Giochi per il mio computer

» see giochiperilmiocomputer.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In May 1997 an Italian magazine called Zeta split in two, and the PC games half walked out as its own title. The staff came from Studio Vit, which kept Zeta going, and Andrea Minini Saldini, who had edited Zeta from its first issue, took the same chair at the new one. The name was Giochi per il mio computer, Games for My Computer, and everybody called it GMC.

The format held for fifteen years with almost no changes. Eight fixed parts to every issue: an editorial, the readers' letters, previews, reviews, a hardware section with a troubleshooting column, a segment called next level for mods and free games, a printed guide to the game attached to that month's issue, and closing credits. Every two months there was a genre special for role-playing games or shooters. Matteo Bittanti wrote a column on the psychology of games and on their right and wrong, filed under L'Angolo di MBF.

Ownership moved around it while the magazine stayed the same. Il Mio Castello Editore published it at the start, and in autumn 2000 the whole stable went to Future Media Italy, the Italian arm of Future Publishing. From issue 127, dated March 2007, it belonged to Sprea Editori. Issue 100 came out in February 2005 and the English Wikipedia entry credits it with print runs above a hundred thousand, a figure nobody has audited in public.

Issue 196 was dated August and September 2012 and went on sale on Friday 27 July. The announcement on the magazine's website, posted on 12 July by Massimiliano Rovati, is a normal issue preview. There was an E3 report out of Los Angeles with Assassin's Creed III on the cover, and reviews of Spec Ops: The Line and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier inside. The site kept running news items into October, about Skyrim downloadable content and the battery life of the Wii U controller, with no mention anywhere that the magazine behind it had stopped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the game on the cover ~

Each month came in two versions at two prices. The cheap one had its own cover and its own giveaway, and the Top Games edition carried a complete retail PC game. The last one was Drakensang: The River of Time in its Gold edition, expansion included. The month before that it was Metro 2033, and in June the attachment had been Darksiders across two DVD-ROMs. The magazine then printed a walkthrough for whatever it had just handed you, which is why the guide was one of the eight fixed sections rather than an occasional extra.

That business ran all over Europe and never once ran in Turkish. My own 1997 to 2012 covers the same years, modem first and TTNet broadband later, and a complete retail game bundled with a monthly would have been the best deal on offer to me in any of them. It was on sale in Italy, at an edicola, in Italian. Turkish newsstands had their own magazines and this was not one of them.

~ three publishers ~

Future Media Italy folding its titles into Sprea in 2007 is the part that reads differently now. Sprea Editori is still trading and still owns the name. The title did not die with its publisher, which is the usual way for magazines to go. It died while the publisher carried on.

The Italian Wikipedia entry claims Sprea put the name back on a Collector's Edition special in October 2026, built around the hundred best games of all time. I went looking for it in shops and catalogs and found nothing, so I am recording the claim rather than the product.

giochiperilmiocomputer.it went to a 470-byte stub by January 2014 and stayed one for years. Something else occupied the domain across 2022 and 2023 and served a real site of 8 KB or so. The domain is dark now, and the only complete copies of the magazine are scans that readers made of their own issues.

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