Fusion Retro Books, besides of publishing very nice retro-computing inspired books, has been reviving some of the old magazines that were popular in the United Kingdom in the 80s. That is Crash for the ZX Spectrum, Zzap!64 for the Commodore 64 and Amtix for the Amstrad CPC.
If I’m not mistaken, it all started with annuals for the speccy and the Commodore, that were (are?) like a slightly larger magazine on a nice hardback edition that covers games released on the last year –with exceptions, they also cover new games that were released before the annuals were a thing–, and because we were living a retro-boom and the annuals were successful, Fusion got the rights for the magazines and started publishing them in a small A5 format with 60 pages.
Looks like, of the three, the Amstrad CPC is the smaller –or less active– community of users, so when Fusion was touching base trying to find if there was enough interest to sustain a Amtix revival, I was supportive of the idea –and excited!–. But as I recall it, the response from the community was lukewarm at best.
Hyperdrive was reviewed in Amtix #7
There were different reasons. For example, some people didn’t like the original Amtix, so I thought it was not going to happen. That’s why we can’t have nice things, etc. But it finally happened, and Fusion decided to give it a go with 12 numbers, and depending on the support, perhaps keep going.
We just got the 12th and last issue of Amtix CPC, and I’m not surprised.
I do think that the Amstrad community is sometimes weird, and not that different from other retro-communities in reality. We see that with new games, when people are very quick to ask for physical releases of the games, but very often the sales of those editions don’t justify the effort –and I’m not talking about profits but to just break even–, or even with people looking forward to play the game when is in development, but when the game is released… silence.
I find this frustrating, but what can be done? The ones wishing there were more things happening around the Amstrad CPC are not always the same that won’t support those initiatives, and being a smaller community perhaps than the ones behind the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64 (or the MSX!), means that we have less options (physical editions, magazines).
Although all this is true, in the case of Amtix, I think there are other reasons at play.
In my opinion the magazine was a bit hit and miss, and this is probably not unique to Amtix. I was subscribed to both Amtix and Crash, and by Amtix issue 7, I decided to cancel my subscription because I wasn’t enjoying reading the magazines.
What didn’t work for me? I guess it was a mix of different things: layout problems, some of the texts were very amateur, reviews of games that shouldn’t be there –a free game that is not good, why waste pages on it when there are more games to review?–, and in general it felt like they wanted to revive exactly what those magazines were in the 80s without realising that we live in a different time.
Yes, I know. But I said it already, the Amstrad community is sometimes weird, and I’m part of it.
Perhaps it could have been better, or different, but I’m glad we had Amtix back even if it wasn’t perfect. You can still get the magazine from Fusion Retro Books pages on Amtix CPC.