Play time
| Play time
|
|
|---|---|
| description | Computer game magazine |
| language | German |
| publishing company | Computec Verlag (Germany) |
| First edition | May 1991 |
| attitude | August 1995 |
| Frequency of publication | per month |
| Editor-in-chief | Christian Geltenpoth |
| ZDB | 1275714-7 |
The playtime was a computer games -Magazine that from May 1991 to August 1995 by Computec publishing house was published. It had an initial circulation of 250,000 copies and was initially sold at a price of DM 1.00.
history
It contained game tests and tips for the PC and the home computers C64 , Atari ST and Amiga as well as for the game consoles Sega Mega Drive , Super NES , Game Boy and Sega Game Gear, which were popular at the time . It was published monthly, but a double edition appeared in the summer, so that eleven editions were published per year. In addition to the game reports, there were also reports on game consoles. Reports on Neo Geo , Atari Jaguar , 3DO and other game consoles have also been published. The editor-in-chief was Christian Geltenpoth from the first edition , the editorial team included Hans Ippisch .
The game solutions were bundled in a separate booklet. The booklets were from issues 10/1991 to 1/1993 in pocket size DIN A6, afterwards they were stapled as DIN A4 booklets in the middle of the booklet and from edition 4/1994 as consecutively numbered permanent collectors provided with a page number and a constantly supplementing game solution index . This idea was adopted in the Amiga Games and PC Games 1992 branches .
From issue 12/1993 there was also the C64 Three in One Kombi. In addition to the magazine, it contained the two disk magazines Magic Disk 64 and Game On , which have not been sold separately since then. The disk magazines Magic Disk 64 and Game On were discontinued with issue 7/1995. Play Time appeared for the last time in issue 8 + 9/1995 . With the headline “ Game Over ” on the last page (114) of this issue, the then deputy editor-in-chief Christian Müller justified the decision by stating that a “multi-format magazine” like Play Time had no future. Among other things, he blamed the spread of personal computers , which became affordable from that time on. He also said that future games will mainly be made for this platform only. He referred to Play-Time replacement, i.e. magazines that report platform-specific, and thanked the readers for the loyalty.
Letters to the editor
Letters to the editor are still a kind of cult today. The trademark of Rainer Rosshirt, the editor who answered the letters to the editor (he is currently still active in the game magazine PC Games ) was, in addition to interest and a certain acquired professional competence, his satirical and ironic comments on questions, requests and suggestions from readers. In addition to technical questions about hardware and software, criticism and suggestions about the magazine were also addressed. Sometimes it was very abstract, for example when it came to the future of the legendary C64 . Occasionally, threads even ran between several readers and Rosshirt through several issues.
To what extent the letters to the editor were genuine at the time is difficult to understand today. It should be emphasized that the simple style of the editorial staff around Rainer Rosshirt gave every layperson a reference about various problem cases and could easily familiarize themselves with the matter without ever having had practical experience. Rosshirt also knew how to use various examples from everyday life for comparison, which enabled the readers to understand his point of view. He knew how to interestingly discuss abstract topics in a computer game magazine and to arouse the interest of the readers.
Edition
The circulation was 76,207 in quarter 2/1994, 52,080 in quarter 3/1994 and 63,331 copies in quarter 4/1994. In quarter 1/1995 it was 42,794 copies
Television broadcast
In 1994 three issues of the program PlayTime TV ran every Sunday on RTL II with Stephan Heller, in which players played certain video games against each other and new computer games were presented.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Dauskardt, Helge Gerndt, Margret Wiese: The industrialized man: Lectures of the 28th German Folklore Congress in Hagen from October 7th to 11th 1991, Ardey-Verlag, 1993, p. 452 [1]
- ↑ www.editorix.org (cached by Google)
- ↑ Episode 2 PlayTime TV
- ↑ Playtime TV on fernsehserien.de