Retro Gamer was meant to be a single issue. Live Publishing, a Cheshire company whose titles included PC magazines, a cheats magazine and a PlayStation reviews magazine, launched it in January 2004 to see whether anyone would pay £5.99 for a magazine about games that were twenty years old. The first issue sold 11,922 copies on UK newsstands, and WH Smith asked for more. Eighteen months later sales had halved, Live was bankrupt and issue 19 sat finished on a computer with no money to print it. A new Bournemouth publisher bought the title from the receivers, and the magazine has come out ever since, passing issue 200 in 2019, still interviewing the people who made 1980s games and telling how those games were made.
Fast facts
- First issue: on sale 15 January 2004, 100 pages, £5.99.
- Publishers: Live Publishing, issues 1 to 18 (2004 to 2005); Imagine Publishing, from issue 19 (late 2005) to 2016; Future since October 2016.
- Editors: Martyn Carroll (issues 1 to 18); Darran Jones, deputy editor under editor in chief Simon Phillips from issue 19 and editor by issue 23, still editor in 2026.
- Frequency: at Live, quarterly at first, then bi-monthly, then monthly, and finally four-weekly.
- ISSN: 1742-3155.
A one-off from Macclesfield
The idea came from Live’s editorial director, Wayne Williams, who first raised it in 2002. The publisher, Robin Wilkinson, was not convinced there was a market, and it waited until a launch meeting in 2003. Williams wanted titles that “were easy to produce and could be done without needing additional staff”, and thought a retro magazine was “something that Future or Paragon wouldn’t even consider”.
Williams put forward Martyn Carroll, who had joined Live as a staff writer in March 2000 and was editing a cheats magazine called TipStation. Carroll got the go-ahead at the end of November 2003, with the issue due before Christmas. That gave him three weeks to fill 100 pages, with no freelance budget, while still editing TipStation and two children’s comics. He wanted “a fleshed-out fanzine, packed with features that went deeper than those on the internet”, so he begged articles from colleagues: Aaron Birch from Live’s PC magazines wrote several pieces “under various names to make it look like we had a proper team”. The one outside commission, £300 for a six-page Sinclair feature, went to a former Live editor, John Southern. Art editor Mat Mabe based the first cover on the box art for Space Invaders on the Atari 2600, and built the magazine’s look from period loading screens, adverts and cover designs.
Carroll had argued for a price under a fiver. Wilkinson reasoned that there was no rival and that the likely readers, “blokes in their late twenties, early thirties with a decent job”, would not mind paying a pound more, and set it at £5.99. Each Live issue carried a coverdisc, which Carroll had to compile himself because there was no disk editor.
The magazine was not quite alone. Darran Jones, who would later edit it, had been building a retro section inside the games magazine gamesTM, and the best of that section’s first 24 issues had been collected as a £9.99 bookazine, Retro. Writing in Retro Gamer 50, Jones admitted he had been “far from happy” to hear that a rival publisher was launching a retro magazine and would “encroach on my turf”.
Rise and slide
To get the first issue into WH Smith, Live had to say it would be quarterly, though Williams’s plan had been “to just publish the one issue and see how it went”. It sold better than anyone expected, Smith’s increased its order, and Retro Gamer went bi-monthly from issue 2 (26 February 2004) and monthly from issue 4. Carroll moved onto it full time with 16 more pages and a freelance budget; Richard Burton and David Crookes were the first freelancers to pitch. Shortly after issue 2 went on sale, 440 people had subscribed, a figure Live’s PC Tools had taken 15 issues to reach. Issue 3 was the best seller of the Live era: 14,204 copies in the UK and 2,390 overseas.
The magazine also made its own news. When the development disks for The Mega-Tree, the unfinished third Miner Willy game by Matthew Smith and his collaborators, came up for charity auction on eBay, Live gave Carroll £1,000 to bid. He got them for £207, and Burton wrote up their contents in an 11-page feature in issue 5.
Sales did not hold. Issue 4 fell to 8,382 UK copies, and by issue 9 they had levelled off at about 8,000. Live tried bagged extras: an A2 poster of game art, a 32-page Your Sinclair tribute issue with issue 9, for which Live had to ask Future, which “initially had no idea that it actually owned the title”, and an Oliver Frey wall calendar. None of it moved sales. WH Smith copies of issue 18 later came with a ZZAP!64 tribute. Williams asked for shorter articles, comparing the magazine to “a stodgy slice of Battenberg cake”, and issue 13 brought a plainer redesign and lighter regular sections. It sold 7,611 copies; issue 14 sold 5,144, and after that sales “barely lifted above the 6,000 mark”.
Bankruptcy and rescue
By the second Classic Gaming Expo UK in August 2005, freelancers had gone unpaid for months. In Carroll’s account in issue 50, “Live didn’t have enough cash to print the finished issue 19, so the pages just sat there, waiting to be uploaded.” Soon after the show Wilkinson told Carroll and Birch to clear their desks: “Live was bankrupt and the receivers had been called in.” Subscribers lost issues they had paid for, and Williams and Wilkinson were left with debts from bank loan guarantees.
“The only good came in October 2005,” Carroll wrote, “when Imagine Publishing announced that it had acquired the magazine from the receivers.” Imagine Publishing was a Bournemouth company set up that year by former Paragon staff. Its issue 19, with December 2005 release listings, opened “It’s great to be back”. The coverdisc had gone and the cover price was a pound lower. Imagine’s managing director, Damian Butt, wrote that he was glad “to secure its future. It also means I can write about Elite a lot”; its creative director, Mark Kendrick, noted that it had “been 20 years since I first worked on the legendary Crash and Zzap!64”. Simon Phillips was editor in chief and Darran Jones deputy editor, and Carroll returned as a contributor with a Spectrum feature.
Under Imagine and Future
Jones was named editor by issue 23 and has stayed in the job since. In issue 100, published in 2012, he wrote that when he started he had said he would be happy to reach issue 35. That issue came bundled with a reprint of issue 1, “as it shows how the magazine has evolved over the past eight years”, and thanked “Martyn Carroll and everyone at Live Publishing”.
Imagine also used the name for “bookazines”, one-off books sold on the magazine shelves, such as The Retro Gamer Collection annuals from 2007 and single-machine books on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Atari in 2012. In 2016 Future, which had published Your Sinclair and many of the 1980s and 1990s magazines Retro Gamer writes about, bought Imagine, completing the deal on 21 October 2016. It has published Retro Gamer since. Issue 200 appeared in October 2019, issue 280 in 2025, and Darran Jones was still editor in 2026.
What is in it
The shape Carroll set in 2004 has lasted: long retrospectives on games, machines and companies, and interviews with the people who made them. Endgame began in issue 2 and was the longest-running regular section by issue 50. Desert Island Disks, a developer interview built around their favourite games, ran through the Live issues and carried on under Imagine, whose first issue opened a two-part interview with the Pickford brothers. The writers were often readers first: Burton had helped start the Amstrad fanzine WACCI in the mid-1980s, and Crookes was a former contributor to Amstrad Action and Amiga Format who wrote in to propose a Dizzy feature.
Because it interviews people decades after the events, Retro Gamer is a record of recollections: first-hand, and often the only published account, but written long after the fact. Where a period magazine from the time exists, it is the stronger source for dates and figures.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 2 (Live Publishing, 2004): masthead and imprint (editor Martyn Carroll, art editor Mat Mabe; Live Publishing Int Ltd, Europa House, Adlington Park, Macclesfield; ISSN 1742-3155).
- Retro Gamer issue 19 (Imagine Publishing, 2005): editorial “It’s great to be back”, staff introductions (Butt, Kendrick, Phillips, Carroll), masthead (Simon Phillips editor in chief, Darran Jones deputy editor; Richmond House, 33 Richmond Hill, Bournemouth), December 2005 release listings, Desert Island Disks with the Pickford brothers.
- Retro Gamer issues 20 to 23 (Imagine Publishing, 2005 to 2006): mastheads (Jones as deputy editor, then editor by issue 23).
- Retro Gamer issue 40 (2007): coverdisc contents, including the Retro bookazine compiled from the first 24 issues of gamesTM.
- Retro Gamer issue 50 (2008): Darran Jones’s editorial; Martyn Carroll, the history of the Live Publishing issues, from p. 40 (the launch, price, sales and subscription figures, the Mega-Tree auction, the tribute issues, the redesign, Live’s collapse and the October 2005 acquisition), with recollections from Wayne Williams, Mat Mabe, Richard Burton, David Crookes and Aaron Birch.
- Retro Gamer issues 5, 10 and 13 (2004 to 2005): Desert Island Disks.
- Retro Gamer issue 100 (2012): Darran Jones’s editorial and the issue 1 reprint.
- The Retro Gamer Collection volume 1 (Imagine Publishing, 2007) and The ZX Spectrum Book (Imagine Publishing, 2012): imprints.
- Companies House, Imagine Publishing Limited, company 05374037: the completion of Future’s purchase in October 2016.
- Wikipedia, “Retro Gamer” (web, secondary, consulted September 2026): issue 200 in October 2019; Darran Jones as editor in 2026.
- Magzter, Retro Gamer issue 280 listing (web, secondary): issue 280 published in 2025.