Hyper (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Hyper magazine launched in Australia in 1993 with a founding editor who had just walked away from a rival publication under new ownership. Phil Keir, the publisher behind Next Media and Rolling Stone, made a phone call one night that changed Australian gaming journalism. Stuart Clarke, who had just left MegaZone after Mason Stewart Publishing took it over in September 1993, recalled receiving that call: "Just as I was starting to relax, Phil Keir, owner of Next Media and publisher of Rolling Stone, rang me at home one night to ask a few questions. Before I knew it he had asked me to set up a brand new games magazine - one that I created and controlled completely! So after a few nano-seconds of thought I said, 'Um, okay then'." What followed was a twenty-six year run that made Hyper Australia's longest-running gaming magazine. The story of how it survived the rise of digital publishing, the global financial crisis, and multiple ownership changes is as much about the people who made it as about the games it covered.

• 2. A Magazine Built in Two Months

  ›

  Clarke's first major decision was to make Hyper a genuinely multi-platform title, covering the best games across all systems rather than anchoring to one console maker. That choice distinguished it immediately from MegaZone, which had narrowed to Sega coverage after the Mason Stewart takeover. The entire launch issue was assembled in just two months. Clarke edited, Andrew Humphreys served as deputy editor, and Aaron Rogers handled art direction. Competitors were already in place from day one: ACP's Gamestar, Australian GamePro, and Clarke's former publication MegaZone all vied for the same readership. Clarke and other contributors also crossed into television, appearing on the video game show The Zone between 1994 and 1995. Hyper's coverage expanded as Australian culture shifted, picking up anime and DVD coverage once those formats took hold in the country - anime arriving in popular consciousness around 1994, DVDs around 1999. A companion publication, PC PowerPlay, focused exclusively on computer gaming and ran alongside Hyper as a sister magazine.

• 3. Milestones and Survival

  ›

  Issue 100 arrived in February 2002 and gave Clarke the occasion to recount Hyper's founding for readers who had grown up with it. Eight years later, on the 28th of April 2010, Hyper published its 200th issue. Daniel Wilks, who had been with the magazine for roughly six years by that point, reflected on what the number meant: "I'll admit there were a few times that I thought the end days may have been coming - especially during the peak of the GFC when every publishing company seemed to be shedding staff and magazines like it was going out of style, but I've always believed that the magazine could weather anything thrown at it." Wilks stepped down after issue 200, and deputy editor Darren Wells took over. The masthead had cycled through many hands over the years. Stuart Clarke had held the editor's role from 1993 to 1996; Dan Toose followed from 1996 to 1999; Eliot Fish from 1999 to 2004; Cam Shea from 2005 to 2007; and Wilks carried two separate stints, from 2007 to 2010 and again from 2013 to 2018. Anthony Fordham and Dylan Burns both held the position in 2010, and David Wildgoose edited from 2011 to 2013.

• 4. The Long Decline

  ›

  In late 2014, Next Media announced that Hyper would shift to a quarterly schedule starting in 2015, a sign of the pressures squeezing print gaming journalism. The pace slowed further as the decade closed. In 2018, Next Media sold its computing titles, including Hyper, to Future. That year the magazine managed only two issues: number 269 on the 7th of February and number 270 on the 8th of August. Future published a final issue, number 271, on the 11th of August 2019. David Hollingworth served as editor for that last edition. No further issues followed, and both physical and digital subscriptions were eventually closed. Former editors Wilks and Hollingworth revisited the magazine's decline in a two-part article published in 2021, offering a post-mortem on a publication that had outlasted nearly every rival it faced on Australian newsstands.