A history of The Crypt
Former editor, Ray Hawkins provides a brief history of
The Crypt, charting its early days as a disk magazine.
Yes, there is a history to The Crypt.
Myself and a good friend Steven Hyde around November 1996
decided to produce a disk magazine. Disk magazines were two
a penny in those days and most of them were rubbish and lasted
just a few editions. However Steve and I decided to start
a NEW style of disk magazine, which would be totally different
and free from censorship and prohibitions, and thus The Crypt
was born.
In those early days just a hand full of people wrote the
the disk mag. Our early circulation figures were around 5/6
copies per edition, but did improve many months later. I should
explain that The Crypt was published
on an "as and when" basis.Later on another friend
Jonathan Bryant (XLR8) joined our small team as Musical Editor
along with a few others. Jonathan wrote and composed the music
modules that played in the background. The
Crypt was written on an Amiga 500 using an early edition
of DMC (Disk Magazine Creator) from edition No1 to No4.
Things changed dramatically for us during the summer of 1997.
We teamed up with Ian Ison (Triadian) who promptly coded a
new front end with AMOS2 called TUMM (The Ultimate Magazine
Maker). First use of TUMM was with edition No5. TUMM was to
be a great success for The Crypt
as circulation figures scaled overnight from around 20 copies
per edition to well over a 100 !!
However TUMM like most newly coded programs was a little
bit buggy and crashed on some models of Amiga. Not that it
deterred its popularity one little bit. Triadian worked hard
on the code and by edition No7 TUMM was pretty stable. I thought
that things were looking very good at that point in time as
circulation figures exceeded 120 copies per edition and contributions
were flowing in, but there was disaster just on the horizon.
June 1998 saw the last TUMM edition of The
Crypt (No8) when Triadian left the scene and we lost
TUMM. Alas the departure of TUMM and the return to DMC albeit
a new version brought a substantial reduction in the number
of readers. We dropped from over 120 to 30/35 copies almost
over night. However The Crypt
went on until I finally put her to rest in June 1999. Edition
No13 being symbolically the last! Why? Well the usual story
.... Lack of contributions .. as simple as that.
However The Crypt was not to
lay dormant for very long. The summer of 2000 brought forth
the formation of a new team, named RIYAN Productions. That
summer Steve Evans (Zola) started work on The
Crypt website and by August it was up and running at
the old URL of www.thecrypt.org.uk. Meantime the RIYAN Production
team where beavering away and October 2000 saw the Resurrection
of The Crypt (14) using the DMC
format of previous editions.
The new editions were toned down and all adult material removed,
this lead to the start of our climb to success. By March 2001
The Crypt (16) was available
to read on line and the first Amiga only DMC hard drive version
was available as a download.
Things have gone from strength to strength over the editions
and in well under two years the website has received over
10,000 visitors. At the time of writing (April 2002) we are
composing edition No23. As they say, the rest is just history.
Read and enjoy..... The Crypt.
Ray.
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