PC Joker

~ the obit ~

Issue 6/91 reached German newsstands in November 1991, a bimonthly with a joker on the cover and a readership that barely existed yet. It was the first German-language games magazine written for IBM compatibles rather than for a home computer, which in 1991 meant betting that the PC would turn into a games machine at all. The publisher was Joker-Verlag of Haar, outside Munich, which in practice meant Michael Labiner and his then wife Brigitta, and which already had a healthy monthly about the other machine.

The schedule records how that bet paid off. Six issues in 1992, then ten in 1993 with a pair of doubles over the summer, and from 1997 a full twelve a year. From issue 12/95 the magazine also came with a CD, sold as PC Joker Total, with a cheaper disk-free edition called PC Joker pur for readers unwilling to pay for one. It was among the first German PC games magazines to put complete retail games on that CD every month, and in early 1997 both halves were folded into a single official title, PC Joker Heft & Spiel.

The anniversary issue is where the house's own history gets tangled. Issue 11/1999 was sold as a ten-year celebration, except that PC Joker was eight: what had turned ten was the first Amiga Joker, dead for three years by then. Issue 1/2000 went out badged as the Millennium-Ausgabe. From 7/2000 the cover claimed to be Germany's most experienced games magazine, and a competitor turned that subtitle into a legal dispute expensive enough to be worth recording.

Sales had been sliding for years. Issue 11/2000 arrived with a radically modernized logo and layout, and at the end of 2000 Joker-Verlag stopped the title with 1/2001 on the shelves. Issue 2/2001 was already finished. It never went to print.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the cover cd changed ~

The sister title had refused a cover disk across its entire run and sold Cheatdisks by mail order instead. PC Joker went the other way from 12/95, and the two-edition split, Total with the CD and pur without, is a small fossil of a market where a CD-ROM drive was still an upgrade you paid for. By the 1997 relaunch the disk was half the product, which is why the title changed.

There was a console annex as well. From the July/August 1994 issue the magazine carried Multimedia Joker, covering the hardware the main book did not, and eight of those ran inside PC Joker before it was spun out on its own in April 1995 with issue 5/6. The standalone lasted seven issues. A 1994 paperback, PC Joker Hits, edited by Carsten Borgmeier and sold by Sybex at 39.90 marks, recycled the magazine's reviews of the fifty best games into book form and has since become a collector's item alongside the first issue.

~ the state took two issues ~

In 1995 the Munich public prosecutor seized two issues of PC Joker and destroyed them, because they carried advertising for games on the German youth-protection index. The loss ran to five figures in marks. Focus wrote the affair up on 7 August 1995 under a headline about blacked-out breasts, with the computer-magazine trade in uproar over advertising for pornographic software, which is a fair indication of what the index was mostly being enforced against that year.

~ der wirklich letzte pc joker ~

In May 2008 a fifteen-page PDF began circulating under the title Der wirklich letzte PC Joker. It was assembled from the finished but unpublished contents of issue 2/2001, out of the archive of Paul Kautz, one of the magazine's editors. The cover was in there, and so was the Ghost comic the magazine had become known for. Some of the article pages still carry Kautz's handwritten corrections, the ones that would have been set into type before the issue shipped.

What makes the date land for me is what got reviewed in it. Counter-Strike 1.0 and Quake III Team Arena were written up and ready in January 2001, in a German-language monthly I had no way of reading. Counter-Strike is what the internet cafes around me ran from 2002 onward, on machines rented by the hour, for about three years. The review of it had been finished and shelved in Munich before any of that started.

~ someone else owns the name ~

In spring 2003 a magazine called Der neue PC Joker turned up, starting at issue 4/2003. It came from Media-Verlag, which had secured the rights to the name and had no other connection to the original. That one stopped with issue 3/2004, after which PC Joker continued as a supplement tucked into Media-Verlag's own Computer Magazin until March 2006, and then stopped appearing in any form at all.

Media-Verlag still holds the rights, and nothing is published under the title today. German Wikipedia's infobox consequently dates the magazine's end to March 2004, which is the revival's ending rather than the magazine's, and that is the date that gets copied outward. The PC Joker anyone remembers stopped at the end of 2000, with a finished issue in a drawer.

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