MegaTech

~ the last words ~

Julian Rignall's idea, pitched to Paul Glancey in a cab: why not make a Mega Drive magazine. Glancey was editing Computer and Video Games at the time and has said since that covering every platform at once was doing his head in. EMAP put the first issue on sale on 6 December 1991, cover-dated Xmas 1991, 84 pages for £1.95, with a strapline under the logo reading MEGADRIVE HYPER GAMING TECHNIQUE and a cover flash promising Britain's only 100% Megadrive mag.

Glancey's launch editorial thanked the reader for buying a publication "engineered by our skilled London craftsmen from the finest quality wood-pulp products" which should, if properly maintained, provide many years of reading pleasure for the whole family. Then it corrected itself: not the whole family, just the members who were heavily into Mega Drive games.

It lasted 43 issues, and most of what has been written about it since gets the ending wrong. Wikipedia says it ceased publication in 1994 and was merged into Mega magazine. The Internet Archive holds a complete run with no gaps, and the last one is issue 43, cover-dated July 1995. It was not merged into anything.

What is true is that it shrank. Issue 1 ran 84 pages and issue 33 was down to 52. The last two ran 32, at a cover price a quarter higher than the launch.

~ the record ~

~ the katakana on the masthead ~

Above the wordmark on issue 1 sit four katakana characters. Read as written they come out メガテケ, megateke, which is not how you spell MegaTech in Japanese; the usual form ends in a different character. A magazine selling British readers on Japanese games put Japanese on its own cover and got the final character wrong. It stayed that way on the masthead for the whole EMAP run.

~ price: import ~

Import games were reviewed with the price field reading, literally, PRICE: IMPORT. There was no number to print because the game had no British release and no British price, only whatever a grey importer was charging that month. The importer in question was credited in the masthead: Console Concepts of Stoke-on-Trent supplied the review cartridges and the chart, so the magazine's sales chart counted imports alongside official releases because the man counting them was the man selling them.

Turkey ran on exactly that arrangement, importers and converters and no local magazine to explain either of them. The ad pages carried the rest of that trade, full-page Datel spreads selling cartridge adapters that let a European Mega Drive run American or Japanese software. Region lockout was a commercial decision somebody was always selling you a way around, and outside the two countries where games came out first, that was simply the condition of owning a console.

~ what Maverick bought ~

EMAP agreed the sale around mid-1993, and the handover only showed up in print with the February 1994 issue, number 26, under a boxed notice headed MEGATECH: NEW OWNERS, promising better layouts and more exclusives and telling readers that not much else would change. The new address was Maverick Magazines, 16-17 Hollybush Row, Oxford, and the publisher was Hugh Gollner, who had put Britain's first weekly games magazine into the ground two years earlier.

EMAP had a reason to sell. It was about to launch Sega Magazine with Sega's official endorsement, cover-dated January 1994, and already had Mean Machines Sega. The one title in the stable with no Sega endorsement attached to it was the one it sold. Maverick then acquired Mega from Future and already owned Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, which left one small Oxford publisher running three magazines about the same console.

~ eight days ~

Issue 43 went on sale on 30 June 1995. It was a guide special, 32 pages of tips and walkthroughs with no news section and no reviews, and nothing anywhere in it says it is the last. The Sega Saturn reached Europe on 8 July 1995 at £399.99. The final thing MegaTech printed about itself was a joke in the credits box about getting free beer by learning the barmaids' names, followed by a list of nine of them, and then it simply did not come back.

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