Atari World Issue 01 (May 1995)

There have been around 80 publications that featured Atari products since the 1970's -- newsletters, fanclubs, reports, journals, and magazines. Atari World lasted 11 issues (May 1995 - March 1996). Editor Vic Lennard heads up this magazine, whose previous work was a Freelance Editor on Atari ST Reviews, another UK magazine that focused on the Atari ST personal computer, and ran for 35 issues leading up to 1995. It was published by EMAP, which was best known for launching Computer & Video Games and the Mean Machines series of magazines. But many know they started moving away from videogame publications toward the end of the 1990's, and completely exited by 2006.

Highlights From this Issue: You won't find many reviews for games, but there are a few, like a review for Cannon Fodder on the Jaguar. You mostly have reviews for hard drives, tutorial packages, video titlers, scanners and things like that. You have articles on topics like MIDI, sequencing, and ones dedicated to programs like Quill 2 and Papyrus 4. The Atari Falcon was their new computer, so expect more coverage for it in later issues. Some will love the trip down memory lane if you used these systems back in the day. There might not be much content for those not deep into Atari computers already.

Very interesting!  Thanks Stryker!

Thanks, dablais. I was going to ask the usual, "where do you find these obscure mags?" But then I decided to just shut-up and do my job -- it is a #1 issue, so I try not to kid-around on those and just put out some interesting history for those looking for it:)

I looked through a lot of old Atari magazines years ago, looking at ones that had info on the SwordQuest Contest, and any others that were around the Great Video Game Crash in North America back around 1983, so I knew a bunch about a handful of them.

To answer your question, these magazine were a donation from a user in the UK.  I never had the time to scan them, I still have others to do!

Regarding the contest of Swordquest with the 4 games (Earthworld, Fireworld, Waterworld and Airworld),  I litterally read that about an hour ago in the book from Tim Lapetin Art of Atari.  And I’m not kidding!

These are the screenshots from the book, these two pages explain the contest and it was originally published in the AtariAge magazine in Sept/Oct 1982.

The final sword value at 50000$ never got won because of the videogame industry crash.  The funny thing is the winner of the Fireworld event actually melted is prize (Chalice of Light) worth 25000$ to pay for his college tuition.

I was looking at doing a video on them, so I got a folder of articles and scans on the games I've collected for years. I knew about the coverage that Tim Lapetin did in Art of Atari, but I think it was a $60 book at the time, and that was a lot for me to buy just see the few pages that it mentioned it. Thanks for letting me see it. Right now, I'm trying to get this other project done before the Xbox 360 store closes, but SwordQuest is standing by for one day. I thought of trying to hire someone to make replicas of the 4 contest items (or even approximations of them), just for the camera. But that would probably even cost several hundred dollars. God bless that UK donation because many of these you just couldn't find over here in the US. Thanks for your time on putting these out -- all magazines you've worked on. It's nice having them preserved, even if they don't get downloaded as much as EGM or GamePro:)

Very cool your project!  I still have some to scan. They will appear slowly but surely!