CPCWiki forum

Hi,

When I was the editor of Amstrad User I commissioned some articles from Jeremy Clarkson. Two of them appeared, I remember one was about gambling and neither were particularly good, but I'd like to dig them up, ideally without having to look through the whole lot.

Does anyone know which issues they were in? Two articles appeared, he never delivered the third.

SImon 

Quote from: simonrockman on 13:03, 12 December 14
and neither were particularly good

Not much has changed then in the last 30 years. :D

Bryce.

Edit: I think all those magazines have been OCR scanned, so you should be able to do a text search through the whole collection very quickly.

Welcome on board!

It would be very interesting to hear about your history on Amstrad User. :)

Quote from: simonrockman on 13:03, 12 December 14
Hi,

When I was the editor of Amstrad User I commissioned some articles from Jeremy Clarkson. Two of them appeared, I remember one was about gambling and neither were particularly good, but I'd like to dig them up, ideally without having to look through the whole lot.

Does anyone know which issues they were in? Two articles appeared, he never delivered the third.

SImon

Hi Simon,


Sorry. Was sure I sent you this info via Twitter a while back.


The ball games article is in September '87 (issue 34) pages 48-49. (the superb Living Daylights cover)


His fighting games article is in Jan '88 (issue 38) pages 58-59 (the Trantor cover)

Now I have to dig these out. Are they in the magazine section of the wiki?

Tried to post one of them but the forum whined about "failed security checks"

Thanks.


A few Amstrad stories.


I was 20 when I started at Amstrad User, and way out of my depth. I'd been the most junior writer at Personal Computing Today and a bunch of other magazines and William Poel offered me the job of editor. I strated and rapidly had to try and remember what my bost at the previous job did so that i could get Amstrad user out. At that stage it was just mailed to members of the club but within weeks of starting I was told it was going monthly and newsstand. I got away with that but was intimidated by Alan Sugar and he used to tell me off for shaking in meetings.


I was crazy he was a very good boss and I'd work for him again in a heartbeat. Alcohol was banned in the Amstrad building but we ignored that, one year AMS's chauffeur got so drunk AMS had to drive him home.


When Jeremy Clarkson was doing those articles I took him a 464 which he'd bought through me at staff discount (so lots of his early stuf was written in Protext). I had  lancia Delat 1500 which I curbed outside JC's office in Fulham, bursting the tyre. I was wearing a suit so he changed the wheel for me.


Simon

Quote from: CraigsBar on 15:03, 12 December 14
Now I have to dig these out. Are they in the magazine section of the wiki?

The Jan '88 one is, but unfortunately the other one is missing. I think I have the original hiding somewhere though.

They are, I found them both there. Not awful articles but not great either.

Of course they're all here : http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/index.php?action=dldir;sa=list;id=7 (http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/index.php?action=dldir;sa=list;id=7) .

@chinyhill10 : yeah, you did tweet about them, I remember looking them up a few weeks back :)

Hi Gryzor, thanks for the links to the pdf versions, I was looking here http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Amstrad_Computer_User (http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Amstrad_Computer_User#1987)

Quote from: Simon Ian Rockman on 16:54, 13 December 14

When Jeremy Clarkson was doing those articles I took him a 464 which he'd bought through me at staff discount (so lots of his early stuf was written in Protext). I had  lancia Delat 1500 which I curbed outside JC's office in Fulham, bursting the tyre. I was wearing a suit so he changed the wheel for me.


Simon

You did a great job at ACU. It is astonishing how it hurtled downhill pretty much from the moment Amstrad sold it and you left. During those first 50 or so issues it was the essential Amstrad read and the top selling CPC magazine (IIRC your one and only ABC figure was around 20,000 higher than Amstrad Action at the time).


Great technical articles, generally good on games (liked the idea of 3 reviewers but suspect it was all 1 person) and superb in depth articles on software houses. Hairy Hacker was also a real treat and a different take on a tips section.


After it was sold it shot downhill. The mag attempted to become more gamer orientated but it always seemed to be like your Dad dancing at a wedding. Out of touch and trying too hard to be hip. Not helped by not even hiding the fact they weren't even bothering to review CPC versions of the games (e.g. Flimbo's Quest which was blatantly a 16 bit version). The second a magazine starts openly reviewing non CPC versions of games it's basically admitting it thinks its readers are dumb and that it simply doesn't care.


From thereon in ACU was passed around like an unloved child between different owners and editorial teams culminating in the disaterous and risible rebranding to CPC Attack (which lasted all of 6 issues). Amstrad Action filled the void and did a far better job of balancing between games and applications (I'll also raise a glass to AA's longest serving editor Rod Lawton at this point who did for AA what you did for ACU).


So thanks for those first 50 or so issues. Great mag, great attitude and some great covers. Just such a shame they ruined it all after you left!

Sadly yes after ACU got sold it did go downhill fast, the first 50 copies felt like a proper computer magazine, the right balance of technical material and entertainment.

Completely off topic I know but I have to ask, why did Amstrad decide to not create an equivalent of the Amiga and ST? was it simply cost?

Quote from: dcdrac on 17:35, 21 December 14
Completely off topic I know but I have to ask, why did Amstrad decide to not create an equivalent of the Amiga and ST? was it simply cost?

I guess they thought the plus machines were. Shame they did not notice 8bits missing.

Quote from: dcdrac on 17:35, 21 December 14
Completely off topic I know but I have to ask, why did Amstrad decide to not create an equivalent of the Amiga and ST? was it simply cost?

Amstrad were dealing in more of the PC based systems, but they had a compact PC system that was more of the Amiga and ST style with the PC-20, though it wasn't set out to carry out what the Amiga or ST did.


I have a review of this machine somewhere, but tracking it down maybe difficult.

Quote from: dcdrac on 17:35, 21 December 14
Completely off topic I know but I have to ask, why did Amstrad decide to not create an equivalent of the Amiga and ST? was it simply cost?

There was far more money to be made with the PC Systems. The CPC was small beer and Amstrad thought (correctly) the market was moving towards PC dominence.


Despite the fact they guessed this correctly they released a series of under powered and lame PC's aimed at gamers that had no appeal at all. This was because Sugar insisted on competing on price. I remember looking at an Amstrad 486 for my first PC in 1994 and it was underpowered and felt very cheap compared to competitors.


The Mega PC was a reasonable idea but to be honest given the low cost of the Megadrive you could have just bought a PC and a Megadrive seperatly.

I was not impressed with the Amstrad PCs, my first was an Elonex 386based one. Amstrad seemed to lose their touch in the 1990's, or the market changed and their philosophy no longer matched it.

those Jeremy Clarkson articles are a cool find.... ie the find was cool not the articles themselves -  i just read the fighting games review and why weren't there any screenshots ?? that was the most odd thing didn't Clarko or anyone else at ACU have a camera ???

It was so much waffle but Clarko has kept the same style it seems from when he first started out..... how he failed to get to load samurai triliogy was a laugh.

I still own the living daylights issue.
Going to dig it out to have a read.
sadly my copies end at December 1987
so close

You can download the missing issues from the download tab. 8)

how many issues of ACU did Jeremy Clarkson appear in ?

When i read the Trantor article review it read as if Jeremy Clarkson had written it but i couldnt see any where in the article from who wrote it....

he sounded like such a cpc noob in those articles it was like he thought he knew everything about it but actually didn't know much but just faked his way through it???

That's exactly what he does now, just with cars :D

Bryce.

Gesendet von meinem Motorola DynaTEC 8000X mit Tapatalk 2.

Going through my old magazines I happened across the issue I was missing with Clarkson's article.


Happy days?

Guru Larry ended up doing a video on these: Jeremy Clarkson: Video Game Journalist - GYCW - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biGN6EP5Klg)

yeah he even put a screenshot from this topic's very first post...


Hey Gryzor, go ask due credits, after all this is your forum...
;)

Lawsuit incoming in 3...2...1.... Oh, it was a dud. Oh well.

Not sure how I got here from Google, probably the words Atari and Jeremy Clarkson, but it was great to hear from the editor.


I read both articles he wrote and for the ball games one the 4 or 5 paragraph intro about casinos/Black Jack were complete filler but the rest of it was actually not that bad. You have to remember this was old Top Gear Jezza era and it does actually read like he reviewed cars back then (rubbish jokes and classic 80s sexism lol).