Well-known Polish Amiga scener Azzaro shared with us a large number of scans from his collections, accumulated through years of swapping and demoparty visits in the 1990s and 2000s. Today, we start with three papermags: Influence (2000), a paper-only add-on for an Amiga diskmag, featuring some party reports and general articles [metadata]; Rave #1 (1995), a tiny two-page Amiga/C64 zine with rather meagre content [metadata]; and, finally Factor Zyn #1, presumably from the 1990s, an ingeniously drawn comic strip mocking a well-known religious-conservative Polish media figure [metadata]. More scans from Azzaro’s collection are coming soon.

Again, we managed to unearth a completely forgotten cracking scene magazine. Criminal was a papermag published by the famous C64 & Amiga group Red Sector Inc. This issue came out only two months before the group’s merger with Tristar into TRSI, an even more legendary team which is still active in today’s demoscene. According to the editorial, the mag had a precursor in early 1990 under the name Business, which had to be renamed due to a different scene magazine being published under the same name. Another note states that the “2nd issue […] will be released at some time in June”, thus one can assume that this is issue #1, even though the cover does not feature an issue number. However, to make things more confusing, Red Sector Inc. released a diskmagazine called “Criminal #1” two months earlier, in February 1990, with completely different content.

The magazine is rather slim; it appears that most of the texts were written by its two editors, Sir Mighty and Irata. Compared to many scene magazines of the time, it has a relatively “grown up” feel to it, and carries a number of copyparty reports and news items. Thanks to Hamster/TRSI, who found several pristine copies of the mag in the basement, we can present you with an extraordinary clean scan. You can download the OCR version (PDF) here, or browse through the mag in the online gallery.

PS: Have a look at the anonymous report on p. 5-6 for an insight into the the fascinating – antagonistic yet symbiotic – relations between crackers and game companies.

Thanks to Lowcola, we can present you two lost and forgotten paper magazine issues from the Finnish Amiga scene. Toilet Paper #5 and #6 both came out simultaneously in December 1991 – for reasons not completely clear. Lowcola writes: “The team had a goal of publishing 6-10 magazines, had enough material, but around December they wanted to take a holiday break, so I figure they ended up making a double issue.” The magazine was obviously not a semi-professional untertaking of the scene’s “elite”, like Illegal, Pirates, and other well-known mags, but rather the work of “average” teenage sceners. If they would have been active nowadays, they probably would have poured their desire for self-expression into a Tumblr blog or a MySpace page. One can see the editors desperately struggling for content, filling up the space with random pictures, font samples, and rather questionable teenage humour. However, as members of the scene, they were quite well-connected. They managed to interview a member of the UK cracking group Mirage, and judging from the published readers’ letters and swapping ads, the magazine circulated as far as Turkey and South Africa.

You can download the OCR’d scans here (#5) and here (#6).