Dengeki Dreamcast

~ the obituary ~

MediaWorks ran a magazine about whichever Sega console was currently failing, and changed the name on the cover each time Sega replaced the machine. It began in August 1996 as Dengeki Sega EX, monthly. In July 1997 it became Dengeki Sega Saturn and went fortnightly to match the pace of its PlayStation stablemate. In December 1998 it became Dengeki Dreamcast, and that is the name it died under, 45 issues later.

The National Diet Library catalogs all three as one continuing serial, with formal continuation links running forward from EX to Saturn to Dreamcast, so this is a single magazine with three mastheads rather than three magazines. Eighty-eight issues in total. The printed issue numbers restarted at 1 with each rename, but the internal cumulative count did not: the Saturn title picked up at 13 exactly where EX had stopped at 12.

None of it was ever sold outside Japan, and the console it ended on was the one Sega never really got into Turkish shops either. What reached me of this period arrived years afterward, in English, long after everything in it had been settled.

~ the case file ~

~ three names, three dying machines ~

The handover timing is almost too neat. The last issue of Dengeki Sega Saturn is dated 27 November 1998, which is the day the Dreamcast went on sale in Japan, and the first issue of Dengeki Dreamcast is dated 11 December 1998, exactly fourteen days later. The magazine switched consoles without missing a single slot in its own fortnightly schedule. English Wikipedia stretches this lineage back to a 1993 title called Dengeki Mega Drive and dates the whole run from January 1993, which the Japanese sources do not support: that one ran six bimonthly issues, two of them physically bound inside Dengeki PC Engine, and the library record for it has no successor link at all. There is a two and a half year gap in the middle. That makes it an ancestor rather than an earlier chapter, with its own ending in December 1993.

~ what it would not print ~

By 2000 the Dreamcast's remaining commercial output in Japan leaned heavily on galge, the dating and romance games, many of them ports up from PC by NEC Interchannel. That was the material still moving units, and Dengeki Dreamcast largely declined to cover it, because MediaWorks also published Dengeki G's Magazine and did not want its two titles competing for the same audience.

So a magazine with a failing platform also refused the one part of that platform that was not failing, in order to protect a stablemate. Circulation got worse. Japanese Wikipedia describes the result as 自縄自縛, which translates roughly as binding yourself with your own rope, and notes that this was the third Dreamcast magazine in Japan to close. The signs are visible in the library holdings without any commentary at all: issues 40 and 44 are both double numbers covering two dates, a fortnightly quietly skipping cycles while keeping the schedule on the masthead.

~ the Christmas it missed ~

Issue 45 went out on 22 December 2000, deep into the year-end selling season.

Sega was watching that same selling season. The story leaked to the wires on 23 January 2001 and the Nikkei put it on the front page the next day. Sega partly confirmed it on the 25th, and on 31 January it held a press conference about restructuring. The decision to stop making hardware was taken on the results of the Christmas this magazine had just finished covering.

So it never printed the story. A magazine whose whole identity was renaming itself after the current Sega console shut down five weeks before Sega cancelled the last one, and its final issue reads like any other fortnight.

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