Raze magazine
Can we talk about Raze magazine? I’ve been dying to talk to you about Raze magazine…
Here’s the thing, I bought pretty much every gaming magazine I could get my hands on back in the day, and I’ve got several copies of Raze from its 12 month run circa 1991-1992.
I always liked Raze and its multi-format approach. But I was also fascinated by the chaos within the magazine. It felt like a mish-mash of several different publications thrown together, all competing with each other. Aside from the usual news / previews / reviews sections, a typical issue would also contain the following:
Japanese import section
Sega section
Nintendo section
Atari section
US import section
That’s all fine in theory, but each of these sections would also contain their own stand-alone mix of news / reviews / previews, etc. None of it connected to what was happening elsewhere in the magazine.
So you might get a review of a NES game in the Nintendo section (instead of the main reviews section). Or some crucial piece of news would be in the Japanese import section rather than the main news bit.
There was no apparent rhyme or reason to any of this. It was just a hodge podge of content and ideas thrown at a wall. Complete madness.
30 years later I finally understand why…
While researching a recent article on Sega Pro magazine I got talking to Richard Monteiro. He was a Future Publishing staff writer at one point before going freelance and eventually launching Paragon Publishing - home to Sega Pro magazine and then a bunch of other magazines.
Anyway, between Future and Paragon he picked up the contract to supply all the content for Raze magazine. Which is where things get interesting.
Raze was a new venture from Newsfielf Publishing. They had made it big during the 8bit era with magazines like Zzap!64 and Crash, but were struggling to adapt to the new generation of consoles arriving on the market. Strapped for cash, they handed over all the editorial and content duties for the magazine to Richard and his Words Works Limited start-up.
Now, normally, when you’d produce a games magazine back in those days you’d have everyone working from the same dank offices. So you’d all be piled on top of each other, and everyone would know what was going on and who was covering what.
That isn’t how Raze was put together. The content and design was outsourced to freelancers working in apparent isolation. And it seems like none of them ever spoke to each other. Or knew they were working on the same magazine.
As Richard explained, “Lack of direction from the owners (Newsfield), probably due to financial distraction, meant the small editorial team assembled in Somerset was left to spin the words after which designers in Shropshire tried to make sense of it all. Little wonder there was a disconnect. Ultimately it was held together by enthusiasm and passion. But even that wasn’t enough 12 months down the line.”
So there you go…
