Xenia Edizioni
Took Newsfield's Italian titles in 1991 and kept one running to 1999
Xenia Edizioni of Milan took over the Italian editions of Zzap! and The Games Machine in September 1991, dropped the Newsfield licence credit the following month, and published TGM for a further seven and a half years — long after the British magazine and its publisher had both ceased to exist.
Xenia Edizioni was a Milanese publisher that took over the two Italian magazines Edizioni Hobby had been publishing under licence from Newsfield — Zzap! and The Games Machine — in September 1991.
The handover is legible in the colophons because everything except the publisher stayed still. The tribunal registration numbers, the printer at Cernusco sul Naviglio, the distributor on Via Famagosta, the advertising agency at Piazzale Archinto and the direttore responsabile Roberto Ferri all carried straight across. Only two things changed: the name of the editore, and — one month later — the disappearance of the line “Su licenza di NEWSFIELD PUBLICATION”.
That timing is not a coincidence. Newsfield went into liquidation in 1991. From October 1991 the Italian editions stopped crediting a company that no longer existed, and became Italian magazines outright.
What it did with them
Zzap! ran under Xenia until December 1993, ending a year after the British Zzap!64 and shortly before Commodore Force closed.
The Games Machine ran until May 1999 — nearly nine years after the British edition’s last issue. Under Xenia it acquired supplements of its own, including seasonal specials and a bound-in Amiga section.
⚠ That Amiga supplement was titled Amiga Action, which is also the name of an unrelated British monthly from Gollner Publishing. They are separate publications: the Italian one is a 13-to-32-page section inside TGM, the British one a 90-to-160-page magazine in its own right. See Amiga Action for the British title.
See also
- Edizioni Hobby — its predecessor on both titles
- The Games Machine (Italy)
- Newsfield