Sega Pro

~ the goodbye ~

Paragon Publishing put the first Sega Pro on British newsstands with a November 1991 cover date, run out of an office at 7 Wicker Hill in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Dominic Handy edited it. The timing was close to ideal: Sonic had landed that summer, and a magazine covering Sega machines and nothing else had an obvious reader waiting for it.

It worked for about two years. Audited circulation reached 64,003 copies an issue in 1993, which placed it in the middle of a crowded field rather than at the top. Sega Power was selling over a hundred thousand. Mean Machines Sega and Mega were going after the same reader, and EMAP had Sega's official endorsement attached to one of its titles.

The last issue carries a different imprint. Issue 62, cover-dated October 1996, prints Rapide Publishing at 14a Union Street, Newton Abbot, Devon, four counties away from where the magazine started. Sixty two issues in total. A German edition ran between 1992 and 1994, and a Russian one appeared as well.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the crash of 1994 ~

Whatever killed Sega Pro killed most of its competitors inside the same eighteen months. British console magazine circulations peaked in 1993 and then dropped hard. Sega Pro fell from 64,003 to just over 30,000 across 1994, and Sega Power came down from 102,068 to 54,321 over the same stretch. Too many magazines had launched against one install base, and that install base was getting old.

Turkey had no stake in any of this, for the simple reason that there was no Turkish console magazine market to crash. Games came in through importers and whatever press existed was general computer coverage with a games section attached to it. A situation where several monthlies could fight over one company's machines, and an audited circulation figure decided which of them saw out the year, describes a trade that operated nowhere near me in 1994.

~ what came stuck to the cover ~

Paragon fought the decline the way British magazines of that period always did, by gluing things to the front. Issue 10 carried sunglasses and a poster. Issue 16 came with a VHS tape, issue 34 with a Mortal Kombat comic, and somewhere in between a reader got a cable tidy. There were tips books bound in as supplements too, Pro Tips Unlimited with issue 31 and Tips Explosion with 45.

Sega Pro CD was the other line of defense. It started in October 1994 as a separate publication aimed at Mega-CD owners, ran three issues under its own numbering, then merged into the parent magazine's sequence at issue 40 and carried on inside it as far as issue 50. By the end of that arrangement it was recycling demo discs from Mega Power, a magazine that had already folded.

~ est mort ~

Issue 62 carries no farewell editorial. The announcement sits on the letters page, buried in a reply to a reader who had written in about how thin the magazine had become. The editor agrees with him about the Mega Drive, says publishers had been too quick to stop developing for a machine that was in more homes than any other console, and then arrives at the page count: "not because the number of pages is going back up, but because this is the last copy of the mag. Yep, it's sad, but true. Sega Pro est mort!" A reader asked why the magazine was getting shorter and was told it was over.

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