Gamers (magazine)
| GAMERS
|
|
|---|---|
| description | Video game magazine |
| Area of Expertise | Sega game consoles |
| language | German |
| publishing company | MLV-Verlag (Germany) |
| Headquarters | Hamburg |
| First edition | 1991 |
| attitude | 1996 |
| ISSN (print) | 0944-5315 |
The Gamers (own spelling GAMERS ) was a magazine that appeared between 1991 and 1996 and was the first German magazine to deal exclusively with video games from the Sega company . During the course of the publication, Gamers reported on the consoles Master System , Game Gear , Mega Drive , Mega-CD , Mega Drive 32X and Saturn .
concept
The magazine's focus was on critical reporting. The independence of Sega and other manufacturers was proclaimed as a main selling point. This was in contrast to the Club Nintendo magazine, which was widespread at the time and which, under the direct influence of the manufacturer Nintendo, only advertised new releases. This critical reporting meant that games for which advertisements were placed in the magazine sometimes received poor ratings; including important Sega games.
Furthermore, the magazine was critical of the Mega-Drive hardware extensions Mega-CD and 32X ; the majority of the games offered for the expensive expansions received below-average ratings, and the editors issued an express warning against purchasing the mega-CD.
Such evaluations and recommendations strengthened the readers' trust in the independence of the magazine, since the success of Sega products was fundamentally vital for a magazine specializing in Sega, and the slipping of those products was not conducive to it.
In order to do justice to the largely young readership, the games were rated as positive or negative tendencies according to the German school grading system with grades from 1 to 6 and the additions "plus" or "minus". In addition, sub-ratings were given for the areas of graphics and sound; However, these were not included in the overall rating, which should only reflect the actual fun of the game. Later, in addition to the main article and the rating boxes, short comments by individual editors were added to reflect subjective tastes.
In addition to the extensive test area, Gamers contained regular sections with news, tips and tricks, previews of upcoming games, letters to the editor and reports on other forms of media. There were current reports on trade fairs as well as interviews and background reports on the creation of a game. Later on, extras such as posters or trading cards were added irregularly.
history
The first issue of Gamers was published by MLV-Verlag in December 1991 and was numbered 01/92. From the middle of 1993 MVL-Verlag also signed for the publication of the magazine Total! responsible, which, under the leadership of the Gamers editorial team, was to apply the proven Gamers concept to reporting on products from Sega's main competitor Nintendo . Gamers was initially published bimonthly by a small two to three-person editorial team, but thanks to the growing popularity of the Sega game consoles and the increased number of radios, it was possible to switch to a monthly publication after issue 5/94; At the same time, another magazine, GamePro, was launched in the editorial team , which was supposed to report on video games from all manufacturers as well as PC games. This multiple burden on the editorial staff was expressed in the fact that test reports on games that were published for several devices were sometimes identical in the different magazines. In such cases, only the scoring box took account of the version differences.
Bankruptcy and end
Shortly after the publication of issue 12/95 of Gamers, MVL-Verlag had to file for bankruptcy , according to the editorial team, despite successful sales of the magazines Gamers and Total !, . All three publications were discontinued without notice. The almost completed edition 01/96 was therefore not available for sale. Some of the members of the editorial team then founded the X-Plain Verlag and worked on taking over finished reports and a new edition of Gamers and Total! to manufacture. The Gamers 2/96 appeared in the newly founded publishing house New Gamers . According to the editorial team, MVL-Verlag had verbally given them the rights to the magazine.
Large amounts of information from the old publisher, including readers' mail, subscriber data and results from competitions, were not available to the young publisher and should be resolved by reporting those affected. Shortly after this edition went on sale, the managing director of MVL obtained the recall of the edition and denied having assigned the rights to gamers to the new publisher. Since the situation in contrast to the rights to Total! whose assignment was proven could not be immediately cleared, this meant the end of the gamers. The young company was unable to conduct a lengthy legal battle over the matter.
All of this was explained to the readers in a detailed editorial , which introduced Gambler 4/96. This special issue on the topic of Sega was nothing more than Gamers 03/96, which was almost completed before the intervention of the MVL Verlag, which was still put on the market in this way and was intended to inform the readership about the second, this time final, end of the magazine.
Special editions
In the course of the existence of the Gamers four special editions appeared. A fifth edition, which should only deal with the games around the popular Sega mascot Sonic the Hedgehog , was announced but never published.
The published editions are:
- Gamers Special 1/93: Best of Sega Tests, Tips & Tricks . Here a mixture of well-known older and new games for the Sega consoles was presented and supplemented in part with detailed solutions and small tips.
- Gamers Special 2/93: Sports by Sega . A special issue in which the sports games, which were regarded as a particular strength of the Sega consoles at the time, were presented and game-related tactics were revealed.
- Gamers Special 3/93: Action by Sega . Edition focused on tests and solutions for popular action games. Particular attention was on Europe's first test of the long-awaited extended Mega Drive version of the arcade and on the competitive system SNES advanced to seller Street Fighter II set.
- Gamers Special 1/94: Best of 1993 . Originally planned as a special edition only on the Sega Mega-CD released in Germany last year , this last Gamers Special has been converted into an annual review of 1993 due to the fact that the software for Sega's latest device was insufficient in quality and quantity in the opinion of the editors .
Furthermore, two gamers paperback books with tips & tricks were published; one dealt with the Sega Mega Drive , the other with the Sega Master System and the Sega Game Gear .
controversy
A report by Julian Eggebrecht about the technology of the Mega Drive, in which the SNES , the main competitor of Sega's top console at the time, was described as an 8-bit system, caused a particular stir . This was received with some horror, as Sega and Nintendo's marketing focused largely on the fact that their machines were 16-bit devices. Most of the young players were not aware that this could not be clearly classified and that it was not to be equated with actual performance, and the actually technically legitimate statement was taken by some SNES owners as agitation. This report sparked the debates that took place in school playgrounds and jokingly called the "console war" between the young followers of both brands.
editorial staff
Many editors known in the German-speaking video game magazine landscape have worked on Gamers over the years, including Boris Schneider , Heinrich Lenhardt , Hans-Joachim Amann, Torsten Oppermann, Julian Eggebrecht, Klaus-Dieter Hartwig and Reza Abdolali.