“Who needs another PC magazine now?” asked the first issue of PC Player, dated January 1993, looking at the pile of computer magazines on every kiosk. Its answer was a monthly about the fun side of “DOS life” that would not sink “auf Kinderzimmer-Niveau”, to nursery level. Two years later it was the best-selling computer games magazine in Germany.
Two editors from the games press
The magazine’s Chefredaktion was shared by two experienced games journalists. The first issue’s staff page introduced Heinrich Lenhardt as someone who had earned his living from game reviews for eight years and had once seen Bill Gates at an MSX press conference. Boris Schneider had programmed on the C64 after leaving school, come under Lenhardt’s influence, and spent some years as an expert on German versions of computer programs. The publisher was DMV Daten- und Medienverlag of Eschwege, whose Herausgeber was Michael Scharfenberger; the editorial office was in Munich. An issue cost DM 5.80.
Lenhardt was not shy of a fight with the industry. In May 1994 the magazine set him against Uwe Fürstenberg, marketing manager of MicroProse’s German office, who had announced higher prices for CD-ROM games because of “the much higher development costs”. A caption gave Lenhardt’s main argument: “CDs sind billig in der Herstellung und nahezu unkopierbar — also runter mit den Preisen!” CDs are cheap to make and almost impossible to copy, so bring the prices down.
Bigger than the “world’s leading” magazine
German magazines had their sales audited by the IVW. In December 1994 PC Player took aim at an advertisement in which Future Publishing, the British publisher, had called its PC Format “The World’s Leading PC Leisure Magazine”, quoting sales of 77,149 copies. A good joke, said a news item: PC Player had already sold around 5,000 copies more in the second quarter of 1994, by the IVW’s figures. “Next time, please research first, then brag.”
In March 1995 the editorial announced that the IVW had counted 140,729 copies sold in the last quarter of 1994. “PC Player ist erstmals Deutschlands meistverkaufte Computerspiele-Zeitschrift”: for the first time, Germany’s best-selling computer games magazine. The publisher, it joked, was already aiming at 200,000. The IVW’s yearly averages later put the peak at about 167,000 copies in 1996.
A change of editors
From March 1996 Lenhardt wrote for the magazine as a freelance from the United States, and Schneider ran it alone. In the spring of 1997 Jörg Langer, Schneider’s deputy, was responsible for it, and from May 1997 Ralf Müller was Chefredakteur. In January 1998 the magazine announced a comeback: “Gründungs-Chefredakteur Heinrich Lenhardt”, the founding editor, was returning, while Müller concentrated on editing Power Play. Manfred Duy, Lenhardt’s deputy from 1998, became Chefredakteur in 1999 and stayed until the end.
Sold twice
In February 1998 the masthead named a new publisher, WEKA Consumer Medien of Poing, part of the WEKA group. In September 1999 a note in the editorial reported a second sale, “Praktisch direkt vor dem Belichten unserer Seitenfilme”, just before the page films went to be exposed:
“Ab dieser Ausgabe gehört die PC Player nicht mehr zur WEKA-Verlagsgruppe, sondern zum Future Verlag GmbH. Wem dieser Name nichts sagen sollte: Future ist eines der führenden Unternehmen in der Spielezeitschriftenbranche und veröffentlicht alles in allem 108 Magazine, unter anderem die Marktführer in Großbritannien, Italien, Frankreich und USA wie beispielsweise die amerikanische PC Gamer.”
From this issue, it said, PC Player belonged to Future Verlag instead of the WEKA group, and for anyone who did not know the name, Future published 108 magazines, including the market leaders in Britain, Italy, France and the United States. Readers were promised that “alles wird wie gewohnt weiterlaufen”: everything would carry on as usual. The buyer was the same company whose sales claim the magazine had mocked five years before.
The end
It did not carry on for long. Sales fell from that peak, to an average of about 88,700 copies in the first quarter of 2001. The June 2001 issue, published from Future Verlag’s offices in Munich, ended as usual with a preview of the next month’s games. That next issue never appeared: Future closed PC Player, and its German business with it.
Sources
- PC Player 1/93, January 1993: editorial; staff page; masthead (publisher, editors, price).
- PC Player 5/94, May 1994: “Warum sind CD-ROM-Spiele eigentlich so teuer?” (Heinrich Lenhardt and Uwe Fürstenberg of MicroProse).
- PC Player 12/94, December 1994: news item on Future Publishing’s PC Format advertisement.
- PC Player 3/95, March 1995: editorial (IVW figure for the fourth quarter of 1994).
- PC Player 1/96 to 3/97, 5/97, 1/98, 2/98, 9/98, 1/99, 6/99: mastheads (editors and publisher); 3/96 (Lenhardt as freelance, reporting from the USA); 1/98, editorial (Lenhardt’s return).
- PC Player 9/99, September 1999, p. 2: editorial note on the sale to Future Verlag.
- PC Player 6/01, June 2001: masthead (Future Verlag GmbH, Munich; Manfred Duy) and preview page.
- “PC Player”, German Wikipedia (web, secondary): IVW yearly sales figures from 1993 to the first quarter of 2001, and the closure after issue 6/01. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Player