This period was marked by several moderately controversial episodes, including the accidental inclusion of a pornographic Doom modification on a cover-mounted CD-ROM, an article about the infamously bug-ridden Frontier 2: First Encounters illustrated with a large photograph of a piece of excrement wrapped with a bow, a joystick group test which featured a model dressed as a nun (testing each joystick for “phallusicity”), and a one-page comic by regular contributor Charlie Brooker, graphically depicting animal cruelty (originally intended as a comment on the violence against animals frequently portrayed in the Tomb Raider games) which resulted in the offending issue being withdrawn from W H Smith newsagents.

Towards the end of the decade, during the editorship of long time contributor Chris Anderson, the magazine underwent another redesign and a stricter scoring methodology was introduced.

It was around this time that the magazine retired the long-running Mr Cursor column, a series of humorous, quasi-autobiographical anecdotes written by a thinly-disguised Duncan MacDonald, originally intended to be a counterpoint to the jargon-heavy nature of much of the rest of the editorial.

Most of the regular recurring features used in the current version of the magazine were introduced during this period, and Woods' final contribution was the redesign which marked the handover of the title to Future plc and the editorship to Jamie Sefton.

The DVD Zone sleeve would occasionally have unique codes which gave readers access to game betas, trials, and in-game content, among other things.

As a combined result of its honest scoring system and its age, PC Zone managed to acquire many UK and world print exclusives in terms of news, previews and reviews.

PC Zone contained world exclusive previews for Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Deus Ex, the first of which achieved a near-record score of 97%, a ranking it shared with three other games: Quake II, Alone in the Dark 2, and the relatively unknown flight simulator EF2000.

It garnered a score of 1%, summarized with "Truly woeful, and the fact that Infogrames hasn't stuck the game in a box and is only collecting a tenner shows how embarrassed [they are] by this unmitigated piece of trash.

Other regular freelance writers included Jon 'Log' Blyth, Ed Zitron, Steve Hill, Martin Korda, Rhianna Pratchett, Richie Shoemaker, Daniel Emery, Paul Presley and David McCandless.

TV presenter and newspaper contributor Charlie Brooker was also a regular during the 1990s, reviewing games, and contributing humorous pieces such as “Sick Notes” and the “Cybertwats”.