Commodore Format Archive

CF33 saw the axing of Roger Frames Buys Budjit Games. It caused controversy, but there simply weren’t enough games around to fill the column. “I hated it”, remembers Trenton. “It was like sacking a friend”.

CF36, SEPTEMBER 1993. ANDY HUTCHINSON BECOMES EDITOR Moving over from Your Sinclair, Andy took the reigns of Commodore Format just a few months after Trenton’s redesign of the magazine…and took it off in arguably what should have been the new direction in the first place.

Although Andy’s first cover – CF36 – was of the upcoming Alien3, he arrived on the scene at a crossroads in the life of the C64 market. With just Mayhem In Monsterland, Alien and Lemmings confirmed as full-price games releases for the future, Andy was faced with a real problem. What would the pages be filled with?

Ambitiously, Andy  began to move Commodore Format into the center of the UK market, promising funds to readers for programming new games that would appear on the covertape. “The future’s you lot”, he said. Articles began to appear on how to code your own games, and new staff writer Simon ‘Hairy’ Forrester wrote a “call to arms” to C64 users asking them to form their own Public Domain groups and write fanzines.

The most memorable aspect of Andy’s time on the magazine was the 100% review score given to Apex Computer Production’s Mayhem In Monsterland. CF had followed the game’s development in a monthly diary and had made the most of such an exciting title appearing on a declining machine.

“Is it the perfect game?”, asked Andy in the review. “No. Is it the best thing you’ll see on the C64 this decade or next? Yes.”

CF44, May 1994. DAVE GOLDER BECOMES EDITOR Andy Hutchinson was CF‘s editor for eight issues. Dave Golder – who first appeared in Commodore Format as a reviewer under Colin Campbell in late 1991 – was his successor. The production editor of the magazine under Trenton Webb, Dave had been keen to get the editor’s role at CF for some time. Indeed, as he told us in an interview for this website, he walked out on the magazine and threatened to resign from Future Publishing when he was first passed over for the job. “I feel bad now though”, he remembers. “Andy Hutchinson was alright.”

Simon Forrester continued as staff writer under Dave, and would remain on the magazine in one way or another until its closure.

As the C64 market continued to decline, Dave was in charge as the magazine underwent the first of two severe cuts in its page count. Commodore Format was reduced from 50 pages to 34 in July 1994 (CF46), although the content remained strong and similar to the hobbyist theme introduced by Andy Hutchinson.

Dave was the editor who looked further afield for new C64 software and was the first to give major coverage to games from Europe, where the indie scene remained quite active. “We had to fill the pages“, he told us in February 2014.

CF51, Christmas 1994. LIVE OR DIE With Dave Golder moved at short notice onto next gen title Ultimate Future Games,  CF51 was the only issue of Commodore Format published without an editor. It was put together by Dave and writer Tim Norris when they weren’t working on other titles. But there simply wasn’t very much to read – because Future Publishing’s new owners, Pearson, had reduced the magazine’s size to just 22 pages.  “The magazine was downsized pretty much overnight“, recalls Andy Roberts.

Issue 51 was more important than readers realised: the next issue of CF was only to be given the go ahead if enough copies were sold for it to still be considered viable. Happily,  that happened.

CF52, January 1995. KAREN LEVELL BECOMES EDITOR Commodore Format enters its last year of life with new editor Karen Levell. It’s now quite hard to get CF in the shops, and subscriptions are no longer available. In reference to just how close the mag came to closure, his month’s issue is nicknamed “The Pheonix”.

Karen squeezed a lot of very good content into the magazine’s remaining 22 pages – unofficially helped by Dave Golder (credited in this month’s magazine as “deserter”). In one of the most technically oriented issues ever, CF52 covered the point and click software GEOS. There was the first nod that the world really was moving on from the C64, too – with a review of a Commodore emulator for the PC.

The magazine’s credit masthead called CF52 “The Phoenix”, one of a few suggestions in issues 51 and 52 that the magazine was very nearly cancelled at issue 50. Certainly from now on, the magazine was running on an issue to issue basis.

CF55, April 1995. REBECCA LACK BECOMES “EDITORIAL CONTROLLER” …only for Karen to re-appear the next month! Rebecca continued as CF‘s production editor.

CF59, August 1995. SIMON FORRESTER BECOMES EDITOR Previously a staff writer on the magazine after originally joining Future to write for Amstrad Action, Simon’s humour was a welcome breath of character into a magazine which had become somewhat dry and impersonal as it was passed around editors in the last year of its life. And finally – an editor who understood the machine again! “I was the only one left in the office who knew enough to write for CF”, he told us in 2013.

His editorship was controversial to some – both in terms of the new bitesize article style that was introduced and the increasingly mediocre covertape software. But unbeknown to readers, Simon was working on a “bulk discount contract” for the magazine with an almost impossible workload. The budget for the covertape was almost zero, too. “It was a nightmare”, he remembers. Future Publishing had decided that the only way CF could continue was if one writer – and it fell to Simon – wrote pretty much everything. Even tips section Gamesbusters, by ever present Andy Roberts, was now gone. He’d been on the magazine since the very start – but CF could no longer afford him. 

CF59 carried a piece on the closure of Amstrad Action, but deflected rumours that CF was about to follow suit. CF60’s editorial was entitled “Still Here”, but also told readers that the next magazine would be an issue to remember. And it was.

CF61. OCTOBER 1995. THE END “We had a meeting with the publisher around issue 59”, remembers Simon Forrester. “And it just had a feeling of yeah, it’s time. CF was sliding into the fanzine model”.

It’s difficult to argue otherwise. And so five years to the month it unexpectedly appeared and changed the market, Commodore Format was gone. The cover was a large painting of Roger Frames and The Mighty Brain walking off into the sunset – perhaps the most striking cover the magazine had had in years.

A revealing sentence on the inside front cover tells you everything you need to know – just 5,000 copies of the final issue were printed.

The arguments around whether or not CF should have continued for so long have raged around the UK scene ever since, and you’ll find a lot of those thoughts around this website and on many other Commodore 64 forums. It’s sad and wrong to dwell on the last few months of its life, though – but it’s indicative of the love people had for Commodore Format that they still care.

Us? We prefer to remember the highs of the likes of CF16. Have a look around the rest of the site and knock yourself out with the memories.  CF