Sega Saturn Magazine (UK)

~ the goodbye ~

EMAP took the official Sega license in Britain in 1994 and spent it on a title called Sega Magazine, which covered the Master System and the Mega Drive with the Mega-CD and the 32X bolted on as they arrived. When the Saturn reached British shops the magazine was rebuilt around the new console. Issue one of Sega Saturn Magazine went on sale on 26 October 1995 at £3.95, cover-dated November, and it kept a Sega Magazine section inside for a while so the older hardware did not disappear in one month.

The license was the whole product. It meant information arrived from Sega Europe before the unofficial magazines had it, and it meant the magazine could ship Sega Flash, a demo CD built by Sega with playable games on it. The competition at the newsagent was Official UK PlayStation Magazine, which had a disc every single month, and that was the comparison readers were actually making in 1996.

Then the Saturn market thinned out underneath it. Total Saturn and Saturn Power both closed, and by the middle of 1998 Sega Saturn Magazine was the only dedicated Sega magazine on sale in the United Kingdom. In 1997 it had reported a readership of 30,140. It ended up with the whole category to itself while carrying a cover logo for a console Sega had already withdrawn in Europe.

In 1998 the fastest thing in my house was a 14.4k modem, and the Saturn was a console with no route in. Sega hardware reached the country through importers and grey-market shops rather than a distributor with a marketing budget, and no newsagent I could walk to stocked British games print. The first Sega writing I could actually reach was on web pages, which arrived for me a year or two after this magazine stopped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the license was worth ~

Close ties to Sega Europe gave the magazine access and gave Sega a channel, and for three years that trade worked for both sides. The cover price drifted from £2.75 up past £4.50 as the demo discs got more elaborate. Editorial tone moved too: the rise of Edge and EMAP's own short-lived MAXIMUM had shown there was an audience for games writing that did not shout, and Sega Saturn Magazine ended up more sober than most of its contemporaries.

~ the import years ~

By late 1998 the Saturn was commercially finished in Europe but still alive in Japan, so the magazine filled its pages with Japanese releases that British readers would have to import or never play. It was also covering the Dreamcast months before anyone in Britain could buy one, while a discontinued console kept its place on the masthead, which is what the license contract described.

Richard Leadbetter was editor in chief through this period. The team pitched Sega a successor magazine built around the Dreamcast, which was the obvious continuation of the work they had been doing all year.

~ the handover ~

Sega gave the Dreamcast license to Dennis Publishing instead. Official Dreamcast Magazine started printing in autumn 1999, a different company with a different staff covering the console that Sega Saturn Magazine had been previewing since 1997. Issue 37 carried a November 1998 cover date and nothing came after it, with no gradual decline to explain the stop. A licensor made a decision about a contract and a magazine with no commercial rivals left simply had nothing to be official about.

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