Super Play magazine
…and the convergence of video games, anime and imports.
The 16-bit console wars were as dumb as they were vicious. Mario and Sonic decapitating each other in magazines. Blast Processing. Genesis does what Nintendon’t..
The tribalism was real, and once you chose a side you stuck with it. Because God knows your parents weren’t going to buy you a second console.
Me? I happened to have a Mega Drive. So that was that. Sonic, EA Sports titles, Sega arcade conversion and a whole bunch of affiliated magazines to choose from - Mean Machines Sega, Sega Pro, Sega Power and MegaTech.
And yet, despite all that. I still found myself buying Super Play on a semi-regular basis…
Launched in 1992, Super Play was Future Publishing’s attempt to capture the burgeoning UK Super Nintendo market. But it was much more than that. With a focus on anime, imports and JRPGs, it provided an early template for the emerging video game market that would define much of the 90s. In the process, it managed to transcend the schoolyard rivalries and taunts that defined the era.
Some 30 years after the fact, I tracked down Wil Overton, the man responsible for those iconic Super Play covers, and asked him about the magazine’s legacy, and why it’s so fondly remembered.
Introducing Wil Overton
Wil Overton has had a long and illustrious career. He first came to prominence for his Super Play magazine covers (and their anime inspired take on Nintendo characters), would go on to work for a string of Future Publishing titles, and eventually made the jump to game dev, with a stint at Rare. Along the way he’d also pick up a pad and pen and become a respected writer.
But before any of that happened he was an anime fan, inspired by the first wave of films that began to make their way west in the 80s.
Wil cites Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, as an early influence, but says it wasn’t until he found a Japanese bookshop carrying anime magazines like Animage and Newtype that he fell down the rabbit hole, and started to hone his illustration skills.
As Wil recalls, “Trying to draw in that style really didn’t come along until I found fellow anime fans Helen McCarthy and Steve Kyte, and the idea came up of trying to turn their fanzine - Anime UK - into a proper newsstand magazine. At that time I was working as a graphic designer with no real intentions of ever being an illustrator. I loved drawing but never really thought I had the chops to do it for a living.”
Wil may have been a reluctant illustrator, but technical issues at Anime UK forced his hand. “We struggled with decent reproduction of images for the mag - this was around 1990, and computer desktop publishing was still very much in its infancy. So I started to redraw existing stuff into easily reproducible black and white linework along with a few original pieces. I would also do the front cover while Steve Kyte, who was - and still is - a far better and more experienced artist than me, would do the back. Suddenly, I was pretending to be an anime-style illustrator.”
Super Play
Anime UK may have been a niche title, but it found its way into the right hands and helped propel Wil’s carer.
“Super Play launch editor Matt Bielby wanted the mag to have a Japanese focus,” explains Wil. “[That was] a good idea as it allowed the magazine to cover far more stuff than just the way-behind-schedule UK releases. They’d done mock-ups of covers using existing illustrations from art books and magazines they’d found, but when Matt discovered some issues of Anime UK he got in touch and asked if I’d be up for doing an original cover for the first issue.”
“By then I’d had a Japanese Super Famicom for a while,” continues Wil, “and was a big import game fan so I jumped at the chance. The first cover seemed to go down well and they asked me back for #2 and it just carried on from there”
Wil would eventually illustrate every one of Super Play’s 47* magazine covers and go on to write for the magazine as well. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Super Play’s inception, and its unique intersection of video game and Otaku culture wasn’t just a forward thinking editorial policy, it was also a response to backroom corporate deals.
Official licences
At this point in time it’s worth noting the difference between official and unofficial magazines.
Back in the day Sega and Nintendo offered publishers ‘licences’ to produce affiliated magazines. These titles had exclusive access to upcoming games, news, and resources, but they also had to tow the company line. Which meant they tended to be little friendlier towards the games being reviewed and the affiliated consoles.
EMAP, a rival publisher, picked up the Nintendo licence in 1992 and readied the launch of their new publication, Nintendo Magazine System.
Super Play didn’t have that official connection. Which was fine with launch editor Matt Bielby, as it provided him with an opportunity to imagine a different sort of video game magazine. One that looked beyond official releases schedules, and turned its attention to where the real action was - Japan.
As he explained to Time Extension, "We were very much influenced by Japanese magazines – not just games mags, but women's mags, car mags and anything else we could get our hands on too – as well as Japanese comics, anime, the whole caboodle.”
"The Super Play I had in mind [combined] the dry English wit of the mags I'd worked on before with a loud, dizzying enthusiasm for anything Japanese. This was before the internet had arrived in any useful form, remember, and still a time when the only anime most folk had ever heard of was Akira. With nobody else really pushing the Japanese angle at all, we suddenly found we had this whole fascinating, largely-unknown culture to explore more or less by ourselves."
Into the 90s
Super Play launched in November 1992, and became a firm favourite amongst the grey-import crowd. While its sales never matched the more mainstream Nintendo publications of the era (it averaged about 50,000 copies a month for its first two years), it was doing respectable numbers and rapidly becoming a cult favourite.
In the process, it offered readers some truly niche content. As Matt noted in that same Time Extension article, “[The goal] was to fill the magazine, and if there were only ten games out one month, then nobody was going to moan at a one-page review of anything, even if it was some utterly baffling strategy game from Sunsoft or Enix, heaving with near-untranslatable Japanese text. It was all part of the magazine's mad mix, part of what made us different – and part of the appeal of the SNES too."
And then there was the anime coverage. Which gave Wil an opportunity to come into his own as a writer, and combine his two passions. “I think the mists of time have somewhat inflated how much writing I did for Super Play,” says Wil. “I’ve never thought of myself as a writer, but early on in Super Play’s run I was asked if I could come up with an article that explored the links between anime and games. Eventually people got it in their minds that I could write stuff as well, and I’d get asked to do the odd thing here and there.”
Remember me
All magazines have a shelf life, and by the time the final issue of Super Play rolled out the door in September 1996 both the console industry and the publishing sector were in a state of flux.
16-bit consoles had been supplemented by the Playstation, Saturn and N64 at this point, early blogs and websites were starting to pop-up, and anime was finally getting some recognition in the west.
“47 issues [and four years] isn’t that big a run in the grand scheme of things, and it didn’t seem that long,” says Wil, “but the Super Nintendo was beginning to wane by 1996. Despite me championing the magazine’s cause, the management at Future felt that it was better to shut Super Play down rather than trying to transition it into an N64 title.”
“The industry might have been growing and changing,” he continues, “but I don’t think Super Play changed that much during its run. While readers may have been more familiar with the delights of Japanese pop culture by 1996 it was still far from being a mainstream thing.”
Holding back the years
Some 25 years later, that dedication to the underground has secured Super Play’s legacy. It may not have sold as well as its rival publications, but it cultivated a strong fan following and took its readers on a journey beyond the high street to weird and wonderful places.
As Wil summarises, “Not everyone would be a fan of the Japanese angle, but if it clicked for you I’d like to think you would have stuck with it. I’ve chatted to many folks over the years who cite Super Play as their entry point into that world, whether it’s exposure to games they wouldn’t have read about elsewhere, the animation, culture, or even just a desire to draw with that aesthetic. It’s a lovely feeling, knowing that I might have had the tiniest part in putting something in front of someone that they grew to love. I had the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time.”
*Super Play #48 came bundled with Retro Gamer #172 in 2017.
Special thanks to Paul Darbyshire for the additional magazine images used in this feature.
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