GAMES MAG TYCOON Deutsch To Steam

Games Mag Tycoon

Run your own video game magazine. From 1986 to 2010.

The game on Steam

Cover story

Your magazine. Your readers.

You take over a small editorial office in an office block: three editors, one test machine, one empty magazine: Which games go on the cover? Who reviews what? Is there enough money for the printer? And how long will your readers stay when the competition at the newsstand has the better covers?

Games Mag Tycoon is a playable memory of the age of games magazines from 1986 to 2010, from the 8-bit home computers to the HD consoles. The deadline creeps closer while you walk through the building and try to turn every issue into a real magazine - into YOUR magazine.

25years
1986 to 2010
approx. 11,000games, modelled on 25 years of gaming history
16rooms
in your office block (with a lift, of course ;-) )

Contents

What you do

Editorial

Plan the issue

Fill your magazine with reviews, previews, hardware, tips and news. Every editor has strengths, favourites and a mood.

Layout

Design the cover

The cover sells this issue, the content sells the next one.

Scores

Review and rate

What score does your team give the classic? And how do the publishers feel about it? And what do YOU review?

Business

Make money

Ads, print run and cover price - they decide your business success. And the publisher keeps demanding more and more...

Growth

Grow with the times

Hire editors, take on new platforms, expand your offices, publish specials and cover disks, all the way to your own editorial video show - whether as multimedia readers’ letters or aboard the Games Mag spaceship.

Letters

Listen to your readers

You will only succeed if you read what your readers tell you and draw the right conclusions. But there is no manual for the perfect magazine.

The playable trailer

Why not take a walk through the publishing house?

Web replica

Gallery

A look inside the office

Your publishing house with grand doors, red carpet and editors on their wayThe office block 1987: the inbox is full, the plan still half emptyEditorial office Choose the cover story, style and coloursLayout office 2008: golden lift, giant banner and a statue at the doorA grown house The main menu styled like a games magazineStart screen Name, logo, start year and the first test devicesFound your magazine Every room explains itself on your first visitIntroduction The issue is fully planned, the scores are inEditorial 1992 120 pages, six editors, the deadline loomingEditorial 2008 The cover story decides at the newsstandCover 2001 Test devices, publishers and exclusive requestsGames office Hire editors and keep them happyHuman resources Sales charts, your magazine on the rack and voices from the newsstandAt the newsstand Ads pay the printer, as long as you hit the promised circulationAd sales After every issue he tells you what he thinksThe publisher Desks and furniture from junk to executive suiteEditorial room Rent more rooms and grow your houseReal estate Neon sign, roof garden or a helipadFurnishing catalogue Loans for the big expansionBank Awards and the best reviews of all timeShow room Your editors in front of the cameraVideo production Test samples and your own test labHardware office Subject, editor, print run and pricePlan a special At the end of your career: the last issueFarewell issue Every issue stays, with cover and salesArchive Every issue feels like a real magazineCover and contents Scores out of 100, like back thenReviews and scores What the issue sold at the newsstandSales report Print run, price and size of the next issueNext issue Walkthroughs and short tips for your readersTips & tricks Demos and trailers on the DVD for the issueCover disc A special issue on the topic your readers wantSpecial issue

Industry report

An industry as it was

  • Play up to 25 years from 1986 to 2010 with platforms, games and publishers as they shaped the era - or start whenever you like
  • Thousands of games with release date, genre and platform, modelled on gaming history
  • Games magazines modelled on the era as your competition at the newsstand

Service

Mods and Workshop

Almost all content sits in the game folder as open files: games, magazines, editors, publishers, images, music - so it can be extended as far as you like with Steam Workshop mods or locally on your own machine.

Editorial

Who is behind this?

oLabAndI

Hi, I am Stefan. And behind “oLabAndI” there is no real company, just a nerd. In the early nineties I played the German pen-and-paper game The Dark Eye, and my character was a rogue called Olabandi. I have carried that name through pretty much every computer game since. So of course it is my name as a developer too - just imagine how lovely it would look as a spinning, blinking GIF or Flash animation... Wow!

Anyway, back to the point: I started programming at school, back then in Delphi 2.0, and naturally always with the dream of building a game. I rarely got far: editors, small applications, the odd mini game (for example a little Pallino game for the Anstoss 4 community back then, which at least got finished), but never anything bigger. Professionally it still turned into application development, multimedia software for a long time, later VR, always more tool than game. For some years now I have worked in web development, mostly e-commerce.

I kept programming in my spare time anyway, tinkered with Unity and other engines and even released a small application on Steam once that records statistics while you play. It was not a game of my own, though.

❤ MAD TV ❤

I have wanted to make a small business simulation for a very long time. I think it is doable for someone like me, who comes from the technical side and is no great artist. And it is the genre I grew up with: Fugger and Kaiser way back, then Anstoss and Bundesliga Manager, The Patrician and a lot of other Ascaron games, but also Der Planer, The Guild and, again and again, MAD TV and MAD News. At some point I turned towards real-time strategy (like pretty much EVERYONE back then), and today I probably spend most of my time with XCOM clones and more complex strategy games (or city builders - tip: “Against the Storm” is fantastic). But I still love MAD TV and keep coming back to it.

And why games magazines?

I was a subscriber to the German magazines PC Player and later GameStar. Although, to be honest, I always held it a little against GameStar that its makers left PC Player for it. PC Player was something like my home brand, that is where I came from. To this day I listen to the podcasts of former games editors.

At some point the podcast Stay Forever covered MAG!!!, a game in which you run a games magazine. And since I was a big fan not only of MAD TV but also of MAD News, the thought was obvious: why not bring the two together? A games magazine manager, but please not that dry (no disrespect intended), more like MAD TV: with walking around, with a lift, with time pressure and with a bit of variety.

A hobby project

I worked away at this idea for a long time and built prototype after prototype. The building with the lifts was there early on, you could already lay out the magazine, design covers, bring in ads and sell - I added the mechanics, data and logic bit by bit. Then, last year, the interface, the data and the graphics really came together. I generated the graphics with code; no AI image generation was used. For about two years I have been working on the game quite intensively this way, but only ever in my spare time. The music consists of my own songs (actually guitar songs with band and vocals), changed only in style with AI for the game. Apart from that, AI was only used for the bulk texts in the game data (game descriptions, for example) and for the English translation.

Now the game has reached a state that I like, and I think I will get to a version that people can take a look at - planned first as Early Access, because balancing on your own is really, really hard.

Tycoon games

I still enjoy playing business sims: Software Inc., Mad Games Tycoon, Game Dev Tycoon, the Two Point games and quite a few more. All of them are fun. But these days the 3D view often bothers me, where the first thing you do is build rooms. I would rather do that in Cities: Skylines or in city builders (recommendation: Against the Storm!). In a business sim I do not want to worry about a janitor turning up in time to clean the rooms. Hence the classic view. On top of that, it is simply something I can do better than 3D graphics, which I have never worked with.

What I am hoping for

I believe there is a kind of magic in living through that era once more: seeing the games again, seeing the magazines again, remembering and trying it yourself. The editors in the game have invented names, because I do not want to step on anyone’s toes.

And I hope it has turned out to be a really nice, classic business simulation without too much around it: with enough of a challenge and a system you can follow, where you notice what each lever does without it being spelled out. I think there are quite a few people who, like me, still find games like this cool and would enjoy playing one again. If you are one of them: this game is for you.

Thank you!
Stefan