Super Play

~ the last words ~

Future Publishing launched it in October 1992 as a monthly for owners of the Super Nintendo, out of the same Bath offices that were running most of the British games press by then. The staff list is a who's who of that press in the years afterward. Matt Bielby was there, and Tony Mott, who went on to edit Edge, and Jason Brookes, Jonathan Davies and Zy Nicholson.

The magazine's real subject was a problem. The SNES library's best role-playing games, the Square and Enix catalog, largely did not come out in Britain. So Super Play covered the American market and then went past it to the Japanese one, reporting on games its readers could only get by importing a cartridge and an adaptor. A column called Fantasy Quest ran every month about Japanese console RPGs in their own market. In the magazine's second half there was a Final Fantasy Forum carrying playing tips for a series that had not been published in Europe.

Future closed it in September 1996 with issue 47. The SNES was finished commercially, the Nintendo 64 was weeks from launch, and the decision inside Future was that the title would not survive the transition to a new console. N64 Magazine arrived in March 1997 instead, edited by Jonathan Davies with Wil Overton on art, built out of former Super Play people and much less interested in imports.

~ the record ~

~ the import desk ~

Because Japanese RPGs and Japanese animation came out of the same cultural plumbing, the magazine ran manga and anime coverage too, written by Helen McCarthy. In 1992 the British anime market barely existed, and Super Play is one of the publications usually credited with building the audience that bought the tapes later.

Writing every month about products your readers cannot buy at home is a strange editorial position, and that is the piece of this I understand from the receiving end. Turkey in the early nineties was not a market anybody's console magazine was reporting on either, and at that age I was years away from being able to import anything. Super Play's distance runs opposite to the usual kind here: a British magazine whose entire value was describing what its readers were not going to get.

~ the covers ~

Wil Overton illustrated every cover, in a manga-influenced style that nothing else on a British newsstand looked like, and drew the staff as chibi caricatures in science fiction armor and flying gear. The logo was put together by Jez Bridgeman in his first week on the magazine, before the art editor had even arrived, and at the last minute the PLAY half was swapped to a sans serif face and stretched to fill the space it was given.

~ why future shut it ~

Killing a magazine with that kind of following looks harsh, and it was probably also the right call. What readers came for was import knowledge about a Japanese software catalog, and the Nintendo 64's library did not have the same gap in it to explain. N64 Magazine was renamed NGC Magazine for the GameCube, NGC closed in 2006, and the line carried on from there as NGamer.

In September 2017, prompted by Nintendo announcing the SNES Classic Edition, Future put out a Super Play issue 48. It was bundled with Retro Gamer 172, written by original staff alongside newer hands, with a Wil Overton cover and an interview with Dylan Cuthbert about Star Fox 2. Future had done this once before, with a 94th issue of Your Sinclair in 2004, also given away with Retro Gamer. Twenty-one years dead and the magazine still got a 48th issue.

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