From the Vault: Game Console magazine – April 2011
Happy New Year, all.
So, I’ve been meaning to post this up for a while: an entire issue of Game Console magazine. In fact, this April 2011 issue was the last to be published during my time as editor. I was only made aware that this would be the last physical issue of the magazine only a few short hours before it went to print.
It’s a shame that Game Console was to cease publication one month shy of the one-year anniversary of its relaunch as a fully fledged magazine (it launched as a stand-alone magazine some years prior before eventually spending some time as a supplementary section of NetGuide magazine). I’d built up a good, reliable team of contributors, and it was certainly a publication that the Australasian branches of the major game publishers and their distributors wanted to feature in. At the time TechDay/Action Media relaunched Game Console, it was the country’s only dedicated, locally produced physical gaming publication. Of course, this presented its own set of challenges. Most notably, the opportunities available to our international counterparts were very rarely available to us in this remote part of the globe. In fact, it seemed that very few print-only opportunities made it over to us here in New Zealand, and so we were typically offered the same content as the major New Zealand gaming websites (who generally had the distinct advantage of being able to run the content much earlier than we ever could).
But this just meant that Game Console magazine had to work a little harder to provide unique, compelling copy – something that would make gamers still want to pick the mag up even though they’re able to access a lot of similar content much earlier online. As such, I aimed to leverage the local angles and local communities as much as possible with Game Console. The “9 Top Tips” section, in particular, sought the professional-gaming talents of some of the country’s best competitive gaming teams and communities such as Team Lateral (formerly Team Sidewinder), NZism, Adversity Gaming and more. And where possible, its news pages were filled with New Zealand-specific content (such as a New Zealand-exclusive reveal of New Zealand dev Grinding Gear’s upcoming Diablo contender Path of Exile). Sure, the bulk of gaming news tends to trickle down from overseas, but we’d always endeavour to clear up the usual uncertainty over local availability, pricing and the like. In this final issue, we also managed another New Zealand exclusive in securing the country’s only Portal 2 developer interview.
At this point, I’d like to give a special thanks to all of the contributors that feature in this issue, a couple of whom were involved with Game Console (in one form or another) before my time. In order of their appearance in this issue, thanks to Alan Jackson, Ryan Vincent, Reagan Morris, Gavin Ogden, Darren Price, Michael Gray and Jeska Innes. There are also many more contributors who don’t appear in this particular issue, such as Richard Armitt, Kris Hermansson, Hamish Bode, Damian Seeto, Hadyn Green and Alex Speirs. Of course, there were also the hard-working designers that worked on Game Console (whether part of NetGuide or magazine or on the relaunched, stand-alone version) during my time as editor: Zena Kitson, Amanda Knight and Joel Facon. It was a pleasure working with you all, and I do miss it terribly 
So, without further ado, please feel free to peruse the April 2011 issue of Game Console below using the magazine plugin. Simply click on the arrow buttons at the bottom to flick through the mag’s 64 pages.
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