Hyper

~ the last words ~

Phil Keir owned Next Media and published the Australian Rolling Stone, and one night in 1993 he rang Stuart Clarke at home. Clarke had just walked out of MegaZone, which had been taken over in September of that year and pointed at Sega hardware only. Keir asked him to start a games magazine that covered everything. Clarke, by his own account in the hundredth issue, thought about it for a few nanoseconds and said okay. The first issue was built in two months and dated December 1993.

What came out was a multiformat monthly with a wider beat than its competitors wanted. Consoles and handhelds were the spine, but Hyper also ran arcade machines and old games, then anime and DVDs as those arrived in Australia, and from its second issue it was already writing about Australian game classification, the local story that never went away: a country with no adult rating for games, refusing them classification one at a time. Readers in New Zealand got it too.

It lasted longer than everything it launched against. Gamestar and Australian GamePro are gone, and so is MegaZone, the magazine Clarke had left to start this one. Hyper reached issue 200 on 28 April 2010 and was still monthly, which by then was an achievement in itself.

~ the record ~

~ sold up the chain ~

Late in 2014 nextmedia announced that from 2015 the magazine would come out four times a year rather than twelve. Going quarterly is usually the last clearly dated decision in a print magazine's life. In 2018 nextmedia sold its computing titles to Future, the British publisher that by then owned most of the English-language games press. Two issues came out that year, number 269 on 7 February and number 270 on 8 August.

None of this ever reached a shelf I stood in front of. An Australian monthly printed in Sydney was sold in Australia and New Zealand, and the English-language games press that made it to Turkey in the nineties was late and mostly British. By the time I could read any of it without an import, the reading had moved to the web and the question of which country a magazine was printed in had stopped mattering to anyone except the people printing it.

~ the issue with no sequel ~

Issue 271 was published by Future on 11 August 2019, edited by David Hollingworth. It did not say goodbye. It was a normal issue of a quarterly magazine, and then the next one was not commissioned, and then the subscriptions came off sale, physical and digital together.

Two former editors, Daniel Wilks and David Hollingworth, wrote the obituary themselves in a two-part article in 2021, which is how most of what is known about the decline got on the record at all. Nobody at Future published a statement. A 25 year run ended as an open question about whether a spring issue was coming, which seems to have caught its own staff off guard.

The scans are on the Internet Archive and on Retro CDN, the covers running from that December 1993 first issue forward. Australia's other long-running games magazine, PC PowerPlay, outlived it by six years and at least got a closing letter to its subscribers. Hyper got none of that.

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