Late in 1991, three people working for Future Publishing began putting together a new video game magazine under unusually secretive circumstances. Steve Jarratt, Andy Dyer, and art editor Wayne Allen worked away from the normal Future offices, with Jarratt later remembering that even many of their own colleagues did not know what they were creating. The reason was Nintendo. The proposed magazine was going to devote itself entirely to Nintendo hardware and games without being an official Nintendo publication, and the team feared that revealing the project too early might give Nintendo an opportunity to interfere with it.
The result appeared with a January 1992 cover date under one of the simplest names imaginable: TOTAL!. Across the cover and inside its opening pages, the magazine made its audience clear. This was a publication for Nintendo players, initially concentrating on the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy, while preparing for the arrival of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It also made another point equally clear. TOTAL! was independent. It was not Nintendo’s magazine, and its writers argued that this freedom allowed them to tell readers what they actually thought about the games they reviewed.
That combination of Nintendo specialization, editorial independence, humor, strong personalities, detailed reviews, strategy material, and unusually ambitious presentation gave TOTAL! an identity that survived well beyond its secretive beginning. The magazine eventually ran for 58 numbered issues, from January 1992 through October 1996, following Nintendo players from the final years of the NES through the Game Boy and Super Nintendo eras and into the opening months of Nintendo 64 excitement.
A Nintendo Magazine Made in Secret
TOTAL! emerged during a remarkable period of expansion at Future Publishing. Future had been founded in 1985 and developed a business around specialist publications aimed at clearly defined groups of readers. By the beginning of the 1990s, video games provided the company with an expanding collection of machines, audiences, and potential magazines. Steve Jarratt later recalled that the strategic decision to enter the Nintendo market came from Future founder Chris Anderson and publisher Steve Carey, as the company sought to cover the different segments of the growing games industry.
Jarratt and Andy Dyer already knew how to work together. They had been part of Commodore Format, another Future publication, where their personalities and humor had become part of the magazine itself. When the Nintendo project began, their partnership was carried into TOTAL! and joined by Wayne Allen on the art side.
The unusual part was where they worked. Jarratt later remembered that publishing director Greg Ingham had a large loft space where the small team could construct the launch issue without attracting attention. Nobody in the wider games industry was supposed to know, and according to Jarratt, most people within Future did not know either. Dyer remembered the final stages as exhausting, including working through the night to complete the issue.
The secrecy has sometimes grown into more elaborate stories in later retellings, but the firsthand accounts establish the essential point. Future believed an independent Nintendo magazine was commercially promising, yet the launch team was concerned enough about Nintendo’s possible reaction to conceal the project while the first issue was being assembled.
When the finished magazine finally existed, Future no longer had merely an idea that could be stopped. It had a publication ready to be sold.
100 Percent for Nintendo Players
The first issue established the magazine’s identity immediately. Rather than treating Nintendo as one part of a larger games market, TOTAL! presented itself as a place where a Nintendo owner could expect nearly every page to be relevant.
The opening editorial explained that the magazine was devoted to Nintendo games and players and emphasized what readers would not find inside. Sega, Atari, and NEC were outside its purpose. The NES and Game Boy were the immediate focus, while the approaching Super Nintendo already represented an important part of its future. At the same time, the editors stressed that the magazine was not published by Nintendo. Independence was presented as an advantage because TOTAL! could praise an excellent game, criticize a poor one, and make its recommendations without serving as a company mouthpiece.
Issue 1 was already much more than a collection of reviews. It included a guide to Nintendo hardware, competitions, the TOTAL! Gameplayers Championship, strategy material under the Tactix name, and large sections devoted separately to NES and Game Boy software. The contents advertised reviews of twenty NES games and twenty Game Boy games, giving the first issue the character of both a monthly magazine and an introductory handbook for someone entering Nintendo gaming.
One of the major attractions was Super Mario Bros. 3. The game arrived at exactly the right moment for the magazine. Jarratt later remembered the success of Nintendo’s handheld business and the excitement surrounding Super Mario Bros. 3 as important advantages for the new title. In the first issue, TOTAL! devoted several pages to the game and treated it as an exceptional release, setting a pattern in which major Nintendo games could become events within the magazine rather than simply another item in a review section.
The timing proved fortunate. Nintendo still faced strong competition in Britain, particularly from Sega, but the company was entering an important period of expansion. The Game Boy had created a large portable audience, the NES still had an established user base, and the Super Nintendo was approaching the British market. TOTAL! had positioned itself where those audiences could meet.
Steve Jarratt, Andy Dyer, and the Personality of TOTAL!
What separated TOTAL! from a dry buyers’ guide was its sense that the people writing the magazine were part of the entertainment.
Steve Jarratt and Andy Dyer became characters within its pages as much as editors and reviewers. Illustrations and caricatures helped turn members of the staff into recognizable personalities, while captions, arguments, jokes, and comments created the impression that the reader was listening to a group of friends discussing games. Illustrator Mike Roberts played an important role in creating the caricature style that became closely associated with the magazine.
The humor was not intended to replace serious criticism. Jarratt later emphasized that the reviews were supposed to be genuine and unbiased, even while the surrounding presentation remained playful. Dyer similarly remembered the magazine’s willingness to have fun as one of the reasons it distinguished itself. As the audience and games market changed, the tone could mature, but personality remained central to its appeal.
That approach also created a practical complication. The original concept presented a small number of recognizable staff members as the magazine’s reviewers, yet producing a monthly magazine required far more material than two people could realistically write. Jarratt later acknowledged that some early reviews were commissioned from freelancers and then presented through the established staff-character format. He described this as a consequence of having built the magazine around its cartoon reviewer concept rather than an attempt to falsify the opinions being published, and said the goal remained to make the reviews fair and accurate.
It is a revealing detail because it shows how thoroughly TOTAL! had committed itself to personality. The people pictured on the pages were not merely names in a masthead. They were part of the magazine’s fictionalized world.
Making Video Games Look Good on Paper
Producing a video game magazine in the early 1990s required work that can easily disappear from modern memory. There was no simple digital screenshot button that allowed an editor to collect perfect images and instantly place them into a page layout. Capturing games for print could be slow, technical, and improvised.
Dyer remembered being particularly determined to improve the quality of the images used by TOTAL!. Photographing Game Boy screens presented an obvious problem, so he devised a setup using lamps, a cardboard box, and a camera to obtain better pictures. The process sounds primitive compared with modern digital capture, yet the result mattered. Clear images allowed readers to understand what a game actually looked like before buying it.
Wayne Allen’s art direction also helped distinguish the publication. Rather than forcing every review into exactly the same rigid template, Allen created layouts that could be adjusted around the material. Jarratt recalled that the magazine was willing to spend money on illustrations and presentation, while Dyer emphasized the attention given to screenshots and page design.
Reviews themselves combined several kinds of information. Games were judged for visual presentation, sound, gameplay, and lifespan before receiving an overall percentage. Larger reviews could spread across several pages and surround the written judgment with screenshots, captions, side comments, and illustrations. The reader was not simply being told whether a game was good. The magazine tried to show enough of the game for the reader to understand why.
Tactix extended that relationship beyond the purchase decision. Once readers owned a game, TOTAL! could help them play it. Strategies, hints, solutions, and reader-submitted tips turned the magazine into something that remained useful after the reviews had been read. The section became prominent enough to receive a separate TOTAL! Tactix Poster Special, one of the special publications now preserved in the Video Game History Foundation collection.
The Super Nintendo Changes the Magazine
The launch issue arrived when the NES and Game Boy were still central to TOTAL!, but the Super Nintendo quickly changed the balance.
By August 1992, contemporary advertising for TOTAL! was explicitly promoting coverage of the NES, Game Boy, and Super NES together. The magazine could therefore remain dedicated to Nintendo without being tied to a single console. A reader who had grown up with the NES could continue buying it after moving to the Super Nintendo, while a Game Boy owner could use the same publication to follow Nintendo’s home console releases.
The transformation also occurred during a period when Future Publishing itself was expanding rapidly. A retrospective history from Out-of-Print Archive notes that by June 1992 the company had around twenty-one magazines and approximately 300 employees. Later that year Future launched MEGA for Sega players and Super Play, a magazine focused heavily on the Super Nintendo. TOTAL! was therefore no longer Future’s only major publication touching Nintendo, yet its broader identity allowed it to remain distinct.
Super Play could immerse itself deeply in the SNES and Japanese gaming culture, while TOTAL! continued serving Nintendo players across different systems. NES coverage gradually became less important as the hardware aged, but Game Boy and Super Nintendo software gave the magazine a large supply of new material. Eventually the Virtual Boy and Nintendo 64 would push its coverage into yet another generation.
That ability to move between Nintendo hardware became one of the magazine’s greatest strengths. It had begun as a publication for the Nintendo market rather than for one machine, which meant that the natural aging of the NES did not automatically make the magazine obsolete.
The Team Begins to Change
The original Jarratt and Dyer partnership did not remain intact for long.
Dyer moved to Future’s Sega publication MEGA in 1992, first becoming deputy editor and later editor. Jarratt also moved on, becoming the launch editor of EDGE, Future’s influential multiformat magazine, in 1993. The two men who had created the original tone of TOTAL! were therefore pulled into other parts of Future’s rapidly growing games portfolio.
The magazine survived because its identity could be inherited rather than simply copied.
Among the most important figures in the next phase was Frank O’Connor. His period at TOTAL! produced one of the most extraordinary episodes in the magazine’s history and demonstrated just how much its relationship with Nintendo had changed since the secret launch.
In late 1993, a competition appeared in Future magazines including TOTAL! offering a young reader the opportunity to travel to Japan as Nintendo’s guest. The winner was thirteen-year-old Gareth Bailey from Cornwall. O’Connor, then TOTAL! editor, accompanied him on the journey in February 1994.
Only a few years earlier, TOTAL! had been created in secrecy because its founders were worried Nintendo might try to prevent an independent magazine from appearing. Now its editor was traveling to Japan on a Nintendo-associated trip.
From an Unofficial Outsider to Nintendo’s Front Door
The Japan trip gave TOTAL! access few young British Nintendo fans could have imagined.
Bailey and O’Connor visited Nintendo and encountered some of the most significant figures in the company’s history. O’Connor later remembered meeting Gunpei Yokoi, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. The trip also gave them access to games and company culture that readers in Britain normally knew only through magazines and imported information.
TOTAL! turned the journey into a substantial feature. The magazine devoted nine pages to the trip, including coverage of Japan, Nintendo, and Konami, as well as a two-page interview with Miyamoto. Surviving photographs from the visit are dated February 18, 1994.
The episode represented more than a memorable competition prize. It illustrated how the British Nintendo press had matured. TOTAL! began as an independent publication that needed to prove there was an audience for a magazine devoted entirely to Nintendo. By 1994, that audience was established enough for the magazine to send an editor and teenage reader across the world and return with firsthand material from inside Japanese gaming culture.
For readers before widespread household internet access, features like this provided a rare window into a distant industry. Nintendo’s designers were not yet constantly available through videos, livestreams, social media, and translated interviews. A multipage magazine feature could therefore become one of the few opportunities a British player had to see the people and places behind the games.
Andy Dyer Returns
The magazine’s history eventually came full circle when Andy Dyer returned as editor in 1994.
Dyer had been gone long enough to gain additional experience at MEGA, but his return restored one of the personalities most closely associated with the original TOTAL!. A later tribute to Dyer documents his move to MEGA in 1992, his promotion there, and his return to TOTAL! as editor two years later.
By this stage the publication was no longer the tiny secret experiment of 1991. Issue 39, dated March 1995, identifies Dyer as editor and carried 92 pages at a price of £2.50. The surviving issue data shows a mature monthly publication several years into its run, operating in a Nintendo market very different from the one Jarratt and Dyer had entered with the first issue.
The games were becoming larger, the hardware more powerful, and the audience older. Yet Dyer’s philosophy about games writing remained strongly focused on the person buying the magazine. In recollections of his career, friends and colleagues repeatedly emphasized his ability to make the reader feel as though a knowledgeable friend was talking directly to them rather than addressing an anonymous crowd. That conversational quality had been present in TOTAL! from the beginning and remained one of the defining characteristics of the British games magazines of the era.
Following Nintendo Toward 64 Bits
By the middle of the 1990s, TOTAL! faced another technological transition.
The Super Nintendo and Game Boy remained important, but attention was increasingly turning toward Nintendo’s next home console. The system that became the Nintendo 64 promised three-dimensional games on a scale that made the screenshots and experiences of 1992 look increasingly distant.
For TOTAL!, the transition was familiar in principle. The magazine had already survived the movement from NES toward Super Nintendo by following the audience rather than one particular machine. Now it began incorporating Nintendo 64 material while continuing to serve owners of older Nintendo systems.
The contrast between its beginning and ending is striking. The January 1992 issue arrived with Super Mario Bros. 3 representing one of the great achievements of Nintendo’s 8-bit home console. By 1996 the magazine was discussing Nintendo games built around fully three-dimensional worlds.
The Nintendo 64 therefore seemed capable of giving TOTAL! another generation to cover.
It did not happen.
The Final Issue of TOTAL!
The October 1996 edition became issue 58 and, ultimately, the final numbered issue of TOTAL!.
The surviving record shows that the magazine was still engaging with Nintendo’s future as it approached the end. One of the major features in issue 58 was a lengthy review of Pilotwings 64, occupying pages 40 through 49. The issue also contained material on games for Nintendo’s older hardware, illustrating the strange transitional moment in which players were simultaneously looking backward at established 16-bit systems and forward toward Nintendo 64.
There is no need to invent a dramatic collapse to explain what the surviving evidence does not establish. What can be documented securely is that the October 1996 issue was the last one published and that the complete run ended at 58 numbered issues. The Video Game History Foundation dates the publication from January 1992 through October 1996, while preservation work by Out-of-Print Archive has made late issues, including numbers 57 and 58, accessible again.
The timing nevertheless gave the end an unusual quality. TOTAL! had survived almost the entire journey from the late NES era to the Nintendo 64 age. It disappeared just as Nintendo was beginning another chapter.
Future Publishing did not leave the new console uncovered. Its later publications would continue reporting on Nintendo hardware, just as former TOTAL! staff members moved through other influential games magazines. The particular combination represented by TOTAL!, however, belonged to its own moment.
Preserving TOTAL!
For many years, old video game magazines were easy to dismiss as disposable objects. They were monthly publications printed to describe products that would soon be replaced by newer products. Readers cut pages from them, removed posters, wrote notes in strategy sections, lost supplements, threw damaged issues away, or simply disposed of collections when they needed space.
That makes the preservation of TOTAL! especially valuable.
The Video Game History Foundation Library now catalogs TOTAL! as a historical magazine collection and holds issues 1 through 42, along with the TOTAL! Special 1993 and TOTAL! Tactix Poster Special. Its archival description records Future plc as publisher, Steve Jarratt as an editor associated with the collection, and the publication period from January 1992 through October 1996.
Other preservation groups have helped fill the later gaps. Out-of-Print Archive has digitized original copies from the end of the run, including issues 56, 57, and 58, while surviving scans elsewhere allow researchers to compare the magazine’s beginning and ending.
These scans preserve more than reviews. They retain advertisements, subscription offers, competitions, letters, staff credits, prices, jokes, illustrations, editorial columns, page designs, and the language publishers used when speaking directly to players. A review can tell historians how a game was received, but an entire magazine reveals something much larger about how games were marketed, discussed, imagined, and incorporated into everyday life.
Why TOTAL! Matters
TOTAL! matters because it captures a period when the relationship between players, game companies, and magazines was fundamentally different from the one that exists today.
In 1992, a reader could not watch twenty reviews of a new game on release morning. There were no social media feeds filled with screenshots from developers, no easily searchable databases of every release, and no instant collection of player opinions. A monthly magazine might provide the screenshots that introduced someone to a game, the review that determined whether they spent their money on it, the strategy that helped them complete it, and the photographs that allowed them to see the people who made it.
TOTAL! tried to perform all of those roles without presenting itself as a distant authority. Its writers joked with one another, appeared as caricatures, made their personalities visible, argued about games, invited readers into competitions, and filled strategy pages with information that could be carried directly to the console.
Its creation also tells a story about the changing place of Nintendo in Britain. The first issue was produced secretly by a tiny team worried about the reaction to an independent Nintendo publication. Within a few years, a TOTAL! editor and teenage reader were walking through Nintendo’s world in Japan and meeting Shigeru Miyamoto. Near the end, the magazine was reviewing software for the Nintendo 64.
In less than five years and 58 issues, TOTAL! followed Nintendo from Super Mario Bros. 3 and the final years of the NES to the threshold of three-dimensional console gaming.
The hardware changed, staff members moved on, and eventually the magazine itself disappeared. What remained was an unusually vivid record of how British Nintendo players experienced one of the most transformative periods in video game history.
For a magazine created where almost nobody could see it, TOTAL! ultimately left behind a great deal worth remembering.
Sources & Further Reading
Future Publishing. TOTAL!, no. 1. January 1992. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/Total_Issue_001_1992-01_Future_Publishing_GB
Video Game History Foundation Library. “TOTAL!” MAG-TOTAL. Collection of issues 1–42, TOTAL! Special 1993, and TOTAL! Tactix Poster Special. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/55
Video Game History Foundation. “TOTAL!” Digital Archive. Digitized issues of TOTAL!. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/3595f2aa-be7c-4cb0-a51e-c24523780a93
Future Publishing. TOTAL! Special 1993. 1993. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/55
Future Publishing. TOTAL! Tactix Poster Special. 1994. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/55
Future Publishing. TOTAL!, no. 39. March 1995. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/55
Future Publishing. TOTAL!, no. 39. March 1995. UK Games Magazines. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.ukgamesmags.com/issues/total%21-issue-39
Future Publishing. TOTAL!, no. 56. August 1996. RetroMags. https://www.retromags.com/files/file/7236-total-issue-56-august-1996/
RetroMags. “Total.” Complete issue database for the 58-issue run of TOTAL!. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/total/
Out-of-Print Archive. “TOTAL! Magazine.” Digitized magazine archive. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.outofprintarchive.com/catalogue/Total.html
McFerran, Damien. “The Making of TOTAL!, the Nintendo Magazine That Had to Be Made in Secret.” Time Extension, September 17, 2023. https://www.timeextension.com/features/the-making-of-total-the-nintendo-magazine-that-had-to-be-made-in-secret
Out-of-Print Archive. “Steve Jarratt Interview.” Interview with TOTAL! launch editor Steve Jarratt. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://outofprintarchive.com/articles/interviews/out-of-print/Steve_Jarratt_interview.html
Commodore Format Archive. “The Andy Dyer Interview.” Interview with TOTAL! cofounder Andy Dyer. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://commodoreformatarchive.com/andy-dyer/
Packwood, Lewis. “From Crash, to Zzap!64, and Amiga Power: The Amazing Rollercoaster Story of the Golden Age of Video Game Magazines.” GamesRadar+. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.gamesradar.com/oh-my-god-what-have-i-got-myself-into-the-amazing-rollercoaster-story-of-the-golden-age-of-video-game-magazines/
McFerran, Damien. “‘The Reader Should Be the Beneficiary of the Writing. No One Else’: A Tribute to Andy Dyer.” Time Extension, June 24, 2024. https://www.timeextension.com/features/the-reader-should-be-the-beneficiary-of-the-writing-no-one-else-a-tribute-to-andy-dyer
Time Extension. “Nintendo’s Golden Ticket: How One Boy Won a Trip to Japan and Met Miyamoto.” Time Extension. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.timeextension.com/features/nintendos-golden-ticket-how-one-boy-won-a-trip-to-japan-and-met-miyamoto
Commodore Format Archive. “The Sean Masterson Interview.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://commodoreformatarchive.com/the-sean-masterson-interview/
Commodore Format Archive. “The Trenton Webb Interview.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://commodoreformatarchive.com/the-trenton-webb-interview/
Commodore Format Archive. “History.” History of Commodore Format and its staff, including Steve Jarratt and Andy Dyer’s departure to create TOTAL!. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://commodoreformatarchive.com/history/
Out-of-Print Archive. “Retro Future.” History of Future Publishing and its games-magazine portfolio. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.outofprintarchive.com/articles/features/out-of-print/Retro_Future.html
Out-of-Print Archive. “Back in Time: January 1992.” Retrospective examination of gaming magazines published during TOTAL!’s launch month. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://outofprintarchive.com/articles/features/out-of-print/back_in_time_january_1992.html
Reetroz. “TOTAL!” Digitized magazine catalog. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://reetroz.com/catalog?pub=total
Campbell, Stuart. “World of Stuart.” Archive of games journalism by Stuart Campbell, including material connected with TOTAL!. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/
Future Publishing. Amiga Power, no. 16. August 1992. Contemporary Future Publishing masthead and corporate information. https://electronicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/Magazine/A/Amiga%20Power%20UK/Amiga_Power_Issue_16_1992_Aug.pdf
Future Publishing. Amstrad Action, no. 81. 1992. Contemporary advertisement promoting TOTAL! and its NES, Game Boy, and Super Nintendo coverage. https://www.two-mag.com/cpc/ACME/LITTERATURE/REVUES/%5BENG%5DENGLISH_UK/%5BENG%5D%5BAMSTRAD%5DAMSTRAD_ACTION/AMSTRAD_ACTION_081%5BOCR%5D.pdf
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Future plc.” Corporate authority record and archival holdings for Future publications. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/agents/corporate_entities/15
The Independent. “Second Fortune for Future Network Publishing Tycoon.” The Independent, June 20, 1999. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/second-fortune-for-future-network-publishing-tycoon-1101060.html
RetroMags. “United Kingdom Video Game Magazines.” Magazine database identifying TOTAL! as a 58-issue British Nintendo publication. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/
UK Games Magazines. “TOTAL! Issue 39.” Archival record identifying Future Publishing, editor Andy Dyer, March 1995 publication, and issue details. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.ukgamesmags.com/issues/total%21-issue-39
McFerran, Damien. “Andy Dyer of Commodore Format, Total! and Mega Fame Has Passed Away.” Time Extension, June 21, 2024. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2024/06/andy-dyer-of-commodore-format-total-and-mega-fame-has-passed-away