#oneaday Day 395: Old Mags - Atari User, January 1988

I like reading old magazines. Ideally I like reading their old paper-based incarnations, but archives such as the one found at Atarimania make an acceptable and discreet substitute. I thought I'd go through the January 1988 issue of Atari User (Vol. 3, No. 9) and see if there was anything interesting to comment on for today's post. Why? Because I'm a bit bored and this sounds like it might be fun.

We kick off with this bizarre story that Atari apparently got into trouble for recommending against trying to "enhance" the play experience of the Atari 2600 and XEGS by making use of "excess use of imaginary backgrounds or special effects". The ad also included a disclaimer that different children have different abilities to differentiate between fantasy and reality. I feel like this is a discussion we're still having today — somewhat futilely in my experience.

Right beneath that, we have a story about the Atari 8-bit games Nightmares and Little Devil by Red Rat Software being refused distribution in France and Italy as well as by what was, at the time, one of the biggest computer and gaming distributors in the UK. The reason? They have "occult connotations". You think we have problems today?

This ad is weirdly charming for its rather British refusal to refer to an established genre as "shoot 'em up". I say, Barrington, I would bally well love a go on that new "shoot them up" from Tynesoft, it looks jolly fun! Mirax Force was quite neat, as I recall, but pretty difficult. It had digitised speech, which was probably its main selling point.

Oh, what do you know? There's a review of Mirax Force in that very issue. It scores a perfect 10 for both graphics and "playability", with 9s for sound and value for money, providing an overall score of 9. The review itself actually isn't too bad compared to some others from the era — it does at least say what it's doing well, but the fact it's crammed into half a page makes the whole thing feel a bit "rushed". Such was the nature of magazine reviews, however… unlike modern online reviews, you really did have a finite amount of space!

This thing is something else. I actually had a go with one back in the day and it's as stupid as it looks. Billed as "a real alternative to the joystick", what this actually is is an arrangement of 17 clicky buttons, 8 of which equate to the 8 directions of a digital joystick, and the outer 8 of which are the same directions with the fire button pressed down. There's also a solo fire button in the middle. It's an interesting idea, but required both hands to use effectively and was not particularly practical for… well, anything, really. Only £18.85 though!

With the release of the XEGS (essentially a 65XE with a detachable keyboard, meaning it could be used as a "console") Atari re-issued a bunch of classic cartridge games. In this feature, Neil Fawcett looks back at what were already considered to be retro games in 1988. To be fair, all these games have stood the test of time very well — and the Atari ports of them are all great.

Another interesting advert and a relic of a bygone age; an advertisement for an "Owners Club", with regular magazines plus benefits such as pen pals, public domain software and all manner of other stuff. The age of the Internet has made this sort of thing all but redundant, but it always makes me smile to see ads like this in the old magazines.

Back in the day, if you had a bit of hardware that didn't work on your computer, did you moan and complain and leave one-star Amazon reviews? Did you fuck; you wrote your own drivers, such as this mouse driver for Atari 8-bit by Simon Miller, composed in machine code and usable in BASIC programs.

Talking of the XEGS, Atari User's resident techhead Andre Willey pulled one apart for you to admire. Look at all the chips and sockets and colour sub-carrier crystals!

One thing I find particularly fascinating about Atari User is that its cover feature each month tended not to be a commercial piece of software, but rather one of the BASIC or machine code listings you could type in to get yourself some free games or other software. This month, the top spot goes to Submarine Hunter by Nick Pearce, a simple "depth charge" shoot 'em up that I recall being pretty competent. You'll notice that the pages for this game are some of the only pages of the issue to appear in full colour, too! Game of the Month was serious business.

Here's another relic of a lost age: programming tutorials. Every microcomputer in the '80s shipped with BASIC either in ROM or on a cartridge, and thus learning to program was regarded as something that pretty much everyone would try their hand at at one point or another. This, of course, led to repeated "first steps"-style ongoing features at regular intervals, such as this one from Len Golding.

This was one of my favourite regular features in Atari User: complete, functional, useful programs that used just five lines of BASIC code. It was seriously impressive quite how much developers could get done in so little code.

This is an interesting section; rather than providing purely theoretical programming tutorials, the Computing in ACTION! section provides practical examples of how you might make use of BASIC programming techniques in "the real world", as it were. This month, it's a cocktail generator, which suggests ingredients for you to mix together — without mixing "the grape and the grain" — for various creative beverages.

I always thought this was cool; while Page 6 and Atari User were rivals — they were the only two Atari 8-bit magazines on the newsstands — they always advertised each other. Page 6 eventually took over Atari User in its latter years, rebranding itself as New Atari User.

And to close things off, here's the back cover advert for those two "banned" games from the news section; the cynical might argue that this is all a big publicity stunt, but remember the Satanic Panic very much was a thing with media that appealed to young people. You can't really blame Red Rat for making use of the stupidity of the situation as a marketing point!