Digitiser

~ the goodbye ~

Digitiser launched on 1 january 1993 on page 370 of Teletext on ITV, and later moved with the franchise to Channel 4, where it lived on page 470. It called itself the world's only daily games magazine and the claim held up, because nothing printed could turn around news every day and nothing on the web in 1993 had an audience. Paul Rose and Tim Moore wrote it as Mr Biffo and Mr Hairs. Their real names were never used on screen across the entire ten year run.

The medium was punishing in a way that is hard to convey now. A teletext page was a fixed grid of characters and blocky color cells, no photographs, no scrolling, no way back to what you just read. You keyed a number into the remote and waited for the carousel to bring your page round again. Everything Digitiser published had to survive that, news and jokes alike, fitted to a page that arrived when it arrived and left again on its own schedule.

What grew inside that box was a comedy publication that happened to cover video games. The cast included a man with a very long chin keeping a diary of every job he was fired from, an ant and elephant hybrid billed as somebody's daddy, and a pig who opened the news by insulting the reader. There was a house dialect, with the definite article dropped in strange places and suffixes attached to words that did not want them. Readership figures put it around 1.5 million against a printed games press averaging something closer to 130,000 a month.

I never pressed a three digit number into a British television remote, and by the time I cared about games writing I was reading it on a web page over a dial-up line, which is a completely different act. The part that stays with me is the engineering of it. This was a daily magazine transmitted in the gaps of a broadcast signal, a few hundred bytes to a page, with a delivery latency measured in whole seconds and no possibility of correction once a page was out. People wrote genuinely funny things inside that, every weekday, for a decade.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Teletext was free and it was already switched on. That is most of the explanation for the audience. Anyone with a television could reach Digitiser without a subscription or a trip to a shop, which put a games magazine in front of a lot of people who would never have bought one, including a great many who were not really interested in games and read it for the jokes.

It also had no letters page in the ordinary sense and no comments, so the relationship with readers was built out of running gags, in-references and material sent in by post that got absorbed into the strip. The result was a readership that behaved much more like a community than a circulation figure, on a platform with no mechanism for community at all.

~ the funny part ~

The end was not a decline in interest. In 2002 a management change decided Digitiser should be a sober games service, cut the comedy out of it and reduced it to weekends. The audience collapsed from around 1.5 million to about 400,000. Enough readers complained that Rose, who had already given his notice in december 2002, was asked to write it in the old style for one final four month run.

So the last stretch of Digitiser was a publication brought back to life specifically to be itself, by the people who had just finished proving what happened when it was not. It celebrated ten years on air with a tribute from the novelist Alex Garland, and went out on 9 march 2003 with a closing joke that was exactly as juvenile as the previous decade had earned.

~ what it became ~

The page number carried on under the name Game Central, staffed by different writers with a straighter tone and no connection to what had been there before. That column outlived the medium it was born on and still runs today as a games section, which is a strange sort of inheritance: the address survived and the thing that made the address worth visiting did not.

Rose came back to it eleven years later. Digitiser2000 launched as a website in 2014, a crowdfunded comedy series called Mr Biffo's Found Footage followed in 2017, and Digitiser The Show arrived on YouTube in 2018. It is one of the few things in this graveyard whose writers got to restart it on their own terms, which mostly demonstrates that the audience was never attached to the delivery mechanism.

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