So who actually are Magical Media, then?

SR: I’d been running What Mobile? magazine for a company called Blah Publishing for seven years, and I was looking for something else to do. We’d done an Internet magazine for Demon for a while and Demon had moved that contract elsewhere, so we had capacity, we had money, all we needed was an idea, and then I was introduced to Caspar, who had the idea for Mr Dreamcast. The team all left Future, and we formed a new company. Blah owns a lot of other magazines, and has put money into Magical Media, but they’re actually separate companies. My partner in Blah owns lots of different businesses – he owns Sports First the weekly sports paper, the Parliamentary Magazine, he owns our typesetters, our courier company, a big chunk of Easynet, a big chunk of Net Benefit, and lots of things I don’t know about, and the way he likes to do it is with everything as a separate business.

Yes, these other "things you don’t know about" – the first reaction of most of the people I’ve spoken to was that, obviously, the whole thing was a front for a Mafia money-laundering operation. I mean, launching a company with a kids’ niche magazine for a struggling console barely six months old? You don’t fool us – that’s dirty cocaine money being processed by the London Corleones, surely?

SR: No, mobile phones are probably just as dodgy.

So you’re NOT denying it?

SR: [silence]

You’re conspicuously failing to deny that on record, then?

SR: [longer silence]

I see. So anyway – a Dreamcast mag for kids? Explain yourselves.

CF: It was a definite gap in a market that had several titles all doing their own thing, but in the main, aimed very old, particularly DC-UK and ODM, and it just seemed like a niche in the market that it would be interesting to try to fill.

Received wisdom, though, tells us that in the first year or two of a console’s life, it’s the older, wealthier early-adopters and really dedicated gamers that buy the machine – the kiddie market doesn’t come along until much later. Why do this mag now?

CF: I think the key difference with Dreamcast is that it’s been launched at £199, and I think they’ll be announcing definite UK price cuts at E3. We just felt it was good to be in the market early and to see if we could challenge some of that received wisdom, I guess. Certainly the feedback we’ve been getting from readers and from kids has been fantastic. Everyone’s been growing up and wanting to make magazines like DC-UK and ODM that are aimed at 25-30 year-olds. I was chatting to Metro, the old Nintendo games champion – he’s now a producer at Midway – and when you talk to any games player about playing games in their youth, you forget how passionate you were about it then. That’s really, I think, forgotten, that kind of passion – I think even I’d forgotten it – and I hope we can tap into it.

The existing mags haven’t done that spectacularly well, though. Don’t kids, with limited resources, tend to spend them on the actual games, and not magazines at all?

SR: The big, spectacular high ground where you could instantly launch something and have it be successful was already occupied, so you’ve got to look at the niches and build from there.

But then why not the Playstation kids market? There’s still plenty of room in there for another title, and it has all the advantages of huge installed user base, low-priced hardware, and consoles being handed down to the younger generation by big brothers who’ve just, in fact, bought a Dreamcast.

CF: The skill set that I have and the market I’ve been working in is the Dreamcast, and it makes sense from my point of view - I know an awful lot about Sega and an awful lot about Dreamcast, so it makes sense to make use of that knowledge.

Having put your eggs firmly in the Dreamcast basket, then, are you concerned about the DC’s rather shaky-looking future? Sales have died off after a strongish start, marketing’s been almost non-existent, software is thin on the ground, leaving you short of things to write about, and the PS2 is almost here.

CF: Not frightened, but there’s certainly an industry-wide concern, certainly among everyone I’m speaking to. Everyone wants Sega to succeed – apart from Sony and Nintendo, obviously – and I think the things they’ve been doing so far are good. As far as the marketing goes, I think they’ve tacitly admitted that they have problems by changing their ad agency in the last couple of months, and they’ve got a way to go. It’s something they’re resolving at the moment, and it should have happened earlier, but at least it’s happening now. We’ve just got to hope now that Sega continues advertising, like it’s done with Tomb Raider, and pushes the great arcade ports that they’re going to bring out.

And assuming, for a moment, that they do, what can we expect in the future from Magical Media?

SR: Lots of ideas. It’s a matter of finding a similar gap to the one we did with What Mobile and we hope to find with this. Not just games stuff – both Caspar and I want to do a car magazine, for example. But there’s no shortage of ideas. Wait and see.