Feature: Gaming Mag Graveyard! Ten Mags that Died Fast. Subscribe to this RSS feed

They couldn't find readers. They couldn't find advertising. Or maybe they just couldn't find a clue. We count down game media's biggest print flops.

Starting a magazine, it's occasionally said, is a lot like opening a restaurant -- you can nail everything absolutely on the mark and still fail colossally.

Since Electronic Games first debuted in 1981, dozens and dozens of video-game magazines have been launched by publishers all around the United States and elsewhere. A few of them were wildly successful; they're the ones like Nintendo Power and Electronic Gaming Monthly, still truckin' along after nearly 20 years. Others didn't quite make it -- because advertisers didn't like them, or it was the wrong mag for the wrong time, or maybe they were just plain unlucky.

Join us as we take a look at ten US/UK game magazines that weren't able to last a year in publication, ranked informally in order of how substantial a flop it proved to be. (Note that we love all game magazines equally, so if you think we're picking on one particular mag or another too much in this feature, just consider it tough love.)

10-Ultimate Gamer (Larry Flynt Publishing, 1995-96)
Number of Issues: 7

Premise: "One video-game trade publication describes itself as the games Bible," the opening page of the first issue reads. "Introducing the New Testament." The "Bible" here is Next Generation, Imagine Publishing's mature-oriented mag that debuted earlier in 1995, and Ultimate Gamer was meant to be a somewhat more down-to-earth version of Next Gen -- "We're not a seriously pretentious magazine written for industry insiders and developers, focusing on games that won't be out for years," editor-in-chief Chris Gore wrote. This translated into an emphasis on reviews, text-heavy features, and reviews packed with screenshots -- in fact, the first issue experimented with having no review text at all, putting all game commentary into copious screenshot captions instead.

Signs of Trouble: UG was picked on by the fledgling Internet community of the time for occasionally getting facts wrong (including the specs of the Sega Saturn in the first issue) and occasionally veering into editorial territory Next Generation avoided, including coverage of "game chicks." The magazine was a dollar cheaper than Next Gen, but not quite as well put together, even when later issues made efforts to copy their clean white-based design.

UG wound up closing in late 1995 without much comment; its lasting legacy is a feature in the final issue that covered long-lost prototypes of Atari games, including the first reveal of the 2600 version of arcade classic Tempest.

9- Mr. Dreamcast (Magical Media, 2000)
Number of Issues: 2

Premise: A fairly obscure title even in its homeland of the United Kingdom, Mr. DC (the name of the blue swirly thing on the top left corner of the cover) was launched in mid-2000, at a time when debuting any sort of Dreamcast magazine, much less one aimed toward children, was a little... risky, to say the least. "We just felt it was good to be in the market early and to see if we could challenge some of that received wisdom, I guess," editor-in-chief Caspar Field told UK trade publication CTW in 2000. "Certainly the feedback we've been getting from readers and from kids has been fantastic." /p>

Signs of Trouble: As you'd expect, Mr. DC was an extremely colorful magazine, divering away from most other Dreamcast publication's clean and Next Gen-like look. Strategy guides and previews take up much of the real estate, and a section in the rear takes a jury of 16 middle-school-age gamers and gets their viewpoints on all the new DC titles of the moment. In short, it was a pretty extensive misread of the Dreamcast's user base at the time -- i.e., hardcore gamers and Sega maniacs -- and the resulting magazine didn't last very long.

8- Maximum (EMAP, 1995)
Number of Issues: 7

Premise: Another UK magazine, Maximum is bar-none the most "hardcore" nationally distributed magazine ever created. Chiefly created by Richard Leadbetter and Gary Harrod (both better known for their work on seminal UK console mag Mean Machines), the magazine was meant to be a sort of anti-Edge, a title that you could tell the editors really put all of their heart and soul into. Most game features ran for upwards of 20 pages per game, and every bit of text was fact-checked to perfection, something the editors hoped the readers would appreciate. "We were extremely anal about every aspect of Maximum," Leadbetter said in a later interview. "Gary would spend far too much time on the design, screenshots had to be perfect. We'd even take high resolution screenshots of low resolution games to ensure that every pixel was captured."

Signs of Trouble: This obsessive attention to detail, coupled with an editorial staff of only three people for the first three issues of the 164-page magazine, meant extensive delays in getting many issues to newsstands. By the end, the editors were too burnt out to continue, with sales remaining disappointing and the publisher breathing down their necks. "The bottom line is, it was a cool mag, but it was ultimately a waste of time, more appreciated now than it was while it was being published," Leadbetter says.

7- Polygon (Deviation, 2003-04)
Number of Issues: 9

Premise: Polygon got its start when Dane Baker, co-founder of video-game news site Core Magazine, bought out Silicon Magazine (a free pamphlet-like mag mainly distributed to video rental stores) in early 2003. Although Polygon was technically a continuation of Silicon, it was in reality a completely different magazine, one written mostly by Dane and other Core Magazine staff.

Originally distributed to Silicon's core market but later made available on mainstream newsstands, Polygon took an adult-oriented approach to game-magazine design, with a clear, simple design (created by art director Jay Vidheecharoen, who now runs an independent design studio in Seattle) and lengthy previews, reviews and developer profiles. The front-page editorial each month was written by a rotating cast of developers starting with issue 2, and very few other mags made similarly exhaustive efforts to chronicle people in the industry.

Signs of Trouble: The highly dev-oriented editorial wasn't very unique in magazines even by the time Polygon was launched, and the magazine (while successfully attracting several big-name advertisers) had difficulty finding a niche. The title was poorly distributed for much of its run, and thanks to a sparsely-updated official website at polygonmag.com, many people (including myself until about Issue 5 or so) were unaware that the magazine had launched at all. The title folded with the March 2004 issue, with a letter to subscribers dated March 22 making the closure official.

6- GameStar (IDG, 2004)
Number of Issues: 3

Premise: The brainchild of former GamePro editor Wataru Maruyama, the first issue of GameStar made a huge splash when distributed for free to visitors to the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo. IDG publishes a series of PC mags across Europe titled GameStar, but the US edition was a multiplatform mag, with a free PC demo disc and adult-oriented coverage of all the platforms, as well as DVDs and electronic gadgets.

Signs of Trouble: The issue distributed at E3 was large, robust, and packed with non-game-related advertising (a rarity in the game-mag business), but the next issue, which did not hit stands until the following October, was much smaller. Like incite before it, GameStar had a great deal of electronics and "celebrity" coverage that wasn't strictly related to games, something that turned off the core audience of game-mag buyers.

Despite this, however, GameStar was still generally well-received, and it was something of a surprise to the editors when IDG laid them off and shuttered the mag in early 2005. (Maruyama has a unique knack for being on staff when magazines close -- he was there for Ultimate Gamer's final issue, as well as VideoGames'.)