Top Secret

~ the obit ~

Until the autumn of 1990, writing about computer games in Poland meant a four page section inside Bajtek called Co jest grane. The cooperative that published Bajtek decided there were enough players to carry a magazine of their own, gave the job to Marcin Przasnyski, a Bajtek editor who already specialized in games, and called the result Top Secret. It came out every two months and it was the first Polish magazine of its kind.

Przasnyski set conventions the rest of the Polish games press then copied: writers signed with pseudonyms instead of their names, and the layout changed whenever somebody felt like changing it. Large sections of the magazine were given over to talking with readers, and the editorial staff wrote about themselves as freely as they wrote about games. He ran it through issue 9, dated February and March of 1992, and then left with his deputy to finish their degrees.

Marcin Borkowski took over. He had been writing the IBM column in Bajtek and had authored one of the first Polish computer games, Puszka Pandory, but games were not his specialty and he said so. His first issue arrived so late that it shipped at the turn of July and August under a May and June cover date, and because he had assembled almost the whole thing alone he signed the articles under six different pseudonyms to hide it. In his opening note he warned readers that the magazine had been handed to people nobody sane would trust with mowing a lawn.

Print runs climbed to 130,000 an issue, where they stayed. Issue 54, dated September and October 1996, was the last one printed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the pages were for ~

This was not a review magazine with walkthroughs in the back. The walkthroughs were the product. Polish readers in 1991 were playing games that arrived years late through unlicensed copying, in English, with no translations and no localization of any kind, and most of them did not read English well enough to work out what a game wanted from them. So Top Secret printed complete solutions and maps that its writers drew by hand, and explained the controls, and covered six year old games alongside new ones because to a Polish player both were new. Criticism and scores took up almost none of the page count. A reader survey confirmed this was exactly what the audience wanted.

I was six years old when issue one came out and the conditions it was built for were recognizable from Turkey. Games came late, in English, on copied media, and nobody was translating them either. The difference is a decade and a medium. When I got stuck in a game, the solution was a text file somebody had uploaded, and my English was good enough to use it. Poland got there first and solved it on paper, at 130,000 copies a time.

~ the Zepsół ~

Borkowski hired a team and the team named itself the Zepsół, a deliberate misspelling of the Polish word for a group that turns it into something broken. It ran to nine or ten regular names in the masthead, among them Emil Leszczyński, Maciej Wiewiórski, Rafał Piasek, Dariusz Michalski, plus Aleksy Uchański and Piotr Gawrysiak, who wrote under a single shared byline. One of them described the magazine as a publication affiliated with a discussion club. They published photographs and comic strips of themselves, kept a careful running list of their own mistakes, and let jokes run for years past the point where new readers could follow them.

From issue 22 in January 1994 they ran a serialized fantasy story in which the characters were versions of the editors, and at the end of each episode they asked readers to write in and decide what the party should do next. The author wrote the following episode from the replies. It ran until issue 33 in December 1994. Bartłomiej Kluska, who has written the history of this period, argues that the same closed-door style that made the readership so loyal is what drove advertisers to the more serious competition and started the decline.

~ Agrobank ~

Agrobank was a small Polish bank and it failed in 1995. The Bajtek cooperative kept its savings there and lost around a hundred thousand zloty, which was a billion in the old currency, and its cash flow never recovered. The cooperative pledged both of its titles to Prószyński i Spółka, the owner of its printing house, which went on printing Bajtek and Top Secret for several months without being paid. In the autumn of 1996 the presses stopped. The magazine and the publisher that made it ended in the same season.

Axel Springer's Polish arm tried to bring the name back in the autumn of 2002 and gave up in March 2003 after four issues. There was one more, a single commemorative number printed for the Pixel Heaven event in 2017. The domain topsecret.pl now belongs to a Polish womenswear retailer that simply liked the name.

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