"It's complete, and there is a game of it"

The end of the 8-bit era saw mags giving away complete commercial games on their covertapes. Everybody won; the mag publishers saw sales go dinggg, the software companies got to sell their games again, and the readers received up to eight new free games a month, except they were largely quite amazingly terrible because it was a shamefully long time before the responsibility for buying the games was given to the mags themselves. (Previously it lay with the promotions departments, who charmingly judged everything by the price being asked.)

It was a short while before someone noticed that the public wasn't buying 8-bit games any more, mainly because it was quite happy with its generously-packed covertapes.

Calamity!

Laws were swiftly passed by industry watchdog, the European Leisure Software Publishers' Association, or ELSPA: no mag was to carry more than four commercial games per month, and the new ST and Amiga mags were barred from carrying any at all.

(The freshly-launched AMIGA POWER in fact was designed to have a game from its Top 100 on every issue, which spurred ELSPA into action. Thus, after AP2 the Top 100 coverdisk was no more, which with games in the list like Leisure Suit Larry 3 and Rick Dangerous 2 was probably just as well.)

Stricken with remorse that they had extremely probably killed off the entire 8-bit industry, the magazine publishers pledged never to give away full-price games again.

(Of course, PD or home-grown games were fine, as there was a general assumption they wouldn't be as good as expensively developed ones. So we were allowed to give you Gravity Power and Super Obliteration and Super Foul Egg as long as you promised it would in no way affect your decision to buy Tower of Souls or Rise of the Robots or Breathless, for example. In place of the commercial games came playable demos, which worked very well indeed thanks for asking.)*

If the Amiga and the ST were to die, it would be in the fullness of time, from natural causes like the emergence of a dominant new format, or a secret 1993 industry summit deciding that Amiga games weren't profitable enough. And then, when the 16-bit market was crashing like a well-read bumblebee, the mags could put on full games anyway, because ELSPA had no power whatsoever and its laws were really just guidelines.

Hurrah!