PC Extreme

~ the eulogy ~

The hobby PC Extreme covered reached me. The magazine never did. Those three years were my university years in Turkey, and my hardware list sat in my forum signature on donanimhaber and frmtr the whole time, which is exactly the readership this title was printed for, except that I was getting the same material free from people who had already done the mod and posted photographs of it. A British monthly priced for British newsstands had no route to a Turkish one, and would not have had much to tell me that the forum had not told me first.

It launched in December 2002 out of Live Publishing International, and its beat was overclocking, case modding, hardware and hacking in the technical sense of the word rather than the criminal one. Games got covered too, because the point of the machine was the games. For most of its first year it had the British modding niche largely to itself. Dennis Publishing launched Custom PC into the same space in October 2003, and Highbury launched GigaHz a year after that.

Three magazines is too many for a niche that was shrinking, and by the summer of 2005 two of them were gone. PC Extreme published its last issue in August 2005. GigaHz, barely a year old, closed within a month of it.

Wayne Williams, Live Publishing's editorial director, gave the trade press the reason and did not dress it up. The title was pulling in less revenue than it had a few years earlier, he said, with advertising and overseas sales both thin. PCs were simply not as popular as they had been. "I think most people would rather have a console to play games." Seven staff were laid off.

~ the dossier ~

~ thirty issues ~

Wikipedia counts thirty issues between December 2002 and August 2005, which is three short of a strictly monthly run across those months. No circulation audit for the title survives anywhere I looked and no editor is named. The English Wikipedia article is a six-line stub carrying a notability warning and a single citation. For a magazine that closed inside living memory, that is a thin paper trail, and it is about what you would expect of a specialist title whose readers moved to a medium that keeps no back issues.

~ the niche that moved ~

Live Publishing went into administration shortly after the closure. Its best-known survivor was Retro Gamer, launched in January 2004 as a quarterly and the first commercial magazine devoted entirely to old games; the rights were bought by Imagine Publishing, a Bournemouth startup formed by former directors of Paragon Publishing, and Future absorbed Imagine on 21 October 2016. Retro Gamer is still printed today. PC Extreme had no such afterlife.

The thing worth noticing is what did not die. Overclocking and the habit of photographing your own build both got bigger after 2005, not smaller. They just stopped being something anyone would pay a cover price to read about once a month, because the people doing it were publishing each other's results for nothing on forums, in real time, with better pictures.

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