There were hundreds of deadlines on AP. There was a disk deadline and a cover deadline. There was a lino deadline and a Subs Letter deadline. There was an on-sale deadline and a covermount deadline and a section-to-printers deadline. There were deadlines for reviews and games coming in and screenshots and features and layout and subbing and leaving in the evening and coming in in the morning and finalising the flatplan, or the deadline deadline.
We missed them all.
Usually, of course, it wasn't our fault. Games failed to arrive, so reviews were late and so on, and how the company that duplicated the coverdisks stayed in business for more than eight minutes, what with losing labels or other vitally important files with a Norman Wisdom deputising in a bureaucracy consistency, we have no idea.
(It was not tremendously amusing to learn that, after knocking ourselves out to meet the lino deadline so we wouldn't miss our on-sale date despite everything arriving in the last two days, an elementary mess-up by the disk duplicators or the loss of a latch-key at the printers meant we'd be on the shelves late anyway. Ha ha, we would say. Ha ha.)
But we toiled selflessly, forgiving the mistakes of others, staying until Wilf The Security Guard threw us out, breaking deadlines with a Norman Wisdom stacking crockery consistency, being endemically lazy and playing Gravity Force 2 and Marathon a lot, for you. Always for you.