Zero Magazine: The Definitive Review
It meant Zero as in ice cold, not Zero as in loser. I swear.
In the UK retrogaming monoculture, there are magazines that are prominent and others that are not. Many of the most-mentioned titles certainly earned their positions in the hierarchy of nostalgia, although it can be argued that some are more prominent because of diligent champions keeping the names circulating and by launching hollow, zombified versions for retronauts to buy. However, for the true mag-fan cognoscenti there is a thread that runs directly from 1986 to 2010, spanning the full glory years of UK gaming magazine culture with a lineage that combined great reportage and review with genuinely funny humour and quasi-mature tone. It starts at Your Sinclair and ends with PC Zone, and sat right in the middle is perhaps the greatest 16-bit gaming magazine ever to exist; Zero.
Zero will always be my favourite of the five multiformat monsters that came of the 8-to-16-bit transition at the end of the 1980s. Computer & Video Games was absolutely the stalwart original, but the emergence of 16-bit platforms saw the birth of no less than four new titles. Lead by Newsfield’s The Games Machine in 1987 and rapidly followed by Future Publishing’s ACE, these early years are marked by straddling the divide between old and new, whereas EMAP’s The One, launching just one year later in 1988, abandons the 8-bits to focus on Amiga, ST and a small but increasingly popular format for videogaming called the IBM PC. The One is very much the template that Zero followed, and yes, you can go as far as saying Zero is a pisstake of its inspiration’s name. The crucial thing was that Zero had something different, a personality that carried far more charisma than its contemporaries. C&VG was too generalist, and too prototypically Gamesmaster in its age targeting. The Games Machine, while steadfastly in the classic Newsfield vein, seemed a bit staid, a bit too much of an old dame of videogame criticism. ACE felt terribly dry and The One felt a bit too ordinary and unexceptional to me.1 But all this is in comparison to Zero, because, and for my 14-year-old self, I immediately found Zero to be incredibly cool and really, genuinely funny in a way that the others were not. That was thanks to it being a graduation of Your Sinclair, which famously used humour to make the likes of Crash look dull and conventional; something that would have been unthinkable in 1985, but glaringly obvious by 1987. Being on the Commodore side for most of the 80s, I sadly never read an issue, contenting myself with Commodore User, Zzap 64 and the lesser-remembered CCI. With many of Your Sinclair’s luminaries hopping onto Zero, the humour seemed to mature a touch into more adult territory, even if that meant via innuendo more than sweary words and direct sexual references. What this created was a magazine that I wanted to read, even though I didn’t have a 16-bit machine.
As I’ve found out surprisingly recently, there is a cohort of late-80s videogamers that read the 16-bit mags as a means of vicariously experiencing the new generation. Lumbered with their aging 8-bits until the Amiga or ST became sufficiently cheaper for parental purchasing, the new multiformats let them see what they were missing. Certainly the titles that bridged the 8-bits with the 16s made this window shopping almost inescapable. I indulged in this constantly, despite still buying Zzap 64 regularly as I owned a Commodore 128, but there was a time where I only had a Commodore Plus/4. I’d be reading Commodore mags partially as a vicarious visitor to the C64 wonderland that my lowly machine, hampered by needing to address the 16kb C16 underlings, could only dream of accessing. Ever the poor relation, C16-Plus/4 coverage was always meagre, hence purchasing obscurities like Commodore Computing International, but even those would tantalise you with screenshots of Amiga titles as the platform gathered its gaming pace. I distinctly recall seeing Defender Of The Crown in CCI’s first issue of 1987, where they’d blown up an Amiga screengrab to fill a double-page spread. On the C64, this would have been a mess of giant pixels and yet here, with glorious scanlines intact, was a videogame screen that felt like a colossal leap towards the photoreal. I was gobsmacked, and my enamoured brain simply needed more of this shit. The growing invasion of Amiga coverage in the Commodore mags wasn’t enough and it seems like the premiere issue of Zero fell into my lap at just the right time. Zero’s cachet didn’t just come from its aforementioned humour - it had a visual design sensibility that seemed a bit more mature than the rest. Even though it was very much in the late-80s sans-serif vogue that all of them shared, Zero’s take was cleaner, more precise, more balanced somehow. Its visual crispness caught my eye, reminding me of how olde-wurlde traditional The Games Machine seemed, or how noisy the likes of ACE and The One could get when getting jiggy with boxouts and the like. Zero had an assured, minimalist kind of typographic identity that seemed closer to The Face than its competitors. I guess that’s what a singular obsession with Futura Bold gets you, alongside a love of Neville Brody, perhaps.
Zero was very much a maturation of Your Sinclair. The general design makes this obvious, but the human links amongst the staff is where the magic is found. Much of the development and the preview issue was under the eye of Dennis legend Teresa Maughan, and she was responsible for so much of Your Sinclair’s spirit, which made the leap fully intact. The writers that were brought across included a very young David McCandless and the now (very sadly) RIP Duncan Macdonald,2 not to mention future Sony/SCEE PR supremo David Wilson, all of which became as legendary to me as Gary Penn, Julian Rignall et al. I remember reading a great review by Macca of the Amiga/ST versions of Laser Squad that featured a comedic tale of excess and incompetence on the battlefield, told in screenshot form. It was the best thing I’d ever read in videogame magazine, and it turned out this was simply standard fare for golden-era Zero. Though that issue (number 2) was to be far more fateful thanks to its fancy dedicated console section. This feature on the Megadrive convinced me to sell my Commodore 128, a disk drive and a shitload of games for £250. I was far off getting a £399 Amiga, but a PAL-compatible3 Megadrive was £189 with Alex Kidd in Miracle World and with another £30 going on Super Shinobi, I still had change left over. As such, Zero became suddenly relevant to my purchasing as it would carry on covering import Megadrive stuff. I naturally ended up paying much more to the C&VG Complete Guide To Consoles Volume 2, where I was able to nod along to its breathless review of Super Shinobi with wise agreement.4 Though for the Amiga stuff, Zero remained my go-to. Oddly, it was also the first magazine I started collecting. A tragic mix-up on a house move saw me lose 90% of my 80s game magazines in the early 90s. Deep into the late-90s, a friend mentioned he had a few issues of Zero that I’d lost and he gave them to me, which I think was the first time I’d actively collected a gaming mag. By then, I was deeply into PC Gamer and PC Zone (alongside Edge, naturally), having sidestepped the ascendency of Amiga Power as a late A600 owner (I went back to Commodore User, which was by then CU Amiga), a brief window before the PC really exploded as the definitive non-console gaming platform. And it was back in Zero that I first noticed the dawn of the PC’s steady rise. Zero covered the VGA era, and it was immediately obvious how advanced 256 colours were over the far smaller on-screen capabilities of the ST and Amiga, not to mention how the sheer 386 grunt made those flat-poly flight sims skip along at a pace the ST and standard Amigas couldn’t match. With the grim death and wrong turns of the Amiga’s AGA generation, and the whimpered failure of the Falcon and Jaguar, it’s probably not surprising that the Zero spirit leapt across to PC Zone, an equally legendary title. And not because of the infamous inclusion of XXX.wad on a Doomfest cover CD. McCandless and Macdonald kept the same irreverent, funny-always vibe, and I can still remember Macca’s recounting of a vivid dream inspired by playing Doom, which carried the same resonance as my own post-play after effects.
For all PC Zone’s modernity and perspective on the PC as it rises to total domination, not to mention how it plotted that rise for seventeen years, it never had quite the same verve as Zero. It was undoubtedly that multiformat maturation that laid fertile ground for now-confident, funny people to write about new games as a new generation found its momentum, and all in a brilliantly fun and engaging way. Zero’s cool left so many others in the shade, thanks to its sheer brightness. It’s something of an everyday miracle that we can read every issue at our leisure, thanks to Jason Scott and Archive.org, and I urge you to delve into those issues, for I think the verve and the brilliance still shine. Especially the first two years, where we get most of the biggies of the Amiga/ST reign. And just remember this; if I’ve introduced you to this magazine for the first time, then I am definitely cool. And if you dig Zero then hey, you’re cool too. It’s key to note that Zero’s cool didn’t come from posturing or by explicit design as with Edge perhaps, it came from its personality, from its people. People whose perspective and writing I must say, I sadly miss.
[21]
Sadly, this is despite the lovely and legendary Gary Penn having a hand in launching both The Games Machine and The One. Meanwhile, Julian Rignall went over to C&VG and carved out the also very legendary indeed Mean Machines.
Renowned for being really fucking funny, I remember readers' pages uproar over a PC Zone backpage where Duncan recounted he and his friends engaging in the nerdiest tweaking of Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 2 car settings while completely off their faces on the then new super-strain of weed, Skunk. An equally obsessive and excessive consumption of butterscotch Angel Delight accompanied the process, which I seem to recall ended in a vomiting incident. Needless to say, such flagrant references to cannabis use with videogaming earned a concerned letter or two, although I was delighted with the piece and understood it on a level the complainants would never understand. My favourite flavours however, were peach, vanilla and Northern Lights.
I am still unsure how my Megadrive, which came in Japanese packaging, was able to play on PAL TVs. I presume some grey-importer voodoo on the board or the modulator had something to do with it, although I do have the vaguest memory it was SCART or composite instead of RF.
Mysteriously unavailable in scanned form, the C&VG GTC V2 also included previews of Megadrive Golden Axe and Thunderforce III, which inspired my purchase of both in mid-1990. I saved up the meagre earnings of a £2-per-hour Saturday job at Top Man to buy them but holy fuck, they were both fucking amazing.