LOGiN

~ the obituary ~

Famitsu review scores showed up in Turkish forum arguments all through the 2000s, quoted by people who had never held a copy of it, me included. What almost nobody outside Japan knew is that Famitsu began as a column inside another magazine, and that the other magazine is the one that died.

LOGiN started in May 1982 as a quarterly supplement to Monthly ASCII, under the name ASCII Bessatsu Login. It went monthly with the April 1983 issue, on sale the eighth of every month, and spent the next quarter century as one of the main places Japanese home computer owners found out what was worth buying.

ASCII published it until 1 April 2000, when the company spun its entertainment side out as Enterbrain and the magazine went with it. The final issue was dated July 2008 and reached shops on 24 May. Enterbrain called it a 休刊, a suspension, which is the standard Japanese way of closing a magazine without saying the word closed. It never came back.

~ the case file ~

~ the column that walked out ~

From the March 1985 issue to December 1986, LOGiN carried a column called Famicom Tsūshin about Nintendo's console. It did well enough that ASCII decided the subject deserved its own magazine, and the first issue of Famicom Tsūshin appeared on 6 June 1986 with Fumitaka Kojima as editor-in-chief.

That magazine shortened its name to Famitsu, turned into the title whose review scores Japanese publishers watched, and is still coming out. The column outlived the pages it was born in by a wide margin, which happens more often than magazine people like to admit.

~ twice a month ~

On 15 July 1988 LOGiN became a semi-monthly, the first Japanese personal computer magazine to try it, coming out on the first and third Friday of each month. It dropped the 月刊 from its title because the word means monthly and no longer applied. That run lasted until the 17 October 1997 issue, after which it went back to a monthly schedule with the January 1998 number, on sale on the 24th.

It threw off siblings the whole way: LOGOUT for tabletop role-playing games from 1992 to 1995, E-LOGIN for adult PC games from 1995 to 2003. TECH LOGiN began as a special edition and became its own magazine, and the sister title B's-LOG is still publishing today.

~ the web magazine ~

Impress reported the plan on 15 April 2008, five weeks before the last issue shipped. Enterbrain said that given recent changes in what readers wanted and the future prospects of the format, the monthly would end and LOGiN would be reborn as a web magazine. A preview went up the day the final issue hit shops and the site opened properly on 24 June 2008.

The newest items on it are dated 31 March 2009. The compilation book promised in the last issue, provisionally titled Kamilog, never came out either. Twenty-six years of a magazine, followed by ten months of a website.

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