*Though naturally shorn of the mini-reviews which accompanied the selected games. For some never-quite-established reason, the champion of a game did not justify that individual title's inclusion in print. Instead, the Top 100 was split into equal parts and a writer assigned to each division.

(Charmingly, while the first Top 100 was arbitrarily handed to Stuart and Mark, the two most junior editorial staffers, because it was seen in the enlightened Golden Age as a bit of a chore, writing duties on subsequent centuries were claimed by more and more members of the team until in short order everyone on the mag was pitching in, in the fine upstanding AP tradition of exaggerating the qualities of your favourite game and pitilessly belittling the tiniest fault of anything you'd violently hated but gracefully accepted as part of the list with the express intention of stitching it right up in the write-up and thus restoring a sense of natural justice to the galaxy. As the high number of contributors meant the Top 100 was split into roughly 20-game segments (with the Ed traditionally taking the more detailed Top 10), the rapid mental calculation necessary in volunteering for a sequential chunk to maximise both the number of games you liked (in order to protect them from sinister flanking manoeuvres by idiots in the office who failed to absorb their grandeur of majesty) and the number of games you hated (in order to reveal THE TRUTHIER TRUTH to the readers) shut up everybody in the room for the longest contiguous period of calming silence in the AP year. And then everyone shouted "75-50!" at once and started fistfights.)

Of course, anyone could pooh-pooh* a personally unliked game; the skill came in undermining it subtly, so the overall effect was a grudging acknowledgement some people with special needs might enjoy this peculiar imposition of an entry bullyingly piked into place by a single member of the team embittered by their glandular inability to appreciate the simple enjoyment of certain other titles but without ever giving the AP staffie fan who firmly recommended it in the first place quite enough descriptive ammunition to claim a foul and start another fistfight. Given AP's famously eclectic choices, the elevation of a game to AP Top 100 status was in itself reason enough for yon reader to look out a title as something intriguing they perhaps might never have privately sampled, so no harm was done except physically within the office by scientific battery.

Using your skill and judgment and a big graph with coloured felt-tips, you may like to glance over the full Top 100s in their respective mags and determine (a) who chose each year's list; (b) who wrote the sections of the full feature, and; (d) which games nobody else had heard of except the person gesticulatingly insisting they went in. That's nontertainment!

J Nash

I was deeply excited about my first Top 100 because I'd recently found the legendary four-player Amiga version of Gauntlet 2 in a barg bin. Come the time and I skipped into AP eagerly like meagrely calligraphy as a rosy-eyed new bug with the game, anxious to secure its place by hooking the entire office or at least three of them. I called everyone over, talked up the splendour of the coin-op, loaded the disk and lo! somebody had crept in and substituted the famous game with some terrible old rubbish, magnitudes worse than the sloppiest Gauntlet rip-off. The real AP people cuffed me about the head with their hats and that was the end of Gauntlet 2 for the Top 100. How could the sequel to the ace Speccy conversion, with two more players, be so disastrously inept? I shook my fist at a sprinkler.

Years later, I was credited as one of the judging panel in JD's inaugural PCG Top 100 even though I had nothing to do with it and only found out when I read the finished ish. Quizzing JD, I was told he meant I'd "been there in spirit." Everything fell out happily though, as a short time after I inadvertently destroyed the mag forever thanks to 1995's Number 7 AP game.