Not long after AP instituted its policy of heading letters to Do The Write Thing not with the tiringly dull "Dear AMIGA POWER" but with an amusingly out-of-context snippet from the letter itself (an idea later stolen by NEARLY EVERY MAGAZINE IN THE WORLD), we printed this letter from a reader.

Do the Write Thing

Letters, AP17

Dear AMIGA POWER,
A few weeks ago I wrote to Ocean saying somebody was selling pirated games at a market. I asked them what I should do, two weeks later they replied to me with a price list of games I can buy. I think Ocean are a crap company.
Yours, Chris Hughes, Harrogate.

An entirely legitimate opinion in the course of a general discussion, and sensing obvious humour potential, we lifted "OCEAN ARE A CRAP COMPANY" as the letter heading.

Unfortunately, the same month's letters pages also carried a small section in which we collected together a small selection of the letters we'd received regarding Ocean's hugely disappointing Epic, reviewed two months previously.

Do the Write Thing

Sample letter, Epic - The Great Debate, AP17

Dear AMIGA POWER,
Blimey, that Epic's a bit crap, isn't it?
Yours 30-quid-down-
the-drainedly, Pete Stevens, Norwich

We'd attempted to get a quote from Ocean justifying the dreadful nature of the massively-hyped title, but to no avail.

The whole thing, however, had ruffled their corporate plumage so comprehensively that they vowed to seize on the slightest opportunity to exact revenge,* and our legal naivety at the time (the letter heading, even although irrelevant and a quote, is technically libellous) provided the perfect target.

Thus, a reader who had merely been attempting to assist Ocean in preventing the piracy of their games, inadvertently caused a huge rift to develop between the UK's biggest Amiga software publisher and the UK's biggest-selling Amiga games magazine.

(Which continues even beyond the magazine's death, in the shape (ironically) of libellous advertisements taken out against former AP staff members in the video games trade press.)

Resultingly, a Future-sponsored series of Law For Journalists courses enabled the AP team (and everyone else at the company) to choose their (and other people's) words rather more carefully, and every attempted libel action against the mag in the following years collapsed shambolically.

Thanks, Ocean.