I've finally finished my efforts to catalogue all the games-related articles (including roundups, re-reviews, type-in listings and issue disk bonuses) from Page 6/New Atari User. My data sheet has over 2,000 rows in it, though some of those are repeats. Even so, that's a lot of material to work with.
As I found myself reviewing the latter-day issues in the magazine's run, though, I found myself feeling an intense sense of melancholy and almost mourning, I guess. Over the course of the publication's complete run, you can see at a glance when it was doing the best (full-colour covers with specially commissioned artwork or photography to appear prominently and attractively on newsstands) and when things started to go downhill (single-colour covers, the return to a subscription-only model) and when things were nearing the end (a switch to an A5 format, with less and less in the way of commercial releases covered each issue).
Here's a shot from Atarimania, which hosts a full archive of Page 6/New Atari User issues, that shows three stages of this evolution:
I found myself feeling sad all over again while working my way through these issues — because I remember this happening first time around. I remember getting Page 6/New Atari User every month, and in those latter years, feeling like something which had been a fixture in my life for as long as I could remember was ailing and would eventually die. Page 6 started before I was old enough to know what a computer or a magazine was, so it was always present throughout my childhood and adolescence.
Its final issue — in which the editor, Les Ellingham, made an unfortunately unkept promise to readers that there would be six more issues of the magazine before it finally closed for good — is a sad read. Even my Dad, who had been a contributor from midway through the magazine's run up until its very last issue, had given up writing about specifically Atari-related stuff, and was instead posting a regular column about the wonders of the then-nascent (at least in consumer-accessible form) Internet and World Wide Web. My article spreadsheet has just a single game-related entry for that final issue: a public domain version of Tetris for Atari 8-bit.
One of the most remarkable things about Page 6/New Atari User is that it wasn't the Atari ST coverage which lasted until the b(l)itter end. No; the last few issues contained pretty much nothing but Atari 8-bit coverage, which provided the first hints of the fact that the "Atari Classic" scene, as the magazine referred to it at the time, would continue to thrive in the years to come, even in the absence of a major specialist publication.
The ST scene is still alive too, but I can't help but feel like there's a lot more Atari 8-bit enthusiasts out there than Atari ST people. After all, the ST marked the beginning of the shift towards all home computing being PC-based; the ST certainly had its own distinctive, unique features, but it also marked a point where the distinction between purportedly different platforms was less pronounced in various ways. Thus, I suspect what happened, is people who were once ST enthusiasts just sort of… "upgraded" to MS-DOS and then Windows-based PCs and then never looked back. That's certainly what my family did — although I certainly never quite left the Atari machines behind, as they had been so important to me growing up, and continue to be important to me to this day.
Anyway, the thing I think I find most sad about the slow death of Page 6/New Atari User is that it was clearly taking a mental toll on Les. In some of the last few issues, he described how the editor of an American Atari newsletter had found himself succumbing to ill health, at least partly due to the stress of working on his publication, and he indicated that he had no desire to do himself a mischief in the same way — particularly because, in these latter years, he was also trying to support himself with handmade crafts. In one of the last issues, he mentions that he thinks he might have to get a part-time job to continue supporting himself, because between the magazine and his crafts, there was no longer enough money coming in to completely make ends meet.
But all good things have to eventually come to an end, and in the tech space in particular, the rate at which things progress can be absolutely mind-boggling at times. I don't think there's any shame in Page 6/New Atari User's eventual bowing out, even with the regrettably unkept promise from Les' final editorial. To consider that this was a publication which continuously supported both the Atari 8-bit and, once it hit the market, the ST, from 1983 up until 1998 is absolutely mindblowing. Les' refusal to let go until it was absolutely, definitely no longer viable to continue in any way whatsoever is incredibly admirable — as is the commitment of the freelance contributors who kept sending in articles issue after issue, without fail, like my Dad.
So yeah. While reliving the end of something that brought me so much joy as a child has made me a little bit maudlin, I also continue to celebrate everything this publication achieved — and continue to derive joy from it as I grow older, since I am now in possession of the complete run of issues that I grew up with.
It saddens me a bit that when something similar happens these days, in the form of a website going down and no longer being accessible, that there is often no easy way to simply look back fondly over past "issues" in the same way as you can with a magazine. There are many, many online publications that are just gone these days, and while The Internet Archive has done an incredible job of preserving some of them, there are others that we'll just never see again in any form. I know — I've worked on a bunch of them, and now most of my articles are now buried, nigh-unsearchable, in the archives of other sites that ingested the data of the closing publications, often introducing a bunch of errors in the process.
Page 6/New Atari User, though, that will always exist in the form that I knew and loved it. So although I'm sad all over again at the end of such an important publication, I know that I will continue to derive joy — and attain knowledge — from browsing that archive of issues over and over again. One day I might even get around to learning how to program the Atari 8-bits properly beyond simple BASIC. You never know.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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