Dengeki Oh

~ the obituary ~

Dengeki Oh went on sale on 8 January 1993 as the February issue, a monthly about Japanese PC games published by a company founded the year before. It came in a modified A4 format the publisher advertised as the biggest in games print, and the launch issue shipped with a hundred-page manga booklet called Dengeki Tama bound in as a free extra. The sales line translates to something like "read it and you will tingle", which is a reasonable summary of the register it was working in.

Japanese PC gaming in the 1990s barely overlapped with anything I could reach. The hardware was PC-98 and the genres ran to visual novels and strategy titles that were never localized. Turkey in 1993 had neither the machines nor the distribution, and a great many of the games this magazine reviewed were never sold in English anywhere at all.

What it did export, indirectly, was the Dengeki brand. The label spread into manga and light novels, then into a whole shelf of sister magazines about individual consoles, and it is still in use today under ASCII Media Works. The flagship that established the name is the part of it that is gone.

~ the case file ~

~ the kadokawa walkout ~

In 1992 Kadokawa Shoten had an internal fight serious enough that a group of editors left and founded MediaWorks. The editors who went had been running Comptiq, Kadokawa's PC game magazine, and when they moved almost the entire contributor roster moved with them at the same time, including the novelist Ryo Mizuno and the director Mamoru Oshii alongside the illustrators who had been filling Comptiq's pages for years.

Dengeki Oh was what that staff published once it had a new employer, which is why a brand-new magazine arrived with a famous masthead already attached. It carried over Comptiq's reader-participation games too, the serials that ran on submissions sent in by the readership, and one of those produced Chris Cross. A magazine founded out of a resignation does not usually get to keep the audience; this one did, because the audience had been reading the writers rather than the title.

~ the market underneath it ~

In 2001 its adult-games coverage was spun out into a separate magazine, Dengeki Hime. That removed the most reliably commercial part of the publication from the publication, at the same moment that the Japanese market for non-adult PC games was contracting badly. The response was to stop being a buyer's guide and start being a trade paper, running developer columns and industry reporting, with Yoshiki Okamoto writing for readers who wanted to know how games got made rather than which ones to buy.

~ one more issue ~

The February 2003 issue came out retitled DENGEKI GAMES, with the first number under the new masthead called the "birth issue". That lasted a year. The March 2004 issue was the last, and part of its job as a general-interest title passed to a stablemate, Dengeki Maoh.

Then on 1 December 2006 the old title came back for a single issue, dated the day before the Wii went on sale in Japan and three weeks after the PlayStation 3 did. One issue, under a masthead retired thirty-three months earlier, for two consoles outside the PC market it was founded to cover. The Dengeki Games name was revived separately in September 2009 and closed again at volume 21 in 2011.

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