You’ve come across this website but just who – or what – is Infinite Frontiers? While we may be new to many of you, we have a long history in all aspects of geek fandom in the UK and Europe and have been active since our formation in the Summer of 1989. In a nutshell, Infinite Frontiers is a celebration of all things geek – gaming, sci-fi, fantasy, movies, comics, television shows, toys, collectibles, books, retro gaming… If it’s something that appeals to you then the chances are you’ll find it here. We’re all passionate about everything nerdy and have been all of our lives and all we want to do is share our passion with all of you, our site visitors.
Our “Family”
Infinite Frontiers is more than just a single website – we’re a family. We have a growing team of contributors to everything that we do but we’re not the sort of team that pulls everything together into one big pot and mashes everything up into one bundled mess! As a team there are areas of work that we do where we have a lot of specialists so we’ve split up and have created a lot of content where we’ve decided to dedicate more time and effort to give you that bit “extra”. These have lead us to launching dedicated websites, events, podcasts, fanzines and even conventions and you’ll read more about these further on and elsewhere on the website.
Our History
Infinite Frontiers has a long, proud history and an incredibly diverse one. It was founded in August 1989 by Simon Plumbe along with school friends Stephen Coller and Mark Haggett, initially as a small local branch of a regional Doctor Who fan club. After a couple of months it was clear that our members wanted more than just Doctor Who. Much to the chagrin of the club we were affiliated to we went our separate ways and evolved into a more generic sci-fi / fantasy club. This marked the start of something we continued to do regularly, adapting as our members, readers, site visitors etc. demanded, changing to survive, thrive and grow.
Anyway, by mid 1990 interest in the club dwindled and we wrapped things up but not before some of the remaining members took an interest in wanting to continue with our publishing work. We’d been producing a newsletter / fanzine since the club launched which was reasonably well received, but we felt that even if the club closed, why shouldn’t we continue and produce a standalone sci-fi fanzine. While we tried to work on the idea, the contributors just weren’t there and people went their separate ways leaving Simon Plumbe alone, but ready for the next project…
By this point, his inner geek had been growing after attending his first Star Trek convention earlier that year. At the same time he had purchased his first Amiga computer a few months previously. Seeing a number of disk magazines released on the Amiga public domain scene, Simon wondered what if the two were combined and a disk magazine was released about Star Trek. He hadn’t seen one available and set to work and started asking around for help. The Final Frontier was born.
After about a year of work, the first issue was released and for the next several years the magazine proved to be a hit amongst its readers and the computing press, and it launched a series of spin-off products as well. It earned us a strong reputation amongst the Amiga community and gave us the footing to launch our first ever Star Trek convention.
While that convention wasn’t a success in terms of attendance, we learned a great deal from it. From that it allowed us to reach a new audience though and our Star Trek fan club Alpha Quadrant was born, and in turn we moved back into paper fanzines. A flurry of fanzines came about covering Star Trek, general sci-fi and even an Amiga fanzine. The next turning point came in 1998 with the launch of The Cybertronian Times, a Transformers fanzine created by Sven Harvey. This was a departure for us as it was completely new territory for us but it turned out to be our most popular print-based title.
Following on from the success of this, the idea was developed to try a Transformers equivalent to our Star Trek club meetings and Auto Assembly was born. Over the years this grew to become not only our primary focus (even more so after Alpha Quadrant closed) but also to become Europe’s largest Transformers convention attracting over 1,000 attendees in 2015.
2012 saw us going back to computing and video games again with the launch of Vita Player, a video games website focused solely on the PlayStation Vita console and since it’s launch it’s managed to build up quite a cult following and has attracted almost 4,000 followers on Twitter making it our most successful project to-date on social media.
Things changed again though and 2015 saw the convention come to an end. Personal and health pressures meant that we had to call it a day with the convention but as with everything else we have done at Infinite Frontiers over the years, it was time for change once more…
This Website
This website will act as the central “hub” for everything that we do here at Infinite Frontiers. As well as all our primary sci-fi, fantasy and geek content, it will act as a portal to all our other websites, retro video game downloads, new retro computer software that we are producing and hopefully plenty of geek news!
Auto Assembly
This will be a great place to visit for Transformers fans everywhere. Originally the home for our Transformers convention of the same name, it’s now changed focus to concentrate on our Youtube channel which is playing host to over a decade’s worth of archive convention footage and brand new material, a new Transformers podcast, as well as a free semi-regular downloadable Transformers fanzine.
Vita Player
Love video games? Love the PlayStation Vita console? Then our sister site is for you. Launched in 2012, the site is packed with news, reviews, interviews, guides and features. If anyone ever tells you that there are no games available for Sony’s much-maligned console or that there is nothing worth playing on it, a quick visit to Vita Player will prove them wrong!
The Final Frontier
This was one of our flagship titles for several years. Released in 1991, The Final Frontier was a disk magazine released for the Commodore Amiga family of computers dedicated to Star Trek. The first magazine of its kind in the world, it was released to critical acclaim in all the mainstream press, it ran for 10 issues until 1996 when it was believed to have come to an end completely… We are making all of the older issues available freely to download but after a surprise discovery, we have found a partially complete copy of Issue 11 and the magazine is back in production 20 years after it was last released so for the first time in two decades we are once again releasing software for the Amiga computer both as a free download for use with emulators and as original disks!
The Team
One thing that has been consistent throughout our 27 year history is our team… or at least one thing about it. As our work has changed, so has our team. We’ve taken a very dynamic approach to all of our projects and that’s why we’ve been around for so long. If someone has left our team, there has always been someone there to step in and fill the void. Since the beginning, we have had well over 50 people come and go and that’s made us incredibly strong and we can only get stronger! Want to know more about them? Well why not come and Meet The Team…
The Future…?
We’re always looking for new people to join the Infinite Frontiers team and be a part of these and future projects. Who knows, your ideas and work could be here next!