"Amiga Magazin" is the dinosaur of the Amiga magazines. It's one of the oldest commercial Amiga publications worldwide, and they still publish monthly. The magazine was launched as a result of the popularlity of the Amiga coverage in the legendary Commodore 8-bit publication, "64'er". The first 'teaser' issue was produced by several members of the 64'er editorial team for distribution at the Cebit 1987. The first regular issue was released in June 1987.

It offered the same exceptional quality as its parent magazine 64'er. Each issue was loaded with information, with lots of interesting bits for the newbie aswell as the experienced user or programmer. Compared to the style and language used in various British magazines, Amiga Magazin may look a bit dull. You won't find big features, rants or similar, but nevertheless it's a brilliant and interesting read.

Amiga Magazin produced lots of spin-offs over the years:

• Amiga Magazin Sonderheft
• Amiga Magazin Spiele
• Amiga Magazin Hardware
• Amiga Play Extra

In 1996 the shrinking market started to affect them, their sales numbers dropped. In an effort to compensate this effect, they bought the games magazine Amiga Games and contracted the former staff of this magazin to produce a bigger games section for Amiga Magazin. It didn't work, so the "Amiga Games" sub-section dissapeared again.

In 1997, the magazine's quality was getting lower with each issue. Finally, at the end of 1997, the publisher decided to redraw Amiga Magazin from the shops and make it available through subscription only, forcing possible customers to buy a combined subscription of Amiga Magazin and PC-Go! (a WinPC orientated publication from the same company).

Despite everybody's expectations, this was not the final death blow for the magazine. Five years later, it is still around. Only 32 pages, but those are crammed with useful information again. The number of subscribers is stable and they're actually paying good money to contributing authors.

Review written by Christoph Gutjahr

View CeBit 1987 edition (34K)
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View January 1996 cover (57.1k)
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