Games-X

~ the goodbye ~

I heard about Games-X for the first time roughly thirty years after it folded, which is about the right distance. It ran weekly on British newsstands through 1991 and into 1992, a product built for readers who could walk into a specific kind of shop on a specific day of the week. Nothing about that was exportable, and almost nobody outside the British newsagent system ever saw a copy.

Games-X launched on 3 May 1991 as a multiformat weekly, covering consoles and home computers in the same pages, published by Europress out of an idea belonging to Hugh Gollner. The pitch was simple arithmetic. A monthly magazine writes about a game six weeks after the people who care already know, while a weekly can print news that is still news. Everything else about the format fought that advantage.

It ran to 48 issues. The last one went out in April 1992, and the staff who had not already left mostly followed Gollner into his next venture.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the bet ~

Greg Ingham at Future Publishing bet Gollner a hundred pounds that the weekly would not survive past Christmas. Games-X cleared Christmas 1991 and kept going for another four months, so Gollner won. He never cashed the check, and he has been honest since about what the win cost him: a big mistake, in his own words, that lost a fortune. His own figure is that the operation went about fifty thousand pounds deeper than it should have.

~ what a weekly costs ~

A weekly books a fixed slot at the printer and that slot does not move. Miss it and you have no magazine that week, so the production calendar runs the editorial department rather than the other way around. Leslie Bunder, who wrote features there, gave the plainest account of the ending later: circulation did not hit what had been promised to advertisers, and the money coming in did not cover what going out every seven days cost.

There was an identity problem underneath the economics. John Davison, a staff writer at the time, reckoned the magazine leaned too hard on being Smash Hits for games, bright and fast, aimed slightly younger than the people actually buying games in 1991. Bunder's counterfactual was the opposite direction, a lifestyle magazine for gamers, which is roughly what Britain built a decade later once there were advertisers willing to pay for it.

~ who came out of it ~

For a failed weekly it held a remarkable amount of talent on its payroll. Gary Whitta passed through early and went on to edit the American edition of PC Gamer, while Davison moved to GB Action and then spent decades running games magazines on both sides of the Atlantic.

Gollner left to start Maverick and took most of the staff with him. Britain did not get another weekly games magazine, and the next serious attempt at news that fast arrived on the web.

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