PC Format

» see pcformat.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Issue one went on sale on 26 September 1991, cover-dated October, 116 pages at £2.95 with Bob Wade listed as editor. The cover disc carried a MiG-29M demo and a playable Speedball 2, so the pitch was clear enough: in 1991 a PC you had bought for yourself was for flying things and hitting things.

It joined a Format series that already covered the Commodore 64 and Atari's ST, and the target reader was around thirty and had bought a PC for himself rather than been issued one at work. That made it louder than the business titles it shared a shelf with. It reviewed on the full 0 to 100 scale and handed a PCF Gold badge to anything above ninety. It also covered video editing and web design years before either was ordinary work for a home PC.

I was at primary school in Turkey when issue one appeared, in a market with its own magazine shelf and no British imports worth speaking of. What crossed over was the disc, copied and passed along until nobody remembered which cover it had come off.

Then the circulation went one way for the entire second half of its life. Over 100,000 copies a month in 2000 had become 18,003 by 2008. The 2011 figure was 8,009 and the 2012 figure 6,249. No audit followed that last one, and the magazine kept publishing for three more years with no figure to show anybody.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the disc pages ~

The cover disc was the spine of the magazine and it changed shape with the decade. It began on 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies and ended on DVD, with the CD-ROM years in between. There were dedicated Disc Pages in the regulars list from the first issue to the last one, so the thing stuck to the cover had its own section and its own editor.

~ fifteen years down ~

At the end it was a long way from the games title it had started as. The January 2007 redesign split the book into a games half and a performance hardware half, and by late 2010 a typical issue reviewed no more than four games. The surviving 2013 issues run monitor group tests and Windows 8 tutorials, which is a hardware enthusiast magazine wearing the name of a games one.

Alan Dexter announced the closure to readers inside the November 2015 issue. He wrote that the powers that be had informed him this would be the last one, and ended on the sentence Press Gazette put in its headline: something needs to give, and unfortunately, it's us. Future's own statement said the company had an active portfolio management policy and that all staff from PC Format had been redeployed to other brands. No title absorbed it. Dexter pointed readers at Maximum PC and PC Gamer, where most of the crew went, and the old domain points at PC Gamer to this day.

~ the name in other countries ~

PC Format outlived its own website by about five years. Future folded the web operation into TechRadar in the mid-2000s, and by 2015 nearly every pcformat.co.uk address was already a redirect while the magazine was still on sale in shops.

The name also got licensed around. A South African edition under Panorama Publications printed its last issue in May 2014, eighteen months ahead of the British one. A Polish PC Format ran in print from August 2000 to January 2022 under Bauer and then Fantasyexpo, and pcformat.pl is still updating today under a Polish esports media company. Both licensed editions stopped printing, and the one version of the name still posting belongs to owners with no connection back to Bath.

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