THE MAKING OF AMIGA POWER
My biggest disappointment,” begins Matt Bielby, Amiga Power’s first editor, “was that we had a very different cover design at the start.” Later Amiga Power staffers would gently mock the initial incarnation of the magazine, with its clean white look and word-spattered covers, referring to it as the ‘Matt Bielby Golden Age’. But Matt reveals that he never wanted those dull cover designs.
Originally, he had called in Jamie Hewlett, the artist behind Tank Girl and Gorillaz, to draw the covers for every issue of Amiga Power. “He developed a character for us,” says Matt. “She was a bit like Tank Girl but had green hair, and she had kind of blobby floating alien sidekicks [you can see a sketch at the top of this page]. And Jamie was going to draw them for every cover in the outfits of whatever the lead game was. So if it was Sensible Soccer they’d be in football outfits, and if it was a car racing game they’d be in racing outfits, and so on.” The suits soon put a stop to all that, though.
“There was a section at the front where we said there’s no point buying any other magazine”
Cam Winstanley
“Greg Ingham [Amiga Power’s publisher] hated it,” continues Matt. “He saw it at the last minute and thought it was wrong for the magazine. And so we suddenly had to come up with another way of doing the covers, which is why we had these sort of Q magazine-influenced text and pictures.” Generally, however, Matt recalls that
