PC PowerPlay

» see pcpowerplay.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The address still resolves. Type pcpowerplay.com.au and the browser lands on the games section of PC Gamer, which is the same company's larger magazine in a bigger country. PC PowerPlay ran for twenty nine years before that redirect was installed, and for most of them it was the only magazine about PC games that Australia had.

It launched in May 1996 out of Strawberry Hills in New South Wales, published by Next Publishing, and the first issue carried a 640 megabyte CD-ROM on the cover. That stayed the shape of the thing for almost the entire run: a thick monthly with a disc full of demos and patches that an Australian connection in 1996 was never going to download. Ben Mansill founded it and edited that issue. In 2018 Future, which owns PC Gamer, bought the title along with the rest of nextmedia's computing magazines, and PC PowerPlay became a Future Australia product.

The last issue was number 311, dated 8 September 2025, and Mansill edited that one too. Twenty nine years separate his first issue from his last, and that symmetry is what gives the ending its particular weight. Former editor David Wildgoose wrote a piece for the issue. Subscribers found a personal letter folded in, telling them the magazine was finished and that the balance of what they had paid for would be served by APC instead.

Australia had one PC games magazine, and nothing was ever going to put it in my hands. In the years PC PowerPlay was at full strength I was getting the same information off donanimhaber and frmtr, where the hardware list in your forum signature did the work a magazine's buyer's guide did somewhere else. The Australian magazine outlived that shift by about two decades, which is the part I have trouble believing.

~ the case file ~

~ all out for 311 ~

The farewell in the final issue reached for cricket, which is about as Australian an exit as a magazine can arrange. It told readers that saying goodbye is never easy, and signed off with the line "all out for 311". Mansill's piece on the PC Gamer site the same day opened with some sadness and a whole lotta pride before calling the magazine a legend and calling it a day.

~ the only one left ~

It was not alone at the start. PC Games Addict ran against it, and when that closed in 2005 the Australian market contained exactly one magazine about PC games. That left twenty years without a direct rival, in a category that was shrinking everywhere else. It did mean that if you wanted local release dates and a local voice on hardware, there was one place to get them.

He did not sit at that desk the whole time. In February 2001 Mansill founded Atomic, the Australian hardware magazine that ran until 2012 and that this site has already buried, and for eleven years the two titles were each other's only real competition. Atomic's print side died first. Its successor was folded into APC in 2018, which is how APC came to be the title waiting when PC PowerPlay's own subscribers were handed over seven years later.

~ pointing at pc gamer ~

Nobody at Future Australia published a reason, and the Wikipedia article still has an empty space where one would go. The circulation figure on record is 14,527, which for a single-country PC magazine in the 2020s is less an indictment than a statement that the category had become a small, specific thing.

What is left is the redirect. The archive of a magazine that spent twenty nine years explaining PC gaming to one country now forwards every visitor to the version of itself written for everyone else.

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