Game Zero magazine
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Game Zero Magazine was a U.S. based video game magazine published from 1992 to 1998 (although primary publication stopped in 1996). Initially starting out as a photo-copy based zine with a print circulation of 500, by the start of 1994 the publication had become a two-color magazine with a print circulation of 1,500, published bi-monthly. In an effort to expand the publication and reduce associated costs, the magazine migrated to the World Wide Web in November of 1994, initially launching with a mixture of content reprinted from the print magazine, the primary features of the web site were, a then extremely comprehensive list of links to web sites covering anything video game related around the world, current news, and reviews.
In 1995, the magazine expanded format and began publishing as a CD-ROM based magazine (which featured all of the content from the web site) that had a circulation of 150,000. The magazine is now maintained as an archive of the published contents.
Notable firsts and events:
- November, 1994, launching at the URL "www.primenet.com/~gmezero", Game Zero becomes the first video game magazine on the world wide web followed next by Intelligent Gamer On-Line in April of 1995, and then followed by several other mainstream publications.
- January 8, 1995, Game Zero features the first daily coverage of a gaming trade show on the web. With complete commentaries by the Game Zero staff and other prominent guest writers known from IRC and Newsgroup postings.
- March 13, 1995 the first video gaming web comic premiers on the internet. "The Plastic Valley Report" (later renamed to "The Polymer City Chronicles") premiers, featuring the on-going commentary of Dr. Otto and his alien wife Andrah as they poke fun at the video game industry.
- April, 1995, finally registers the "gamezero.com" domain and migrates site from previous location.
- June, 1995, first site to regularly publish video footage of new and up-coming games. With exclusive sneak previews of Wipeout, Resident Evil to name a few. Due to overwhelming demand for the videos, a new partnership with hosting services "tethys.net" was struck to relieve the load on the main website. Tethys offered to host the content on their FTP server in exchange for promotion of their high-capacity download services. Unfortunately heavy loads of high-demand download traffic again took their toll and after having their server go down several times under the load of FTP requests, a limit had to be set to how many users could be logged in at the same time in order to avoid denial of service conditions. Many of the videos were distinct in that they featured more than just generic gameplay (examples being video featuring a 10-second drift in Ridge Racer, or a high value combo in Killer Instinct).
- August 19, 1995, first gaming website to feature promotional contests for site visitors. Notable contests were for a copy of Killer Instinct on the SNES (runner-ups got baseball caps), Street Fighter Alpha, Mortal Kombat 3 and others. Contests initially consisted of trivia/drawings, and were later changed to clue based skill puzzles in order to allow Canadian readers to participate, as by this time over 25% of visitors e-mailing the magazine with questions were from Canada).
- August, 1995, first site to publish a leaked photo of the then Nintendo "Ultra 64" motherboard.
- August, 1995, a deal is reached with Catapult Entertainment, Inc. for Game Zero to become the primary source for news content on the X-Band service. Summarized news items are updated weekly on the service. Additionally X-Band communications on up-coming events, and competition rankings are featured on the Game Zero web site. The Game Zero staff also takes on the duty of answering gaming news related e-mails from X-Band subscribers.
- November, 1995, beats the fledgling Nintendo.com site to press by two weeks with coverage of the N64 debut in Japan. In the end the Game Zero site featured more photos and higher quality screen captures than any other online source at the time. This is the first and only time where Nintendo is scooped on the web regarding coverage of a major product announcement as shortly after this Nintendo's P.R. firm begins to add moratoriums for web publications and Nintendo Power staff step up news turn around on the nintendo.com website.
- February, 1996, prominent web guide "I-Way" magazine ranks Game Zero as #9 out of the 25 best "Game Sites" on the internet, beating out other notable entries "New Type Gaming" (#14), "Games Domain" (#19), and Nintendo (#25).
- March, 1996, becomes the first gaming magazine to establish a mirror site in Europe to both ease load on the primary site based in the U.S., and provide higher speed page loads for visitors from overseas. At the time this was a real issue as general network speeds between the US and Europe were terribly slow, and the only major European based news sources were Happy Puppy and Games Domain (which itself eventually launched a U.S. mirror site to reduce cross Atlantic traffic).
External links
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