Strana Igr

» see gameland.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dmitry Agarunov opened a games shop on Novy Arbat in 1992 and turned it into a chain. When he went looking for somewhere to advertise it, he tried the handful of Russian games magazines that existed and got nowhere. The working title of the thing he built instead was CD-ROM Entertainment. It came out as Strana Igr, Land of Games, and the first copies were printed in Hong Kong and carried to Moscow in the same containers as the consoles.

The pilot issue is dated 1995 on its own pages and was in readers' hands by the first weeks of January 1996, edited by Oksana Donskaya, mostly out of translated foreign magazines. The run that followed reached 350 issues over seventeen years, twice monthly from November 1998 until August 2010, with a disc on the cover from the autumn of 1998, when Sony's European arm began handing over its PlayStation demo collections.

That cover disc is the part I recognize. In Turkey the same years produced the same object, a magazine you bought partly for the plastic taped to the front of it, because a 33.6k modem was not going to deliver a demo of anything. The Russian version of this is mine with other words on the cover, and the Turkish titles of those years went down in the same decade.

~ the chronicle ~

~ banzai ~

Under Konstantin Govorun, editor from July 2006, the magazine ran a line about games as art and carried things its competitors did not. Banzai was a large anime and manga section inside a games monthly, which no comparable magazine in Russia or outside it printed. From the December 2010 issue it printed translated pages from Famitsu under a deal with Enterbrain, keeping the Japanese magazine's original layout on the Russian page.

Reviews ran on a ten point scale in half steps, about 3,600 of them over the life of the magazine, averaging somewhere near 7.5. A positive review of Lada Racing Club in 2006 cost its author a two year absence from the masthead.

~ the circulation nobody believed ~

The colophon of issue 6 in 2012 says the print run was 189,100 copies. In February 2011 Novaya Gazeta published the working papers behind a competition-authority session on magazine circulations. The row for Strana Igr reads: claimed 120,000, imported into Russia 11,762, real print run 12,381, an overstatement of 9.69 times. The check was possible because the magazine was printed in Poland, which left customs numbers to compare against. Govorun has since accepted the general point while arguing the real number was higher than that table allowed. Either way the claimed figure rose from 120,000 to 189,100 across the years the business was dying.

~ number 350 ~

The last issue went to the printer on 2 November 2013 and reached kiosks around the fifteenth. The cover story is an interview with Yu Suzuki about Shenmue, a game that was too expensive and too far ahead of its market, which the editors understood was a fitting last subject.

By the publisher's own account the closure had not been decided when the issue was locked, so they put every exclusive they had brought back from Japan into it. The team was paid almost nothing, the production budget was cut to a figure the publisher itself calls ridiculous, and Govorun paid the interpreter for the Suzuki interview out of his own pocket. They sent a printed copy to Suzuki's office in Japan. He has sent the magazine a Christmas card every year since.

~ frozen, then closed ~

Officially nothing was dead for another year. In December 2013 the staff still said the magazine would continue if a year of advertising contracts could be signed, and they raised about two thirds of the money. On 16 April 2014 a distributor bulletin carried the publisher's formal notice: publication suspended indefinitely, on grounds of economic expediency. In November 2014 Govorun wrote that it could no longer appear in its old form, so it was not frozen, it was closed.

Late in 2017 he bought the rights to the magazine's entire archive and put it back online at gameland.ru in May 2018, with no advertising on it. That version published its last article on 31 May 2020. The site is still there, which is why the brand looks alive from a distance and is not.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »