PC Gamer

PC Gamer is a computer games magazine founded in 1993. The original British version was founded months before its American cousin. It is a popular magazine devoted to reviewing new computer games. It features news on developments in the gaming industry, previews of new games, and reviews of the latest popular PC games, along with other features relating to hardware, mods, "classic" games and various other topics.

There are two main editions of PC Gamer; the American and the British versions, although the British version is considerably larger. Both are published by Future Publishing.

There are also numerous local editions that mainly use the materials of one of the two editions, typically the British one. These include a Malaysian edition, a Swedish edition, and a Russian edition.

The US PC Gamer mascot Coconut Monkey, an artist's rendering of a colorful monkey character carved out of a coconut, has appeared numerous times in the magazine, often mocking vaporware developers by hawking a fictional game called Gravy Trader, which boasts an ever-more-impressive list of features, yet which never actually comes out. When PC games with FMV sequences were popular in the mid-to-late 1990's, PC Gamer's CD-ROM included elaborate FMV sequences featuring one of their editors. To access the features of the CD, including the demos, patches and reviews the user had to navigate a 'basement', which played very much like classic PC games such as Myst. It was in this game sequence that Coconut Monkey was introduced just as the editor was leaving the magazine, marking the transition from the FMV demo CDs to the more contemporary menu driven demo CDs that they use today.

In the US the magazine has two editions; One edition comes with a CD (or sometimes a DVD) containing game files; the "solo" edition does not. In the UK the Magazine is sold with a DVD attached (with the attachment being labeled 'DVD-Gamer') as they have recently (as of issue 162) discontinued the CD edition ('CD-Gamer'). Cover-diskless versions are not sold in the UK. The 'PC Gamer' name has also been used by the new Mastertronic Group for selling low-price reissued software which originally scored 80% or more in PC Gamer magazine.

The PC Gamer UK subscriber edition has no writing on the cover and has been in publication for 162 issues.

Review system

Reviews are written either by the magazine's editors or by freelancer writers. Games are graded on a percent scale. In the US edition, no game has yet received any higher than a 98% rating (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Half-Life 2), while the UK edition has never awarded more than 96% (Civilization II, Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and Quake II). In the UK edition, the lowest score ever given was "N/A%" (Big Brother 2), with the lowest numerical score being 2% (Big Brother 1). In the US edition, the lowest score awarded was 4% (Mad Dog McCree 2), unseating the previously lowest-rated game, Skydive! (5%).

External links

PC Gamer

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Review system

See also

External links