Back in 1988, when I had already graduated from the Abitur and finally entered a local university after ditching my original plans since my dad had just lost his job and my mom lost her mother, a former classmate from high school who was studying computer sciences and had stayed in contact with me all that time let me know about this local computer magazine he found downtown titled Atari Creativo. It was printed on cheap paper and in varying tones of green ink, for some reason. Its price at the time was 30 Intis. Back in high school, my friend had owned an IBM PCjr, when I owned a Timex/Sinclair TS-1000 first and an Atari 800XL later, but later he had moved on to an Atari ST, and that's the reason he bought that magazine, since it contained articles both for the ST line and the 8-bit line. He let me borrow it from him later, as I couldn't find a copy anymore:
I couldn't find any further issues of that magazine, either.. since it never published any further issues other than this one (numbered as Issue 0).
However, in early 1989, while on his way to work, my dad caught an interview on a local news radio station with the editor of a new magazine titled Informática Creativa and noted down what he was saying, and then passed the information to me. I hunted down that one and found it on a well-known newsstand at Diez Canseco street in Miraflores, the price was 1500 Intis and it featured a better cover (though they messed the art, a story I came to know later):
This one was numbered as Issue 0, too.It turned out Atari Creativo had morphed into Informática Creativa in an attempt to reach a broader audience by covering other computer brands aside from Atari exclusively. The magazine came with a subscription card, so I filled it out and went to the editor's offices (located at his home), becoming the very first subscriber of the magazine.
Then later in 1989, Issue 1 of Informática Creativa came out. The quality had improved further, as well as the number of pages (from 24 in Atari Creativo to 40 in Issue 0 of Informática Creativa to 48 in Issue 1). And the price had also increased to 4500 Intis, not as much due to the improved quality of the magazine but rather to the rising inflation in the country at the time:
In this issue they published a trick I submitted for their tricks and tips column. It also featured type-in programs submissions by Eduardo Helfer, William Moloche and Mario Caillahuz, three names which would become well-known in the Peruvian Atari 8-bit scene.
Then in August 1990, Issue 2 came out. It didn't feature a price on the front cover anymore, since at the time, inflation in the country was so rampant that prices could increase in the course of the same day. The quality of the magazine was still the same as the previous issue, as well as the number of pages:
On this issue they published another trick I submitted for their trips and triks columns, and also, a program listing I had written in TurboBASIC XL 1.5 called TurboPaint XL, which allowed you to make drawings on the screen in graphics mode 15 using a joystick and save them to disk.
I had also submitted another program listing which was a character set editor and was meant to be published on Issue 3. Sadly, even though it was finished, Issue 3 never saw the light of day. After the success of Issue 1, the editor had decided to increase the number of printed copies for Issue 2, but unfortunately, probably due to the aforementioned inflation (and to the delay between the release of Issue 1 and Issue 2), it didn't sell as well, and he ended up with a lot of magazines in his living room. It would also have featured a great game by Mario Caillahuz which was called "ACCION" and can now be found on AtariMania.
The editor had also planned to offer all the listings published for Atari 8-bit computers from Atari Creativo Issue 0 up to Informática Creativa Issue 2 on a single 5.25" "flippy" 2-sided disk. Some time later I got permission from him to upload an image of both side of the disk in DCM (Disk Communicator) format to the University of Michigan Atari 8-bit Software Archives in 1996. Yes, it's the same year again... looks like I was really active back then, in retrospective.
Anyway, some years ago I downloaded the images back from the UMich Archives and I've used DCM2DISK on the PC to generate ATR images from them. You can download them together in a ZIP file from hrere:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rIavH1K78CsbHRmwwf7I6u4JqiUny36u/view?usp=sharing
I also scanned the issues I have on my shelf and made PDF files from them. The front and back covers are in color (except for Atari Creativo), but the inner pages are in greyscale only. The links are below:
The magazine editor then went to work for a newspaper, editing its weekly or quarterly computing supplement. Then, after seeing that his brother's Anime fan club was becoming increasingly popular, he started publishing a magazine devoted to Japanese Manga and Anime and abandoned the computer magazines business altogher. But that's a completely different story...
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