Your Sinclair
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Your Sinclair or YS as it was affectionately known, was a computer magazine for the Sinclair range of computers, specifically the ZX Spectrum. It was formed in 1984 as Your Spectrum, the title being changed to Your Sinclair in 1986 to include coverage of the new QL computer. It was published by Dennis Publishing until 1990, when Future Publishing took over. In a typically YS-ish moment, they claimed the takeover bid happened this way:
- "Hello, I'd like to buy your Sinclair"
- "Certainly, that'll be £30,000, please."
- "£30,000? That's rather a lot for an electric tricycle!" (a reference to the Sinclair C5)
- "I'd hardly describe it as that. OK, you have it for 380 quid, and we'll even throw in the editor."
- "Would it be possible to deliver it?"
- "Yes, but it'll cost you an extra fiver"
It finally folded in 1993, after the Spectrum games scene diminished to almost nothingness, after 93 issues, in a strange state - the magazine had become a flimsy pamphlet, but the humour was at its peak.
Like a lot of similar computer magazines, such as Zero and Amiga Power, it created an endearing sense of community with its readers, especially through the letters page (indeed, several regular letter writers, such as Rich Pelley, went on to become full time staff members), and it could be argued that YS had a language all of its own, culled partly from references such as Viz and Monty Python.
YS was rich with irrelevance - often pages at a time would go by with no mention whatsoever of the Spectrum. The main culprit was Pssst - supposedly the news section. Originally called Frontlines, Pssst regularly contained mock celebrity interviews (such as the 'At The Bus Stop With' series), trivial charts, and was basically an outlet for whatever the YS writers felt like talking about. Indeed, sometimes the only place within Pssst that you could guarantee to find any news about Spectrum games was the T'zers column, initially written and named after YS's longest reigning editor, Teresa Maughan. YS's quirky, in-joke laden, pop culture referencing writing style eventually culminated in the covertape-mounted YS2; a collection of some fifty or so 'extra' pages loaded into the Spectrum and viewed like teletext. This was largely written by then editor Jonathan Nash and regular contributor Steve Anderson, and served as a template for Nash's website, The Weekly (http://theweekly.co.uk/).
YS didn't have writers and editors, it had characters. Editors didn't just 'leave to work on another magazine'. The very concept was alien to the writers of the magazine. Instead, Matt Bielby was carted off to the funny farm after declaring himself to be God, Andy Ide became a Green Party ambassador, and Andy Hutchinson left to design a skate park at Alton Towers. The truth, of course, was far simpler. The biggest majority of ex-YS reviewers went on to work for Amiga Power, so giving that magazine its own very similar character. YS reviewers were often 'interviewed' in a column at first called 'Joystick Jugglers' and later called 'The Shed Crew' (although referred to internally as the 'Flannel Panel'). It was here that characters were built.
YS sometimes reviewed games, of course, and reviewer Jon Pillar embraced both extremes of the review scale, giving Count Duckula 2 a mere 9%, and Mercenary 99%. Games which were scored at more than 90% were awarded YS's coveted Megagame status, but this was undermined slightly when Duncan MacDonald Megagamed his own Sinclair BASIC creation, Advanced Lawnmower Simulator, in a not-so-rare moment of surreality. Reader games got reviewed too for a while, although rarely favourably, in the Crap Games Corner.
The Tipshop contained all the tips and cheats, and spawned its own book, the YS Tipshop Tiptionary. Stuck on a game? Then you needed Dr. Berkmann's Clinic (renamed The YS Clinic With Dr. Hugo Z Hackenbush after Marcus Berkmann left for the Daily Mail). Herein could be found solutions to reader's game problems, more often than not solved by Richard Swann. But it wasn't all about games. Program Pitstop contained type-in programs, and was the last column of its kind, the one remaining remnant of an era when magazines didn't contain reviews of games, but program listings. Spec Tec and its descendant, Spec Tec Jr were where all the technical queries went, but even these were typically YS-ish, written as they were in the style of a Philip Marlowe monologue.
These days, YS writers are increasingly hard to find in the mainstream press—indeed, only Dave Golder (editor of SFX magazine) comes to this contributor's mind—but its influence abounds. Sadly, there are not many current magazines that share YS (and Amiga Power's) self-referential style, but it is still a visible influence to the writing styles of some magazine writers.
Recently, a 94th issue of YS was given away free with the British version of Retro Gamer magazine. As well as being a retrospective on the magazine, with interviews with writers such as Phil South, Marcus Berkmann and Matt Bielby, it also contained new material.
External links
- The YS Rock 'N'Roll Years (http://www.ysrnry.co.uk)
- Your Sinclair: A Celebration (http://homepages.enterprise.net/cavan/ysac/)
- YS2/100 (http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/prod/dialspace/town/avenue/db38/ys2/YS2_100.html)