Videogame Magazines: The Definitive Review
Paper matters.
I recently undertook what I see as a moral crusade for the good of our culture. I decided to start reading 2000AD again. I was always passing it in Tesco, but for some reason hadn’t quite hooked into buying it. My relationship with the comic goes right back to the early 1980s, and a chance parental purchase from a hospital newsagents to distract me while waiting for a plaster cast to set a chipped left elbow. I was immediately taken with the comic’s idiosyncratic style and sheer panache, but was still a bit too young, and too much of a Beano reader to become fully obsessed. That would come just a few years later with the printing of 2000AD Monthly, which collected together full runs of stories alongside single-episode stuff, coinciding with me entering the double-digit ages. I fell completely in love with Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper, Nemesis and all the other wonders that 2000AD could offer. I quickly fell into weekly readership, making a smooth transition from DC Thompson’s finest to IPC’s most under-sung talent. As is so commonly the case, I ended up forgetting about 2000AD once in my early 20s, but picked it up later that decade when it was arriving at the office of my first PR agency. Again, I stopped reading when I left that agency, leading to a big old stretch of non-participation until earlier this year.
The biggest impetus for me committing to 2000AD is its rarity. There is literally nothing like it, and it seems absolutely miraculous that it still exists in print. I felt that even if I didn’t like the content, I should still buy it, if only to maintain the legacy. Likewise, my eldest was now reading Beano annuals from back to front, so it seemed wise to start buying Beano on a weekly basis, and again I was somewhat stunned that it still appears, weekly, as a physical object. Even if it is easily lost amongst the vast hordes of bagged toy-carriers that 99% of the other childrens’ print media comprises. Naturally, there’s always encouragement with both 2000AD and The Beano to subscribe. After all, the commercial case for the publishers is obvious and there are plenty of reader incentives for doing so. But not the incentive that got me buying them in the first place - I want them to stay on the shelves of supermarkets. I want them to be visible in public. I want them to remain as excitingly discoverable as they were me.
2000AD’s companion monthly, the Judge Dredd Megazine is the other comic I buy for myself and it sits, oddly, in a different section. It’s in with the adult hobbies and culture mags and in viewing the range here, I was struck that there’s a complete lack of videogame culture magazines. Take the music sector - there are genre titles, and demographic titles, but a rich field. With videogames, I struggle to name more than three that appear in supermarkets. Perhaps even the dizzying heights of four if you visit WH Smith. We have Retrogamer, Play, PC Gamer and Edge. Yet in the aviation section, there’s easily twice that1. And for real envy, the automotive sector is fucking bonkers, supporting a thriving ecosystem of mags from extreme niche to mainstream generalists. The demographics here surely mix; the people buying VW or Porsche-specific mags can’t be that far removed from the modern gamer population. Crossover has to be inevitable. And there’s more than enough obvious appeals to Gen-X and Millennial car fans across the covers of Car and Classic, Octane or even the beautifully mundane Practical Classics. Of course, the key issue here is funding. Car magazines thrive thanks to a commercial sector of remarkable breadth, with each one of the niches catered for by component companies, after-market suppliers, second-hand car specialists and so on, before you even need to consider major car manufacturers or lifestyle, fashion and accessory brands keen to sell themselves to easily-categorised readerships. I’m not sure we can say the same for the videogames industry with its handful of major publisher conglomerates, three platform holders and a retail sector that consists of a scant few indies and one, constantly ailing national chain. In fact, it’s weirdly surprising that the videogame sector never matured enough for lifestyle and fashion brands to find justifiable spends. Thus we fall back to niche publications supported by crowdfunding, most of which rarely make it to actual shelves. Wireframe’s arrival and disappearance seems to sum up the problem with the sector, but again it seemed to be too on-par with Edge. I personally suspect there is an audience out there wanting more print magazines, and enough for it to be viable, but it has to offer something different. I would love to take a stab at a retro magazine that isn’t all about nostalgia cannons and fizzy recreations of 40-year-old titles but instead just a straight bunch of longform articles. In the vintage automotive sector, there are no making-of’s for the Jaguar E-Type or soundbitten interviews with the guy who did the steering. These are more often box-outs or fleeting paragraphs. There are instead experiential reviews, comparisons with rivals, insights into restoration, critiques of the vehicles and discussion of their cultural relevance. This is what the videogame magazine sector lacks - a sense of pride in its past and an interest in contextualisation and analysis that could easily fill 200 monthly pages. Edge is too concerned with the novel and Retrogamer too populist to fulfill this remit. But I’d love to sit down with eight or so pieces on games from the 2000s every month. I mean, could you construct a magazine around the PlayStation 2 catalogue? I reckon so. And yes, I know there are various academic, semi-academic and crowdfunded journals that approach this idea, but I don’t think they’re quite the same as a magazine. And, if I’m being honest, I would actually love a magazine that compiles interesting papers from academia and packages them for laymen audiences. Ultimately though, I’m left with a sense of real sadness. If the music sector can support a monthly magazine dedicated to Prog Rock, can we not have an 8-Bit home computer rag?
For a slightly less dour ending, I was lamenting the lack of a Gamesmaster for the 7-14 age group, but decided to pick up DC Thompson’s 110% Gaming to entertain one child while the other had a piano lesson. And it was fascinating. At £4.99, it’s a bagged affair that uses free gifts as a lure but the magazine within it is surprisingly decent. It’s gaudy as fuck and seems to operate under the rule that no piece of text can be longer than a tweet, but it is rich and varied. It celebrates Mario and Sonic, but also hardy perennials like Minecraft and Roblox, but even more besides. My pessimistic expectations were wonderfully confounded, and it gave me a glimmer of hope that there may still be a continuing audience for videogames in print media. Looking back to the adult titles that survive on the shelves, I find a weird comedy in seeing PC Gamer, Edge and Retrogamer2 as the three that survived. I can remember when there were SIX or so PlayStation 2 magazines, and Future decided there needed to be another!3 In my PR days, we’d pore over the ABC results and marvel at how despite its status, Edge never seemed to get past 40,0004 or so. More cynical heads saw it as a halo mag for Future, a profligate bauble it used to assert dominance over its competitors. The refusal to sell inside covers was almost a direct challenge to the market-minded on the game publishing side. And yet, it’s still here, and it still doesn’t sell its inside covers. If Edge proves anything, it’s that there’s always a market for print that isn’t wholly populist and commercially-focused. I can only wish that someone with the money and the passion can follow Edge’s example. Not to copy it, but copy the way it carved out its own channel. How it defined its own niche through commitment to an ideal and deploying the talent to fulfill it. You know what? Fuck it - I’m going to get a fucking loan and do a fucking mag that’s all fucking green and is only about games from 1985-1987 on the fucking ZX Spectrum.
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If you include aircraft model making, to be fair. But other niches outnumber the videogame sector too. Bikes! Photography! LEGO MAGAZINES WITH ACTUAL LEGO ON THE FRONT COVER.
I had the pleasure of seeing an extremely happy and excited Darran Jones on our very first visit to the then-nascent Imagine Publishing. Having been plucked from the ashes of the collapsed Highbury House as an insert in GamesTM, it was a deserved chance to really make something of the mag and holy cow, did he make something.
PSNext. An odd hybrid of standard PlayStation 2 fodder and higher-minded Edge cultural content. To weird to live, too rare to die. So Future killed it.
I may be underestimating here. I think it was often 35-38k? And this was when fucking FHM was on 400k and gave any game they covered four stars. :(