Secret Service

~ the obit ~

Secret Service was written in a language I cannot read, for a country going through roughly the same decade Turkey was going through, on the other side of the same sea. Poland got its games press early and got it seriously. The first issue reached kiosks on 16 March 1993, five years before I had a modem of my own, and by the time I was online at all the magazine had already done most of the things it is remembered for.

Marcin Przasnyski and Waldemar Nowak started it at a small publisher called ProScript. Both of them came off Top Secret, which was the Polish games magazine that came before and the one Secret Service was built to answer. It ran monthly. Ninety five issues came out, under that name until April 1999 and then under New S Service, which is what the masthead said for the last two years.

What made it matter was not the reviews. It was the disks. Secret Service put the first cover disk into Polish kiosks in December 1994 and the first cover CD in June 1996, which in a market where software mostly arrived by way of whatever somebody had copied for you meant the magazine was functioning as the shop.

That part I understand without needing the language. Turkey in the same years had the same shortage and reached the same answer: a magazine on a shelf with something readable taped to the front, and the something readable being the actual reason you handed over the money. The reviews were how the publisher justified the price.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it did first ~

The editors flew to London for ECTS and to Los Angeles for E3 before any other Polish magazine did, and the line they used about it afterward was that they went to prove there really were computers in Eastern Europe. From issue 40 in November 1996 the cover carried the words BIGGEST SELLING COMPUTER GAMES MAGAZINE IN EUROPE, in English, in capitals. Nobody could ever quite explain what was being measured. In March 1998 the claim quietly shrank to IN POLAND.

It was also the first magazine in Poland to run manga and anime coverage, in a section called Manga Room, which is not a normal thing for a games monthly to do and is a large part of why Polish manga fandom exists at all. Four compilation books went out under the magazine's name, and the issues themselves carried a house comic strip alongside pages of reader high score tables. It behaved less like a publication than like a club with a print budget.

~ the day it died ~

Several of the senior editors left, Przasnyski among them, and founded a different magazine called Reset. The legal trouble started shortly after that. The last real issue, number 95, went out in November 2001.

On 31 December 2001 a notice appeared on the magazine's official website saying publication was suspended. A few days later the editorial staff said the notice had been put there by someone who broke into the server. They did not say it was wrong. They said the cause of the confusion was technical problems, and then said nothing else. Issue 96 had already been finished and sent to the printer. It was never printed.

~ the long tail ~

Readers built an e-zine called SS-NG in July 2002 and kept it going until August 2005. Then in June 2014 someone announced a real revival and put it on a crowdfunding site, and the target was hit in twenty hours, which was a record for Polish crowdfunding at the time. It finished at 284,200 złoty. Issue 97 came out on 30 September 2014 with a print run of fifty thousand.

There was one more issue in December and then a fight between the publisher and whoever actually owned the title, and that was the end of it. The publisher folded the effort into a new monthly called Pixel, which ran until 2023. In August 2025 a retro imprint announced it was reprinting the first issue with extra material. That is where it stands: not a magazine anymore, just a thing people keep trying to hold.

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