PC Zone

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

~ the obituary ~

The cover disc is the part of this i can actually speak to. A demo worth having was not something you downloaded on a 33.6k line, it was something somebody handed you, and that fact organized a whole industry for about a decade. PC Zone's argument for costing money was that it turned up with the software attached. That argument had a shelf life. honestly, Future said as much out loud when they closed it.

The magazine itself i had no route to. british monthlies did not reach Turkish newsstands, it launched in april 1993 out of Dennis Publishing at £3.95, edited by Paul Lakin, and its claim was that it was the first UK magazine given over entirely to games on the PC. Everything else on the shelf was still covering the machine as a machine.

still, what it became known for was tone. Charlie Brooker wrote for it before anybody outside games knew the name, and Rhianna Pratchett came through the same pages. for whatever reason, the house style was somewhere between a review and a grudge, which readers later described as the reason they trusted it. A magazine that will print an insult is a magazine that is not trading scores for exclusives.

Future bought it in 2004, along with Computer and Video Games, for about two and a half million pounds. That put PC Zone in a stable with PC Gamer and PC Format under one roof, which is the arrangement that eventually decided which of the three was expendable.

~ the case file ~

~ what a cover disc was for ~

It is easy to read the cover disc as a gimmick now. it was distribution. Before broadband there was no other legal way to get a few hundred megabytes of playable game into a house, and the magazine was the only object in the supply chain with a monthly schedule and a shelf. Publishers wanted on it. readers bought the magazine for it, and sometimes the writing was the thing you got by accident.

this landed differently outside the countries with cheap lines, and Turkey was one of those. for a long time, a disc on a magazine was the fastest connection in the room. When Future explained the closure, the reason given was that the web and faster downloads had taken the disc's job. That was true in Britain years before it was true where i was sitting.

~ the scores ~

The scoring is the other thing people remember, mostly because the scale had room below the floor. Half-Life 2 got 97 percent in 2004. A Page 3 calendar and screensaver got minus ten, which is not a score so much as a public refusal to treat the thing as a product.

There was an award called the PC Zone Dump, given to whatever had wasted everyone's time that month. honestly, that is a small thing but it is the whole editorial position in one line. A publication that gives out a prize for the worst release is telling you it does not expect to be invited to the launch party.

~ how it actually ended ~

Future announced the proposed closure on 15 july 2010 and gave a strategic review as the reason, which is the sentence publishers use when the honest one is that the numbers stopped. Audited circulation had been 22,297 across 2007 and 11,357 across 2009. by then it was the smallest of the three PC magazines in the building.

Issue 225 went on sale on 2 september 2010, seventeen years and five months after the first one. Steve Hogarty was the last editor and had already left in july. for whatever reason, nobody pretended this one was a transition to digital. The title just stopped and the staff went to PC Gamer or elsewhere.

~ the long tail ~

pczone.co.uk answers today. It is a working PC gaming site called PCZ, several hundred kilobytes of current reviews and opinion, run by people who wanted the name to keep meaning something. That is a rarer ending than it sounds. Most dead mastheads resolve to a redirect at a bigger site, the way CVG did five years later.

i did not read PC Zone and i am not going to claim i did. What i can say is that the thing it existed to solve, getting large software to people over a slow line, was solved by somebody else while the magazine was still on the shelf. still, that is a cleaner death than most. The problem went away.

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