incite PC Gaming Issue 01 (December 1999)

Thanks for finding these inCite magazines! I know they are not popular, but I have memories of the first two issues since I went home for the holidays from the military at this point, and I would buy ANY videogame magazines I could at the airport. I couldnt find popular stuff like GamePro or EGM at the airport racks, but I did find inCite PC Gaming, and a few others I never heard of before. I cant find these mags anymore, so it great looking through these high-quality scans over 20 years later. It was mags like this that I remember more than others because they were all I had access to at the time. Thanks for taking the time to publish mags like this. They might be sub-par for their time, but its great to see them once again:)

Dave Halverson started GameFan, but then left not to long after it was bought out by Metropolis Media. Halverson created a new company, Millennium Publications, and launched Gamers' Republic and produced a number of strategy guides. Gamers' Republic would eventually have trouble keeping up a regular schedule and there seemed to be some strife with the staff. At the time, Prima Publishing and Versus Books had a virtual monopoly on the strategy-guide marketplace, so Millennium had a hard time licensing new games. Around 1999, most of Millennium's senior staff (including co-publisher Dave Rau, Greg Han, and editors Dave Rees, Dan Jevons, and Ryan Lockhart, alone with Hodgson) left after a falling-out with Halverson. I dont know the details, but this isnt the place to discuss rumors anyway. Several of them would end up at Computec Media, a German tech-publishing giant that was trying to establish a foothold in the US magazine business.

They would end up launching two magazines, Incite Video Gaming and Incite PC Gaming on US newsstands simultaneously on October 26, 1999. Both premiere issues were priced at a loss to get them circulated as much as possible (Video Gaming at 99 cents, and PC Gaming at $1.99 with CD-ROM). Most of the editorial staff was headhunted from other game magazines (especially Gamers' Republic), and supposedly they had a $12 million ad campaign that was prepared to launch alongside the magazines on TV, in print, and on outdoor media like billboards and kiosks. I was in the military at the time, so I have no knowledge of seeing ads or if the budget was even finalized. So that's were Incite came from, an interesting background, but I didn't see many issues from both (Incite Video Gaming has at least 8 issues, and I've only seen Incite PC Gaming have 8 issues available. Incite Video Gaming is the mag that has several of the GameFan staff behind it, but I don't know how well the mag reads because I just can't find many issues out there.