Sega Pro
The magazine that launched a publishing empire.
The early 90s was the golden era of video game magazines.
The arrival of 16bit home computers and Japanese consoles helped take a niche hobby to a whole new audience. And as the market expanded so did the demand for magazines that covered these new systems and their rapidly growing software libraries.
But here's the thing, magazines weren’t just an essential news resource, they were also a lucrative cash-cow. A successful publication was a multimillion dollar business, and a top selling UK title might shift 150,000 copies a month back in those days. At £2 pounds a pop that quickly adds up. And it’s supported by significant ad revenue.
Which is great if you happen to own the publishing company. But very little of that money ever trickled down to the staff writers, editors and designers who were hacking away at these publications in dank offices on modest incomes.
Which may explain why Richard Monteiro decided to branch out on his own. A staff-writer from the 8bit days, he had worked his way up and had front row seats to the industry’s early 90s transformation and the opportunities it presented.
So in 1991 he launched Paragon Publishing and debuted Sega Pro magazine…
A decade later he would sell his half of the company for a comfortable £16 million pounds. This is an abridged version of that story.
I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks
As the 90s came into focus Richard found himself at a crossroads. He’d been working at Future Publishing for a number of years at this point and had made his name at Amstrad Action and St Format.
This was a solid gig at a reputable company. But it wasn’t where the action was. Richard had been privy to the Japanese consoles that were starting to filter out to the wider world and knew that this was where the industry was heading. As he explains, “There was an understanding that the next generation of gaming consoles was looming and the excitement in the potential of the 16bit platforms was palpable.”
Rather than wait for an opportunity to jump on the next generation bandwagon at Future he decided to make matters into his hands. “Having been at Future Publishing [since] the early days, when the headcount was half a dozen, I cavalierly decided that progression through the swelling ranks was going to be long and uncertain. Naively, I figured I’d seen enough and knew enough, so I went freelance and embarked on various editorial adventures.”
Richard’s freelance adventures were many and varied, but the one most relevant to our story is the editorial contract he landed with Newsfield - the home of legendary publications like Crash, Zzap!64 and The Games Machine.
By the early 90s Newsfield was in financial trouble and looking to cut costs. Which is how Richard picked-up a contract to supply all the editorial content for a new multi-format magazine they were launching called Raze. That lasted 12 months and saw Richard outsourcing the content to various writers and attempting to shoehorn the results into a coherent monthly publication with a separate design team. Ultimately, no one was particularly surprised when Newsfield went bust in late 1991 and took Raze with it.
But those 12-months provided Richard with the know-how to get a magazine out the door. So when Newsfield went under and left a vacuum in the industry he teamed up with another Future Publishing alumni, Diane Tavener, and launched Paragon. Sega Pro was the first magazine they debuted.
A rising tide and a blue hedgehog
“In the early days of Paragon Publishing, deciding to launch a magazine was more gut feel and enthusiasm rather than market research,” he explains. Our first magazine, Sega Pro, was a step into the unknown. Everything afterwards benefitted from a tried and tested methodology.”
Timing is everything, and Sega Pro’s early 90s debut was right on schedule. Its focus on the Mega Drive, Master System and Game Gear meant it arrived alongside a certain blue hedgehog and a massive spike in popularity for all things Sega related.
Sega Pro hit the ground running, and the first few issues sold out, but behind the scenes things were a lot more ad-hoc than fans may have realised.
As Richard tells it, “The plan was to entice editorial and design talent from Bath-based Future Publishing to the dreamy destination of Trowbridge (where Paragon Publishing was located). When that failed I went on the hunt for local talent. Interviews were not elaborate or expansive or at all insightful – more along the lines of, ‘What’s your high score on Sonic the Hedgehog’, ‘What do you think of Streets of Rage’, ‘What games machine do you have’. Yes, different times.”
It may not have been an exact science, but Richard found some genuine writing talent, including Dominic Handy, Les Ellis and Dave Perry. They were complemented by designers able to streamline the production process with cutting edge technology - and some questionable layout choices.
As Richard notes, “Magazine design in the early 90s was a reflection of the techniques and technology of the time – ie, paste-up and limited computer functionality. The design had to be simple and boxy. Paragon was fully digital from the start and unbridled by such constraints. Sega Pro [had] psychedelic backgrounds and barely legible text - just because you can doesn’t mean you should. But we did and enjoyed pushing the boundaries. The readers didn’t mind either – even if they did end up with eye strain.”
A decade of hits. Sega Pro and beyond
If Raze magazine felt like a hodgepodge of writers and art directors fighting each other in a dark room, Sega Pro arrived fully formed. The debut issue had a unified look and feel that helped it find an audience amongst the many new Sega fans in the UK and abroad.
This was supported by crisp writing, a welcome focus on US and Japanese imports, and technicolour riot of clipped manga images and blurry screenshots.
Point being - it worked. And Sega Pro was soon selling over 60,000 copies a month in its first year of publication.
That was a very respectable number and provided Richard and Paragon Publishing with the funds needed to expand the empire. Mega Power was the next cab off the ranks, launching in 1993, it was later joined by Games World, Play, Saturn Plus, X-Gen and Games(™) amongst a host of others.
As the industry expanded and evolved, so did Paragon’s roster of publications, and it forced Richard to approach magazines from a different perspective. “Inevitably there has to be a change of thinking when moving from an editor to a publisher. The bottom line becomes all important, especially for a start-up without a backer, go-fund me page, or the security of a bulging bank account,” he recalls.
“In an editorial or design capacity, you always want more and better – more pages, more staff, more freelance budget, better paper, better equipment… The flatplan is almighty whereas the spreadsheet is evil incarnate. From a publishing perspective, the spreadsheet takes precedence.
The end of the millennium, the fall of Sega
Sega Pro started off strong, but that momentum was never sustainable in a rapidly evolving industry. Sales peaked in 1993, dropped sharply in 1994, and went into freefall by 1995. For anyone paying attention to the industry that wouldn’t have come as a surprise, and echoed Sega’s broader fortunes.
The magazine’s eventual closure in 1995 went largely unnoticed. By that point both the industry and the readership had moved on. But Sega Pro had achieved what it set out to do, providing a beachhead for Paragon and Richard’s publishing aspirations. Its success helped launch an empire that would last from early days of the 16bit era to the arrival of the GameCube, XBox and Playstation. A lifetime in gaming years…
Read the full interview with Richard Monteiro
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