PC Accelerator

Overview

PC Accelerator was an American computer game magazine published monthly by Imagine Media from September 1998 to June 2000. Edited by Mike Salmon, it covered PC gaming in the irreverent style of a men's lifestyle magazine — the staff described its formula as Maxim for gamers — and it is remembered for its humor, its review scores (including a famous 11 out of 10 for Half-Life), and a staff that went on to prominent roles in games media. Its closure in 2000, and absorption into the website DailyRadar, marked the print game magazine's first great collision with the internet era.

Imagine Media and the Late-1990s PC Boom

Imagine Media, the Brisbane, California publisher behind PC Gamer's American edition and other technology titles, launched PC Accelerator in September 1998 to capture the hardcore end of a booming PC games market. Hardware acceleration — the 3D graphics cards that gave the magazine its name — had transformed PC gaming, and titles such as Quake II, StarCraft and Unreal supported a confident, technically literate readership. Imagine guaranteed advertisers a launch circulation of 100,000 audited through Curtis Circulation, signaling serious intent.

Editor Mike Salmon and the Formula

Editor-in-chief Mike Salmon built the magazine around personality. Where PC Gamer was authoritative and encyclopedic, PC Accelerator was brash: comedy features, photo shoots in the Maxim manner, running jokes and staff characters — including "Hector the Scarecrow", a mascot who appeared in the magazine's pages — surrounded the reviews and previews. The formula targeted adult male gamers who bought expensive hardware and wanted a magazine that sounded like their friends rather than a buyer's guide.

Reviews and the Half-Life 11

The magazine scored reviews on a 0-to-10 scale, and its most famous verdict broke the scale: in February 1999 it awarded Valve's Half-Life an 11. The gesture captured both the magazine's voice and the game's impact — Half-Life was redefining the first-person shooter, and PC Accelerator's willingness to look unserious while being right about games was central to its identity. Its reviews were widely quoted in game advertising of the period.

Competition and Market Position

PC Accelerator competed in a crowded field: PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World and Computer Games Magazine all chased the same readers and advertisers. Its lifestyle positioning was the most aggressive differentiation attempted by any of them. For two years the experiment held an audience, but the advertising economics of second-tier game magazines were deteriorating as marketing money moved online.

Closure and DailyRadar

On April 26, 2000, Imagine Media announced PC Accelerator's closure; the final issue was dated June 2000. The magazine was merged into DailyRadar.com, Imagine's games website — an early, explicit instance of a publisher killing a print title to feed a website. The decision foreshadowed the following decade, in which nearly every print game magazine would face the same arithmetic.

Where the Staff Went

The magazine's alumni validated its talent-spotting. Mike Salmon went on to found the Official Xbox Magazine, one of the most successful console titles of the next generation. Other staff moved to PC Gamer, keeping the Accelerator sensibility alive inside its former rival. The diaspora is a standard part of the magazine's story: a two-year title whose personnel shaped games media for a decade.

The 2007 Revival Issue

In the fall of 2007, PC Gamer's staff produced a one-off revival issue under the PC Accelerator name — a nostalgia exercise that confirmed the original magazine's cult standing among readers who had been teenagers in 1998. Few two-year magazines earn a commemorative resurrection; the revival testified to how strongly the title's voice had imprinted on its audience.

Legacy

PC Accelerator demonstrated that tone could be a game magazine's product — that readers would buy attitude and comedy alongside benchmarks and reviews. Its failure was financial and structural rather than editorial, and its brief run, famous scores and notable alumni keep it in the front rank of remembered American game magazines.

PC Accelerator's two years capture a hinge moment in media history with unusual clarity. Imagine Media launched it in September 1998 on the classic print proposition — a guaranteed 100,000 audited circulation through Curtis Circulation, sold to advertisers against a booming hardware market — and killed it in a decision announced April 26, 2000, explicitly to feed a website, DailyRadar.com. Between those dates the magazine itself had done little wrong: Mike Salmon's Maxim-inflected formula, the mascot humor of "Hector the Scarecrow", and a review culture confident enough to score Half-Life at 11 out of 10 in February 1999 had found and held exactly the hardcore audience it promised. The staff's subsequent careers — Salmon founding Official Xbox Magazine, colleagues absorbed into PC Gamer — confirm that the talent was real and the failure structural: second-tier print titles could no longer hold advertising against the web. The one-off Fall 2007 revival issue, produced by PC Gamer's staff nearly a decade later, was an act of institutional nostalgia that few magazines of any lifespan receive, and it fixed PC Accelerator's reputation as the definitive voice of late-1990s PC gaming's brashest moment.

The magazine's title was its thesis. "PC Accelerator" named the 3D graphics hardware — the Voodoo-era accelerator cards — that had split PC gaming into those who had the hardware and those who did not, and the magazine wrote for the ones who had: readers who overclocked, benchmarked and treated the machine as a hobby in itself. That audience was young, male and affluent enough to sustain the Maxim formula Imagine applied to it, and Salmon's editorial voice — funny, profane-adjacent, allergic to corporate caution — was calibrated to a generation that read its irreverence as honesty. The formula's risk was advertiser comfort, and in the event it was not the risk that killed the title: the April 2000 announcement folded a working magazine into a website strategy at the peak of the dot-com land grab, months before that strategy's own economics collapsed across the industry. PC Accelerator thus died twice over — as a magazine ahead of its audience's migration online, and as a casualty of the bubble its successor was built to ride.

Imagine Media's portfolio framed the experiment: the publisher of the American PC Gamer was deliberately running a staid flagship and a loud challenger at the same readers, and for two years the pair demonstrated that the PC audience was large enough to segment by temperament as well as by interest. The challenger's voice — Salmon's — is the one readers of the period quote, and the magazine's scarcity in the back-issue market, relative to its print runs, suggests its young audience read it to pieces, which its editors would have counted the proper fate.

The Half-Life score has become the magazine's shorthand in retrospectives — the 11 that broke the scale — but its significance is editorial rather than numerical: a two-year-old magazine asserting, in its most visible feature, that its enthusiasm could not be contained by its own format. Readers remembered the gesture because it matched the magazine's whole manner, and because the game deserved it; the conjunction of a historic game and a magazine willing to look foolish for it fixed PC Accelerator in the period's memory more firmly than circulation ever could.

Directory Facts

PC Accelerator was a monthly PC gaming magazine published by Imagine Media in the United States (the batch entry lists San Francisco, California) from September 1998 to June 2000. The magazine is defunct.