The Games Machine
Newsfield's answer to a rival's good year
Launched October 1987 as a multi-format magazine from the publisher of CRASH and Zzap!64 — a deliberate departure, and by a competitor's account a direct response to the success of a revamped Computer & Video Games.
The Games Machine was Newsfield’s multi-format magazine, launched in October 1987. Its own first issue frames it as “a brand new magazine… that represents something of a departure for Newsfield the publishers” of CRASH and Zzap!64.
Departure is the right word. Newsfield had built its reputation on single-format magazines that knew one machine intimately. TGM covered everything.
Why it launched
A rival publication is more candid about the reason than TGM was. Writing in August 1987, the C16/Plus 4 Handbook records:
September 19th has seen the launch of yet another computer magazine, from the Newsfield stable. Angered by the success of a re-vamped Computer and Video Games, along comes Newsfield’s answer with the Games Machine.
⚠ That is a competitor’s characterisation of a motive, not Newsfield’s own account, and the launch date it gives differs from the October cover date on issue one. It is worth recording because it places TGM in a specific competitive moment: C&VG had invented the multi-format magazine in 1981 and, six years on, had revamped successfully enough to provoke a response.
Fast facts
- First issue: October 1987.
- Publisher: Newsfield, of Ludlow.
- Scope: multi-format, review-led — issue two describes “the next 38 pages” as “the core of” the magazine.
- In this library: 34 UK issues, 3,651 pages — against 112 issues of the Italian edition.
- Spectrum reviews: 303 scored reviews recorded in ZXDB.
How it scored
TGM appears throughout this Vault as the sceptical voice. Its marks tend to sit below the Spectrum specialists on the same games — Chase H.Q. 91% against CRASH’s 95%, R-Type 90% against 92%, Out Run 61% against 72% — which is what a multi-format reviewer does to a conversion. Judged against the arcade original and the 16-bit versions on the next page, an 8-bit port has less room.
Ex-TGM writers turn up later in the record: Amstrad Action in 1990 describes a magazine produced by “a group of ex-Newsfield writers (mostly from The Games Machine)”.
The edition that outlived it
Newsfield licensed TGM to Edizioni Hobby of Milan, whose first Italian issue appeared in September 1988 carrying the line “Su licenza di NEWSFIELD PUBLICATION”. The British magazine closed after issue 34 in September 1990 and Newsfield collapsed the year after. The Italian edition changed publisher, dropped the licence credit, and ran until May 1999.
Counted across this library’s whole holdings, then, TGM is not a three-year magazine. It is an eleven-year one, and its longest phase is Italian — 112 issues and 11,563 pages against Britain’s 34 and 3,651. See The Games Machine (Italy).