge of Andy). He loved thoughtful stuff like Paul Woakes Mercenary. Andy became “Thicky” Dyer, the hapless gamer with a heart of gold who’d never get things quite right. He loved games so much that he’d find a speckle of joy in even the crappiest software and was immediately likeable.
Across the 100 pages of CF every month the pair bickered and got in to all sorts of scrapes. Here’s Andy stapling a walnut to his ear (p.57), and here’s Steve getting attacked by the Predator (p.16). But no matter who got injured or how many times they fell out, the boys agreed on one thing: the C64 was great. You couldn’t help but be invested on one side or the other and - yep - feel like they were your cooler, older friends. We’re back there again. The magazine had other writers, but this double act was its heartbeat. Commodore Format became Future’s most successful launch to date.
By the summer of 1991, Future was looking to expand again – this time to a Nintendo magazine. With the SNES imminent in the UK, securing a slice of the advertising that would come with the 16-bit console launch was A Big Deal. The competition was already out there, with the likes of Julian Rignall impressively updating the Zzap! formula on stuff like Mean Machines (and, later, an official Nintendo magazine) for EMAP. Their answer needed to be big. Future pulled Andy and Steve off CF and – in complete secrecy – started to talk to them about what would become TOTAL!.
Nintendo were infamously precious about any coverage of their brand. In fact, they were so ridiculous about their IP that Future wasn’t entirely sure how the Japanese business would react to an unofficial mag. It was better to ask for forgiveness than permission, they figured. So for the entirety of Autumn 1991, Andy and Steve worked on TOTAL! at a publisher’s house without telling a soul. Even the other staff at Future Publishing didn’t know about it, and they wouldn’t until issue one arrived back from the printers.
Grumpy and Thicky were about to level up. 👴
Next week, we’ll have a proper look at issue one of TOTAL! We’ll see what it took from the past and how it made those ideas even better. No mention of Paul Daniels (probably). Bye for now and (YouTube voice) dontforgetosubscribeguys!
This article was amended on 13th August 2022. Chris Anderson joined Newsfield in late 1984, not 1985. I’ve also clarified that Chris left Newsfield after the publishers decided to bring the magazine in-house at Ludlow, rather than be produced remotely in Yeovil.
Thanks very much this week to Julian ‘Jaz’ Rignall for his help.