Atari 7800 Console

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: the 7800 was not a bad piece of kit. The console had strong hardware capabilities, with impressive sprite handling, excellent potential for arcade conversions, and, most importantly, compatibility with the massive existing library of 2600 titles people already had in their collections. The console had a number of popular arcade conversions lined up for release, including ports of Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Pole Position II. Had it been released in 1984, as originally planned, it would have been one of the strongest consoles on the market.

Unfortunately, the console had several factors working against it. It’s hard to ignore one of the major dominoes in the chain of events leading to the console’s downfall: the deadly release delay. The console was initially developed during 1983-1984 as Atari’s answer to the post-crash console market. Atari had a massive rollout planned for the 1984 Christmas season, with a lineup of 14 cartridges, a high-score cartridge that would have allowed users to save high scores from one session to the next, and even a keyboard peripheral. Unfortunately, the parent company, Warner, had decided to sell Atari’s computer and console divisions to Commodore founder Jack Tramiel. Tramiel, in turn, canceled the ’84 rollout of the 7800.

Pole Position II for the Atari 7800

Unfortunately, the system was held up by the Warner-Tramiel transition and a dispute over who ultimately owed money for the console and games. When Atari eventually did release the console, it was two years later, in the summer of 1986. The 7800 was released with Pole Position II as a pack-in game, and it did moderately well. Unfortunately, Nintendo had spent the last year establishing a foothold in the US with the NES, and there was no chance for Atari to regain the momentum it had lost in the two-year release delay.

The 7800’s launch library would have been impressive if it had been released in 1984. But with Nintendo dominating the home market with titles like Super Mario Bros., Excitebike, and Kung-Fu, arcade conversions of games like Ms. Pac-Man and Robotron: 2084 looked dated. Titles on the horizon, like Xevious and Galaga, while impressive home conversions, simply weren’t enough to draw gamers away from Nintendo’s steamroller of a system.

Even though the Atari 7800’s hardware was advanced, it did have some notable deficiencies. It’s MARIA graphics chip was very capable at moving objects across the screen, which gave it a leg up on arcade conversions. And, of course, the aforementioned 2600 backward compatibility was a big selling point. But the system used the same sound chip from the 2600. While it did support cartridges with more advanced sound hardware, such as the POKEY chip, these cartridges would be more expensive and the exception rather than the rule. This left games sounding much more primitive than those being released on the NES. And while the Pro controller was not as divisive as the one released with the 5200, it was still no match for the NES control pad, which would become the controller standard, so much so that Atari would eventually release the similarly designed CX-78 control pad for their system.

Xevious for the Atari 7800

Unfortunately, Nintendo had locked up the market that Atari needed a share of to succeed. Nintendo also didn’t have to deal with the baggage from the pre-video-game crash that Atari carried around. After the crash, retailers were not anxious to stock their shelves with brands that would remind consumers about this disastrous time. With no home console presence prior to the crash, Nintendo managed to avoid this, and retailers felt more comfortable with Nintendo product stock than Atari’s. By 1987, Nintendo, Sega, and Atari were all in the home market, but Nintendo was the one most closely associated with the home console renaissance in consumers’ eyes. Atari wasn’t simply competing with Nintendo as a company; it was competing against its own image, and it was losing.

While Nintendo and Sega were able to establish themselves with clear identities, with characters like Nintendo’s Mario and Sega’s stellar home arcade conversions to the Master System and, later, the Genesis, Atari simply wasn’t able to break away from the idea that they were simply more Atari. They could have gained a foothold in the market as a budget alternative to the more expensive competition, but instead, they were content to try to convince consumers that “Atari was back.” Sadly, it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Atari retired the 7800 after the 1991 Christmas season, along with the 2600 and the XE computer line, with just around 12% of the gaming market.

While Atari would continue into the 90s, it wouldn’t be able to reclaim the dominance it enjoyed during the 2600’s heyday. And, by the summer of 1996, Atari ceased to exist as an independent video game company. Fortunately, the resurgence in popularity of retro gaming and computing has given Atari a new lease on life, but it’s hard not to consider what might have been had the 7800 been released before the NES. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.

The post Atari 7800: What Went Wrong? appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Do you remember when you created your first video game or arcade and what do you remember about the experience?

My first electronic game development was modifying electromechanical games so they could operate in an amusement park setting where players could win tickets.  The other game I designed strictly in software on a large mainframe that had a video display was the game of Fox and Geese.  It was sometime in the winter of 1967 at the University of Utah.

What are your opinions about today’s generation of video games?  How do you compare them to older, classic games?

I believe the games are graphically fantastic and there are so many that making any judgment has to be on individual games.  There are excellent games out there but there is quite a bit of junk as well.  I’m particularly looking forward to augmented reality.

Did you ever think when you were younger you would be on a Video game Trading card?

No, we only knew of athlete trading cards, and I knew I’d never make one of those.

When did you first meet Walter day and where was it at?

I met Walter at a game convention, possibly at the Smithsonian, I’m not sure.  I loved his passion for the history of games.

When you created the company Chuck E Cheese, did you ever expect it to still be successful today?

Absolutely.  I knew that CEC had the right economics and the right dynamics and would never get old because there are new kids every year.

If you could describe Walter Day in one word, what would that word be and why?

Passionate, because he is.

Are you still involved with gaming today, and what role do you play?

Still doing some designs, some of which will be announced shortly, and working on another big project with my sons.

What is your favorite portable gaming device and why?

My iPad and my cellphone are what I use frequently.  They are easily accessible and have great graphics. We also have an Xbox One and a PS4.  I play on all of them.

Do you prefer PC or Console gaming and why?

PC is better for certain types of games where the mouse and keyboard give more functionality and certain games are better on a touchscreen.  The games available for consoles are particularly interesting, such as Just Dance, which is great for a group.

What games today do you play and what are your favorite genres of games?

I still like games with a puzzle aspect.  Twitch games today are not as fun because my kids can easily beat me.  Reaction times diminish with age.

Out of all the games and systems you help create throughout the years, what would be your favorite and why?

I still have a special place in my heart for Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede and Tempest, all in their coin op form.  I was involved in the design and fine tuning of them and they all subscribe to my “Simple to learn, impossible to master” credo.

What does it take to be a Video Game creator, and what advice would you give a person today who would like to get into the industry?

Learn Unity and go for it.

Are video games today aimed mainly at children, adolescents or adults?

Everybody.

Do you believe some Video Games are too violent and lead to violence in America today?

Atari had a rule that games could allow shooting at ships, tanks, etc., but not at people.  It sounds so quaint today, but I do believe that gratuitous, anti-social, violent portrayals are not beneficial.

Do you like it when Hollywood makes a movie from the video game?

Yes, I particularly liked “Wreck-it Ralph”.

Who is your favorite video game character of all time and what makes that character special?

Mario…..he’s just so cool, how can you not like him.

Where do you see Video gaming in the next 20 years?

I think augmented reality will take over a large part of the board game market and expand the group game around a table market.  I think geopositioning cellphone games will become more common.

This is one of an ongoing series of articles based on the Walter Day Collection of e-sports/video gaming trading cards – check out more information at thewalterdaycollection.com.

The post Video Game Trading Card Spotlight – Nolan Bushnell appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

There is something quietly vertiginous about walking through an exhibition and finding yourself already inside it. Not a self you remember putting there, but a self distributed across objects, images, words; a self that arrived in the museum before you did, and which now looks back at you from behind glass.

This happened to me at Göteborg’s Världskulturmuseet, where the exhibition “A World of Games” includes a display dedicated to the excavation of the Atari landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The photographs shown in that display are mine. My name appears alongside them as do the names of the team of archaeologists that I worked with. Nearby, video interviews with Andrew Reinhard — the archaeologist who led the excavation — play on a monitor. I stood in that gallery for some time, in a museum I had traveled to for reasons only partly connected to this material, trying to decide what I was experiencing. Neither pride, nor estrangement accurately describes the way I feel. The feeling was uncanny in the precise sense: familiar and foreign at once. I just stood there.

I have been thinking about that moment ever since, and about the other moments like it: standing before display cases in Rome, Sheffield, Málaga, Cambridge, and Shanghai, looking at what each museum had gathered to tell this story, trying to understand what the museums are doing with it, what questions the objects raise in their new institutional lives.

On these trips I would text my wife with some version of the same line: “more dig materials at _______.” And I would typically share how flummoxed I was at seeing such attention devoted to the recovered materials at museums the world over. The Atari Burial — as the disposal of the company’s products has come to be known — is even an exhibit at the Video Game Museum of CADPA in Shanghai. My perplexity, I told her, resided in my own skepticism: is this stuff really that important? I mean, sure, we unearthed a myth, hushed the rumors, quelled a legend, and unveiled all that infamous trash to major international media outlets. But…are all the recovered materials – including dirt from the actual pit – really that important to the history of games for museums to devote time, money, energy, and space to display smelly garbage to their visitors as historical artifacts? My wife’s response was blunt, and rather sobering: museums are telling you that the stuff is important. I stood corrected. It seemed best, on reflection, to cast off my skepticism and work to understand what work this stuff is doing in a museum.

 

This installment is my attempt at that understanding, conducted in dialogue with a framework that has long shaped my thinking about video games in museums: Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe’s 2010 essay “The Migration of the Aura, or How to Explore the Original Through Its Facsimiles,” published in Switching Codes (University of Chicago Press). Like the physical appearance of the excavated game cartridges themselves — distorted, smashed, eroded — I will not arrive at tidy conclusions. It is not the cracks in the plastic or the frayed packaging themselves that teach me anything; it is how museums curate that damage, what they choose to make of it, that becomes the object lesson.

Before the Ground Opened

I should establish my position in this story. I am not a neutral observer of the Alamogordo story. I am, in a modest but real sense, one of its authors, and the earliest critical one. My camera never fully recovered from all that sand.

In 2004, I published “Concrete and Clay: The Life and Afterlife of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600” in the journal Design and Culture, an article that took seriously what was then treated primarily as an industry fable: the claim that Atari, facing catastrophic losses after the collapse of the home console market in 1983, had buried millions of unsold cartridges — including unsold quantities of the notorious E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game — in a municipal landfill in southeastern New Mexico[i]. The story had circulated for two decades by then and had acquired in the telling all the features of urban legend: dramatic scale, corporate denial, with a location simply too good to be true — in the same state as Area 51 and the test site for the US’s first nuclear weapon. The persistent legend gave the industry crash a burial site. It made the failure literal, interred. I took it seriously as a cultural object regardless of whether it was literally true, because the rumor was doing real work in how game history was being made and remembered. I then devoted an entire chapter to the burial in Game After (MIT Press, 2014). I wrote about my images of Atari’s trash in Cabinet. I wrote about the culture of the excavation with game studies colleagues in Reconstruction. The team of archaeologists and I wrote about it in The Atlantic. Each venue asked something different of the material and of me, and each piece forced me to understand more precisely what I thought the legend meant. Now having it shown back to me at museums prompts even more considerations.

Latour and Lowe offer a concept I want to borrow here: the trajectory. Rather than asking whether any given object is an original or a copy — a question they argue is almost always the wrong one — they propose attending to the whole “catchment area” of a work: the river and all its tributaries, sources, and deltas. “A given work of art,” they write, “should be compared not to any isolated locus but to a river’s catchment, complete with its estuaries, its many tributaries, its dramatic rapids, its many meandering turns and its several hidden sources.” The Alamogordo story, thought through this lens, does not begin with the burial in 1983 or the excavation in 2014 — though for the locals who picked through the landfill at the time, there was no legend to wait for; they had the cartridges in hand. For everyone else, the story begins somewhere in the accumulation of rumors that circulated through game culture in the years between, before anyone put a shovel back in the ground. “Concrete and Clay” was a segment in that trajectory. So was every version of the story that preceded it, and every museum display and ongoing discourse that has followed.

What I want to hold onto, for now, is the implication that my decade of writing about the Alamogordo burial before the excavation took place was not merely prologue. It was part of the trajectory — part of what made the dig legible as a cultural event rather than a municipal curiosity. The rumor needed critical attention before it needed archaeological confirmation.

Going Underground

The excavation took place in April 2014. The city of Alamogordo granted permission for a dig organized by Fuel Entertainment, with documentary filmmaker Zak Penn present and a camera crew in tow — the resulting film, Atari: Game Over, was produced by the entertainment arm of Microsoft’s Xbox, and I appear in it. Penn had interviewed me in New York and invited me to Alamogordo; I came on my own dime. No one was flying me anywhere to discuss a thirty-year-old rumor about garbage. My role at the site was as historian and documentary photographer, a position that shaped how I moved through the event and what I paid attention to.

The cartridges themselves have stayed with me, and I have written about them at length elsewhere. But what I remember just as vividly is the crowd. In a piece I later co-wrote with Judd Ethan Ruggill, Ken S. McAllister, and Carly A. Kocurek for the journal Reconstruction, we noted that people had driven for days to be there — one man told a camera crew he had come twenty-eight hours straight from Oregon, and when asked what he would do if the dig came up empty, replied gravely, “That would be bad.” Others arrived by Greyhound bus and then by taxi from town, which must have made for one of the stranger fares the driver had ever logged. The line to get in stretched for hundreds of people by the time the gates opened, long enough that families set up folding chairs and sent runners to the McDonald’s down the road. There were food trucks — one of them, painted lime green, advertised itself with the tagline “Order Some Disorder” — and a dig-side arcade improvised from a folding table, two old television sets, and a generator humming against the wind. People bought souvenir canteens printed with the excavation’s coordinates and an 8-bit foam sprite of E.T. We signed legally binding releases before we were allowed anywhere near the pit. It had, in other words, all the trappings of a small, temporary community organized around the possibility that a rumor might turn out to be true. We were all there to watch a story become true.

When the first cartridges appeared — dirty, degraded, some smashed, some of them still sealed in blister packs — the crowd reacted with a sound I am still not sure how to describe. It was not just a rousing cheer but something more like release, like the exhaling of a story that had been held thirty years too long. I took photographs throughout. I was thinking, at that moment, primarily about documentation — and about advocating that museums like The Strong National Museum of Play, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives receive whatever we recovered, if anything was there at all. I was not thinking about Göteborg, or Rome, or Sheffield. I was not thinking about what it would feel like, years later, to stand in a museum and find my images in an exhibit.

The cartridges that came up were not all E.T. The excavation recovered a wide variety of titles — the landfill was not simply an E.T. graveyard, despite what the legend had insisted. The condition of the materials varied considerably. Many were intact enough to be identified but showed clear signs of wear from having been jumbled with other trash underground in a sealed landfill — though at least one cartridge, astonishingly, booted up without trouble when plugged into an Atari 2600 on site. They were, in the most precise sense, excavated objects. Trash cum archaeological objects. They had been in the ground and now they were above ground.

Then they entered another kind of ground: the e-commerce market of eBay.

The Certificate of Authenticity Problem

Here is something that does not appear in the documentary, and that I find myself thinking about every time I stand in front of an Atari burial display at a museum: the City of Alamogordo issued official Certificates of Authenticity to accompany the recovered cartridges. These certificates were designed to distinguish cartridges genuinely recovered from the landfill from the millions of identical cartridges that have been circulating since their production in the 1970s and 80s. That is a reasonable problem to solve: without some authentication mechanism, a dirty E.T. cartridge pulled from a collector’s shelf is visually indistinguishable from one that spent thirty years underground (the latter will just smell worse).

 

The certificates were issued to accompany cartridges sold on eBay. Each listing came with a property tag, the certificate itself, and a pamphlet containing photographs from both the original 1983 dump and the 2014 dig, an authentication package of surprising elaborateness, assembled for a commercial marketplace. Which means that the museums now holding these objects — the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, OXO in Málaga, GAMM in Rome, and others — had to acquire them by bidding against private collectors on eBay. I think about that a lot: a museum, sandwiched between bids, treating a dead company’s garbage like a contested estate sale.

 

This is worth pausing on. The document that confers institutional legitimacy on these objects was produced for a marketplace. Museums became one category of bidder among others. I picture a curator hunched over a laptop at 11 p.m., refreshing a listing.

The Henry Ford Museum received its materials differently: the Henry Ford came directly to the archaeology team. My hard hat from the dig is in the Henry Ford collection, alongside other excavation artifacts including actual dirt from the pit. The Henry Ford’s mandate is American industrial and technological history: its collections include the Rosa Parks bus, the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop, Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. My hard hat keeps unusual company. That a hard hat from the Alamogordo dig sits in that company is a version of this event that game-specific museums cannot produce, and it is the version that perhaps takes most seriously what the excavation was: a moment in American business and technology history, not just game history.

 

Back to the certificate. Latour and Lowe are useful here, though not in the way one might expect. They argue strenuously against the obsession with pinpointing originals, against the idea that the meaningful question is, “is this the real thing?” The Certificate of Authenticity performs exactly that obsession in bureaucratic form. It is a municipal government’s attempt to freeze the original/copy distinction — to say, officially, this cartridge is from the landfill, and this one is not — at precisely the moment when, as Latour and Lowe would have it, that is the wrong question. The more interesting question is what any given museum does with its version of the object once acquired. The certificate answers a question about provenance. It has nothing to say about meaning.

Still, I do not want to dismiss it entirely. The dirt on these cartridges matters. The wear matters. The time spent underground does as well. The specific history of burial and recovery matters, even if it cannot be read directly from the object without supplementation. The certificate is a clumsy instrument for preserving something Latour and Lowe would recognize as worth preserving: not the object’s claim to be original, but the specific trajectory that brought it here. A cartridge dug out of the Alamogordo dirt and a cartridge that has sat on a collector’s shelf since 1983 are materially the same object; what distinguishes them is everything that happened to each one in between. The problem is that the certificate enlists this distinction in service of a market rather than in service of understanding.

End of Part 1

[i] I did a follow-up piece for the USC journal, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, in 2006 that utilized the phrase “undead media” to address surviving coin-op arcade games. The landfill legend played a role in that article; namely via the account of the landfill shared in D.B. Weiss’s novel Lucky Wander Boy. The funny thing is that I just searched my essay in Vectors entitled, “Ms. Pac-Man: An Elegy for the Undead,” to see how to access it given that the journal was built in Flash. Here’s what Gemini shared: “The irony of the piece is that “Ms. Pac-Man: An Elegy for the Undead” has itself fallen victim to the exact digital obsolescence and “media death” that Raiford Guins wrote about. Because the Vectors Journal interface was built entirely on Adobe Flash, the original interactive format is now broken on modern browsers.” Bravo, Gemini, bravo.

The post Versions of a Burial: The Atari Landfill Excavation in Museums, Part 1 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

This was all nonsense, of course. Both nations had access to enough missiles to usher in a comprehensive Armageddon and put a definitive kibosh on all life on Earth. At some point, you hit diminishing returns on reducing humanity to cinders

Read the rest of this article on page 20 by clicking here!

Be sure to sign up to get Old School Gamer Magazine for free by clicking here!

The post Dragon Warrior – by Jeremy Parish appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Read the rest of this article on page 17 by clicking here!

Be sure to sign up to get Old School Gamer Magazine for free by clicking here!

The post JRPG FAN TRANSLATIONS – by Noah LaPointe appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

One such game I used to love was that fantastic platformer ‘ Wonder Boy ‘ designed by Ryuichi Nishizawa. A game which started its life as a skateboarding rock jumping and axe bashing platformer, that later became the adventure platformer with RPG elements Wonderboy in Monsterland. And it’s the original Wonderboy which is getting an announcement, as thanks to the creator Benjamin Yoris@BenYoris letting us know, the classic skateboarding platformer which many of us still love to this day, is still coming to the Amstrad CPC as a much improved 128k version!

While this is still demo footage and I’m unsure when it will be released as a final version. Atleast this gives us a glimpse of this 128k remake with highly improved details, sprites, smoother scrolling, and a great soundtrack. A new new remake that is in the works by Ivan Duchauffour (GurneyH) for Code & Optimization, Benjamin Yoris (OneVision) for GFX and Game/Level Design, and the late Stéphane François (e-dredon) for music.

Links 1) Source

The post Wonder Boy Remake – A fabulous remake for the Amstrad 128k is teased again with some demo footage! appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

To define what a JRPG is, we need to look at what RPGs were like when video games were starting to take off in the late 70s-early 80s, and the answer starts with the granddaddy of all RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons. While the tabletop game was gaining popularity and notoriety (thanks to the Satanic Panic of the early 80’s) DnD formed the groundwork for RPGs to come, and in 1981, the world saw two of the most influential games for RPGs, Ultima and Wizardry. While these…

Read the rest of this article on page 6 by clicking here!

Be sure to sign up to get Old School Gamer Magazine for free by clicking here!

The post Defining JRPG – by Ben Magnet appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Welcome to Block’n’Bubble II, a direct continuation of the classic action gameplay developed by natthrafn. Originally programmed by the author and published in Germany back in 1989 via Markt & Technik Special #30, this updated iteration breathes fresh life into the retro title with enhanced features and an expanded universe. New features and upgrades include : A built-in Level Editor in which players can design, test, and share their own custom stages, two-Player Simultaneous Play, 20 new in-game levels plus 6 new level packs of 20 levels each on the included disk, and a high score table.

The narrative picks up centuries after a disastrous magical mishap. At a grand annual wizard assembly, your character’s spectacular performance accidentally infested the guild’s headquarters with dangerous creatures known as Bubble-Jumpers. Despite successfully clearing the building with the help of peers, the guild ruthlessly expelled you. Now, 1,307 years later, you have broken back into the heavily guarded sanctuary to exact your revenge by exposing the wizards’ secret realm to humanity. To stop you, the Supreme Magician has cast the same forbidden spell, flooding the chambers with treacherous bubbles. Players must clear every room of these bouncing threats to open the gates for mankind.

Links :1) Source

The post Block’n’Bubble II – An updated C64 game that seamlessly continues the action-packed gameplay of Block’n’Bubble. appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Fancy playing a new Commodore Amiga game that smacks of high quality, is fun to play, and well worth keeping an eye on as developments progress, then this game called ‘Double Baboon Ninja’ by Danlabg is just the game for you. An upcoming Arcade game in which you play as The Double Baboon Ninja’s, and must put a stop to an alien invasion terrorizing the city. To coincide with this news, Saberman has provided some footage from Version 7a which has been made available today.

Here’s the latest. “Baboon City sleeps beneath its neon glow…Until an alien invasion turns its citizens into mindless blobs. Hope remains.Two warriors emerge from the shadows. The Double Baboon Ninja strike back!”

Technical notes

• AGA chipset
• 2MB of CHIP
• 68020 with Fast RAM should be sufficient
• Supports one or two button controllers

Credits :

• Graphics & Code by Dan
• Music by Robyn
• PTplayer by Frank Wille

Links :1) Source 

The post DOUBLE BABOON NINJA – This upcoming Arcade game by Danlabg for the Amiga looks fab [Version 7a UPDATE] appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

More great news this week as looking through the itch io website, we’ve found out that LC-Games has released the latest game of RandomPac for the Commodore 64. A game that isn’t just a tribute to Pac-Man, an arcade game released by Namco in 1980. But this version of the game has procedurally generated mazes and even bonus rounds to enjoy. To coincide with this news, there’s some footage of the game that can be watched below.

Originally released in the 1980’s as an Arcade game and then ported over to other systems, Pac-Man became one of the most successful American produced games selling over 115,000 cabinets. While many different clones of Pac-Man have appeared over the years, with a large amount appearing on the ZX Spectrum. This version by LC-Games for the Commodore 64 however, is well worth a play with feedback such as “Wow Looks Great” and “Excellent game!.

Although the game was released some time ago, an update was recently made available with the following changes.

• A bug introduced in version 1.3 caused the incorrect generation of random mazes, resulting in poor variety or even repetitiveness. In any case, maze generation has been overall improved, and even symmetrical mazes are now more interesting and varied.
• You can now choose between 5 different shapes for the maze walls.
• Added attract mode.

Links :1) Source 

The post RandomPac – A great tribute to Pac-Man, an arcade game first released by Namco in 1980 [UPDATE] appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.