The biggest reader backlash in AP's history - larger by far than the complaints about Cannon Fodder 2 and Team 17's tantrums - was brought about by the review of Sensible World Of Soccer. We awarded it an unprecedented 95% - AP's highest mark of all time - and declared it "The best Amiga game ever."
Letters fatbagged in.
"It's bugged!" people wailed. "Unplayably so!" they added hysterically. "Are you insane?" they concluded.
An investigation was demanded. Was SWOS riddled with bugs? If so, how? And why hadn't we noticed?
We came clean on the latter point and invited Sensible to address the former by handing them the approximately 146,992 letters we'd had on the subject. Chipper, the programmer, and Jon Hare, Sensible's big wheel, then answered the criticisms, which Stuart Campbell in his role as Sensible's Development Overlord assembled into an amusing column.
(It was perhaps unfortunate that the answers were made funny as they left Sensible looking arrogant, unworried and generally gittish in the face of valid points made by people who'd bought their game expecting it to work properly, but there you go.)
What emerged was that SWOS had been rushed out to cash in on the Christmas market, and the bugs which Sensible had warned us against before the review but promised would be fixed before release were still there. Renegade (the distributors) thus had to organise sending out thousands of update disks and Sensible went on to write Sensible Golf.
A fitting punishment.