Mega

Chirpy Megadrive mag which swapped a higher than average number of people back and forth with AP like a game of limby keepsies, including Cook, A (us to them), Huntley, S (them to us), Mellerick, P (them to us) and West, N (both at the same time, the wily juggle-chap).

Slightly unfairly, Mega is now remembered chiefly as part of an experiment to create a mag personality out of empty blue space by pretending that no freelancers were involved; in other words, by crediting everything printed in the mag to a small number of permanent staff irrespective of who actually wrote it.

This idea, probably called Technique 19 or something by the bottle-spectacled clerks who invented it, was applied most famously to Total, where it worked splendidly because the entire mag was draped napkinly around the collary neck of special slapstick cartoon hosts who appeared on every page; but in the case of Mega, which was otherwise a traditionally presented games mag staffed by ordinary normal mortal human beings just like you, everything sort of fell to bits because there was no "acting" - staff did not adopt distinct, broad characters people could write "as," contributors simply remitted features which then had their bylines changed to that of someone in the office.*

This was all a bit of an unnecessary shame as Mega would have worked perfectly well without all the back-room shenanigans; mags like Super Play and - no! But yes! - AP demonstrated blackboardily that you could emit a characterful riffle-pape just by letting everyone get on with it (though obviously in our case we made it all up; JD was in reality an illiterate midget docker, for example). Another, equally obvious weakness of the scheme was that if contributors were not to be credited, they had no incentive to put their best into something; but this inexplicably did not prevent Technique 19 (or whatever) continuing through later mags for about a million years.

Ach weel.

Mega came to a horrible end.