MCV issue 121 (2 February 2001)

The first of four 2001 issues (there were about fifty, I mean I only own four) of your favourite UK video game trade magazine and mine.

In this issue:

Big changes at Nintendo UK for retail customers. Some real how-the-sausage stuff—distribution, price setting, minimum orders—we seldom hear outside the trade press.
Eidos's Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is the fastest game to hit a million UK sales and the bestselling game of 2000. I can't even name a quiz game released in 2025, much less imagine it being the #1 game of the year. Different times.
The Dreamcast dream is dead, as Sega announce games for the PS2 and GBA. In fact, there was bigger news: they'd killed the Dreamcast and left the hardware business on January 31st, between this issue being locked and being distributed. So we now have an insight into how many days out of date these issues were by the time anybody was reading them.
Feature: everyone wants a piece of mobile gaming! Not smartphones, those are still six years away. Not even J2ME, which wouldn't land on phones for another year. God, no. We're talking Nokias and WAP (that acronym didn't age well).
Top of the all-formats chart this week: Millionaire (of course), Smackdown 2 and FIFA 2001.