I remember the first time I saw it. Walking back towards my school one day, I saw some bloke straddling his motorbike, reading a newspaper-sized weekly mag whose bright green letters I instantly recognised: Hebdogiciel.

“Eh?!? What the fuck are you on about, mate ?” I hear you mutter all the way from your so-called ‘English’-speaking distant shores.

I could have taken this opportunity to tell you misty-eyed people of my love for the trusty C64 back in 1985 but this is one piece of computer mag history that has to be told because in those days I lived in France and most of you guys really missed something the same way few kids over here knew about Zzap 64.

So many memories. If you’re French.

Few things back then warranted such feverish attention from me – a weekly instalment of the most biting, sometimes downright cruel, often brilliant and never boring computer rag. I say rag because a lot of it was just listings of games that were mostly shite. But that never bothered me because by that time I was a bit of a naughty floppy swapper dude.

“That’s a good magazine, that is”, remarked the charming lady behind the counter as I parted with my dosh. Smiling a tad smugly, I somehow doubted that she was referring to the witty content that lurked behind its often cryptic frontpage title. Little did she know just how good it was, indeed. Unless she was leading a double life – newsagent by day, hacker by night. This seemed somewhat improbable for a sixty-year-old.

Ooooookay…

But I digress. Back at the Commodore cave that was my bedroom, I flipped through the pages to get to my favorite section: the reviews. Not just software mind you, but also movies, comic books (the hardcover stuff that the French are nuts about). Not forgetting the other spicy bits that got the mag in trouble on a regular basis – the hacking and the small ads column. More about that later.

Imagine, if you will, a mag that, in it’s heyday, was so popular it could live with hardly any advertising and still be reasonably priced. The reviewers therefore allowed themselves an unheard-of luxury not seen since: almost total freedom in shooting down in flames anything that did not live up to their high standards. It actually got to a point where one of the few brave advertisers once came up with an ad that started with the words: ‘At last a game that Hebdogiciel is going to like’. They spat on it the following week.

Need we translate?

Icons were sequenced next to the reviewed item: from the standard thumbs-up all the way to a pile of crap. Literally. With flies dying around it. They often complained they had to buy the stuff to review themselves, which was a real surprise. Ahem. Don’t know if they received death threats but the mail section was side-splitting stuff, too.

We interrupt this feature to show you this unrelated, but really good, picture.

It was as if Mad Magazine had spawned an illegitimate child with PC World on dope. Or something like that. A la Aragones, it had Carali, the in-house artist, making his crude and completely irrelevant gags in the corners. It was bliss.

Having checked out the games and made a mental note of the digital faeces to avoid at the next swap meet, I would eagerly chuckle at the small hacking column recessed away deep in the midst of stuff that had nothing to do with it. After complaints, they had resorted to a trick whereby Transpac (the ‘80s French national fat digital pipe supplier that could be accessed via a Minitel terminal) addresses would be wedged in an amusing form, such as: “Today, 17543220142 people were waiting in front of me to get a baguette this morning and they complained because I paid with 12400218719 coins.”

The Editor in his prime.

There were a vast number of lawsuits, one of them coming from the paper itself when software publishers refused to deliver copies to them for sale through their in-mag shop. It ended with the Court deciding that they were not competent to judge . And still on it went. Until the bitter end. Somehow, having made so many enemies, the seemingly stainless will of the Editor finally wore down and he threw in the towel. A few glossy mags tried to take over and revive some of that pionneering spirit but it mostly came down to much lame flavourless mimicking that disappointed more than anything else.

Who could forget the time they put a fake Amstrad on the cover to confuse the hell out of everyone for April’s fool day or the drawing showing Alan Sugar thwacking Sir Clive with a heavy bag of cash.

And when the software cops started saying that the small ads column was full of pirates, they responded the following week by putting the word ‘Pirate!’ in bold by every single ad. These guys had balls. May their acid, pie-flinging prose rest in peace and remind us of the blandness of most of the leading computer mags out there, today.

NOODLES, May 2004.

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