...you can, but not your relations, as Yoda might say. Except he'd be wrong - you can choose your relations. As long as they're Public relations, that is (cymbal crash). Why, then, are so many publishers simply not bothering? Stuart Campbell sighs, and investigates.

Despite this month's ABC announcements (in which everyone seems to have got terribly excited at some mags' sales rising to, ooh, nearly 20% of what they were two years ago), there can be little doubt that the specialist games press is reaching an increasingly marginalised segment of the games-playing public. And with the new technology of the next generation machines now able to knock the socks off even the most Luddite person-in-the-street, it might seem logical that games PR would be throwing a lot of weight behind attempts to break into 'real world' media, that is, lifestyle press, radio and TV.

So when 1996 showed a huge downturn in real media games coverage ("Tuning In To Games", CTW 10^th Feb), in what was probably the biggest year ever for exciting new hardware and software releases, it was difficult to escape the conclusion that something was going rather wrong somewhere along the line. And it was only in the process of discussing this with some real-media acquaintances that I found out what it was.

The problem, it would appear, is that large sections of the games industry simply don't appear to want mainstream media coverage. PR departments are too understaffed, too lazy or, in a few cases, directly antagonistic to outside media attempts to feature their products. And it wasn't just bad luck - the same names cropped up time and time again the more I spoke to writers and broadcasters. What's going on?

The first person I called was Paul Rose, of Channel 4 Teletext's Digitiser. Digi is read by an astonishing 1.5 MILLION dedicated gamers EVERY SINGLE DAY, and yet has a complete nightmare trying to get publishers to send out review material.

"Our big problem is that Teletext is so desperately unfashionable, despite the fact that practically every games player in the country uses it. I remember at one ECTS a year or two back, I approached a PR woman from a sizeable games firm to talk about some coverage, only to have her snootily ask 'But what could you offer us?', before turning her back and walking off without waiting for an answer. It's mad."

But... 1.5 million readers? Surely?

"In our experience, PR people simply don't see the facts and figures. And yet, they do know people read Digi - GTI went ballistic at us last year when we mentioned that someone on the Net had uploaded a full cracked version of Quake, so they must have thought people would be noticing."

A similar sentiment appeared when I talked to Mark Greenway of Select (ABC 100,000+).

"I've frequently had to send out page-long faxes of sales and readership statistics to get a simple review copy out of someone," he told me. "They'll ask for sample copies of the mag upfront, all manner of guarantees about space and scores, and generally treat us with contempt. It's almost paranoid - they can't comprehend Select being interested in games, even though we're a youth lifestyle mag with half a million readers. I mean, there are a lot of companies who aren't like that, who are pretty good, but still way too many who look right down their noses at us."

Running total: 2 million readers going begging. Pausing only to add my own 480,000 from my monthly games column in Esquire (you wouldn't think that it would be hard to fill just five any-format review slots every month, but you'd be wrong), I rang my colleague on FHM, former EMAP stalwart Radion Automatic. With FHM's new ABC falling just short of the 400,000 mark (ie as many copies a month as every games magazine in the country put together), surely Rad wouldn't be having any problems?

"Ever since I started doing FHM, most of the games I've covered I've only seen because I've gone down to the EMAP Images offices and played their copies. My life's going to get a lot more miserable now they're moving to Docklands."

But that's ridiculous, isn't it? What are they playing at?

"If you're not out on the piss with the games business on a regular basis, people forget you exist. A lot of PRs are totally entrenched in the culture they're used to, and the lifestyle press is an alien world to them."

This was to be an observation I'd hear with disturbing regularity - if you're not in the fairly small boy's club world of the Generic PR Bloke, it seems you're running a sizeable risk of being totally ignored. Still, Generic PR Blokes love football and stuff, don't they? With this in mind, I broadened my search still further and called Jessica Mitchell from Radio 5 Live's Sportshop. They're been trying to give around 500,000 listeners some decent sports video game coverage for a while now, so they must have had some success?

"Well, I wouldn't actually say games companies were actively obstructive, but that's about as far as I'd go. There's been a palpable air of hostility from a couple of the ones I've had to deal with, and the helpful attitude you get from some people is the minority one."

So now we're up to 4.5 million ignored potential customers from TV, radio and the lifestyle press. I could go on, but you've probably got the picture. What on Earth could be the explanation for all this intriguing blend of indifference and incompetence? For fun, I decided to ask some people with good PR why everyone else's was so awful. Laura Fireman at Coalition (who handled the impressive Quake launch) was keen to help.

"A lot of people in the industry don't think normal people would ever want to buy video games, so they don't pay any attention to anything that might help reach them. They don't even know stuff like Select exists. I mean, we had a client once for whom we got a half-page feature in The Face, which we were understandably quite pleased about. We told them about it and they said 'What's the Face?' Like, only the most cutting-edge youth style magazine in the country. Hello? They just don't realise the importance of it. There are a lot of people doing games stuff at the moment who take the play-hard-to-get approach to PR - just sit back and wait for everyone to knock at your door. They just want to have lunch with their mates all day."

And Virgin's Danielle Woodyatt added: "A lot of companies have inexperienced PR people who don't understand how PR works - as long as they've got front cover on Official Playstation Magazine, then they think they've done their job."

Ah. Now. Playstation. Yes. Sony have done perhaps the most comprehensively wonderful PR job in the industry's history with the PS. Meanwhile, Sega have become more and more distant and impenetrable, winning CTW's Villains Of The Year poll at a canter two years running, and have been all but left completely behind. (I've personally been trying to get hold of Saturn stuff to tell my 480,000 young, wealthy male readers about for the best part of a year without success, and I'm far from alone). A couple of years ago, ordinary people used "Sega" as a generic term for videogames - now the Playstation is the console everybody knows about. I asked Sony's Alan Wellsman why he thought he'd been handed the entire next-generation market practically on a plate.

"I'd give Sega the benefit of the doubt - the Saturn arrived at a major time of transition for them. At Sony, we've got the luxury of having the company really put its weight behind the Playstation in an attempt to seriously break into the games market. That said, it's almost unforgivable not to budget for the mainstream media. Even including local newspapers and the like, we've got something like 90 people on our UK mainstream mailout list. To send out copies of a new game to every single one of them, you're still talking about well under £1000, which is nothing really, especially when it's bringing you to a potential audience of many millions. You can spend that flying a single pet specialist-press journalist to California for a preview."

Indeed. And Wellsman's estimate of the cost of review copies is, in fact, one of the higher ones I was quoted in the course of my investigation. Sega's Andy Mee went so far as to say "We can just run a couple of hundred extra silver discs for reviews off the stamper when we're making our own sample copies - the cost is practically nothing." The mystery deepens. (Sega and their PR firm Nelson Bostock, for the record, put their difficulties down to a series of inexplicable coincidences or, in my own specific case, the possibility that the 60-year-old architect or the two ladies from the reflexology clinic in the offices downstairs from mine might have been stealing all my Saturn games from the mail).

So let's take a look at the other side of the coin. As I've already said, the same names cropped up over and over as real-media-hostile, so it's ony fair to give them a chance to explain. Jon Sloan of Konami - what are you, stupid or something?

"The whole PR/marketing side of Konami has been handled until now by just two people, myself and Pete Stone. We do everything from product evaluation to actually taking stuff out on the road, and that's meant there simply wasn't the time to cover the mainstream media to any decent level. Also, Konami in Japan are extremely paranoid about piracy, so we tend to have a pretty hard time getting gold discs from them - we usually only get five, with which we have to cover the entire UK media."

Good grief. And this absurd state of affairs was confirmed by many of those accused, including GTi's Pete Hawley.

"This is a problem we're fully aware of, and we're trying to address it. Until now we've only been two people, and with something like 95 products in our current release schedule, it's an impossible task. We've completely restructured our PR department, and we've now got an official database of outside media and a gold disc burning facility, which was a big difficulty in the past - you can't send out discs if you haven't got them. Mainstream media definitely suffer from not being in the, shall we say, social circle of the games business. It's a real boy's club affair, and it's pretty grim, but hopefully this year will be a totally different ball game. I think you'll see a dramatic change in the next couple of months."