Mega Play

From Retromags

Mega Play
Editor	Ed Semrad
Categories	Sega console games and hardware
Frequency	Bimonthly-ish
First Issue	Nov/Dec 1990
Last Issue	June/July 1995 (?) 28 (?)
Publisher	Sendai Publishing
Country	USA

Mega Play is a bimonthly magazine devoted to Sega video games, particularly the Genesis. It "debuted" inside an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly before going out on its own in 1990, almost simultaneously with Game Player's Sega Genesis Strategy Guide.

History

By and large, Mega Play was created mainly to create more product for Sendai to sell. Each issue (nearly all of them 52 pages long) had roughly the same content as would be in a normal issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly. Extras included longer strategy guides, more previews, and a different Review Crew taking on new games each month.

In 1991, Sendai announced that Mega Play had been picked up by Warner Publisher Services, the same distributor handling Electronic Gaming Monthly at the time. With this improved distribution, Sendai revealed plans to make the magazine monthly and increase its distribution to over 200,000 copies a month. For whatever reason, though, Mega Play didn't go monthly -- in fact, it had trouble keeping a bimonthly schedule in the following years, occasionally skipping a month or putting out two issues in consecutive months.

Despite the lack of original content, the documented devotion of Sega fans allowed Mega Play to survive for over five years before petering out in the summer of 1995, just as Sega's Saturn was debuting in the US.

Issue Index

Mega Play Index

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1990											v1/1
1991	v1/1		v2/2		v2/3		v2/4		v2/5		v2/6
1992	v3/1		v3/2			v3/3		v3/4	v3/5
1993	V3/6	v4/1		v4/2		v4/3		v4/4		v4/5		v4/6
1994		v5/1		v5/2			v5/3	v5/4		v5/5		v5/6
1995		v6/1		v6/2		v6/3