The Games Machine (Italy)

The Games Machine was published in Italy under licence from Newsfield from September 1988. This library holds 112 Italian issues against 34 British ones. The magazine Britain remembers as a short-lived three-year experiment ran in Italy for close to eleven years.

The licence

Issue 1’s colophon states it plainly: “Su licenza di NEWSFIELD PUBLICATION” — under licence from Newsfield Publication. The publisher was Edizioni Hobby of Milan, and the arrangement was not new. The editorial on the same page, signed Roberto Ferri, credits “gli amici della Newsfield che ancora una volta hanno creduto nelle nostre capacità” — the friends at Newsfield who once again believed in our abilities. Once again, because Edizioni Hobby had been publishing Zzap! under the same licence since May 1986.

The Italian edition was not a translation of the British one in the way the phrase usually implies. It took Newsfield material — Andrew Braybrook’s development diaries, reportage by Julian Rignall, the Gary Penn and Gary Liddon double act — and set it alongside Italian editorial with its own staff and letters page.

It also had a different pitch. The British TGM was multi-format across 8-bit and 16-bit. Its Italian counterpart opened by claiming to be “prima in Italia, una rivista interamente dedicata al divertimento elettronico ed al sedici bit” — the first magazine in Italy given over entirely to electronic entertainment and to 16-bit. Where the British title had been Newsfield’s answer to a rival, the Italian one was staking a claim on a machine generation.

What happened when the licensor died

Newsfield went into liquidation in 1991. The Italian colophons record what that looked like from Milan, and the sequence is unusually legible because the magazine printed the same block every month:

Issues to July 1991	September 1991	From October 1991
Edizioni Hobby	Xenia Edizioni	Xenia Edizioni
“Su licenza di NEWSFIELD PUBLICATION”	licence line still present	licence line gone

The publisher changed first; the Newsfield credit was dropped the month after. Everything else in the colophon carried on unaltered — the same tribunal registration (Milan no. 587 of 19 September 1988), the same printer at Cernusco sul Naviglio, the same distributor on Via Famagosta, the same advertising agency at Piazzale Archinto. Roberto Ferri, who signed the first editorial in 1988, is direttore responsabile under Xenia in 1992.

Zzap! moved on exactly the same two months, which is why this reads as one transfer of a Milanese operation rather than two separate deals.

The licence ended with the licensor. The magazine did not. It ran another seven and a half years and closed in May 1999, by which point nothing about it was British except the name on the cover.

Why this entry exists

A Vault written only from British holdings gets The Games Machine materially wrong. From Ludlow it is a three-year magazine that closed in 1990. Counted across everything this library holds, it is an eleven-year Italian institution with three times the page count, and its longest and least British phase is the part no British source covers.

⚠ This entry is built from colophons and from two editorials in issue 1. The library holds the Italian run in quantity and holds no secondary account of it, so nothing here describes how the magazine changed across eleven years, who read it, or what it meant to Italian gaming. All three would be worth knowing and none is claimed.

See also

• The Games Machine — the British edition
• Zzap!64 — the first Newsfield title licensed to Milan
• Newsfield — the licensor
• Edizioni Hobby — the licensee
• Xenia Edizioni — what followed it
• MC-microcomputer — the largest Italian title held