Issues of AP didn't just "happen," although the game-portly luxury of pre-dead-machine eras mostly did away with having to come up with clever, funny features by not having room for them in the first place. No, before the highly-trained team of professionals that was AP - well, that we imagined ourselves to be - well, not even that, although by pretending we were, nobody thought to wonder if we were making it up as we went - could be unleashed upon a fresh pile of papers, the Ed had to think up the magazine with a special head.
It wasn't enough, you see, to have dozens of reviews. To stand out in the grazingly-crowded Amiga mag market, you had to be "different," although why reviewing games fairly and truthfully wasn't different enough was never satisfactorily explained.
Being different fell into eight roughly chronological categories. They involved:
1. Six-page articles on software houses and interviews with large, hairy programmers. Not that different, in fact.
2. Six-page articles on pop stars. Their favourite computer games, for example.
3. Genre specials spinning off from the cover game. Sports games, say, or point-and-click adventures.
4. "Event" issues, like the AP Top 100s, everyone having a real good time together or fifty years of AP.
5. "Theme" issues. The unrelated assassination special, for instance, or the best-of-all-themeds PC clones/Amiga versions/running around pipey cellars wearing crash helmets, carrying BB miniguns with everyone's knees laced together Doom one.
6. "Supplement" issues, which turned the embarrassingly lightly-attached centre pages of the final-stage floppy stapled APs into booklets on Dead Magazine and Canoe Squad.
7. Having the mag and everyone involved with it brutally slain by The Four Cyclists Of The Apocalypse, the only minor deities committed to a programme of rigorous consumer testing, acting on the orders of one mightier e'en than they.
8. Being another one of it.