UK · 1993–present
The UK's most critically rigorous games magazine, known for its austere visual design, willingness to award low scores to high-profile games, and a long-running editorial philosophy that treats games as a serious design discipline.
Edge launched in October 1993 from Future Publishing under the editorship of Steve Jarratt, with a visual identity — dark cover backgrounds, minimal typography, anonymous review bylines — that signalled immediately that this was a different kind of games magazine. The publication's scoring scale, where a 10/10 is genuinely rare and a 7/10 represents a recommendation, became its most talked-about feature: Edge awarded low scores to games the rest of the press celebrated, and the occasional perfect score — given to relatively few games in three decades, among them Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and Halo — carried enormous weight as a result. Edge's reviews have traditionally been unsigned, emphasising institutional editorial judgement over individual critic personality. Edge has remained in continuous publication longer than any of its 1990s British contemporaries, repositioning through the magazine market's decline to serve a committed, technically literate readership.