Mega Drive Advanced Gaming

~ the goodbye ~

The last issue of Mega Drive Advanced Gaming went on sale in April 1995, three years before I first dialed up. British newsagent magazines did not reach Turkish shops, and the Mega Drive that did reach Turkey arrived without the press that surrounded it in Britain. What I know about this magazine I know from scans.

Maverick Magazines Ltd launched it from 16-17 Hollybush Row in Oxford in August 1992, with issue 1 cover dated September. It was the company's first title, which is a nervous way to start a publishing house, with one magazine aimed at one console and no license to print it. The cover logo read Sega Mega Drive Advanced Gaming and the staff called it MAG in their own pages. Wikipedia says the Audit Bureau of Circulations recognized it early on as the UK's best-selling Mega Drive magazine, without citing where that comes from. It covered the Mega-CD and later the 32X as those arrived, which is to say it covered Sega's increasingly expensive attempts to keep the machine current.

It ran to 32 issues and stopped in April 1995, monthly the whole way, with no skipped months and no final-issue drama anybody recorded. A twelve-month subscription cost £27 and you sent a postal order to Oxford to get one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ unofficial, and printing it ~

Every issue carried this in the masthead, in small type under the distribution details: Mega Drive Advanced Gaming is a totally independent and unofficial magazine. We are in no way connected with, or endorsed by Sega Europe. It was on the front cover too. The thin line running beside the SEGA logo on issue 6 reads ISSUE 6, FEBRUARY '93, AN UNOFFICIAL SEGA PUBLICATION, in the same strip as the issue number and the price.

Licensed magazines of the period had to send pages to the platform holder and live with what came back. Putting the words on the cover was Maverick telling a newsagent browser, before they had opened anything, that nobody at Sega Europe had seen a page of it.

~ five magazines, one console ~

Five British monthlies were chasing the Mega Drive by 1993 and this was one of them. EMAP's MegaTech had been going since December 1991. Future put MEGA on sale on 17 September 1992, a few weeks behind this one. Paragon added Mega Power in August 1993, and Impact had Sega Force Mega. All five were splitting an installed base with about two good years left on it.

Without a license, what Maverick had to sell was its own voice. The issue 21 pages read like a magazine written by people who played the games in the office and in the arcade down the road, with a next-month column promising Streets of Rage 3 and Sub-Terrania and hoping out loud that a Codemasters cartridge would land at £35. The subscription page calls it the greatest Mega Drive magazine to exist in the known universe. That register is what makes the scans readable thirty years later, and it is the whole of the product that was not reprinted screenshots.

~ who actually made it ~

Wikipedia's infobox lists Hugh Gollner as the editor. He was the publisher and the owner. The issue 21 masthead, read off the archive scan, gives the editor as John Davison, with Allie West as deputy and three staff writers under them, Lee Brown among them. Pam Norman ran production and Stephen Lindley ran art. Gollner's own entry sits further down the same column, under publisher, with Jane Gollner credited just above him as a much appreciated contributor, which is the kind of line a family business prints about itself.

UMD handled distribution, fully sale-or-return, which for a small independent meant the unsold copies came back and the risk stayed in Oxford. There was a North American subscription route too, run through a distributor in Woodstock, Ontario, for readers in Canada and the United States who wanted a British Mega Drive magazine badly enough to wait for the post.

~ the scans ~

Hugh Gollner gave a magazine preservation project permission to scan and release the full back catalog, which is a thing almost no publisher of that era bothered to do. The Video Game History Foundation's finding aid dates the run to September 1992 through April 1995 and breaks it into the issues it holds and the issues it does not, and the Internet Archive now serves the scans as searchable text. The company is gone and its output is in better shape than most of what outlived it.

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