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NOT SEEN FOR 25 YEARS: CLASSIC DIGITISER UNEARTHED!

11/1/2018

24 Comments

 
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Blimey. It's astonishing what you forget.

The genius that is Jason Robertson - teletext's answer to Indiana Jones, only spunkier - has been digging through dusty VHS tapes once again, seeking to retrieve old teletext data.

Now cram this down your neck-vent: he has managed to salvage the tenth ever edition of Digitiser, from January 1993. To date, this is the earliest surviving edition of Digitiser to have been retrieved in full. Yes, the very first edition is available as a video on YouTube, but never before has the clean data for a Digi from that era ever been retrieved.

And thus, behold: the first Digitiser index page design in all its glory; I recall our editor asking what the "DIGITISING" text was all about. I couldn't give an adequate answer, other than I thought it was cool.

And note that we were still trailing the "Mind Games" section - featuring Chess and Bridge - which our editor had wanted to make Digitiser a part of. That could've been... interesting. I'm very glad that this was a fight we dug in over, and won.

What's really odd, is that we evidently weren't doing tips at this point, and there were three reviews - including a "Game of the Week", an arcade review, and a PC game review. I have absolutely no recollection of this particular layout for the section, nor that we weren't covering tips from the very beginning. And why we broke up the reviews with the letters page sandwiched between them is anybody's guess.

But anyway. Let's take a look at the rest shall we? You might like to compare and contrast this edition with the brand-new classic-style Digi I put together last week....

Huge thanks on behalf of us and Jason to @amylrob1863 for supplying the tape upon which this important historical artefact was sprawled.
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"Super-fabby"? Oh dear. What can I say? We were in the process of finding our identity. Still, at least we got a mention of bodily fluids in there. We weren't entirely twee.

I'm pretty surprised that these two intro pages are still up ten days after Digi launched, leaving just one page of news. Also: look at that optimistic line-up. Somehow, we felt certain we'd have enough PC games to be able to review them every single weekend. And note that we'd already caved in on the Amiga, a good three months or so earlier than I thought we had.

​That should give you some indication of the tsunami of complaints that we received.
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No idea why we highlighted the words "highly illegal" (indeed, some big idiot even takes issue with this practice, on the letters page below). I've a vague memory of there being a style guide from the higher-ups, which required that certain words had to be emphasised.

​Ultimately, we must've decided that this was stupid, and did our own thing; make the first paragraph of a page green, and the rest cyan.
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Graphix and Sonix.... Jesus wept. We really didn't have a clue.

Though I do quite like the sort of graphic equaliser-style scoring system. Shame we dropped that for the industry-standard percentages; surely the most ridiculous and abused rating method that has ever been conceived.
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I can't quite believe that we actually reviewed a pinball table, ten days into Digi's life. Furthermore, this rather generic description could apply equally to any pinball table. You can read how much I'm struggling to fill even a page-and-a-half.

Still... they gave us twenty quid every two weeks to go down the Trocadero, so we had to justify that somehow.
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Well now... that's interesting. You see, that's clearly a made-up letter. I'm fairly certain of that, because I'm assuming - with good reason - that "Gemma W." is actually my niece. I don't know why we went with this particular subject for a made-up letter, which feels rather self-serving.

​I mean, we definitely got later letters asking who we were - so much so that we came up with fake names in order to maintain our anonymity - but I'm assuming we must've been sick of receiving nothing but complaints about the lack of bloody Amiga coverage, if the next one is anything to go by.

Also, the slightly cynical "reply" does rather point to a sense that we were already feeling like outsiders, and seems starkly at odds with the "super-fabby" tone of the rest of this edition. I'm guessing we weren't having much luck with games publisher PR departments, and were starting already to resent their cliquey relationship with the perceived importance of magazine journos.
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We soon put a stop to letters which sprawled across more than one page. Looking at our reply here, I can sense how backed into a corner we were when it came to the Amiga. There's a certain weary exasperation coming through, and a truly Trumpian effort to insist that we were massively popular already.

And clearly we'd been worn down, because we'd already agreed to start reviewing Amiga games on the following Monday, far earlier than I thought we had.

​So... whaddayaknow? 
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A small hint that we had a sense of humour at the top there. I mean, it's not particularly funny or anything, but it's a hint at the massive whimsy that was to follow.
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I remember playing this in the office, but it reads more like an early-Mr Hairs piece. It's entirely possible that he had rewritten me. Which I wouldn't have blamed him for; it was something he probably had to do quite frequently in the early days.

​No idea who Computermate were, and I have no recollection of ever getting games from them. Again though, this was doubtless borne out of the lack of success we were having with PR people.
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"Show us your tips!"... "If they arouse us"... "Get your tips out now" - it's a little dash of that scarcely-veiled Digitiser innuendo!
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And so, the charts, back before we ran individual charts for each of the formats. What a snapshot of early-1993 that is; heavy on the Sonic 2, a couple of Marios in there, plus Alien 3 - released as a movie the previous year - and a trio of sporting nudes.
If you have any old VHS tapes, from 1993-2003, please get in touch with Jason Robertson. They might contain old Digis, allowing us to "plug" the "gaps" in the oeuvre.
24 Comments
Jim Leighton (Future World Darts Champion) x
11/1/2018 09:35:35 am

Wow. Seeing stuff like this takes me back to my youth and makes me feel all warm inside and stuff. Nostalgia, it's better than crack.

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Confused of Tunbridge Wells
11/1/2018 10:14:47 am

I'm a bit confused. You say: "And note that we'd already caved in on the Amiga, a good three months or so earlier than I thought we had."

...but Digitiser was but 10 days old at this point? What am I missing here? Did the complaints about lack of Amiga reviews begin *before* Digitiser? How would that even work?

As I said, I'm confused. And I'm not really even from Tunbridge Wells -- that's how confused I am!

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Amigo
11/1/2018 10:17:56 am

In previous digi retrospectives that Mr.B has written, he, I believe, alluded to the fact that they started pandering to the Amiga crowd far later.

This is proof that they started far earlier than he previously believed.

HTH

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Mr Biffo
11/1/2018 10:33:39 am

Yeah - what Amigo said. I would've put money on us finally doing Amiga reviews in the spring of 1993, having endured months of complaints. Turns out we caved in after 10 days of them.

Presumably we got so many complaints in those 10 days that it felt like three months.

Confused of Tunbridge Wells
11/1/2018 10:34:17 am

Yep, I've read his previous emissions. Perhaps it's my memory that's failing but surely they didn't cave after just 10 days? I mean... 10 days? In my head at least, I remember Digitiser goading Amiga fanbois for weeks if not months -- but certainly more than 10 days...

...perhaps Biffo Bacon can shed some light on this?

Mr Biffo
11/1/2018 10:46:03 am

Doing Digitiser reviews didn't stop us goading them! That carried on indefinitely...!

Mr Biffo
11/1/2018 10:46:39 am

"Digitiser reviews" = "Amiga reviews" obviously.

Oh, Mr Biffo... why can't we edit our comments?

Amigo
11/1/2018 11:09:43 am

What would be even better, and another option that's consistent with your memory, would be you simply lied for laughs in your response here.

Who knows?!

Good stuff anyway.

Weird to think that there could be the data for so much more content out there, sitting in boxes in sheds or lofts. I disabused myself of all VHS's a long time ago, and I was constantly taping stuff off the telly. Argh

Nikki
11/1/2018 10:32:45 am

I remember the "digitising" text! I thought it was some kind of Tron reference, where we were going to get digitised into the page and do a thing, or things, or maybe nothing. Like in Tron, where things happen, then a thing happens, then nothing (the end).

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Harry Steele
11/1/2018 10:35:46 am

Aliens 3? ALIEN*S* 3?!!!!

It's 'ALIEN 3' (or ALIEN³ I suppose)

I will be shortly writing a strongly-worded letter to Digi's postal address.

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Nikki
11/1/2018 10:49:27 am

The Aliens, Three!

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RG
11/1/2018 11:41:22 am

Wasn't it: Alien, alien, alien!

David W
11/1/2018 11:09:10 am

Typo fans: Biffo was not unusually illiterate in 1993. Those restorations are from imperfect source material.

Digitiser, as transmitted, was a series of black and white dots, hidden in the vertical blanking period of the television signal so you didn't see them. It was an analogue signal, but crisp enough for teletext receivers to interpret it correctly. Most of the time.

Jason Robertson works from VHS recordings, which have a lower bandwidth than the television signal, so contain smeary light grey dots. Do you remember waiting for another page to arrive? As I understand it, his clever software combines several smeary broadcasts of the same page, then determines the most likely original dot pattern. So the "e" in "monkey-eeeding", and "!" in "pr!se", are almost certainly due to one rogue dot in the description of each letter.

On reflection, Mr. Biffo might have preferred rude comments about typos.

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Mr Biffo
11/1/2018 11:19:08 am

Digi2000 is usually so riddled with typos I doubt anybody could tell the difference, though!

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Jason Robertson link
11/1/2018 01:08:02 pm

I can't take credit for the software, this was written by Alistair Buxton and is here: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext . I've put in small improvements and built software to help process it for display.

I've been through all of the pages to correct recovery errors, but I might have missed some :-)

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Adam
12/1/2018 01:32:41 am

You've done a brilliant (and important) job here Jason, many thanks for your time and effort. Such a shame so much good writing hasn't been archived.

Jason Robertson
13/1/2018 06:12:18 pm

Thanks Adam :-)

Chinnyhill10
11/1/2018 01:54:38 pm

When it says All Formats chart I assume it actually means All Console Formats as hard to believe at the price of cartridges unit sales would have been higher than the Amiga at this stage. I have some market share figures for mid 1992 and the console formats share was very low compared to the home micros.

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD
11/1/2018 04:05:15 pm

And to think some people still insist that piracy was killing the Amiga by 1993.

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Adam
11/1/2018 04:38:51 pm

Does Mr Hairs now qualify for a reprint royalty payment?

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Stoo
11/1/2018 05:41:45 pm

Now I want to go play Incredible Machine again.

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Nikolay Yeriomin link
12/1/2018 01:24:37 am

Reading the earliest surviving Digi issue as of now is quite astonishing. There are some shades of early installement weirdness, but seeing how similar and different the style to all-new classic Digitser issues makes a bit lacking in the words department. It is like comparing Orson Welles's first short film to features he made later in his career or something like that.

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Rob link
13/1/2018 03:59:52 pm

Reminds me, I must offload the rest of my VHS tapes onto Jason - he has had a few already, but I've lots more, probably mostly from this era, too.

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Jason Robertson
13/1/2018 06:13:28 pm

Please do! I also have some to return.

Reply



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