A Lore Dump on Two Obscure Magazines
I've been collecting digital magazines for two decades at this point, and misspent a chunk of my teen years reading British computer mags in print. I've always thought myself somewhat in the know on the subject; not an expert, by any means, but at least acquainted.
So when I found out last year about not one, but two, PC gaming periodicals from the UK that I'd never heard of, magazines which were nowhere to be found on Retromags or the Internet Archive, magazines that have generated barely a trace of online discussion, I sat up and took notice.
This article is a record of everything I've been able to find out about these two magazines, some of which can't be found with a search engine (well, it can now).
There are still significant gaps in this knowledge, so I plan to update this page with any more details that come to light, as well as links to scans.
PC Strategy Games
Crimson Publishing, 2000–2001
Crimson Publishing was a small magazine press, founded in 1999 by David Lester. They had a small stable of publications; their first title, What Laptop, was performing relatively well. But Lester had an interest in strategy games that went beyond personal: he was the former head of Impressions Games, the British studio that had produced the Caesar and Lords of the Realm series before being sold to Sierra On-Line in 1995. PC Gamer and PC Zone were established as the big two PC games magazines in the UK, but their remit was broad. Lester saw an opening in the market for a specialist magazine aimed at strategy fans.
For the editor, he headhunted journalist Martin Croft. Previously, Croft was the strategy editor for Ziff-Davis's PC Gaming World magazine (another mostly unpreserved title), but he was a veteran journalist; a writer and editor on publications like Popular Computing Weekly, Micro Adventurer, and Dragon User going back to 1984.
The first issue of PC Strategy Games hit the shelves in Spring 2000, with an April cover date, costing £4.99 (with a coverdisc). Publisher David Lester staked out his goals on the back page:
I feel that the current magazines in the UK do a very good job entertaining their audience, with a frequently flippant, uncaring and irreverent look at games. I don't think any of them cater for the older, better-educated strategy gamer who's serious about gaming. We will.
According to the catalogue of the British Library, PC Strategy Games ran for sixteen issues, from April 2000 to June 2001. (This includes a Xmas 2000 issue.)
I've managed to pick up the first four issues of this magazine. They'll be scanned and uploaded in the coming months; when they are, links will be added here.
- Issue 1 (April 2000) • archive.org • blog post
Strategy Player
Paragon Publishing, 2000–2002
As if the discovery of one obscure British PC strategy games publication was insufficient, there's a second, about which even less is known.
Paragon launched their strategy magazine six months after Crimson's; whether or not this was in response we'll likely never know. But two things are apparent: Strategy Player had more pages for the same price (112 to PCSG's 100), and Paragon was an established publisher with more shelf presence. Play, 64 Magazine, and Dreamcast Magazine were already familiar to many gamers, and it seems possible that Paragon had a more mature distribution network than Crimson. Five issues in, editor Geoff Spick mentioned that the title was:
now firmly established as the best selling PC Strategy magazine in the UK.
Inevitably, the competition between these two niche publications didn't last. In May 2001, Paragon purchased PC Strategy Games from Crimson for an undisclosed sum and merged the two titles.
In Paragon's announcement, they promised that though PCSG was being discontinued, its tone would live on:
Strategy Player, the new issue of which goes on-sale on 7 June, will combine a strong mix of both titles. Written for a more intelligent and discerning gamer, Strategy Player will adopt a unique reviewing style, reviewing and previewing the biggest strategy games from around the world.
However, I don't know if any of PCSG's writers were retained by the company. (Editor Martin Croft had already departed.)
The combined title lasted less than a year. According to the British Library catalogue, there were 18 issues of Strategy Player: October 2000 to January 2002. Like the other publication, it's listed as having 13 issues per year.
I've found only one issue of Strategy Player for sale so far: issue 5. As was common with Paragon titles, there's no cover date, though if there were it would likely have been January 2001. I also have the accompanying cover disk, which doesn't seem to have been dumped. Both will be digitised and uploaded in the future.
My thanks to Martin Croft and Charles Fulton for their assistance in the research for this post.
