In The Style Of...

AP03; AP06; AP16; AP17 to AP65

The second-longest running component of AP after Do the Write Thing, at least as far as can be determined by stating that as a fact in order to shirk research, In The Style Of... began as an intermittent Back Page but soaked through the mag leaves like a big tea until it arrived in the news section as a permanent and coincidentally highly popular reader-submission corner. (AP30's giant In The Style Of... Gallery, a two-page round-up of the pictures sent in so far that presumably were nearest to hand when whichever two-page review it was fell through, convincingly states, "This is NOT going to be a regular feature.")

AMIGA POWER was for people who liked games and nothing but. On the face of it then, a bit in which readers won generous prizes by activating their pirate copies of fussy Workbench-driven art prog Deluxe Paint and remitting screens displaying something in the style of another thing directly contradicts everything ever in the history of all things, but we've only just noticed that ourselves, so there you go.

An important part of In The Style Of... (the two sides of the equation games to begin with, reflecting the original idea, though this rapidly evolved) was that every winning entry would be wildly championed until the end of the paragraph, at which point a previously unsuspected flaw would be recognised and the contributor's prize ("£120 in games," for example) penalisingly halved in value (for instance, "£80 worth of games"). Though obviously the reader would in reality be receiving a large reward when before posting the envelope they had nothing at all, we liked to think this swingeing punishment element of the formula kept successful artists from fatal pride, or fostered a lifelong guttering resentment, we forget which.

We managed to lose the names and addresses of approximately 68% of all In The Style Of... winners, about 84% of whom would diligently write in when we published the fact alongside their picture. This was merely our hopeless uselessness rather than part of the joke though.

AMIGA POWER: a magazine In The Style Of... fumbling bumbling calamitous amateurs.