A Polish video game magazine which evolved from the earlier computer magazine "Bajtek" and existed from 1990 to 1996. Top Secret was the first magazine of its kind in Poland, and quickly became a cult classic still fondly remembered today, mainly because of its editors' wacky sense of humor. It was characterized by huge amounts of inside jokes (sometimes the articles would descend into ranting about the editors' everyday life).
In the beginning, Top Secret wasn't really a review mag —until 1994, due to the obsolete copyright law, software piracy was basically legal, so pirates were pretty much the sole source of games— and since they sold games at cheap prices, buying a bad game wasn't much of a loss. Thus, an average gamer needed a manual and a gameplay description more than a review (especially since knowledge of English was very scarce). Starting 1992, the magazine began actually rating the games (much to some readers' ire who claimed that reviews are for "snobbish magazines").
Occasionally, the magazine contained comics featuring its three Mascot characters; the comics were basically Sprite Comics, with the characters digitally added to the screenshots.
Displays examples of:
- But You Were There, and You, and You: Piwem i Mieczem ("With Beer And Sword"), an episodic story, involves a character hallucinating about going to a fantasy world and meeting characters who are all based on the magazine's editors.
- Continuity Reboot: In 2002, the title was restarted by Axel Springer publishing house, with the best-known "original" editor-in-chief at the helm. It lasted for four issues.
- Cut-and-Paste Note: There were at least two humorous letters of this kind sent to Top Secret (and subsequently published), containing demands of ransom for the safe return of supposedly kidnapped editors.
- Digital Piracy Is Evil: In one of the comics, the characters go to the future and find out that the entire gaming industry has collapsed due to software piracy. They promptly set out to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and cause new copyright laws to pass.
- Four-Point Scale: The magazine rarely gave any game a rating below 7/10, even when the review contained mainly complaints about the game's quality.
- Mascot: There are a number of recurring fictional characters starring in the comics, and sometimes replying to reader letters and writing articles. (They were originally created to cover up the lack of editors by an editor-in-chief who was pretty much making an entire issue by himself after the previous team left abruptly.)
- I Know Mortal Kombat: An article in issue 7 (Oct/Nov 1991), asking the question "Does playing a lot of flight simulators make a you an expert pilot?" It's mostly a Long List of all the vital things involved in flying a civilian plane that a military flight sim won't teach you.
- Note from Ed.: Indulged in it a few times. The most major example comes from issue 28, where the editor-in-chief interrupts a review halfway through, supposedly to remove the reviewer's unrelated ramblings, and instead writes the second half by himself.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Except for the masthead, the editors all signed themselves with, and referred to each other with nicknames.
- The Rival: Secret Service, a rival magazine (helmed by Top Secret's former editor-in-chief and managing editor who left in 1992 to pursue their own career.) Since then, both magazines kept tossing thinly veiled Take Thats at each other.
- Rouge Angles of Satin: Both the editors and readers were very likely to misspell any English word or phrase they quoted. The user-submitted cheat codes section was an especially eye-searing minefield of errors, so most of the codes had no chance of working.
- Serious Business: For the readers, the Computer Wars above. Also, in the earliest issues (1990-1992), playing computer games is sometimes treated as something of a mystic ritual.
- Sprite Comic/Machinomics: As mentioned in the description, there were quite a few comics, most of them made up of photoshopped game screenshots with the characters (standing out, as they were drawn in vector graphics) added in. Of course, since the comics were made in the early 90's, we're talking about 2D pixelated graphics here.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Sir Haszak, the strategy game reviewer, loves pizza.
- World of Weirdness: The comics seem to take place in a world made from all the video game settings mushed together, thus allowing the heroes to go on wacky hijinx with Indiana Jones or having their office attacked by the Death Star.
