Mega

~ the eulogy ~

Issue one went on sale on 17 September 1992, cover-dated October 1992, at £1.95 for 98 glossy pages. Future Publishing built it in Bath out of staff pulled off its other titles: Neil West came across from Sega Power as launch editor, Amanda Cook from Amiga Power as art editor, Andy Dyer from the Nintendo magazine Total! as deputy, and Paul Mellerick from Sega Force as the staff writer. The launch issue carried most of what the magazine would run for the next three years, including the Top 100 buyer's guide that readers argued about in the letters pages for its entire life.

The competition was absurd. A single console had five British monthlies chasing it: EMAP's MegaTech, Maverick's Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, Paragon's Mega Power, Impact's Sega Force Mega, and this one. Mega outsold all of them at one point. Its audited circulation was 55,612 for January to June 1993, then 45,263 for the rest of that year and 45,214 across the first half of 1994. The curve flattened after the first half of 1993 and then stayed flat.

Then Future sold it. Issue 23, cover-dated August 1994 and on sale from 21 July, was the last one Future published, and nobody told the readers why. Maverick Magazines took over with issue 24 in September and replaced the entire editorial team. The magazine kept the layout and lost the staff who had made it, and its coverage narrowed from everything released on the Mega Drive to whatever was selling.

I was eight when issue one came out, and the magazine war this title fought was a specifically British event. Five monthlies about one console in one country only works where a dense newsagent distribution network can carry them all, and no such thing existed in Turkey. The console reached me eventually. Its press did not, in any language I could read at the time.

~ the dossier ~

~ sold to a rival ~

Maverick already published Mega Drive Advanced Gaming when it bought Mega, and it had bought MegaTech off EMAP the same year. So one publisher ended up with three separate monthlies covering one console, competing with each other for the same readers and the same advertising, which is not a strategy so much as a collection.

The reason EMAP let MegaTech go was that it was launching Sega Magazine with Sega's official endorsement. Mega never had that endorsement either. Future had built it as an unofficial magazine about somebody else's hardware. That was fine while the hardware sold and left the title with no protection at all once the hardware stopped.

~ the page count ~

You can read the decline off the magazine's own indicia, because the publisher's statement always sat on the last page. In 1992 that page was 98. By mid-1994 it was 90, and by the autumn 82. From the April 1995 issue onward the statement appeared on page 32, which means the magazine had shed two thirds of its paper while its cover price went up twice.

~ what the saturn did ~

The Saturn went on sale in Europe on 8 July 1995. Mega ran another three issues after that and stopped with number 37, cover-dated October 1995 and on the shelves in September. Thirty-seven issues, one summer special in 1993, and a buyer's guide that still had Sensible Soccer at the top of it.

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