Well before Multi-Man Publishing began producing official material for Advanced Squad Leader, it had a two issue run of Backblast magazine. This magazine appeared at roughly the same time as Time on Target and Critical Hit Magazine, all of which arrived during the 1993-1996 era of ASL when it's future was quite uncertain. Backblast had a similar format to the ASL annual with many of the articles being written by people who had worked on ASL Annual material. Although the production values were not as high as the ASL Annuals, the quality of writing was exceptionally high for a third party production at the time.