YS94 - Return Of The King?

YSRnRY Webmaster and YS fanboy Nick Humphries gives his views on YS94 and YS in general. Better get a drink handy, this could take some time. If he starts gesturing a lot with his hands, for god's sake duck...

Nick Humphries In the beginning was the Speccy. And everyone saw that it was good. And then came Your Spectrum, which pleased many a boffin, yet was missing that je ne sais quoi - you could tell that it knew the sort of mag it wanted to be, yet felt shackled to the more serious tone set by the first few issues of Your Spectrum. So, with the arrival of the QL and the promise of more machines to come (like the Loki and the Pandora Portable), the YS team took the opportunity to rebrand the magazine to Your Sinclair, focus a lot more on the games, and a legend was born.     Really. You can see the YS influence in many of the magazines written and published over the past fifteen years, all trying to get that balance of humour, news and irrelevance that made the classic magazine so well-loved. After all, with YS peaking at over 80,000 readers and leading the Spectrum magazine circulation wars from part-way into its life to the very end where it outlasted all others, this was surely a golden formula that the magazine publishers of today would wish to emulate.     Anyway, YS ran for nine years, up until 1993 in fact, by which time all the major software houses had moved their resources to either the consoles or the 16-bit machines which were then being sold at entry-level prices. Issue 93, the September 1993 edition, was christened "The Big Final Issue", and became the tribute issue to formally round off the YS run. It was a damned good read, too, and a lot of effort went into it with things like look-backs over its lifetime, a staff reunion (which revealed a lot more insight into how much people enjoyed working for YS), and then a handover to the next generation of Speccy gaming with a concluding review of the fanzines available and the Spectrum emulators you could download for your nextgen machines.     It was a work of art, a fitting end to a fine magazine. Reading it still brings a tear to my eye. The other issues that came out in 1992 and 1993 also brought a tear to my eye, but for very different reasons, not least of which was witnessing the slow death of the Speccy scene.     Everyone thought they'd seen the last of it. The Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years was created as both a memorial and a celebration of the magazine. YS3 all too briefly revived the formula that more professional and experienced writers and publishers failed to grasp, but that too has now passed on.     And then something wonderful happened.      It's alive!! Over the past fifteen years, many Speccy gamers had transformed into Speccy retrogamers, playing old games using emulators on their current machines, from PCs down to even games consoles. Amstrad's current eM@iler product allows you to play Speccy games on demand, and it's only a matter of time before Amstrad wakes up and produces a joystick you plug directly into your TV which will allow you to play preloaded games again on a big screen. Speccy gamers aren't alone in retrogaming - masses of other people who used other machines also do the same, although it's arguable that the Speccy retro scene is significantly better developed than any other platform.     ZX Format has capitalized on this, and the fine magazine is released three times a year. It's not YS, but is a damned good read regardless. The popularity of ZXF, together with the various retro columns popping up in mainstream computer magazines all over the place, finally convinced Live Publishing to take a gamble and produce a magazine dedicated to retrogaming, imaginatively naming it RetroGamer. No one knew how popular it would be - was retrogaming a niche thing that would only appeal to spods on the internet, or was there genuine mainstream appeal there? The first issue was released intending to be a quarterly magazine, as demand couldn't possibly be high enough for something more frequent, surely?     All copies sold out. Within a very few issues, RG went from quarterly, to every two months, to every six weeks, until finally plumping to become a fully-fledged monthly magazine. A true success story, and well-deserved as you can see that the RG writers really do love their subject, and most of the articles literally ooze infectious enthusiasm. And with the editor Martyn Caroll being a strong Speccy fan, you were guaranteed good coverage for that machine.     Being editor obviously has its perks - close to one year into the run of RG and something utterly wonderful happens: Martyn decides to bring back YS.      YS is back and still number one for Spectrum games! Whilst RG was a gamble for Live Publishing, it really was just gambling with money. If the magazine failed then it would sink without a trace and be quickly forgotten. Bringing back YS, however, is a completely different kettle of fish - you were gambling with the hearts and minds of hundreds and thousands of Spectrum fans who held YS close to their hearts, mine included.     I saw the first YS rip-off: the issues of Crash towards the end of their run. Starved of sales yet refusing to bring in some new faces and new ideas to reinvigorate the fading magazine, the Powers That Be at Newsfield Publications decided to go the whole hog in trying to reproduce the YS formula, starting with the design of the magazine right down to the tone and writing style of its editorial. It was horrible. Truly awful. The gamble didn't pay off and, after one thing and another, Newsfield went out of business, Crash surviving for a few months at a spin-off publisher before being "merged" with rival mag Sinclair User.     Other publishers ignored Crash's fate and tried to reproduce the YS formula in new titles for the new machines and games consoles, even going as far as recruiting a few ex-YS writers. The end-result was usually a different animal to YS, although usually not the abomination that Crash became. Two notable titles at the time were exceptions: PC Zone and Arcade. They were quality magazines in their time and shared the same balance between humour and information that YS had in its editorial, although they'd minimized or completely eradicated the 100% silly bits that YS enjoyed.     That's not to imply that YS itself was flawless. From 1991 onwards the flow of new Spectrum games was slowing down alarmingly rapidly to a trickle and this had two knock-on effects on YS: decreasing advertising revenue to subsidise the number of pages possible in the mag, and a dramatic drop in the number of things to write about to fill those pages once they'd been paid for. The magazine's focus flipped 180-degrees from being little funny bits wrapped up inside editorial to little bits of editorial wrapped up inside funny bits. With the funny bits taking up more and more of the mag, that naturally required more and more new funny material, and soon enough many of the funny bits appeared to be increasingly forced and contrived. Whilst aiming to maintain the YS formula whilst simultaneously filling in the gaps in the mag with silly stuff, the later YS teams lost sight of what worked and the mag, in my opinion, suffered for it. Sure, there were still plenty of gems within the later mags, but the silly bits really did appear to be just padding. For me, the YS in 1992 and 1993 just wasn't the YS I knew during the 1980's.     So, once I'd seen that even YS couldn't reproduce the YS formula anymore, I had little confidence that anyone else could pull it off. As a result, when anyone came up with the idea to petition Future Publishing to bring back YS in some form or another, my responses ranged from cautiousness to outright dismissive. I grew up with YS between the ages of twelve and seventeen, and it meant a lot to me. I was a complete fanboy, reading and re-reading each issue for many years to come. It was only when I got bored of lugging out all my YS binders to read the mags that I came up with the idea of putting it on the web in some form or another, and the Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years was born. The response I got from the website showed me people still enjoyed YS to this day, and so when I heard that RetroGamer was bringing it back as a special one-off supplement I was both excited and incredibly wary. Would they succeed where others had failed? And if they didn't pull it off, then they surely could expect to lose a fair few readers who'd be offended at seeing a poor imitation under the YS name.      I never knew there was so much in it! They've pulled it off. You cannot possibly know how relieved I felt to discover that.     But first things first. This isn't the YS you knew and loved from the 1980's. Times change, and people change too. Back then YS was aimed to people like me who were thirteen in 1987, and I'm now thirty in 2004. YS94 is aimed at the latter category, and is a better thing for it. Gone are many of the in-jokes, and the YS Lingo is also minimised. But the YS formula is not only preserved, it's also evolved so that it's relevant to us twenty- and thirty-somethings, not some spotty teenager with an attention span of a goldfish.     From the moment you open it you are gobsmacked just how well they've recaptured the YS spirit. The design that they've gone for is borrowed heavily from the YS of 1990, and boy does it hit home. When I first opened the mag I didn't have time to actually read any of it, so just flicked through checking out the look and feel. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I was repeating over and over "oh-my-god-oh-my-god-oh-my-god-oh-my-god-oh-my-god..." as I turned each page. Even the cover looked as if it could have been used in the original YS. The only thing wrong with the look is that the paper used in the cover is your regular in-mag-page-type paper, and also the ink comes off the pages onto your fingers far too easily. A thicker cover and faster ink would be in order should they decide to do this sort of thing again.     It's funny, and we're talking laugh-out-loud funny, too. The humour feels like YS. It even brought back memories of buying and reading the original. One thing I've missed out on is getting YS94 by mail. If you went to a newsagent for the latest RetroGamer you'll find the mag bagged together with new YS. Depending on how slap-handed the shelf-stacker put the mags on the shelf, chances are you'd be greeted with the YS cover facing you as you enter the newsagents. I've been told it's like the 1980's all over again.     Don't think of this new issue as a new issue of the "regular" YS, or you'll be disappointed. Of the 30 pages within the mag, twelve of them are filled with nostalgic reminiscing by the YS and RG teams. But in the remaining eighteen pages you'll find Pssst, Reviews, a MegaPreview, Future Shocks, Joystick Jugglers, Tipshop, and Program Pitstop - featuring the BASIC listing of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator! There's even a pseudo-cover tape on the RG CD containing YS classics Batty and Moley Christmas, plus playable demos of new Spectrum games More Tea, Vicar? and Sensitive. Thankfully, unlike the original YS, they only spend a quarter of a page describing them, rather than the obligatory half-forest that later issues of YS used to pad out the mag with.     One other thing that worried me about a YS revival was what "era" would be chosen - the YS in 1984, 1989 and 1993 were very different animals in character. Also, what ex-YS people would be brought in? A real disappointment would be if they brought in some of the more obscure members of the YS team. Thankfully RetroGamer has delivered in spades. Phil South writes a good look-back piece, and together with Matt Bielby, Teresa Maughan, David McCandless, Mike Gerrard, Marcus Berkmann and Jonathan Davies also take part in duplicate mini-interviews about their times at YS, what they liked about the Speccy, and what they've been doing since. I'm especially pleased that Phil, Marcus and T'zer were on-board in this project - the whole YS formula and character was mainly down to them and it would have been downright insulting if RG didn't get them to take part.     However, it's inevitable that some YS writers weren't even asked to be involved in this project. There's a slim-to-fair chance that they could be reading this, so here's my take on the situation. First of all, space is an issue. It's a crap excuse, it's also the default excuse used by publishers, but as YS94 was only 32 pages it's also a persuasive excuse. Secondly, there's the choice of era. If writers where chosen spanning the whole life of YS (nine years) then YS94 would have been formed in a hodgepodge of different styles and approaches. The mag wouldn't have felt self-consistent. Finally, YS94 was aimed mainly at ex-YS readers, but also other retrogamers, therefore it makes sense to me that they focussed on those people who were writing for the mag during its heyday when it was getting over 80,000 readers a month - that would be 1988, and the writers eventually chosen reflect that choice. I know how disappointed some ex-YS writers will be when they realise they weren't asked to get involved with YS94, but I hope they understand the choices RetroGamer made.     The editorial of YS94 was written by RG staff plus one notable addition - Colin Woodcock, editor of ZX Format, who continues to impress me. Reviews are done using the traditional Final Verdict ratings box, complete with thermometer. It would be unfair to critique individual articles, so I'll summarise by saying that most of them are written in the YS style (although updated a bit as mentioned earlier), however one of the five game reviews looks like it's just been lifted from RetroGamer's news pages as it just provides information about a game but no actual opinion about how well it plays. And the Joystick Jugglers images are digital transformations of images rather than Nick Davies drawings, but that also is just me being picky.     Pssst is hilarious. In the original YS it could sometimes be hit-and-miss, especially when there's very little news to report. This got both the balance and the humour spot-on. Tipshop is written in true YS style, although at one point the humour wanders into slightly-dodgy territory. The content is fully authentic, having come out of The Tipshop website - I had a very small hand in the choice of games they covered by producing the most popular requests at time of writing. Future Shocks feels truly authentic.      Our work is done - for now It's a fine piece of work - the only other downside is RetroGamer's penchant for sticking in pixellated images and scaling them up a little too much. You'll especially see this with the old Joystick Jugglers images. Plus once or twice RG look like they're padding out the mag a bit by filling large chunks of pages with single images - a common RG flaw that is used in their regular mag, but these really are minor niggles that distract you from the fact that they've done the improbable: they've reproduced the YS look and feel. I cannot recommend this highly enough, you really must buy issue 9 of RetroGamer even if it is just to get this YS supplement.     And now comes the question that is a big one: should there be a second YS supplement?     That's a more complex question than you think.     First thing you have to remember is that about a third of the current supplement is look-back stuff - you can only do that once, so you'd need to fill up those pages somehow. The good thing is that the reviews and previews are spot-on, so they could be used to fill that gap, plus things like hardware reviews and suchlike.     However, there's a second issue to consider: frequency between supplements. Whilst there is activity in the Speccy retrogaming scene producing new software and hardware, it's done at a slow pace. This is, after all, a hobby and not a career choice. ZX Format is released every four months and has plenty of high-quality stuff, however it doesn't have the same exposure that RetroGamer has. Thankfully Colin Woodcock has a foot in both camps, so in theory could repackage ZXF content in a YS sort of way. Cutting out all the emulator stuff which won't appeal to your average RG reader, I think there's scope for an annual YS supplement, keeping it at 32 pages each. This avoids overkill and also hopefully prevents any burn-out and overstretching of the YS formula.     So, from a cynical YS fanatic, YS94 gets a huge thumbs-up. Many thanks to the YS94 crew and Imagine Publishing for providing tons of original material!

Published in the 2004 Special issue of Your Sinclair

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