Tilt (magazine)

~ the obit ~

Issue 1 of Tilt went on sale in September 1982, eighty pages for fifteen francs, published by Éditions Mondiales out of an address on the rue des Italiens in Paris. The name came from pinball, from the penalty you earn for shoving the machine. The cover showed a boy holding a joystick in front of a wall of television sets, and the subtitle under the logo read Jeux Électroniques.

France in 1982 is a specific place to be writing about computers. The state was about to put a free terminal in every house that wanted one, and for the next decade France had a mass online culture built on Minitel. Tilt eventually had its own service on it, 3615 TILT, run by François Julienne. None of that reached me. Turkish dial-up in 1998 put me on a web that had already settled its standards, and France's videotex decade stayed something I know from documents.

The magazine moved as the hardware moved, and it renamed itself while doing it. Issues 1 through 18 were Tilt - Jeux Électroniques, 19 through 23 were Tilt-Micro-Jeux, and from issue 24 onward it was Tilt Microloisirs. It went bimonthly for its first nine issues and monthly from issue 10 in March 1984. Jean-Michel Blottière held the editor's chair for most of the run, with Bruno Barbier on the first issue and a staff that included Alain Huyghues-Lacour, whose initials AHL became a byline readers knew on sight.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the tilt d'or ~

Once a year Tilt handed out the Tilt d'or, its own awards, split across categories like action and adventure and judged on things like sound and graphics. For a market where most buyers could not see a game running before they paid for it, a gold Tilt on a box was doing real work.

The magazine also ran the kind of reader competitions that dated it precisely: win a console, win cassettes. That was the promise on the cover of issue 1, printed next to a tease about the secrets of Pac-Man.

~ consoles plus ~

In July 1991 Tilt put out a special issue about consoles, numbered zero. By September it was a separate magazine called Consoles +, which went on to be one of the bigger French games titles of the nineties. Tilt had read the console shift correctly, and the magazine it spun off went on to outlast the one that made it.

~ one hundred and twenty two ~

The last issue was number 122, dated January 1994, and it came out visibly thinner than usual. The cover line was Tilt fait Tilt, which is the joke the title had been sitting on for eleven years and never needed until the end.

No source states a cause. The reading the French retro press settles on is that the formula had run out of air and the younger magazines, Joystick among them, had gotten past it. That is a thin ending for the magazine that taught France how to write about any of this, though eleven years and four months is a longer run than most French games magazines ever got.

~ the name after the magazine ~

The title sat unused for nineteen years. In February 2013 the Paris commercial court sold the Tilt name to Anuman Interactive, in the same proceeding that moved Joystick, and Anuman turned its purchases into retro labels. The magazine did not come back. Somebody owns the word.

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