How the internet killed video game magazines

The October 1996 issue of Computer and Video Games (CVG) magazine has a feature titled ‘The Net Revolution’. It looks at online gaming, and how a new generation of consoles and home computers can deliver affordable connectivity. This is expressed via four pages of Quake-online multiplayer screenshots, and the occasional reference to internet cafes.

What the feature fails to mention, and what the writer couldn’t have predicted, is how the internet would revolutionise the broader media landscape, and kill off video game magazines in the process.

By the mid 2000s newsstands once stacked with gaming magazines were looking considerably lighter, with just a handful of titles fighting over scraps. CVG published its last issue in 2004.

This is a story about an industry in flux, and a 10 year window that would see games, media, and technology converge to create the biggest consumer market in the world. A partnership that would take video game magazine subscriptions to record heights before sacrificing them at the altar of algorithms and accountants. 

Mean Machines, monthly deadlines, dank offices, and the best job in the world

The early to mid-90s was the golden era of video game magazines. Rapid growth in the home console market and more affordable personal computers meant there were several competing platforms on the market - each supported by dedicated publications. This was in addition to all the multi-format titles covering everything from ageing 8-bit micros to the latest Japanese imports.

Back in those days popular UK magazines like Mean Machines might sell 150,000 copies per month. In the US, Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) was doing similar numbers. All of this was boosted by advertising revenue. Which made publishing a successful game magazine rather profitable, and at one point the UK had something like two-dozen dedicated gaming magazines on offer.

These magazines may have been showcasing cutting edge consoles and games, but the monthly production process was a relic from another era, dependent on technology that had barely changed in decades. 

When Paul Glancey joined CVG at the start of the 90s he recalls being shocked by the old-school ‘paste-up’ nature of the layouts. As he explains, “[The production process ] meant taking printed blocks of text, cutting them up with scissors, and physically glueing them to a page to create the layout. Images and headers would go through the same process, having to be physically laid out with blue, scissors and a steady hand. Once a page was deemed ready it was sent off to the printers where it was ‘photographed’ and prepared for print.”

Design and layout was only half the equation, finding content to fill the pages was an equally arduous process. Trying to source news, procure games to review, interview developers and  sell advertising was an old school mix of phone calls, mail deliveries, faxed notes and face-to face meetings.

A couple of times a year it meant boarding a flight for the other side of the world so you could be on the ground for the latest trade show and file your blurry screenshots and wild speculation for the home office ahead of looming deadlines. 

That’s something industry veteran Dan Whitehead (formerly of Eurogamer) recalls vividly. “At E3 in 1996 our deadline for PlayStation Pro was the day after the show finished, or something equally ludicrous. So we had to race around all the different publisher stands, grab press kit CDs, stuff them in a box and have them couriered overnight so the designer back in the UK could start laying out pages. I sat in my hotel room banging out write-ups and emailing them… Just a few years later, all the press stuff was available online from password-protected press sites and we knew pretty much everything about every new game before we even got on a plane.” 

All of this was done by small teams of writers and contributors barely out of their teens with no real world experience, happy to accept working conditions that would get you shut down in this day and age.

Richard Leadbetter is another CVG and Mean Machines alumni. His memories of the old Priory Court offices are, let’s say, evocative. “The working conditions were pretty disgusting, the office was a mess, there was no air conditioning, probably about a quarter of the people smoked in the office — and the games room was stiflingly hot in the summer. I was pretty surprised at how bad it was when I went to interview for the job.”

For the younger staffers putting these magazines together every month it was clearly a labour of love. It was also the only game in town. There was no internet. There was no Youtube, Twitter, digital downloads or any other modern trappings. Magazines were the only source of news and information about this burgeoning global market. 

And if you happened to live outside major hubs like the UK or US you might have to wait three months for those magazines to be shipped overseas so you could read all the latest news.

From IGN to UK Resistance - testing the limits of the early internet 

The first gaming sites started to appear online in the early 90s. These were simple bulletin boards and static pages maintained by individuals. Websites as we recognise them didn’t start to emerge until the mid 90s and the arrival of the ubiquitous 56k dial-up modem.

Keith Stuart is a former Edge contributor who went on to run DC-UK magazine. He was there in the mid 90s and says, “1996 was the turning point. It was when both IGN and Gamespot launched. They had a lot of money and marketing behind them so it felt like suddenly this medium which had previously mostly been about video game newsgroups and fan pages was now a source of mainstream, commercial games journalism.”

IGN was born from the grouping of several Imagine Publishing websites under a single online banner. According to industry legend they set up former magazine editor Doug Perry in a small office with some computers and told him to get busy. Over the next couple of years he would cobble together a network from the ashes of N64.com, PSX Power, Saturn World, Next-Generation.com and Ultra Game Players Online. Let’s hope he was well paid because News Corp bought the entire IGN network for $650 million eight years later. 

As for Gamespot, that was just a few marketing guys who quit their day jobs and started a website. Because that’s just how you did it back then, and it’s not like there was a whole lot of competition.

While IGN and Gamespot represented the commercial end of a new digital medium for video game coverage, they weren’t the only ones trying to get a foot in the door. Various fan sites, blogs, and message boards began to spring up in the second half of the 90s, joined by official sites from game publishers and developers.

UK Resistance was one such fansite. Launched in 1996 by Gary Cutlack as a source of Sega news, it helped popularise an irreverent blog format that would define a generation of video game fan sites. It would later be acquired by a venture capital firm, but that’s a whole other story. Point is, UK Resistance, and the blogs that followed, showed that anyone could now get online and add their voice to the conversation. 

As Gary explains, “I certainly didn't turn my computer on every day in 1996 to look at the internet, as there wasn't the 24/7 content fire-tornado you see today… It seemed a perfectly fine and very worthy achievement to write 50 words a week and check your emails every Wednesday.”

Clearly, it was a more innocent time. But it also opened up the conversation to anyone who had an internet connection and an opinion. Before social media, this hodge podge of forums, user groups and blogs provided a proto-type of web 2.0 interaction and the back and forth flow of information.

As Keith recalls, “In the mid-90s, the internet definitely made it easier to catch-up on gossip, both in terms of the industry and the gamer fanbase. Usenet gaming groups were really interesting at the time - I remember writing a feature on them for Edge when I first started in early 1996 - they were a good way of finding out what gamers were interested in and what they were discussing. It helped us to prioritise certain games and themes. There were also a lot of private game developer forums and newsgroups that we could sneak on to for industry gossip. This world that had been totally closed to us before now opened up a little.”

Print vs Online. Features vs blogs

If gaming sites had started to build some traction in the late 90s, there was still a clear divide between the monthly print magazines and what was happening online. 

After leaving EMAP and Mean Machines magazine Julian ‘Jaz’ Rignall found himself across the Atlantic where he helped establish the editorial policy for IGN. Writing about his experience for VG247, he noted that divide, saying, “In those early days, working on a website wasn't necessarily seen as a prestigious thing …  [so] the most junior writers at publishing companies [were assigned to the online content].” 

While the juniors were pumping out daily website content, “Magazines had larger, more experienced teams who scrutinised pages and ensured that what was printed was as clear and error-free as possible. Not so online, where an often-punishing daily schedule emphasised speed and quantity over quality….”

Dan experienced both sides, having started his career with Amiga Computing and Atari ST User before transitioning to online publications. “For me personally, my tone didn’t change much – I still wrote like a Your Sinclair fanboy, with lots of terrible puns and jokes – but the structure of the writing was very different. In print, word counts were written in stone, more or less. Writing for print was also much more piecemeal – lots of box-outs, sidebars, that sort of thing. Online, at least to begin with, it was – perhaps weirdly – much more text heavy. Suddenly you could write 1000 words for a review rather than a few hundred. This, of course, enabled much more ‘deep dive’ coverage – but also a lot of waffle and prattle.”

Video, screenshots and aesthetic. Looking online for print inspiration

As the 90s settled into a comfortable groove, the visual design of magazines began to change; influenced by both the adaptation of desktop publishing techniques and the growing excitement around the internet and the possibilities it offered.

Looking back at magazines from the start of the decade, they tended to favour clean and simple designs, with long reams of text and large showcase photos. That approach was born out of necessity. But as Keith notes, “The rise of desktop publishing and the wide scale adoption of Quark Xpress was a major practical factor. You could try things with Quark that you couldn't with legacy magazine layout technology - there was lots of experimentation.”

There was also a lot more content to cover. More systems, more games, more money sloshing around and a more professional PR machine meant there was an abundance of information that needed to be covered. This helped feed the nascent websites that had begun to emerge. But at the same time it made magazines re-appraise their approach to content and layout, 

“The internet had an impact,” continues Keith. “Suddenly, there was a need to convey video game information in more of a dynamic way - magazines had to capture the sense of movement that games websites could deliver simply by embedding a video clip. In a sense, titles such as Mega and GamesMaster used box-outs just like embedded videos - constructing them around sequences of screenshots.” 

“At about that time our screenshot capturing software became more capable and advanced. In the past, we had to capture screenshots one at a time, hitting the space bar, then downloading the images, naming it, etc., before taking another. But in the late 1990s, we had a new system at Future that let you keep smashing the space bar to take multiple screenshots in a row. That made it a heck of a lot easier to show sequential moments - like a special move in Street Fighter.”

Pre millennium tension 

The February 1999 issue of Official Playstation Magazine holds the record for the highest selling video game magazine in history. With a playable demo disc of Metal Gear Solid on the cover, it sold over 453,000 copies.This was a high water mark for the industry, but those same waters were about to get a whole lot choppier.

According to Michael Meyers, a former editor at Gamepro, “The transition from the 90’s to the 2000’s is really the seismic event in the gaming industry’s trajectory. Once the internet started playing a major role, everything changed. It propelled this industry to heights previously unimagined.” 

It also changed the nature of business. “Things [became] much more career-like,” says Michael. “Video games no longer seemed like some flash in the pan hobby.” 

That awkward Y2K era would see the industry try to balance the competing demands of two very different business models in a rapidly changing, increasingly cutthroat consumer market.

As Jaz notes in his article for VG247, “Consumers are often prepared to put up with a ‘lesser’ product if it's more interesting and convenient than another, and in the case of online, the speed at which information was disseminated was often weeks ahead of print. Slowly, but surely as the millennium turned over, we began to see a dramatic migration of readers out of the traditional print publications to online. While the effects wouldn't truly kick in until the late 00's, the turn of the century was the turning point for magazines. Any publication that didn't have a parallel online publication was in deep trouble.”

That parallel approach to print and online was certainly the case at DC-UK magazine, where Keith was editor throughout much of its run. “We were lucky in that we were pretty well financed at the beginning. Our launch editor Caspar Field was determined that we'd have a web presence to reflect the machine's own emphasis on connected play. So yes, we had a website that we managed as a team. It was very rare at the time for Future magazines to be on the web - Edge certainly wasn't! So we were quite groundbreaking.”

The start of your ending

Daniel Wilks was a long-time editor at Australia’s Hyper magazine, and had front row seats to the internet’s cannibalisation of print media. As he recalls, “When I first started in games magazines, the internet was a kind of goofy thing and advertisers were reluctant to pump dollars into it. Each issue was raking in 50 or 60k in advertising and selling tens of thousands of copies. As soon as the internet gained any momentum in gaming circles, you could watch circulation and advertising revenue falling in real time.”

His experience isn’t unique. The huge popularity of the Playstation (and the cover mounted demo discs that came with the official monthly magazine) generated massive newsstand sales in the late 90s and early 2000s. But they also disguised the sweeping changes that were taking place online and driving more people to join gaming forums, start a blog, or just leave a comment on their favourite gaming website.

That interactivity, and the social aspect it encouraged, was the cornerstone of Web 2.0, and the real deathknell of print publications. Because it didn’t just fasttrack news and reviews, it levelled the playing field, and allowed anyone to participate. In the process, it  democratised how information was shared and consumed online.

Where you once needed money, staff and resources to reach a significant audience, anyone with an internet connection and the inclination could launch a basic website or blog and start talking to people around the world. 

It was an early harbinger of how the media’s stranglehold on information was being eroded. And if there was any doubt it was put to rest with the arrival of social media in the early 2000s. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc, blew the doors wide open, and gave rise to the first generation of content creators and / or ‘influencers’. In the process, it subverted the gatekeeping that traditional media had relied on.

Which, for better or worse, made reliance on monthly publications and professional journalists a choice, rather than a necessity. 

And as broadband connections became the new norm, and ad spend was re-allocated online, and social media turned journalism into ‘content’, the writing was on the wall, if not in the actual print publications. 

….

Follow-us on Twitter via @American80s

Forgotten Worlds is back! With two new magazines...

Issues 2 and 3 come packaged together as a limited edition bundle. Pre-orders come with additional gifts and insets.