Power Play (magazine)

~ the last words ~

Power Play was not founded so much as cut loose. Happy Computer, the home computer monthly that Markt & Technik published out of Haar near Munich, had a games section that kept outgrowing the pages it was given, and in November 1987 the publisher printed it as a magazine of its own. On page 113 the first issue carried a preview promising the next one for 28 December. It took another two years to become a magazine in the full sense: special issues came first, then a monthly supplement bound into Happy Computer from the end of 1988. The standalone title arrived at the start of 1990.

The logo called it das grosse Computer- und Video-Spiele-Magazin, and in the early years that was accurate. Power Play started as a multi-format magazine, covering arcade cabinets and console releases next to everything running on a home computer, and Heinrich Lenhardt ran it with a staff that had helped design the thing. Rolf Boyke drew a serial comic called Starkiller inside it until 1993 and laid out the pages the rest of the time. The scope narrowed as the decade went on, and in issue 12 of 1994 the letters column announced that the magazine was concentrating on PCs, with Jetzt 100% PC printed across the cover.

This magazine did not reach Turkey, and the border it failed to cross was linguistic. A German-language monthly sold off German newsstands had one audience by construction, which is why the German games press of the 1990s is invisible from here even though it was enormous where it stood. The whole band of magazines this one belonged to has no English Wikipedia article at all. I found Power Play by going looking for it in another language.

WEKA, which by then owned the title, sold it to Future Verlag in the summer of 1999. Future relaunched the magazine and then dated its final issue April 2000, nine months later. The name carried on for a while as an online magazine, until Future's German operation itself stopped.

~ the record ~

~ the august that was taken away ~

In 1995 the public prosecutor in Munich seized the entire August issue and had it destroyed. The reason was advertising: the magazine carried ads for games that were on the German index, the list of titles that could not legally be advertised or displayed to minors. The offense sat in the ad pages.

WEKA put the loss in the six figures, in deutschmarks. A magazine does not get many months to make its year, and losing one of them to a warehouse confiscation is the kind of event that shows up later as a line in a sales chart rather than as a story anyone outside the building remembers. The German indexing authority shaped what this press could print for its whole life, and Power Play is the one that got a whole month taken off the shelf for it.

~ everyone left and started their own ~

The departures began almost as soon as the magazine stood on its own. Heinrich Lenhardt and Boris Schneider left to found PC Player in 1992, which went on to outsell every other PC magazine in Europe. Winnie Forster and Martin Gaksch were two of the three who started MAN!AC in 1993. Replacements arrived, among them Michael Hengst and Knut Gollert, and Stephan Freundorfer began his career there, so the masthead kept refilling with writers who would go on to run somebody else's magazine.

~ what the relaunch did ~

In the later 1990s Power Play was losing on two fronts at once, to competitors it had trained and to problems inside its own publisher. Future Verlag, the German arm of the British publisher, bought it from WEKA in the summer of 1999 and did what new owners do. The relaunch did not hold. April 2000 was the last cover date, and the magazine Ralf Müller was editing by then had been running for twelve years and five months.

The afterlife is small and worth recording because it is so often mistaken for a revival. At the end of 2012 the Chip publishing house produced a one-off special called Chip Power Play for the magazine's twenty-fifth birthday, put together under Lenhardt with old contributors writing in it. Early in 2014 a purely digital Power Play for tablets was announced. It never appeared, which leaves the April 2000 issue as the last one that exists.

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