Jonathan Nash

The secret's hidden in a picture of the Animaniacs watertower.

I was taking advantage of Cam's absence to use the Mac in his new Board Stupid office - I needed some internet pictures for our Our Net Page - when a call was put through from a member of Amiga Technologies, the machine's parent company (that day). She requested I call Jonathan Anderson, the company's boss, on his private line. I did so and was entertainingly abused for a quarter of an hour.

In the course of the call, Jonathan (Anderson) informed me that - sigh - AMIGA POWER was out to kill the Amiga, that in giving Pinball Mania 11% I was "on another planet" and that a round of letters to the other Amiga games mags, not to mention the heads of Future, would settle my danged hash and the danged hash of AP too.

Punchliningly, he signed off with "N - A - S - H isn't it? N for nobody - because that's what you are - a nobody."

Accordingly, I printed the story in AP57 as explanation of both why we wouldn't be getting any more news from Amiga Tech and why the games bundled with the new A1200 were so grisly. ("They're the best we could get for the pennies we're offering... There's an incentive to go out and buy a better one," revealed Jonathan.)

I then received a call from Jonathan threatening to have me arrested for recording the previous one as I confessed had happened. Of course, being a member of AP and not a proper journalist at all, I had no idea the chap was talking rubbish, but, more amusingly, I hadn't recorded the call at all but considered the real reason I was able to repeat the conversation verbatim (I have an alarmingly complete memory) unconvincingly weak.

(Of course, as Sue From Amiga Format, a proper journalist, pointed out, all I had to have done was to say I'd been taking notes. Honestly. It's a wonder I don't punch myself in the head peeling sastumas each morning.)

Jonathan denied every part of the previous call, challenging me to produce evidence he'd said, for instance, "I admit it's not great," of the wretched Pinball Mania. As it happened, I'd carried on downloading internet pictures while he was insulting me, my friends and our mag, and I realised that the drawing of the watertower in Animaniacs would have a File Creation Date of exactly the time I'd rung the head of the company responsible for selling and promoting the Amiga to be verbally attacked with little imagination - a pleasingly stupid AP equivalent of a proper journalist's noting of the time of important conversations. But! the picture had accidentally been archived on the wrong CD (it happens - one month we ended up with a copy of half of AP45 and half of the Christmas issue of Ultimate Future Games) and was effectively lost forever.

T.

Triumphantly, Jonathan rung off, having once more vowed never to speak to AP again. Shortly afterwards, Amiga Tech moved offices but neglected to take Jonathan along. Nick Veitch, then Editor of Amiga Format, who'd been closely following the antics of the man ultimately responsible for the future of the Amiga in Britain, suggested a cracking joke, and AP marked Jonathan's passing with "We wish Jonathan Anderson well in whatever he goes on to do. No hard feelings, eh, Jonathan? That's Jonathan with a J. As in Jobless."

Thanks, Nick.