Diskmag Scene in 1998
The diskmag scene had some remarkable climaxes in the last year. While diskmags had been almost completely silent on PC in 1997, 1998 brought us the revival of the international diskmag culture. Time to look back at the highs and lows!
January: Not much happened then yet. The Slovenian scene published the fourth issue of their mag "Bytes of Wisdom", which was in English for the first time. Also a new "Pain" was released in this month.
February: TPF released the first and so far only issue of their weird AnotherMag, featuring a rather innovative interface and only a few articles about strange topics. Besides, two sad events happened: The last issues of the newsletters "DemoNews" and "TraxWeekly" were published. After 150 issues, Snowman/Hornet finally quit making his famous DemoNews, mainly due to lack of time, as he explains in a very extensive and personal interview in this final issue. Besides, Pain 2/98 and the first "Coders F/X Newsletter" of the year came out.
March: Dilemma and Dinasty released the first issue of "Fleur", the first English-language magazine from Hungary, with a surprisingly good quality of texts. Furthermore, TUHB released issue 3 of their "TUHBzine", which was only spread in The Netherlands then albeit being in English.
April: Several mags found their way to the world in this month: "Restless #2", by Goblin/Xtatic and Phoenix/Hornet, and "DefCoN #2", the mostly French magazine with a beautiful interface. Besides, Fred/Calodox took over main editing Pain with issue 4/98. He brought some new spirit into it and reshaped it to a more international than Swiss mag.
May: Not much did happen. Tatanka released "Total Disaster #Amber", which was mainly in Polish. Later on the mag should become one of the nicest pieces of PC scene journalism in English language in 1998. The Restless staff produced a bugfix for their mag, and as always new issues of Pain and CFX News were published. Programmer/UniVerse also founded The E-Mag Network, a platform for diskmag editors to discuss and exchange articles. The first members were his own mag Armor of Gods, Hugi, Imphobia, Restless, DefCoN, and Total Disaster. The actual goal was to create a huge diskmag compiled by all the articles of the member mags, but it has not been realized yet.
June: We released Hugi #11, the first issue with a majority of English articles, which quickly got spread in the scene. Coplan of Immortal Coil also sent out an announcement of his soon-to-come monthly demoscene and tracking zine "Static Line", Garfield published the Polish mag Measure #5 with 100 kbyte of English articles, and TUHB released TUHBzine #4, still focussed on the Dutch scene.
July: UniVerse released "Armor of Gods #4", a mag with English and Russian articles. Green also produced the "Belgian Scene Report #13" with a Wired Special, and the first Static Line newsletter made its way to the readers.
August: Psychic Symphony released "demojournal #1", a weekly newsletter which first was rather poor but has improved a lot since and found many enthusiastic subscribers. Bytes of Wisdom #5 was also published, as well as the first "Lookain Fanz" issue, then completely in French. Moreover, this month's Pain issue contained a new SVGA interface, which gave the formerly ANSI-styled mag a modern outfit.
September: Hugi #12 hit the scene, this time with 1.8 mbyte of articles. Two new issues of Lookain Fanz were released as well as a CFX newsletter and a Win32 interface for DefCoN #2.
October: Not much happened in this month. New issues of Static Line, CFX News, Pain, and the small Swiss mag "Trip!", which this time contained polls filled in by people from all over the world, were released.
November: But this month was a bomb. Three rather good international mags, namely Total Disaster #Black, "Shine #3", and TUHBzine #5 were released. Besides, Black Maiden (Germany) published the second issue of "BEAM", a mag about the ANSI/VGA scene. This time they used an SVGA interface, which looked much more professional than the ANSI interface of the first issue.
December: This month brought us some good releases, too, namely Fleur #2, the first issue of the new chartsmag "Heroin", and, last but not least, Hugi #13.
What will the future bring us? From what you can guess, the PC diskmag scene seems to be growing again. New mags have been established, and we can only hope that they will remain active and get more quality articles.
Recently an announcement pack about an upcoming mag project called "Amber" was spread, which claims to be going to feature graphic, music, and texts by some of the best Polish and international sceners. Although they wrote different things in their last issue, there will probably also be another issue of Shine. They are suffering from a serious lack of articles though; when I talked to Goofy on IRC the other day, he told me they had only got about 4-5 articles and 5-6 votesheets so far. Certainly also new issues of Fleur - maybe even already at Mekka & Symposium 2k-1 in April -, Armor of Gods, and of course Hugi will come out in 1999.
However, what the future will look like exactly, is impossible to predict. You all can take influence on the further developments through your activity. So, take your chance to shape the scene!
- adok^hugi
"hvyää päivää tietokone"