(*No one ever says SINCLAIR USER.)
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| PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD August 1979 page 5 |
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| PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD September 1979 |
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| November 2024 |
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| YOUR SPECTRUM January 1984 |
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| YOUR SPECTRUM December 1985 |
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| YOUR SPECTRUM December 1985 page 40 |
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| YOUR 64 Issue 1 |
But first, there was... YOUR 64. Or rather, YOUR 64 &VIC20. Why not call the magazine YOUR COMMODORE? I don't know. Argus Specialist Publications did publishing a magazine called YOUR COMMODORE but Dennis could have got in first with the name because the first issue of YOUR COMMODORE appeared in October 1984. It's possible Dennis were worried about Commodore objecting to the use of their company name on an independent magazine.
Like YOUR SPECTRUM, YOUR 64 started out bimonthly and changed to monthly from issue 3, October 1984. That makes issue one June/July 1984 probably. YOUR SPECTRUM was launched into a potentially crowded market so the idea of a cautious, test-the-water approach makes sense. I don't understand why Sportscene repeated this for YOUR 64. As the cover of issue one notes, this is "the only magazine for the Commodore 64" (&VIC20). Maybe it was standard policy for Sportscene/Dennis Publishing.
YOUR 64 closely follows the template of YOUR SPECTRUM. If you just looked at the page layout you'd be hard pushed to tell which magazine was which. The (&VIC20) subtitle is dropped after issue seven. The first ABC figures are published in August 1985, covering the January to June 1985 period. They were 38,021. That's considerably lower than YOUR SPECTRUM but the C64 magazine market was smaller. Six month's later ZZAP!64 reported a total circulation of 42,973 (UK, 40.603) for July-December 1985. Sportscene obviously didn't consider YOUR 64 a success. Issue 14 was the last. The magazine was sold on to Argus, who merged it with YOUR COMMODORE. The sale was so quick that YOUR 64 didn't even have time to write a "great news for all readers!" story. That was left to the November issue of YOUR COMMODORE.
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| YOUR COMMODORE November 1985 |
I wonder if Sportscene was reviewing the future of both YOUR 64 and YOUR SPECTRUM in the autumn of 1985. It seems more than a coincidence that one title should be sold off and the other rebranded so close together.
The first issue of YOUR SINCLAIR hit the newsagents on 6th December 1985. How different is it from the last issue of YOUR SPECTRUM? The content hasn't regenerated but the style is updated. The cover for YOUR SINCLAIR looks more dynamic. The artwork is better and more exciting than the previous issue's photo of a slightly singed Rambo. Text is used better on the YOUR SINCLAIR cover. There's a strapline at the bottom, rather than the coloured text boxes which clutter up YOUR SPECTRUM's cover. YOUR SINCLAIR is thicker, running to 122 pages compared to 84 the previous month, 38 extra pages for the same 95p cover price; nice. And inside, there's better use of colour and fonts to make the issue look more packed. Little design tricks make the opening pages feel more full. There's actually slightly more space given to news in the old magazine, 6 pages compared to 5 in YOUR SINCLAIR, but the new magazine put the news on double-page spreads so the first few pages feel fuller because there's more to read before the page has to be turned. It's not all a trick, there are more game reviews. Overall the new magazine is an improvement.
Not all the readers were delighted. Issue three printed a very sour letter from Les Panselle. He wrote:
What a tragedy, what a waste. All those extra pages and you waste them on trash (sorry, you call them games).
However, I do recognise your grand strategy. Within the year you plan to poach all the readers from the Beano and the Dandy Rest assured, you will succeed.
But as for me, I'm going back to the Beano and Dandy (as soon as my subscription to Your Dan Dare, sorry again, Your Sinclair runs out). I find the content of those comics more intellectually stimulating than the juvenile hysterics of your reviewers.
Why not be honest and disassociate yourselves from computers. Trust me, you would retain the same clientele . Writing computer games programs is obviously clever, playing them and writing about them is moronic.
So, as I bid you farewell, some advice. Change your ways or most certainly go the way of other magazines — under.
YOUR SINCLAIR continued for another 90 issues. Issue 17 saw the publisher change from Sportscene Specialist Press Ltd to Dennis Publications. This was explained to the readers as a simple name change. The accounts for Dennis Publishing, made up to 31 December 1986, go into more detail:
On 1st January 1987 the company took over all assets and liabilities of Sportscene Publishers Ltd and Bunch Partworks Ltd, its subsidiary companies, and of Sportscene Specialist Press Ltd, a publishing company owned by Mr Felix Dennis, in order to provide the new group with a single identity.
On 27th February 1987 the company changed its name to Dennis Publishing Ltd.
The accounts record Felix Dennis received a licenced publication rights payment of £13,174 to 31st December 1986. Copyright of YOUR SINCLAIR remained with Felden Publications Ltd. Sportscene Specialist Press carried on as a subsidiary company of Dennis Publishing until 29 July 1999 when the name was changed to Dennis Interactive Ltd.
I said earlier that YOUR SINCLAIR carried on for another 90 issues. It did but not as a Dennis Publications title. April 1990 saw the magazine sold to rivals Future Publishing. Issue 52 was the first under the new owner, with the tagline "The Future Starts Here..." on the cover.
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| YOUR SINCLAIR October 1989 page 6 |
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| ZERO November 1990 |
And it did. You'll also be relieved to hear that all the material remained the copyright of Felden Productions. ZERO didn't have a long shelf life, 35 issues between October 1989 and September 1992. The magazine frequently gets overlooked because of its position sandwiched between the more well known YOUR SINCLAIR and PC ZONE, and I'm not going to help that much.
ZERO was still based out of 14 Rathbone Place and the magazine gave readers a good look at its home. Starting with issue 23 and an interview with programmers Sean Griffiths (Magic Pockets, Bitmap Brothers) and Tony Crowther (Captain Planet, Mindscape) on the roof. This was followed in issue 25 by Jeff Minter in the kitchen. Peter Molineux in the toilet for issue 26. And Archer Mclean in issue 27 by the fireplace.[2]
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| ZERO November 1991 page 56 |
ZERO issue 25 carries an advert for a team up with Radio Luxembourg. A show called Zero Hour, broadcast every Tuesday from 9-10pm. Alas, the internet is empty of details about Zero Hour. If you know anything about it please let me know.
ZERO issue 25 also carried an advert for Dennis Publishing's new
magazine GAME ZONE. ZERO had started out covering consoles with an internal supplement called Console Action. The first couple of issues in 1989 gave a lot of coverage to the Konix Multi-System, the great hope of the British software industry. Console Action ran all the way through to October 1991 before being quietly dropped in advance of the new magazine.
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| ZERO November 1991 page 84 |
GAME ZONE was clearly intended to muscle in on the territory already claimed by EMAP's magazine MEAN MACHINES. And is all the material in GAME ZONE copyright Felden Productions? You betcha.
Issue 29
of ZERO featured the inevitable ZERO/GAME ZONE crossover. They
interviewed Andrew Braybrook in the offices of GAME ZONE, which you
won't be surprised to read look a lot like the offices of ZERO. The
actual interview took place on "Viv's lap". Viv being Vivienne Nogy,
Production Editor of GAME ZONE.
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| ZERO March 1992 page 56 |
19 Bolsover Street, London, W1V
May 1992 saw something inconceivable occur. Dennis Publishing moved away from 14 Rathbone Place. They'd been there... forever. Or at least forever since 1979.
GAME ZONE and ZERO updated their readers with the new address in the May 1992 issue. Except that someone at ZERO was so upset by the move, or distracted by the game on that month's cover disc Cover Girl Poker, that they forgot to also update the address on the letters page; the silly sausage.
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| ZERO June 1992 page 69 |
ZERO readers got no warning of what was to come in July 1992. The brief for issue 33 was presumably to take ZERO and VIZ it up a bit but the result was more like CRASH in its declining years. I'm struggling to describe the redesign without using the word rubbish, so let's move on. The new look clearly wasn't a success. Four issues later, October 1992 issue 36, was the last before ZERO closed without warning. The magazine's only memorial came in the small print at the bottom of the masthead for the October 1992 issue of GAME ZONE: "Bye bye Viv, Alex, Stefanie and Zero. We'll miss ya!"
November 1992 saw GAME ZONE split in two, into SEGA ZONE (which ran for 23 issues to September 1994) and NINTENDO GAME ZONE (18 issues to April 1994). This split took place a month after EMAP did the same to MEAN MACHINES to create MEAN MACHINES SEGA and NINTENDO MAGAZINE SYSTEM. Part of the redesign of ZERO involved folding console coverage back into the magazine. I wonder if the intent was to create suite of magazines like those owned by EMAP? A multi-format magazine aping COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES alongside two console specific titles.
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| November 2024 |
19 Bolsover Street lurks in the heart Fitzrovia which sounds like a made up central European country but is actually the area bounded by Oxford Street and Euston Road. The old offices of Dennis Publishing are a part of a ginormous Georgian terrace. Today the offices at number 19 go by the name the Media Centre.
SEGA ZONE and NINTENDO GAMES ZONE were sold as a pair to Future Publishing in 1993. The archiving is patchy for both magazines (it seems to be worse for SEGA ZONE). I've been able to establish that issue 9, July 1993, of NINTENDO GAMES ZONE was still published by Dennis from the Bolsover Street address and by issue 11 it had transferred down to Bath. God bless whoever archived issue 11 of NINTENDO GAMES ZONE because they included the subscriber's letter which accompanied the issue in the post. It says:
Life at Game Zone has been a little chaotic this month, because the Cart Fam has become an extend-o-fam, welcoming a few new members and moving house. We’ve fled from the big smoke, sin city and even London too. We upped stumps and moved to the country, where the air is fresh, the grass green and cute little birdies can be heard sweetly chirping their summer songs. But it’s hard to make this kind of move without a little upheaval.
Thus I proclaim issue 10 of SEGA ZONE and NINTENDO GAMES ZONE as the final Dennis Publishing issues, and issue 11 the first of the new Future era. It's a shame that neither of the two issue 10s have made it online. I'd like to see if any of the Dennis crew knew of the sale in advance and snuck in subversive messages.
I've stuck the ABCs down at the end of this article. Hopefully it will make them easier to read and find. The short summary, ZERO only printed ABCs for 18 months of its existence. SEGA ZONE and NINTENDO GAMES ZONE never printed any.
Issue one of PC ZONE came out in April 1993. After ZERO had been killed off but before SEGA ZONE and NINTENDO GAMES ZONE took the long walk to Bath. This was a good time to start a PC magazine. X-Wing was the cover game on the first issue, and titles like 7th Guest, Syndicate, Doom, System Shock, Wing Commander 3, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, and UFO were all on the near horizon. PC ZONE was rightly popular. It styled itself as Britain's best-selling PC games magazine from May 1995-April 1997, in the little box where the magazine printed their ABC figures. This covers the circulation figures from July to December 1994 to January to June 1996. After this the "best-selling" claim was gone although the circulation figures went up from 43,149 to 49,655. Presumably PC ZONE had been outsold by PC GAMER. In April 1999 PC ZONE was able to claim again that it was Britain's best-selling PC games magazine although by this point the magazine was no longer printing the circulation figures. This claim lasted as a banner on the cover all the way to November 1999, when PC GAMER probably beat them again.
There are plenty of stories about PC ZONE. And I'm not going to talk about them. Have a look here and here[3], for starters.The last issue of PC Zone is a good place to start because it includes some really nice retrospective material. You can download a PDF of issue 225 here.
Instead, I'm going to talk about my close encounter with PC ZONE (on J. Allen Hynek's scale it would rate a one). For a brief period I worked for Virgin Interactive Entertainment, for their technical support service, in the basement. There were about six of us. We all had our own desks and we were issued with telephone headsets because the majority of people contacted us by phone. You could tell when someone was dealing with a bad call because, ironically, the first thing that would happen was the person taking the call would stop talking. Long periods of silence meant one of my colleagues was being berated from the other end of the phone line. The person being yelled at would make an occasional attempt to speak, or would repeat themself, or in extreme cases would make a dickhead gesture and flick v's at the phone. We didn't often get unpleasant phone calls. The only one that really sticks in my memory involved a bloke getting cross at me because he didn't understand how his computer worked, and the resulting phone call lasted 40 minutes past the end of my working day. But you never knew what was going to happen when you picked up the next call [4].
Like I say there were six of us. And it's a source of endless frustration that I can't remember the name of the subject of this story. It might be Graham Archer, but I'm not 100% certain of that. Anyway, it was clear Graham was taking a difficult call but not necessarily a bad one. He didn't sound stressed, bemused might be a better term. I think I realised Graham had a live one on the line when he made a comment about not shouting at someone's son. That made me prick up my ears. From then on I tuned in and waited for the call to finish so I could ask what was going on. "He wanted me to write his son's name on a board.... and draw a snowman next to it." Is the comment I really remember.
Then it was forgotten in the rest of the working day.
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| PC ZONE April 1998 page 64 |
I don't know at what point we realised this was a hilarious prank call from Charlie Brooker at PC ZONE. It must have been pretty soon afterwards. Someone, presumably Charlie Brooker, came to interview Graham and that was written up for a box out at the end of the feature which was written up from several calls to different technical support lines. It was a bit strange. The vagaries of magazine deadlines mean the phone call must have come
through some time around the end of January/start of February 1998 in
order to be ready for the April issue. And, as we were all fans of PC ZONE, it can't have been long since we were laughing at Charlie Brooker's "Cruelty Zoo" page in the February 1998 issue; which got the magazine pulled from newsagents. The April issue arrived and I remember being dismayed on Graham's part that they had included recordings of the call on the cover CD. This seemed like a dirty trick. I was overwhelmingly relieved that I hadn't been the person to pick up that call which you can, if you want to, listen to here. The publication of the article generated a flurry of follow up activity. I ended up doing an interview for Radio One's Newsbeat because my manager didn't want to. Fortunately that hasn't been archived online forever.
30 Cleveland Street, London W1P
Dennis Publishing still had another move in them. From issue 95, November 2000, the magazine's editorial address shifted all of 300 yards round the corner.
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| November 2024 |
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| November 2024 |
Fill in the blanks in this sentence. In 2001 was sold to . Sorry, you were wrong. The answer is: in 2001 COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES was sold to Dennis Publishing. Yes, just for a change Dennis was buying the cast offs from another publisher; EMAP in this case. Later issues of C&VG are sparsely archived which makes it difficult to narrow down the date of the sale. The September 2001 issue of PC ZONE, on sale from August 23, is the first to carry an in house advert for C&VG so that narrows the date down to no later than July 2001.
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| PC ZONE September 2001 page 82 |
On 23 August 2004 THE GUARDIAN reported that:
The specialist magazine publisher Future Network has bought two computer games magazines from Dennis Publishing in a £2.5m deal.
PC ZONE would continue to be published but C&VG would exist only as a website:
PC Zone, Britain's longest-running computer games magazine, sold a
monthly average of 41,000 copies during the six months to June 30 this
year, while Computer & Video Games's monthly average was 19,200, 40%
down on last year.
And that was it. Dennis Publishing exited the computer magazine business after 11 years of publishing PC ZONE. Actually that's not true. Dennis Publishing continued to print MAC USER, a magazine it had published since 1985 and would continue until 2015. However, it feels like it falls outside the remit of anything I do.
And now the moment you've all been waiting for, some ABC figures:
Jan-Jun 1985
YOUR SPECTRUM 55,126
YOUR 64 38,021
ZERO [6]
Jul-Dec 1990 53,634
Jan-Jun 1991 60,636
Jul-Dec 1991 52,580
PC ZONE
Jul-Dec 1994 45,384
Jan-Jun 1995 48,161
Jul-Dec 1995 50,267
Jan-Jun 1996 43,149
Jul-Dec 1996 49,655
Jan-Jun 1997 55,083
Jul-Dec 1997 60,013
Jan-Jun 2004 41,000
MAC USER
Jul-Dec 1994 27,816
[2] Originally Archer McLean was supposed to be interviewed the toilet but he went to America instead. Peter Molyneux took his place. At the end of the Molyneux toilet chat, Archer McLean's interview was publicised as taking place "by the photocopier". His actual interview by the fireplace ended with loose talk that the next interview would take place "on the pavement outside the Zero building." This would have been super but never happened.
[3] Note how the news story includes a picture of the cover of issue five labelled "The first issue of PC Zone came with two floppy disks on the front." Typical BBC accuracy.
[4] And that's the story of how I took a phone call from Dave Lee Travis, who wanted help with Aladdin.
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