30 years of PC games: journey through the history of the magazine – part 4

Welcome to the fourth and final part of our review series! We’re starting in 2009, which marks the biggest upheaval in PC gaming to date. There have been rumors for a long time, but now there are loud rumors on the floor radio. The bosses keep getting together for mysterious meetings, the content is secret. But one thing is clear to everyone: changes are imminent. At the beginning of the year, the cat is out of the bag: our publishing house forms a new, large team, the Computec Games Group. There, the editors from PC Games, PC Action, play3 and X3 will throw all their skills into the balance. As is so often the case, the decision initially met with long faces. Everyone fears for the identity and strengths of their notebooks, nobody wants to give up “their baby”. But after the disastrous merger with PC Action four years ago, we now at least know which mistakes to avoid. And because the editors can now actively get involved in the new plans and help refine the concept, the games group is off to a much better start than expected. You can find out all this and much more in the fourth and last part of our review, which you can watch here – in summarized form – also as a video.

missed article? Here are the other parts of our series:
First part: 1992 to 1997
Second part: 1998 to 2003
Third part: 2004 to 2008

Extended family overnight

With the Gamesgroup, the cast of the PC games grows in one fell swoop. Long-time colleagues like Alexander Frank, Jürgen Krauß or Ralph Wollner bring a breath of fresh air to PC games. Our mod experts Marc Brehme and Andreas Bertits are now appearing more and more frequently. And from the console magazines we welcome top-class artists like Sebastian Stange and Toni Opl, who give our performance a strong (some say: badly needed) dash of humor. The games group is now headed by newcomer Thorsten Küchler. His predecessor Christian Burtchen is leaving at the beginning of the year at his own request. Petra Fröhlich will stay with us as boss throughout this period. A little later, Thorsten will get an experienced editor-in-chief in Wolfgang Fischer, after which the two gentlemen will share the wonderful task of getting four (!) issues across the finish line every month. There’s frustration, there’s anger, but we’ve rarely had more laughs than at that time. In issue 06/2009, a tall former intern will also join the team. You may know the new trainee today in a different role, namely as editor-in-chief for print at PC Games: Sascha Lohmüller. Together with Sascha, Christoph Peter Schuster also starts his traineeship with us. Our little baby had already made a name for himself as an intern months earlier, and now he shows his strengths in PC games, especially in role-playing games.

Podcast Rebels

Peter is enthusiastic: podcast listeners keep sending us all kinds of delicacies. We sincerely apologize for the smack in the recording.

Source: PC games



In mid-2009, a couple of editors grab a microphone, look for a quiet corner in the publishing house – and secretly record the very first PC games podcast. Not everyone welcomes going it alone at first, but when it becomes apparent that the format is well received by the audience, the green light is given. The podcast will be broadcast weekly for eight years, and we will produce a total of 383 cheerfully chaotic episodes before we have to stop the project due to lack of time. And anyone who has been crying themselves to sleep at night since then can now laugh again: The PC Games Podcast has already made its comeback!

A great development from this time: more and more creative indie games are conquering the market, also thanks to Steam, which now offers many studios completely new opportunities for self-marketing. Very, very bad: Plants vs. Zombies. The tower defense game paralyzed half of our editorial staff for days, sometimes they played secretly in window mode (“Attention, Petra is coming over!”). From now on we try to unearth more and more indie secrets and potential surprise hits for you and discuss them in larger sections of the magazine. That lifts the spirits, even if we don’t always succeed as well as we initially thought. A tiny For example, a game called Minecraft slips through our fingers! In the magazine we are also beginning to finally expand our much too small masterpieces articles. We enjoy it so much that we decide to give valuable retro themes even more space in the future. Today, elaborate retro specials play an important role for us.

In memory: Thomas Weiss

In October 2009, we received shocking news: our long-time friend and colleague Thomas Weiß passed away unexpectedly. Many companions say goodbye at the funeral. Numerous readers on pcgames.de also pay tribute to him and thank him for his striking articles, with which he shaped and enriched PC games.