Joystick

~ the obit ~

On a 33.6k modem a sixty megabyte demo was not a download, it was a decision. You started it before going to bed and hoped nobody in the house picked up the phone. That arithmetic is the whole reason a magazine with a disc glued to the cover was not really a magazine in the years I was learning what a PC could do. It was a delivery mechanism. The articles came free with the plastic.

Joystick was the French version of that object and one of the loudest anywhere. Marc Andersen put the first issue out on 9 November 1988 as Joystick Hebdo, thirty two pages a week of cheat codes and reviews, and it went monthly in January 1990 and stayed monthly for twenty two more years.

I do not read French and never bought a copy. The title was locked behind a language I do not have, and that is the honest distance here. What was not locked was the format. A demo disc reached a PC in Ankara exactly the way it reached one in Lyon, at the speed of somebody walking home from a shop, which in 1998 was considerably faster than my modem.

It ran to issue 260, published on 23 November 2012, two weeks after its own publisher went into liquidation. Twenty four years, from a weekly cheat-code pamphlet in the eight-bit era to a DVD-carrying monthly that had outlived the reason for the DVD.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

The house style was serious about games and unserious about everything else, long technical reviews delivered in a register that would get somebody fired at a corporate publisher. French readers who grew up on it still describe the writing rather than the scores, which is close to the rarest thing you can say about a review magazine.

The physical package escalated the way they all did. Floppy disks at first, then a CD-ROM, then several CD-ROMs at once, and finally DVDs carrying complete games instead of demos. That last stage ran until April 2012, seven months before the end, by which point the disc had become a courtesy rather than a reason to buy.

~ the cracks ~

The ownership history reads like a chart of an industry losing confidence in print. Sipress ran it until Hachette bought it in June 1993. Andersen left in November 1995. The British publisher Future took it in May 2003, passed it to Yellow Media in 2009, and it landed at a company called M.E.R.7 at the end of 2011.

Circulation went the same direction. Sixty two thousand copies at launch, under twelve thousand in the final year. Broadband had taken the disc's job and the web had taken the reviews, and a monthly print schedule turned out to be a strange way to discuss a patch that shipped last Tuesday.

~ the funny part ~

M.E.R.7 went into liquidation on 8 November 2012 and issue 260 came out on the 23rd, so the magazine outlived its own publisher by two weeks. In February 2013 the Paris commercial court sold the Joystick name to Anuman Interactive, which turned it into a label called Joystick Replay.

Joystick Replay reissued old PC games, Darkstone and Moto Racer among them, repackaged for machines that could no longer run them without help. A magazine that had spent twenty four years telling readers what was new spent its afterlife selling them what was old.

~ what it became ~

The French gaming press did not really die, it dispersed. The writers went to websites and later to video, and the tone survived considerably better than the format. You can still hear Joystick's register in French games coverage, which is not a thing any balance sheet ever recorded.

The disc is the part with no successor. For fifteen years or so, a magazine was the fastest connection most households had, and the object you carried home from the newsstand outperformed the wire coming into the wall. Then the wire got quick and the object had nothing left to carry.

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