GamePlay

» see gameplay.hr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The first issue reached Zagreb kiosks on 28 November 2002 at 18 kuna, and editor in chief Dario Zrno put the purpose of the thing in terms that have not aged well. The goal was to keep building gaming culture in Croatia and to get players ready for the online console boom, which he expected inside half a year, when the machines would connect to the internet and a Croatian could finally play a few games against Brazil. All of that did eventually happen. It took considerably longer than half a year, and when it arrived it was among the forces that made a print monthly unnecessary.

That gap is familiar to me. Online console play was not available where I was in 2002 either: my multiplayer ran on Counter-Strike over a cafe LAN in Turkey, billed by the hour, because home broadband was still some years off, and a console with a network cable belonged to magazine articles rather than to anyone I knew. Both countries were waiting for the same infrastructure, and the magazines in both countries were writing about a future their readers could not reach yet.

GamePlay was built out of a closure. The journalists who had made PSX, a magazine strictly about Sony's console, lost that title and immediately started a replacement that covered everything Sony's machine had excluded, from Xbox and GameCube out to mobile games, with PC games added from issue 37 onward. When the magazine Hacker shut down in 2005 some of its staff joined too, which is how the PC coverage got serious. NCL Media Grupa published it, roughly a hundred pages an issue, distributed in Croatia and in three markets across the border.

That distribution list is worth sitting with. A single Croatian games magazine was being sold, in the 2000s, across four countries that had recently fought a war against each other. Teenagers in Belgrade and Zagreb were reading the same reviews, written in a language the politics insisted was several different languages.

~ the dossier ~

~ the argument about paper ~

Near the end of 2010 NCL hit financial trouble. The instruction that came down to the editorial team was to cut the cost of making the magazine: lower-quality paper and fewer pages. The team declined those terms. Issue 99 went out in February 2011 and there was no issue 100.

NCL talked about relaunching GamePlay as a new magazine with a new site. That never happened, so the brand simply stopped one issue short of a round number, which is the detail Croatian readers still bring up about it.

~ next level ~

In 2012 some of the same people started another monthly, Next Level, built along the same lines as GamePlay, which makes it the second magazine this group founded after losing one. The lineage runs PSX to GamePlay to Next Level, three titles and one editorial team, each handover triggered by a publisher rather than by readers going away.

~ what the kuna price tells you ~

Eighteen kuna at launch, twenty later. In 2002 that was roughly two and a half euros for a hundred pages, in a market of four million people, before you count the neighbors. No version of that business survived the arrival of broadband, and yet broadband is not what killed GamePlay. It was a publisher under cash pressure asking for a cheaper product, and an editorial team that had already seen what happens to a magazine after it starts cutting.

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