How Magazines Died

A gloomy title but bear with me. This started out as a paragraph about AMIGA POWER in the Power Computing article but the paragraph got longer and longer, until I thought it justified snipping it out and making it an article in its own right. WARNING - I have never worked on a magazine. I know nothing about the process of making them. This hasn't stopped me speculating like mad below. People with actual editorial experience will probably find what follows naïve, at best. Read on at your peril.

Power Computing

Power Computing look like a pretty obscure company. How obscure? As far as I can tell, they only released three games Breathless (1995), The Big Red Adventure (1997), and Red Mars (1999). All three were released for the Amiga after Commodore had declared bankruptcy. Unless you know differently, there's not even a cover online for the Power Computing version of Red Mars That's all pretty darn obscure. Here's the Rod Serling-type twist, the company is still trading successfully today.

Retro Gamer

RETRO GAMER is well into year 26 of an incredible run. It feels like it should be one of the oldest computer magazine in the world, let alone the UK, and yet it turns out to be quite a long way down the list. EDGE and PC GAMER both started in 1993 and are still going. Then you move on to the magazines no one (ie, me) has ever heard of, like APC (AUSTRALIAN PERSONAL COMPUTER) which started in 1980 and is still going strong. Then you step back and consider non-computing titles like PRIVATE EYE (1961), or the RADIO TIMES (1923), or NEW STATESMAN (1915) and suddenly RETRO GAMER looks like a positive sapling in a forest of old growth.

Future Publishing

Valeside, West Street, Somerton. Somerset TAJ I 7PS

But the biggest news of the moment was that ZZAP! was to be moved from its base in Yeovil to Newsfield's mega-stylish giga-tower block HQ in Ludlow. In the process of moving, a few things were lost such as Gary Penn's Tears For fears tapes, some biros and our erstwhile newshound Ed Banger through an unfortunate accident on the M4. Oh, and Chris Anderson and Bob Wade who decided they prefered Amstrads to Commodores.
(ZZAP!64 Christmas Special 1985 page 96)

Sportscene Specialist Press/Dennis Publishing

14 Rathbone Place, London, W1P

CRASH, YOUR SINCLAIR, and SINCLAIR USER which was your favourite?* I was a CRASH kid but around 1988 it was clear the crown was slipping from CRASH's head and YOUR SINCLAIR picked up that crown and wore it proudly for the next few years. ZERO, Dennis' 16-bit magazine, carried the YOUR SINCLAIR crown on to the next generation, and then PC FORMAT made it a hat trick. Newsfield never really succeeded in producing another magazine that matched the love/nostalgia for CRASH and ZZAP. I'm not familiar enough with EMAP's titles to say whether they passed the success of COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES forwards; although I know a lot of people have a soft spot for the MEAN MACHINES titles. And Future. Well, their titles were frequently wildly successful but they always seem stamped from a template; magazines like AMIGA POWER were the exception. I think the point I'm groping vaguely towards is that Sportscene/Dennis was unique in producing a trilogy of beloved magazines.
(*No one ever says SINCLAIR USER.)

EMAP: East Midland Allied Press

Priory Court, 30-32 Farringdon Lane, EC1R

EMAP were first. In 1981 they launched COMPUTER & VIDEO GAMES. The first magazine in the world dedicated to computer games. Not one of those qualified firsts, like the first "regularly published" video games magazine in the world or just the first games magazine "published in the UK" or the first "multiformat" video games magazine. The first. Anywhere. Number one. EMAP did it. [I stand. Sing two verses of Rule Britannia and then sit down again and apologise to the cat, who had been sleeping quietly on my lap].

Newsfield Ltd

1/2 King Street, Ludlow, Shropshire

So we're doing magazines now are we? Well yes, obviously. The tagline of this blog is "seeking out Britain's pioneering software houses," but I've covered Argus Specialist Press and assorted computer manufacturers under the fig leaf justification that those companies did occasionally chuck out a few games. I could have done the same for Newsfield because they spun off a software house called Thalamus but it seems unnecessary. Newsfield were an essential part of the UK software scene in their own right, as were other publishers like Future (AMSTRAD ACTION) or Sportscene/Dennis (YOUR SINCLAIR and YOUR 64), or hardware companies like Romantic Robot (the various Multiface machines) and joystick kings Konix. A whole support industry grew up around software companies like the ecology of a coral reef and to not talk about it is to not tell the whole story.