PC Leisure

~ the last words ~

Before 1990 a British reader who wanted to know what PC games were worth buying read about them in the back half of a magazine about something else. The One covered the sixteen-bit formats and New Computer Express covered everything, so the PC got whatever space was left after the Amiga and the ST had been served. EMAP's answer was PC Leisure, the first magazine in the country dedicated to PC entertainment and nothing else, and the publisher hedged the bet by making it quarterly.

The hedge is visible on the cover of issue 1, Spring 1990, which I have only ever seen as a scan on the Internet Archive. One pound fifty, the strapline "The complete guide to PC entertainment", and a cover feature comparing ten flight simulators, because in 1990 flight simulators were what the PC was for. Down the side there are trailers for a piece on multimedia and another on getting software down a telephone line. In the corner, a yellow starburst promising over fifty games reviewed.

EMAP had tested the water the previous November by bundling a free sample issue with What Personal Computer. Readers wrote in about it, and their letters filled the letters page of the launch issue the following spring. A magazine that does not exist yet receives very little post, so the free sample was also the mailbag.

~ the record ~

~ four editors, nine issues ~

The masthead churned. Ciarán Brennan edited from the launch until the January/February 1991 issue, Steve Cooke did March/April on his own, Garth Sumpter took May/June and July/August, and Christina Erskine edited the last one. That is four editors across nine issues, which usually means a title nobody upstairs has made up their mind about.

The contributor list reads like a register of the British games press of the period, with Gary Penn and Gary Whitta both writing for it. The first four issues came out quarterly and the remaining five bimonthly, so the schedule sped up as the market did.

~ the two-page notice ~

In May 1991 EMAP split The One into separate Amiga and ST magazines, and the PC pages that had been in it were handed to PC Leisure. Several of the staff went the other way, onto The One for Amiga Games. That is the moment PC Leisure stopped being an experiment and became the house PC title, and it is also roughly when EMAP decided the experiment was over.

Issue 9, dated September/October 1991, carried a two-page announcement across pages 28 and 29: the magazine was being renamed PC Review and would come out monthly from 15 October 1991. No farewell, just a schedule change and a new word on the cover. PC Review ran for years afterward and is the title people from that market actually remember, which means the nine issues underneath it are now mostly findable as scans with a number and a season in the filename.

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