Mega Power

~ the last words ~

Issue 1 of Mega Power carried an August 1993 cover date and cost £1.95. Across the top it read "Strictly for Sega Mega Drive and Mega-CD owners only", which is a narrower promise than it looks: the Mega-CD was a separate and expensive box that most Mega Drive owners were never going to buy. Paragon Publishing launched the magazine anyway, less than two years after it had launched Sega Pro, and put Dominic Handy in the editor's chair for both.

The staff list in that first issue runs to a handful of names. Handy edited it and Dave Perry designed it, with Steve Bough the only staff writer working under them. Perry would end up as managing editor by the end of the run, which is a fast two years. The address was Durham House on Old Christchurch Road in Bournemouth, and the editorial noted that Sega had opened a Sega World arcade on 24 July about two hundred yards away.

The cover story was a preview of The Lost Vikings, a SNES game arriving on the Mega Drive, which tells you where the console was by mid-1993. By issue 13, cover-dated August 1994, the price was £4.99 and the strapline had narrowed to "The only guide for Sega Mega-CD owners". By issue 24 the company had moved up the road to Paragon House on St Peter's Road and Phil King was editing. The ISSN stayed 0969-8434 throughout.

Mega Power was written for a reader who had already bought a CD drive to bolt onto a games console, and who lived somewhere a newsagent stocked a monthly aimed at people who had done that. Neither half of that describes Turkey in 1993. Mega Drives did arrive here, through importers and in clone form, but the add-on stayed something you read a paragraph about rather than something anyone you knew owned. The entire run came and went before I had any way of finding out it existed.

~ the record ~

~ the disc on the front ~

Issue 4, November 1993, carried the first cover-mounted demo playable on a Sega console, a slice of Thunderhawk. Wikipedia cites the issue itself for that, pages 1 and 5; it is the broader boast about being the first console magazine with a cover CD at all that sits there flagged as unsourced. Discs appeared on and off through the following year and became a regular fixture after May 1994.

What went on them was a decent sample of what the Mega-CD was for: Soulstar, Battlecorps, Sensible Soccer, FIFA International Soccer, Star Wars: Rebel Assault, Lawnmower Man, Mickey Mania, BC Racers, Lethal Enforcers II. A magazine that has to charge £4.99 because there is a pressed CD glued to the front is running on margins that only work while the audience is growing.

~ what the last issue looks like ~

Issue 24 does not know it is the last one. The contents page announces a Samurai Shodown demo on the disc, a look at Cobra Space Adventure, a review of the CD version of The Smurfs, the closing part of an Eternal Champions guide, and full solutions for Dragon's Lair and Shadow Of The Beast 2. The editorial is about the new office being too hot and a staff writer's court appearance over a crash on the M25. There is no farewell and no thank-you.

The back of the book lists the rest of Paragon's range: SegaPro, Sega XS, Games World, X-Gen, PC Power, MPC & CDRom User, Super Gamer, CD32 Gamer. That is a publisher spread thin across a market that had already peaked. British console magazine circulations topped out in 1993 and fell hard through 1994, and Mega Power launched at the very top of it carrying one of the most expensive cover-mounts in the business.

~ the date that is wrong ~

Wikipedia's infobox gives the final issue as July 1995. The contents page of issue 24 reads AUG95, in the magazine's own typesetting. The same article captions its cover scan as issue 12; the scan says issue 13. Issue 25 does not exist in any archive, and by the time Sega Pro wound down in October 1996 it was recycling Mega Power's demo discs, so the folding had clearly already happened. August 1995 is the month, and the only reason anyone can check is that someone scanned the thing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »