Mega Fun

~ the obit ~

Mega Fun ran its entire life in German, about machines I was not playing. It covered consoles from 1992 to 2000, and the years when I started taking games seriously came after that, on PCs in internet cafes rather than on a Mega Drive at home. I am reading its last issue now the way you read a stranger's letters.

It began in Würzburg in June 1992 as a private publication, which is the polite German term for a fanzine. Issue 1/92 called itself megafun in lowercase and was printed in black and white apart from the magenta wordmark. It asked four marks as a Schutzgebühr, a nominal fee. Six more came out the same way. Then there was a three month gap, and in May 1993 the title reappeared in color as a professionally produced magazine from CT Computec Verlag in Nürnberg, with Christian Geltenpoth as editor in chief.

What it actually did was test games, sorted by machine, at a time when the German console reader owned any of half a dozen incompatible boxes. The Super Nintendo and the Mega Drive got their own run of pages, and so did the PC Engine and the Neo Geo. Imports were reviewed when Japan or the United States got a release first. Scores ran from 1 to 100, with playability counted apart from graphics and sound. Above 85 a game was a Gold Game. Below 35 on playability it got a stamp reading Gib diesem Spiel keine Chance, do not give this game a chance.

Ninety nine issues came out between 1992 and 2000, monthly for most of that, carrying the magazine from the last of the 8-bit machines into the 32-bit generation. The audited distribution printed in its own final masthead was just under thirty thousand copies for the second quarter of 2000.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ seven photocopied issues ~

Seven issues came out before any publisher was involved, and they were good enough that one bought the title and kept the people who had made it. Among them was Uwe Kraft, who was listed as the magazine's own Herausgeber in the fanzine days and was still editor in chief eight years later when it closed.

Plenty of magazines in that market began as fanzines. Few made the jump to a real publisher with the same people still in the chairs. There were four logos across the run. The lowercase fanzine wordmark lasted until issue 2/93 and the Computec version took over from there, except that copies of issue 12/93 went out carrying both.

~ the last würzburg issue ~

The December 2000 issue went on sale on 2 November. Its cover said Tag der Entscheidung, day of decision, over a face-off between the PlayStation 2 and the Dreamcast. Inside were Shenmue and the new Zelda, with forty games put through the test pages. It reads like a magazine in good health. The editorial is entirely about the office move to Nürnberg: an apology for the removal boxes everyone was tripping over, and an introduction for a new writer, Henry, who had given up his flat ahead of a relocation that kept slipping and had hurt his back sleeping wherever he could until they put him in a hotel.

The last page previews issue 1/01, starting with Daytona USA and Driver 2. The editorial calls it a pretty last Würzburg issue, cobbled together under the stress of the move, meaning the last one before it. German console publishing emptied out that winter, with Total! ending at the same point and Video Games lasting a couple of issues into 2001, and no German source says why Computec stopped this one. The editorial team went to Nürnberg. The magazine did not.

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