It was me all along!

Gentleman editor Jonathan Davies's New High Score feature of AP47 sought to pin down publishers of clearly terrible games and get them to admit they were, for example, clearly terrible.

Regrettably, the publishers would not do this, insisting (say) that the ridiculously large, empty Ishar 3 was exactly what players had wanted. Jonathan also inadvertently came under fire from the increasingly eccentric David Braben, who repeated his accusation that AP's accurately belittling Frontier review featured doctored screenshots, shortly before suing a PC magazine that carried a snapshot of Speccy Elite on its coverdisk for £5,000 "loss of earnings."

Retrospectively, the stolid front was unsurprising (although the Braben thing is still spectacularly alarming). What company would want to admit they'd released something awful? It would upset the accountants, or something.

However, away from the all-powerful PR machine, things tend to be different. It is hard for someone demonstrating a palpably rubbish game to be convincingly enthusiastic, and there is a long tradition of withholding particularly awful games from reviewers or, as in the relatively recent case of unrelievedly dismal PC adventure Fable, awarded a slightly generous 10% by Jonathan Nash immediately after he reviewed Toonstruck, a company literally begging for the review not to be printed. (It wasn't.) Hence the occasional event of AP bumping into a representative of Company X and asking conversationally, "Blimey, Representative Y - Game Z was horrible, wasn't it?" and Representative Y replying, "Yes. We knew it would be/couldn't save it/had to release it because it was Executive Sigma's pet project. Of course, I didn't say that."

Around the middle of 1997, Jonathan Nash was introduced to a senior ex-member of Team 17. "I remember AP," said the senior ex-member of Team 17. "We stopped talking to you after the reviews of - what were they? - Kingpin and ATR.

"Kingpin is fun, especially when you're drunk, but ATR is crap."