Earlier this week we sadly lost Roger Kean, co-founder of the legendary Crash and Zzap!64 magazines amongst many others…
Earlier this week we sadly lost Roger Kean, co-founder of the legendary Crash and Zzap!64 magazines amongst many others. If you’d like to learn more about the legacy of Crash, Graeme told its story in brilliant detail for us back in 2017.
As with the passing of his friend, colleague and partner Oliver Frey, the death of Roger Kean, anticipated but no less sad, has dismayed so many retro gaming fans in the last week, particularly those affiliated with the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 computers.
Together with Frey and his brother Franco, Kean formed Newsfield Publishing in 1983. Both Kean and Frey had cut their publishing teeth at the London publisher Alan Purnell. The experience was a crash course in the process of publishing, working with CRTronic typesetting, photo-mechanical tints, rotary drum laser scanning and more, all proving invaluable when later setting up Newsfield.
As 1982 closed, Franco Frey suggested to Kean and his brother that mail order business, selling ZX Spectrum games, could be a profitable venture. Throughout 1983, the trio built up their business, promoting the games via a slim printed catalogue. As the UK computer game scene exploded in 1983, Kean and the Freys were serendipitously at its heart. Frey’s art had already been gracing the cover and pages of the catalogue; when a WH Smith’s news buyer spotted it, the idea of an actual magazine dedicated to the Spectrum games scene was born – as was Crash Magazine.
Written and edited almost entirely by Kean (often under his nom de plume of Lloyd Mangram), Crash was a huge success, quickly inspiring a sister Commodore 64 magazine, Zzap!64. While not a gamer himself, Kean understood how to create magazines and connect them with their audience. A critical early decision was to let local Ludlow schoolchildren review the games in Crash, slowly bringing the better and keener writers into the Newsfield fold.
As editor, Kean vehemently supported his young charges. When 16-year-old Crash reviewer Ben Stone attracted the ire of one company’s PR department for a less-than-enthusiastic analysis, the result was a massive loss in advertising revenue.
