SegaMags is a website that focuses on British Sega magazines. Sega… magazines? Yep, that’s right. Sega magazines. And only the ones that were published in the United Kingdom. Why, you ask? Well, allow me to explain…
During its years as a console manufacturer, Sega enjoyed a huge amount of success in the United Kingdom — most notably with its Mega Drive console, which dominated the UK’s 16-bit video game market1. Out of this success came a lucrative and fiercely competitive market for independent Sega magazines — magazines that were entirely dedicated to Sega’s video games and consoles. These magazines were sold (typically on a monthly basis) in shops, supermarkets and newsagents around the country. At their peak, over 600,000 copies of the various Sega magazines were being sold every month2, with the best-selling titles achieving monthly circulation figures in excess of 100,000 copies per issue3. Bear in mind that this was a time before the internet had become mainstream, so video game magazines were essentially the only way of getting the latest information on video games (whether it was news, reviews, guides, cheats, or in-depth features).
Between October 1989 and May 2002, over 650 unique Sega magazine issues were published in the UK, and they contain a wealth of Sega-related material that still hasn’t found its way online. SegaMags hopes to change that. Over the coming months, we’ll be delving into our archive of Sega magazines and reporting back with all the neat little nuggets that we find along the way. We’ll also seek-out some of the talented people who created the UK’s Sega magazines and (if we’re lucky!) hear what they have to say about their time working on the magazines.
Other themes and goals of the SegaMags website include:
- To complete the SegaMags archive (which aims to secure a copy of every Sega magazine issue ever published in the UK),
- To provide tips and features for collectors of Sega magazines,
- To chart the rise and fall of Sega in the UK.
In the long-term, we aim to establish SegaMags as the definitive go-to website for collectors of Sega magazines. More generally, we hope that anybody with an interest in Sega (or the British video game culture of the 1980s-1990s) will enjoy checking us out.
Have fun!
