Amstrad Action was a monthly magazine, published in the United Kingdom, which catered to owners of home computers from the Amstrad CPC range. It was the first magazine published by Chris Andersen's Future Publishing, which with a varied line-up of computing and non-computing related titles has since become one of the foremost magazine publishers in the UK. Jump to: navigation, search Amstrad CPC 464, with CTM644 colour monitor The Amstrad CPC was an 8-bit home computer produced by Amstrad in the 1980s. ... Future Publishing Ltd - part of Future plc - is a magazine publishing company based primarily in Bath, England, but with offices in London, Italy (Milan), the US (California and New York) and France (Levallois-Perret). ...

Lifetime

Amstrad Action, known in the CPC community as AA, had the longest lifetime of any Amstrad magazine, running from October 1985 until June 1995 and producing 117 issues in total. It was still being published long after the CPC had ceased production and games were no longer available in the shops. This is believed to have been due mainly to the fondness with which the title was regarded by its publisher. Amstrad Consumer Electronics plc, usually known as Amstrad, is a company formed in 1968 by Sir Alan Michael Sugar in the UK, and based in Brentwood in Essex, England. ...

Cover-cassettes and disks

AA front cover (#87, Dec. 1992).

AA was the first magazine in the world to covermount software cassettes, beating Your Sinclair to the honour by a matter of months. The cover-cassettes (and, later, cover-disks) featured game demos, miscellaneous free software and, in some instances, complete games. Jump to: navigation, search Image File history File links Download high resolution version (539x768, 94 KB)Cover from Amstrad Action issue 87 File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Jump to: navigation, search Image File history File links Download high resolution version (539x768, 94 KB)Cover from Amstrad Action issue 87 File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Your Sinclair or YS as it was affectionately known, was a computer magazine for the Sinclair range of computers, specifically the ZX Spectrum. ...

Editorial staff

Memorable staff included Rod "The Beard" Lawton, James Leach and Adam Waring. Adam had written several games himself, for which, if one came up for review upon re-release, he would gracefully be allowed to write a second opinion.

Features and editorial style

Long-running features included Forum, for technically-minded CPC users; Action Test, for games reviews; and Cheat Mode, containing walkthroughs, hints and cheats. A game rated 90% or more in Action Test received the award of AA Mastergame, 80-90% an AA Rave. Publishers of CPC games such as Activision, Ocean and Infogrames proudly mounted these awards on their packaging to promote their games to customers. Jump to: navigation, search Activision, Inc. ... The familiar Ocean logotype had an often prominent placement on the box art and is recognized by many people. ... Infogrames Entertainment SA (IESA) is an international holding company headquartered in Lyon, France. ...

Interactive fiction was covered by "The Pilgrim" and, later, "Balrog". As activity in the Amstrad world declined, the editorial staff were reduced to three and the magazine adopted an increasingly eccentric style, with one edition in particular featuring an eight-page script for a Christmas pantomime. The magazine is also notable for pioneering the kind of responses - sometimes dry, sometimes surreal, usually humorous and mildly rude - to readers' letters of a form now seen throughout UK gaming magazine culture. These characteristics, for many readers, added to AA's charm. Jump to: navigation, search Zork, an early work of interactive fiction, running on a modern interpreter Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software containing simulated environments in which players use text commands to control characters. ... Jump to: navigation, search This article deals with J.R.R. Tolkiens Balrogs. ...

Toot

A mysterious blob with legs called Toot lived in the page margins of early issues of AA, surfacing sometimes to comment on the contents of the magazine or play with a page number. His or her whereabouts are unknown.

See also: CPC Attack CPC Attack! was a short-lived magazine dedicated to Amstrad CPC gaming. ...