Let’s Try to Make More Loadstar!

First, to recap The newsstand cover of Loadstar #1. Way back in 1984, having had success with their first product Softdisk, the nascent Softdisk Publishing released the first issue of Loadstar, a “magazine-on-disk” for Commodore 64 microcomputers. Softdisk is mostly known these days as being the former workplace of several people who would go on to found Id Software, creators of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Softdisk published, as the Id guys’ last work for the company, Catacomb 3D using the Wolf3D engine, and a Commander Keen episode. Softdisk released other products too, but Loadstar eventually proved to be something special. Early on they assumed that their PC and Mac products would be their legacy, but then Microsoft and then the internet came along and it suddenly became much harder to make a go of it with a monthly paid software collection. Softdisk became an ISP; they got bought out by a bigger ISP; nowadays they don’t exist really, except as a bag of rights…