Family Computer Magazine

~ the obit ~

Family Computer Magazine went on sale on 5 July 1985, dated the issue of 10 August, and it was the first magazine in the world devoted to a single games console. Tokuma Shoten Intermedia published it. Readers called it Famimaga. It started monthly and ended up fortnightly, and the circulation figures from the first months explain the hurry: 180,000 copies in July 1985, then 600,000 by December. Once it went to twice a month in 1986 it was selling over a million per issue.

Its advantage was access. The editorial staff also edited the instruction manuals for Nintendo's own Disk System software, which is an unusual relationship between a publisher and the company it covers, and it showed in what the magazine knew. Most issues at the peak shipped with a strategy-guide supplement bound in. It also looked different from everything around it: where Famitsu and the other Famicom titles opened from the left and ran horizontally, Famimaga opened from the right and set its text vertically, copying Beep, the older general games magazine it had followed into the market.

It was also the template. English Wikipedia's account of Tokuma Shoten says the magazine inspired imitators, and names two: Famicom Tsushin, which became Famitsu, in 1986, and Nintendo Power in 1988. Both of them outlived it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ uruwaza ~

The magazine's signature was the cheat section. Secret techniques were called ultra techniques, shortened to uruwaza, and early issues carried fifty or a hundred of them. Alongside it ran a quiz: one fake trick was planted in every issue for readers to identify. The staff had a practical reason for starting it, which was that readers kept writing in to say a printed trick did not work, and the quiz let them answer that they could not comment without giving away the solution. The first fake was a full password reveal for Flappy, and CoroCoro Comic reprinted it as genuine, which turned out to discourage the other magazines from lifting Famimaga's material.

What I can see clearly from outside it is the economics. A magazine like this existed because a secret could be scarce. Somebody had to find the trick and somebody had to print it, and the only way to read it was to buy the issue. By 1998, when I got online, the answer to any question about any game was a plain text file somebody had uploaded for free. The uruwaza pages were already shrinking before that, partly because puzzle-led role-playing games have fewer exploitable bugs, and partly because publishers complained that printing bug tricks made their software look shoddy.

~ the report card ~

From 1986 the magazine ran a reader-voted rating system called the Game Report Card. Readers scored a released game on six axes by postcard, five points each, thirty in total, and the results were tallied into a ranking. It was built as an answer to Famitsu's Cross Review, and its pitch was that the scores came from readers rather than from a panel of staff reviewers. The all-time highest score it ever recorded was 28.01, for Dragon Quest II in 1987.

Reader voting had the problem reader voting always has. A manufacturer was caught organizing bloc votes to push its own games up the ranking. A related problem hit the high score section, where readers photographed the screen to prove their scores. Somebody calling himself Super Tiger was found to have sent in a pile of shots faked on a Sharp X1. The section closed, helped along by Dragon Quest and the shift to games with no score to compete over.

~ the best-selling book in japan ~

In October 1985 Tokuma published Super Mario Bros: The Complete Strategy Guide, partly assembled from material the magazine had already run, written by Naoto Yamamoto, who received no royalties for it. It sold 630,000 copies that year and was the best-selling book in Japan. By January 1986 it had sold 860,000, and it finished at 1.3 million, which made it the best-selling book of 1986 as well. Nintendo of America later put out an English version as How to win at Super Mario Bros.

~ the nintendo 64 bet ~

Famitsu moved toward new-release news and took the readership with it. The PlayStation then broke the thing Famimaga's whole existence depended on, which was Nintendo owning the console market, and circulation fell hard. The response was to retitle the magazine around the next Nintendo machine: with whole number 251, on sale 12 July 1996, it became Famimaga 64. From October 1996 Tokuma also launched a weekly, Famimaga Weekly, aimed directly at Famitsu's frequency.

The weekly lasted 20 issues and closed in March 1997. Famimaga 64 kept going for another year on a console that was not selling the way the Famicom had, while Tokuma Shoten's own finances deteriorated. Whole number 278 went on sale on 20 March 1998, dated as the combined May and June issue, and the National Diet Library's record of the title ends with four characters meaning suspended thereafter. No farewell was announced. Tokuma's other console magazines followed in 1999.

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