United Kingdom · 1991–1996
The magazine that used the whole percentage scale, published a table comparing its scores to everyone else's to prove the others were inflating, and got its ad revenue pulled for it.
Amiga Power launched in May 1991 from Future Publishing and ran for 65 issues until September 1996. Its founding principle was brutal honesty about review scores, and it pursued that principle with a consistency that repeatedly brought it into open conflict with the industry it covered. The core of the argument was arithmetic. Amiga magazines of the period skewed the percentage scale so that a merely average game scored around 70%, compressing all meaningful judgement into the top third of the range. Amiga Power insisted on using the full scale — a 50% game was genuinely mediocre, and a bad game could and did score in the teens. Because publishers and readers alike had internalised the inflated convention, AP acquired an entirely undeserved reputation for harshness, when in fact it was the only publication being straight. It then made the point unignorable. In later issues it ran a regular table called The Disseminator, which simply listed the scores rival magazines had awarded a game alongside AP's own, exposing the gap. The industry response was predictable: Team17 in particular withdrew its advertising and stopped supplying advance review copies. The magazine flourished anyway, and its reputation has only grown since — it is now routinely cited as the moment British games journalism decided that its obligation ran to its readers rather than to its advertisers.