The MegaTech story

As told by Paul Glancey

Paul Glancey is one of the unsung heroes of the 16bit era. While I’ll always know him as the founder and editor of MegaTech, he was a driving force behind several of the best loved magazines from those days. 

Starting his career with Zzap! 64, he worked his way up through CVG, had a cameo role in Mean Machines, and eventually launched MegaTech in 1991… 

That was where our story was supposed to start. But context is everything, and sometimes interviews take on a life of their own. 

So, if you’ve ever wondered about the evolution of CVG magazine, the state of the old Mean Machines office, how the staff nearly came to blows over Quackshot on the Mega Drive, and how all that eventually led to MegaTech you’re in the right place.

Here’s several years worth of publishing industry anecdotes, drama and gossip in fast-forward. As told by the one-and-only Paul Glancey.

Part 1. “I got a call from Julian ‘Jaz’ Rignall”

“I carried at least one video game magazine with me everywhere I went. I would read them over and over. Your Computer, CVG, Crash and Zzap! 64. It was insane. 

“I was 18 when I first applied to join the Zzap! 64 team. I was lucky enough to get an interview and had lunch with the team. I was gutted when I eventually found out I hadn’t got the job. 

“A few months later I got a call from Julian ‘Jaz’ Rignall, asking if I would come down for another interview. I couldn’t believe my luck when I got the job [at Zzap! 64] just before Christmas 1987.

“A year later Julian left [to join CVG as deputy editor]. They were also looking for a staff writer - shoes that I was invited to fill”

Part 2. “We were all running on youthful enthusiasm and crisps”

“Julian effectively relaunched CVG. [The magazine] had previously covered two or three NES or Master System games per month, but as the import scene was taking off we were soon covering more Japanese PC Engine and Mega Drive titles. 

“Many of our readers had long aspired to getting that ‘arcade experience at home’ so they were super-excited about owning near-arcade-perfect console games like R-Type and Afterburner.

“To see whether there was an audience for a console-only magazine, the CVG team put together The Computer and Video Games Complete Guide To Consoles in their spare time. 

“When the guide sold out [Mean Machines was green lit as a stand alone magazine]. Julian moved to focus on that and I took over as associate editor at CVG.

“Considering these were pretty popular mags, the editorial teams were under-staffed and we were all running on youthful enthusiasm and crisps. CVG had a team of three writers at the time - myself and two young lads called Richard Leadbetter and Rob Swan - covering the whole gamut of 8bit and 16bit computer games, as well as console titles.” 

Part 3. “The Mega Drive was THE hot console at the time”

“The initial pitch [for MegaTech] was me sitting in the back of a cab with Julian saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we make a Mega Drive mag’? 

“This was in mid-1991, Virgin Mastertronic was handling all the Sega hardware and software in the UK and making a pretty good job of it. With no official release for the PC Engine, and the Super NES still on the horizon in the UK, the Mega Drive was THE hot console at the time. 

“Mag publishers always have to think of [advertising sales]. How many advertisers they can sell pages to - ‘pages pay wages’. 

“The expectation was that there would be loads of official games [coming for the Mega Drive] that would need lovely full-colour, full-page ads in MegaTech.” 

Part 4. “It was a nightmare. I had no computer to write on and no Art Director.” 

“[Before launching MegaTech] we talked about testing the market with a Complete Guide To Mega Drive. I was supposed to work on my own to get this done over the course of a couple of months.

“It was a nightmare. I had no computer to write on and no art director to work out how the mag would look. With no more than about two weeks before deadline I managed to get an old computer and started writing features and reviews of every Mega Drive game we knew of. 

“Then with about a week to go, I was joined by an art director from a London creative agency. He would join me in the evenings after his day job, to lay out the copy I had written and typeset. 

“We had to wing it. I was only 22 and felt completely overwhelmed by the whole thing. 

“The Complete Guide To Mega Drive shipped and it sold OK, but I think the company was already bought into the idea of going with a Mega Drive mag whatever happened.”

Part 5. “We’d often do 12-hour days and weekends.”

“We were throwing all kinds of ideas around [about what MegaTech] should be. l guess you could say it was more high-tech than Mean Machines, and a bit more expensive-looking too. Well, we had a glossy cover and the mag was perfect-bound rather than stapled together.

“The content of the magazine was a very familiar mix of news, reviews, tips and previews. The visual style ranged widely over the first few issues though. The reviewer-pictures varied from weird geometric faces that looked like they came from a Soviet cartoon about robots, to images we pinched from Japanese Manga. 

“The design eventually settled down and we kind of got an idea of how to make the mag from month-to-month. It was still a hell of a lot of work though and we’d often do 12-hour days and weekends. It was a major breakthrough when I bought a coffee maker and a little stereo boombox to keep us going through the night.”

Part 6. “MegaTech peaked at around 45,000 sales per month.”

“Both CVG and Mean Machines had a much more substantial readership. I think MegaTech peaked at around 45,000 sales per month. But those mags all had a slightly different personality, so I don’t think we ever thought of them as direct competitors. 

“As far as fighting over things like exclusive reviews, I don’t remember many of those. I think there was a slightly heated discussion about who got first dibs on Quackshot, of all things. If a game came in at just the right time for your deadline you might get the exclusive by default.

“Sega-specific publications like Sega Pro, or Mega Drive-focussed titles like MEGA became more of a direct concern because we were all fighting over the same audience and advertisers.”

Part 7. “Sonic definitely sold a lot of copies of the magazine”

“Until the Super NES came along the Mega Drive was the de facto solution to any players’ need for an arcade experience at home; Super Hang On, Altered Beast, Super Monaco GP - all Sega’s own coin-op titles, and then you had masterpieces like Ghouls ’n Ghosts and Strider from Capcom. 

“Virgin Mastertronic’s marketing nous had got the Mega Drive into a really strong position by the end of 1992. I mean who could forget the excitement around Sonic 2sday. And their TV advertising was really memorable - the Cyber-Razor Cut ad. It was like an early versions of what Sony did for PlayStation a few years later.

“When the Super NES arrived, its software started to go beyond that arcade experience. It was clearly a superior machine with quite a few superior games.

“At the time though, I definitely championed Sonic over Mario. Sonic definitely sold the Mega Drive and a lot of copies of the magazine as well.”

Part 8. “I was initially excited about the Mega-CD.”

“I was initially excited about the Mega-CD because the whole multimedia/CD-ROM thing was kicking off across the industry, and there was that promise of bigger and better games to come. But it never really came off. 

“The Mega CD was so expensive, and I think the only games that came anywhere close to using the hardware in an exciting way were a couple of Core Design’s games, like Thunderhawk.

“Looking back, the Mega-CD made it look like Sega had given up on the Mega Drive prematurely. Like they thought it had nothing left to offer in its standalone form. A bit silly really, in retrospect. 

“You could expunge the Mega-CD, and all of the other add-ons from the timeline - so Sega just goes from Mega Drive to Saturn - and it would probably have made very little difference to the players.”

The aftermath

Paul left MegaTech around 1993. As he explained to the now defunct Mean Machines Archives. “I had to jack it in after about 20-odd issues. It was looking pretty good by the time I left, but, once again, I was totally knackered by the stress and the hours, month after month.”

Soon after his departure, MegaTech was purchased by Maverick Magazines, which published a number of rival Sega and Mega Drive focused titles. MegaTech would be shut down within the year, ending its run in 1994. 

Paul would return to CVG in the mid 90s and work there for a number of years before the (inevitable?) switch to game production, and a role with Eidos Interactive. He continues to work in the industry.

As for the ill-fated Mega CD and Sega’s fall from grace in the mid 90s, that’s a whole other article. It’s also the next item on the editorial schedule here.

….

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.