CGH Services Publications

In December 1987, CGH Services, a QL software company in Pencader, South Wales, owned by Richard Alexander, started publishing two subscription-based magazines called QL Technical Review and QL Adventurer’s Forum (later called QL Leisure Review).

QL Adventurers' Forum was a magazine which, as the title implies, included reviews of new games, adventure game hints, discussion on the adventure game writing tools available at the time, wargames and so on. The first issues were produced on Text 87 in December 1987 and originally available on disk for just 50pence for the first 3 issues, although copies later became available on paper, as a 16-page A4 magazine to start with, increasing to an average of about 30 pages per issue.

As time went on, it became obvious to Richard Alexander that despite having started as a mainly adventure games magazine, more and more people saw it as a more general games magazine, so after 9 issues of QL Adventurers' Forum, he proudly proclaimed on the cover of issue 9 that this was "The Last Issue" then went on to explain in his editorial column that actually he was just changing the name of the magazine to "QL Leisure Review" to both reflect the move to more general games coverage and to bring the title into line with his other QL publication, "QL Technical Review." After 2 issues of QL Leisure Review, Richard Alexander had found it rather difficult to publish regular issues. In his editorial, he wrote: "The problem has quite simply been one of a lack of articles to print."

With that, he handed over editorial control to Bruce Nicholls, who went on to start "QReview" magazine.

Richard's other publication was QL Technical Review. As the name implies, this was more of a publication for users and hobbyists, aimed at users who did more than play games. The first issue appeared about a year later than the first QL Adventurers' Forum and Richard went on to produce 8 issues in all, mostly with about 30-40 pages. The last issue appeared in 1992.

The first issue of QLTR contained an article called "Making A QL Monster", which always made me laugh when I saw it! The magazines covered just about every subject imaginable except games.