Official Dreamcast Magazine (UK)

~ the obit ~

Dennis Publishing told the trade, before launch, who this magazine was for: predominantly but not exclusively men aged 22 to 30, who may or may not already be interested in games. I was 15 in 1999, in Turkey, one year into a dial-up account, and about as far outside that brief as a person could get. The Dreamcast itself barely registered where I lived. Sega's last console came and went in Europe while the people around me were still arguing about PC specs.

The magazine launched with a special issue on 2 September 1999, a month ahead of the console's European release, with a Dream On preview tape in the bag. Issue 1 followed on 30 September with Shenmue and Ready 2 Rumble Boxing on the front. Mark Higham was editor-in-chief, and his opening column said he wanted a stylish magazine to match a stylish machine, with reader interaction modeled on the console's multiplayer side. He resigned in February 2000 to start a media title called Create, and Warren Chrismas, features editor since launch, took over that April.

It sold best between July and December 2000, at 52,157 copies an issue. By the time Dennis shut it down that had slipped to 46,294, which for a magazine tied to a console in free fall is a gentler decline than the hardware managed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the license moved ~

EMAP had held Sega's official UK license through the Saturn years. When that relationship ended and Sega Europe began shopping the Dreamcast license around British publishing houses, editors built whole mock issues to win it. Future's team put real work into a pitch and came close. The license went instead to Dennis, a lifestyle publisher whose shelf included Stuff and Bizarre, which explains the oversized glossy paper and the music interviews sitting beside the review scores.

Being the official magazine cost it something. Import reviews were off limits, and in a console's dying years the import shelf is where the interesting releases are. The last issues were thin because the rules said they had to be.

~ planet ring ~

On 4 December 2000, Sega released Planet Ring in Europe and nowhere else, and in Britain the way you got it was free, on a disc attached to this magazine. The game would not start at all unless the console was connected, which was close to unheard of in 2000 and puts it nearly two years ahead of Xbox Live. You built a small character out of a list of options that went down to its intelligence, walked it around a globe, and joined events that took up to 32 players at a time.

There was no broadband adapter support. The whole thing ran over the modem in the console, across the continent, so a player in the UK was dialing in to play someone in France or Spain. Sega's Dreamcast servers went dark in 2002 and Planet Ring went with them, until a homebrew server project called Earthcall brought it back online in June 2013.

~ the postmortem ~

Chrismas wrote his column for issue 21 on 21 July 2001. The plan he described was a flexible release schedule, with the next issue arriving in roughly two months rather than monthly, which is the standard way a games magazine admits its platform is finished without saying so. Dennis killed the title before that issue reached the shops.

Rez and Shenmue II were both still ahead of the Dreamcast at that point, and a magazine on a two-month cycle could have covered them. Dennis did the arithmetic on a console Sega had already stopped making and stopped printing instead.

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