['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

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The Out-of-Print Archive alerted me that they've got an issue of '90s UK magazine Mega Drive Advanced Gaming available for download. That, in 'n of itself, isn't really news. I have an external hard drive full of PDFs of old game and computer mags, after all -- nearly all of which, I suppose, are a bit questionable in terms of legal status. The real news here is that the Out-of-Print Archive has received full permission from the publisher, Hugh Gollner, to distribute the mag online.

Gollner was the head of Gollner Publishing, which began with an Atari ST fanzine and eventually expanded to game titles ST Action and Amiga Action, both of which served their computers pretty amicably. Future's Amiga Power is the mag that UK computer gamers remember the most fondly these days, but Amiga Action actually outlasted it on the stands, continuing until December of 1996 -- a fair bit after there was no real action on the Amiga to speak of.

As Gollner recalls in the interview he did for the site, Amiga Action wasn't necessarily better written than the competition, but it did have Amiga Power beat in one important field:

"We just worked out that if you stuck more and more coverdisks on, then sales went up. I think we had at least three disks on at one point! ... I really respected Future Publishing and especially Chris Anderson, Greg Ingham and Steve Jarratt. Future revolutionized computing magazines -- they made them 'sexy' as Chris used to say. In the early days I got an offer from Chris to come and work for him -- I wished I'd taken him up on it, but at the time we had debts running Gollner Publishing and his offer was not very generous."

Gollner eventually sold his outfit to UK publishing giant Europress, where he worked on Games-X, a weekly game mag that launched in the spring of 1991 and lasted just over a year before folding under tremendous losses. After Games-X fizzled out, Gollner left Europress and founded another publisher, Maverick Magazines, which did Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, SNES mag Super Control, and the Edge-like PC Player -- one of the first masthead appearances from current GamePro EIC John Davison.

Until now, I didn't really know the name "Maverick" except from the rather poor job the publisher did on The One in its waning months. But Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, despite the stilted name, is a pretty decent piece of work -- at least as good as Future's MEGA in terms of content, although there were so many 16-bit console mags in the UK that it was often tough for any individual title to stand out of the crowd. It's certainly worth a download and peer-through for 16-bit fans, in my opinion.

Gollner has given the Out-of-Print Archive permission to release all of the mags his publishing outfits released, which is extremely generous of him -- I definitely look forward to seeing more of his publishing work. It'd be nice if more publishers gave out permission like this, but considering there's pretty much no money to be made off doing so, I doubt that the Futures and EMAPs of the world are going to agree anytime soon. Ah, well, back to my grey-area external drive...

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]