The History of Sega Mania Magazine

Sega Mania began on an unusually hot day in March 2021. Sam and I were poring over an old copy of Sega Power, sent to me as part of Reddit’s yearly secret Santa, and talking about how brilliant the old gaming mags used to be: the daft humour, the slight lads’-mag swagger, all of it pitched squarely at thirteen-year-olds.

That conversation stuck. I started wondering what it would take to bring a magazine like that back, and stumbled across Amiga Addict, a proper print magazine for Commodore Amiga fans that had only just launched. My thinking was simple: if they can do it, surely I can.

So we got to work. In the beginning it was just me, Sam and Simon, a friend of a friend who was keen to get involved. Issue 1 took about three months to put together, and two of those were spent working out how to actually make a magazine. My design experience amounted to a short stint with QuarkXpress at a regional magazine, so I settled on Affinity Publisher and learned as I went.

The premise was naively simple. We would start in 1990 and work our way through a year of Sega with each issue, aiming to publish one every month, just like the proper magazines did. I was born in ’85, so 1990 felt like the right place to tap into memories that were still sharp. By ’88 they would have been a blur.

Issue 1 was ready in time for its July launch. It was ropey, and it sold a thousand copies on the very first day. We started on Issue 2 immediately and brought in Rob, a fellow Geordie who had answered the ad in Issue 1 asking for writers.

Then reality arrived. A monthly magazine was never going to be possible. The number of games being released was climbing as we moved into 1991, and the packing and admin for Issue 1 were still rumbling on weeks after launch. I couldn’t give Issue 2 the full-time attention I’d given its predecessor, and it slipped to September 2021.

We slowed things right down for Issue 3. Steve and Alex joined to help with the writing, and I set to work on our first cover CD to go with the Mega CD printed on the cover. The result was a properly pressed audio CD featuring some of Audio Sprite’s best work. Issue 3 is the first issue I was truly proud of. The design was still a bit ropey, but it felt like we were finally getting closer to my original vision.

It also brought our first major disaster. Our courier lost every single UK copy, some 400 magazines, in their warehouse and refused to compensate us. I found out on Christmas Eve. Reprinting the magazines and repressing the CDs cost about £3,000, and we’ve probably never fully recovered from it. It was a hard lesson to learn.

As we moved into 2022 we released Issue 4, the first issue where I didn’t design the cover. We were blessed with artwork from the legendary Duncan Gutteridge. By now we were working much more closely as a team, and I was teaching myself better design techniques with every page. Issue 4 was the turning point, the moment Sega Mania stopped being a rag-tag, play-it-by-ear publication and became a proper magazine.

By Issues 5 and 6 we were really starting to regret the plan of covering a whole year of Sega in every issue. The list of games kept getting longer, and my decision to staple-bind the magazine limited how many pages we could print. So we started splitting each year in two, with half a year per issue, and we’ve done it that way ever since.

Our first public outing came in early October 2022, and it was also the first time the whole team had been in the same room. We’d spoken endlessly on The Sega Mania Podcast but had never actually met. Play Expo Blackpool, at the Norbreck Castle Hotel, was the destination, and we had an amazing time meeting readers and fellow fans.

The highlight? Being on a table next to John Romero, the co-creator of Doom.

Issue 7 followed Blackpool and took us into the world of the Sega Saturn for the first time. It also brought a new face to the writing team: Tom also joined us for Issue 7 as a writer. To this day, Issue 7 stands as possibly my favourite issue.

But the pressure was mounting, and things in my personal life had become incompatible with making a magazine. Issue 8 had already entered the planning phase when, in November 2022, I abruptly brought Sega Mania to an end.

Two years later I was in a much better place, and I was sorely missing the magazine. The rest of the team had moved on to create Sega Force Mega, but they were keen to tickle the idea of a Sega Mania comeback. After a slow start we got back into the groove, and in February 2025 Issue 8 landed on people’s doorsteps.

Issue 9 followed in January 2026, with a free Panzer Dragoon art print by Simon Pike and a feature on the history of Sega Mania itself.

Issue 10 was supposed to mark our fifth anniversary, but the realities of our increasingly busy lives meant we overshot it slightly. It was worth the wait. At 112 pages, printed on silk paper with a gloss cover and an exclusive painted cover by Super Play legend Wil Overton, it is the biggest and best issue we have made. Inside you’ll find the life and death of the 32X, 27 Saturn and Mega Drive reviews, and plenty more.

We’re bigger and better than ever, and our focus is now razor sharp.

The heady dreams of an issue a month are long behind us. But with a target of two issues a year, Sega Mania is here to stay: a real, printed magazine, made by fans in their spare time and posted to your door, with plenty more issues to come.