CPC Attack! magazine told its readers to "sod off". So they did
The self-styled "rival" to Amstrad Action was more interested in the SNES and slagging off Amiga Power than celebrating the CPC. It didn't last long.
If the CPC world of 1992 was a pub and Amstrad Action was sitting in the corner with a pint doing the crossword, CPC Attack! was the idiot at the bar demanding to know what you’re looking at. It is an angry, confused and embarrassing magazine far more interested in itself and the Super damned Nintendo than the cuddly 8-bit computer it’s supposed to be championing. It lasted for six issues between June and November of that year.
Attack!’s vanilla roots make the tale even stranger than it already is. We’ve got to go back to 1984 and Amstrad Computer User to tell the story properly. It was the computer’s official magazine, first published by Amsoft as CPC464 User and sent out to members of the Amstrad User Club. Issue one really pushes Alan Sugar’s shouty vision for the computer: Amstrads, they say, will soon dominate Britain in homes, schools and the office.
The games coverage is an irritated afterthought, echoing Sir Clive Sinclair’s famed annoyance that the Spectrum might ever be used for leisure (“why can’t they take us SERIOUSLY?”). It’s a really tangible example of how differently the architects saw these machines versus what the public wanted them for, but you also see how quickly the manufacturers caught up. By issue three at the start of 1985, the mag had gone mainstream. A colour ACU was available in WHSmith for 95p. It was full of games, salivating at the prospect of Jeff Minter stuff in glorious green screen.
ACU then floated from publisher to publisher, racking up an eyebrow-raising ABC of 63,599 in the first half of 1987 (it’s the only known circulation figure for the mag, and towers over Amstrad Action’s mid 30k-ish high). What it said had impact: The Oliver Twins cared about their reviews, and ACU Gold Star awards were coveted.
As the micro scene faded, Amstrad pulled the plug on the official license for a magazine in spring ’92. By this point the publisher was HNL, who still fancied the ad revenue ACU was bringing in. A new, unofficial title was decided on to scoop it up. CPC Attack! was born.
Oh God
So here’s the thing. ACU wasn’t pulling up trees, but it was a fun read. The Amstrad was a cracking machine which you could do a whole bunch of stuff on, and the official magazine served up an according mix of type-ins, full-page colour games reviews and chummy letters. OK, it has a nude guy on the cover for October 1990 somehow and it wasn’t above sniping at its rivals. But ACU had figured out the games magazine “secret”. You are successful by becoming your reader’s waaaaay cooler older buddy who drops ‘round your gaff once a month and shows you all the latest stuff. If you get that tone right, and if you talk to the reader one on one rather than as part of a group, you’ll build a proper relationship that folk don’t want to let go of.
CPC Attack! does not do this. If Amstrad Action wants to be your mate, Attack! simply isn’t a very nice person. We’ll get to that attitude in a tick, but let’s see how issue one looks on first sight (all these links are going direct to the magazine, by the way).
The welcome is on page four. They’re “the biggest Amstrad magazine out there at 68 pages” (check), and “have the major backing of the industry. We’re already their official top CPC magazine”. The source? Er, none. There’s no mention of what an exciting time it is for Amstrad games (like Lemmings, the visually incredible Addams Family or the interesting French scene that Amstrad Action fell in love with), and there are zero screens of anything Amstrad. There is, however, a whole half page thrown over to a piss-poor Tank Girl-ish cartoon called Amy Strad. Uh-oh.
It is CPC Attack!’s first major feature which has become legendary, so let’s spend some time on page 13. The piece is called Console Crazy. There are pictures of Mario and Sonic. It’s a friggin’ long read about which 16-bit console you should buy. At five pages, it gets more space than the flimsy tips and PD section combined. The logic – defended in later issues – was that “you might want to buy a console”, but using that defence Attack! might as well have started counting down the best Findus Crispy Pancakes.
But wait!
It isn’t all bad. Once you’ve recovered from the butt plug caption joke in a magazine aimed at children, the whole thing takes a breath around page 42. The adventure game section is calm and informative. The monochrome tones of the public domain bit and the orderly grids on the printer review pages are a welcome bit of namaste, even if the techie guy is wearing a cannabis leaf around his neck (because huh huh huh he’s so chill). The month ends gently with some advice on word processors, and then it hits you: the last third of CPC Attack! is content that was intended for the old, sensible and infinitely more readable ACU. Sigh.
In issue two, the magazine doubles down. Amy Strad is on the cover. She looks like something you’d draw on the back of your school exercise book. Reviews of SNES games are flagged up on the front page (the word “console” appears more often than “Amstrad” or “CPC”), and the editorial defends this baffling coverage. It is utterly butt hurt at the negative response to its first issue. “If you’re not interested, sod off!” they end the first page cheerily, and the attitude spills over to the news pages. “Amstrad Action wrong again”, it lies (Amstrad Action’s story on ACU’s demise was in fact perfectly accurate). Above it, there’s an even weirder box slagging off Amiga Power for having the audacity to sell advertising using their official circulation figures. This is the worst sort of jealous office bitching spilling on to the page, and it’s pathetic.
You have to wonder who the staff of CPC Attack! thought would be interested in this stuff. And the answer’s themselves. They’re making a magazine for themselves. But not for much longer.
By issue four, they’ve had a bollocking. “We’ve done things wrong, we’ve said a few things we shouldn’t have” whispers the editorial, looking at the floor and rubbing its own arm like a kid caught in the fridge before dinner. CPC games get a mention in the first few pages for a change, and a turn of the page brings September 1992’s biggest surprise: having spent months slagging off Amstrad Action, CPC Attack! is now aping it. There’s a ton of news (there was always a ton of news. CPC Attack! just chose to toss off to the SNES instead), and a useful DTP bit. Games for small kids get a look in, and they even remember to use some screenshots in the Turbo The Tortoise review. It isn’t all good (the individual elements of games like graphics are scored out of ten but the final score is a percentage, for example) but it isn’t awful either. It is at least an Amstrad magazine about the Amstrad.
Issue five is probably the best of them all, with a creep towards more techie stuff and a good map of recent smash The Addams Family. There’s a bit on fanzines and the return of everybody’s favourite, the type-in section. But it was all too late. If you were the twelve-year-old child who’d taken the trouble to write in from the other side of the world only to be publicly called a “dumb Aussie” back in issue one, would you have carried on reading CPC Attack!? Or how about Mr. Ramsay of Manchester, who’s told to piss off because there’ll never be a cover tape? This is a really awful piece of gaslighting. Cover tapes were wildly popular and a primary reason to purchase magazines thirty years ago. They saved a fledgling Future Publishing. CPC Attack! just couldn’t afford to do one.
But it costs nothing to be a) nice and b) understand your audience. Future Publishing started in Chris Anderson’s garage with a couple of mates. They operated by two rules: you understand your reader’s needs, and you satisfy them. That’s why their own Amstrad magazine ran for ten years. Readers supported their old mate Amstrad Action even when the CPC was dead. That’s the strength of the relationship that was built.
CPC Attack!, meanwhile, mouthed off and thought it knew better for six issues before collapsing face-down in the CPC pub bathroom in November ’92, not to be mentioned again until this very feature. And that’s the thing if you’re not a very nice person, innit? Nobody wants to know. “Sod off”, it told the people they needed to make the magazine a success. So they did.