Gemaga

~ the obituary ~

A magazine that changes its name six times in twenty eight years is a magazine that keeps outliving the hardware it was built to cover. Gemaga started in 1984 as Beep and finished in 2012 as the oldest video game magazine in Japan, and every rename in between marks a console dying underneath it.

None of it reached me. It was Japanese-language, sold on Japanese newsstands, and the closest thing i had was a Turkish computer magazine and then, from the early 2000s, the hardware sections of donanimhaber and frmtr. Forums did the job print used to do, clumsily at first and then completely. The same replacement was happening in Japan on a slower clock.

The beginning was Softbank Publishing, 1984, a monthly called Beep covering games on home computers and arcade machines, with a layout borrowed from the men's fashion magazine Popeye. That version was discontinued on 8 march 1989. The editor, Yoji Kawaguchi, pitched his publisher two replacements: one for the Sega Mega Drive and one for the Super Famicom that was coming. Softbank preferred the Nintendo side because Nintendo was bigger in Japan, but the new console had slipped past its 1989 date, so they started with the Sega one and called it Beep! Mega Drive. Kawaguchi kept the old name up front to make the continuity obvious.

After that the pattern runs almost mechanically. Mega Drive coverage was dropped in 1995 for the Saturn and the magazine became Sega Saturn Magazine, weekly now, with Beep finally removed from the title because Kawaguchi thought it had done its work. In 1998 it became Dreamcast Magazine. Sega discontinued the Dreamcast on 31 march 2001, so it renamed itself Dorimaga, which is what readers had been calling it anyway, and went multiplatform. The last change came in 2006: Gemaga, short for Games Magazine, a name with nothing specific left in it.

~ the case file ~

~ the name changes ~

Tying a magazine to one company's hardware gives it exactly the lifespan of that hardware. Gemaga survived four of those deaths by cutting the tie and keeping the staff, which is a rarer trick than it sounds, because the readers were tied to the hardware too and did not all follow it across.

By the final rename there was nothing particular left to be about. Games Magazine is what you call a games magazine once the thing that made it yours has been removed, and it ran six more years in that condition.

~ the long tail ~

The end leaked before it was announced. Chiaki Kyan, an idol model who wrote for the magazine, said on her blog on 16 january 2012 that it was closing, at a point when SoftBank Creative had made no public statement at all. Those january reports said it would finish in march, and Wikipedia records the May 2012 issue as the last, which is the same fact once you allow for a Japanese cover date running ahead of the sale date.

Small things went down with it. A dance unit called me to me, formed out of the magazine, folded in april 2012 because the magazine it belonged to had stopped existing. That is the part of a print closure nobody counts. Not the pages, but the little economy of people who had a reason to be in a room together every month.

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