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In The Beginning, There Were Video Game Magazines
simoniker writes "The early history of video game mags doesn't get explored much, but over at GameSetWatch, there's a new column that looks at the dawn of game magazines, from Computer & Video Games' 1981 UK launch to Electronic Games' same-year U.S. launch. The column's writer, Kevin Gifford, who also runs the Magweasel website dedicated to documenting old video games, also claims of the early days: 'Terms like easter egg, scrolling, and screenshot were originally coined by [Electronic Games editor and co-founder Bill] Kunkel.'"
Did anyone else subscribe to Nintendo Power to get a Dragon Warrior game cartridge?
I sure did.
Around 1992 or so. My favorite was Computer Game Review.
I loved the reviews. Each reviewer (with different videogame tastes) would give his own opinion about certain videogame, and they would all give a certain opinion and I just loved the screenshots of all the games. There were dozens, hundreds of new games I'd like to try out.
Unfortunately, this golden era of videogames came to an end with consoles. Not only you had to pay suborbital prices for the consoles, the games were much more expensive. And my fascination for videogames was gone.
I remember buying some magazines that had print outs of the source code for C64 games.
:>
Heh, I remember correcting the listing in pencil too then passing them on to my mates.
Actually, in the beginning there was the Nintendo Fun Club.
Well, before Nintendo Power at least. Maybe not *THE* begining.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Was my favourite mag of the time. It introduced me to the Brit terms "nuff said", "well hard" and "git", which I thought were hilarious at the time.
I still have fond memories of mean machines sega.
All mags seemed to eventually suffer from the problem of their writers getting too big for their boots though. Once it became about them and not the games anymore it was time to move on.
I found all but 3 issues in a dusty old used bookstore.
The mag was around 1982-1983 before the video game crash. They are a delight to read. Very in-depth reporting of home console games, hardware, and even arcade games. Computer games were lightly covered.
The best mag I ever collected.
The article only seems to cover a fraction of the video game mags that were out there.
Zzap!64 was the game mag I bought more than any other, there seems to be a pretty good resource of material from the mag here
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
I think my Dad used to get Rainbow or whatever the mag for the Co-co TRS 80 series computers was called. I think he still has them around on a top shelf somewhere. They had code and all sorts of things to try out on the computer.
Oh You POS
...which became "Spectrum User" IIRC. Fav part was the programs that came as page up and page down of machine code that you had to painstakingly enter without a single error.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
This article reminded me of a good magazine which I used to get back in the day called NMS (Nintendo Magazine System). It was the official Nintendo magazine of Australia until one day it folded (No pun intended). Oh how I miss you NMS.
My favorite magazine was Compute Gazette since I had a Commodore 64. I also read Byte in the early 1980's. I was too young as a teenager to understand what I was reading since I wouldn't switch from a Commodere 64 to a PC until 1995 and a Mac this year. You know you're old when a book you read 22 years ago ("Hackers" by Stephen Levy) is now a Penguin paperback with the distinctive orange spine.
The two top mags were Crash and Your Sinclair, both of which are pretty much completely available online.
So what did the developers that created those games call it before EG existed?
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Anyone else out there read it? Perhaps it just appealed to my childish sense of humour...
CVG nearly exists. The paper magazine died finally in October 2004 after turning into a kiddie biased pile of toilet paper. The online version still exists at http://www.computerandvideogames.com./ I'm involved in a project to archive the entire run so we'll get back to you on that.
The article does it a dissevice. While it was close on its purchase by Future that was because Dennis (who themselves bought it from EMAP) wanted shot of it. It's circulation was half of Gamesmasters' and to call Gamesmaster kiddie compared to the CVG of the last couple of years is like calling Windows svelte compared to DOS 1.
As for "Coasted all the way to 2004", that ignores the Jaz Rignall and Paul Davies eras of the early 1990s and 1996ish which produced some of the last great games journalism before magazines were beaten to a bloody press-release filled pulp by the internet. They also had Retro coverage before any other mainstream magazine, which got countless of us into it and no doubt accounts for the success of the superb Retro Gamer magazine published by Imagine these days.
Joystick had some of the best design out there. From cover to spread the game oozed art direction by those who "got it" in the business.
Electronic Games magazine was the the one that the others looked up to. It was right there when it happened, and it had great articles covering the newest arcade and home games.
I used to ride my bike to the mall and anxiously await each new issue on the day it arrived. I can remember drooling over reviews of the Vectrex, a system that my parents never did buy for me, despite my begging. Perhaps if they had, the cool kids would have come over, and id'a been popular. Ok maybe not.
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
It's not much of an article! OK, so it covers the very beginning, and is only a short column, but there's an awful lot it misses out. Sure, it mentions C&VG, and indeed, the whole industry read it at the time, here in the UK. But Sinclair User came along shortly afterwards and garnered a sizeable following. There's also no mention of the Newsfield publications. Crash and Zzap!64 really were the defining magazines of the 1980s computer gaming scene.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Nearly all of the modern UK games mags follow the 'format' Newsfield devised. It's a format that works, because magazines that try to do something radically different tend not to last very long. Newsfield was also the direct ancestor of the major UK games magazine publishers - Future was founded by an ex-Newsfield guy, Paragon was founded by ex-Future staffers, and now Imagine was set up by ex-Paragon types. (In fact, one of Imagine's bosses worked at Newsfield, so the games rag Kevin Bacon game is very easy...)
You must think in Russian.
The British magazines were the best, C+VG ruled until the late 80's when it had a demographic shift. Keith Campbell is the king.
POKE 36879,8
Amstrad Action magazines online:
http://www.digi-alt.net/cpcoxygen/aa.html
There's also an issue of Amtix. I don't know if Amstrad Computer User ever got online though.
..and it's all thanks to CVG!!
(if you get this, you probably read the tongue-in-cheek comics about CVG in CVG as well;))
EDGE is an excellent British magazine which covers all sorts of video game machines with excellent reviews, intelligent layout and content. It proves that there is stuff that you can not have online; for example: analysis of gameplay, interviews with developers, exclusive reports for technological breakthroughs in electronics, back-bedroom programming reports, and many many others.
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/categories/personal/2 006/01/18.html
Includes scans of some 80s magazines, including Compute! (which, along with "Family Computing" was the predominate "type-in" magazine).
-Filik.
Unfortunately I can't tell how much earlier, but it was probably bimonthly or quarterly, issue 19 being dated "Spring/Winter 1982". It might not count as a computer games magazine, as it was subscription only, but the VCS did have a Basic cartridge (of sorts) so I'd argue it's a games computer.
Some scans here. This publication has special memories for me because I was in it
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
In Germany we had one magazine topping all other domestic magazines, namely PowerPlay. Not only had they reviews of C64, Atari ST, Amiga (and later PC) games, but also reviews of all kinds of console games. They also reported about and reviewed lots of games from Japan, e.g. for the Super Famicom when it first appeared there and had lots of interesting specials and looks behinds the scenes.
Another great feature was their contact to the developer teams like Factor 5, Team 17, Kaiko who explained their development of Turrican, X-Out and so on.
Too bad, once PC games really began booming, PowerPlay as it was, died in the multitude of cheap gaming magazines.
Amstrad Action was brilliant. The writing was so damn funny (especially in the later issues).
It was also the first magazine in the world to mount cover cassettes with demos, games, utils, etc. It was also one of the longest running 8 bit computer mags running from 85 til 95 even outlasting Zzap64 I believe.
I didn't realise until now but it was a major influence on me back then and I probably wouldn't be typing this now on slashdot without that influence - some of the segments from the mag had a real cool hacker side and you could learn how to do some pretty cool stuff with computers back then from these mags which at the time were pretty mainstream.
PC Format was great too, in the early to mid 90's anyway - very similar to AA back then but has since lost it's touch - far too glammy and glitzy these days.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
Offcourse it sucked for everyone else because of the horrible noise :P
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Games magazines sure have come a long way. I still have some old ones from the early 90s and they are written in such varying voices. Some magazines read like trade publications, others were for retail store owners, some were from pen-and-paper and play-by-mail fans... but as a 10 year-old I was only interested in the games and the technology. My potential IQ probably dropped 30 points when I started subscribing to Nintendo Power since the writing style was so juvenile in comparison, but that magazine treated me well too - I, like 30% of subscribers (so boasts one ad in the magazine), still have every single issue in my garage.
When CDROM was on the horizon and everyone was drooling over juicy screenies of The 7th Guest and Myst, one magazine (PC Games and Computer Entertainment maybe?) actually split into two - one dedicated to CDROM titles - and were sold together in a plastic bag. Others started packing floppies, and later on, (gasp!) CDs. I requested some free sample CDs from advertisers which had demos of hundreds upon hundreds of games per disc which really whet my appetite for multimedia.
I'm glad the internet didn't become popular until well after the video game - and video game magazine - boom. The web is slowly killing the print medium, and I'm quite sure I won't have years worth of web archives in 10 years. I cherish and reread my old games magazines all the time and I wouldn't trade them for all the buckazoids on Xenon.
The early nintendo power magazines were good during the NES era, gamepro and EGM took over during the SNES/Genesis/Arcade/Playstation, but I stopped buying mags just before the playstation was released, they all lost most of their value as the internet became the hub for video game info.
Fantastic magazine, and beautiful to look at. I still have the issue that covers TRON and Donkey Kong Jr. strategies, as well as Pitfall for the Atari 2600.
:-)
The whole magazine was pure 80's gold, from layout to content.
My favorite quote from that issue- "Admitting you don't own this classic is like admitting that your house doesn't have indoor plumbing." What were they talking about? Asteroids for the 2600, of course!
Good times.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
I subscribed to both Compute!'s Gazette and RUN back in the glory days of the 64. I still have them around somewhere, including the first issue of RUN. I don't know how many nights I spent typing in programs from the back of those magazines. It was nightmarish at first, but got better once they started using checksum programs (remember MLX?).
About a year ago I found out that my boss at the time had also subscribed to RUN as a kid, and had even had a program published. I probably have it on a 5.25" disk somewhere. I still play Canyons of Zelaz on a 64 emulator from time to time.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
My favorite mag was and probably still is Video Games & Computer Entertainment. I remember Bill Kunkel the "Game Doctor"...Andy Katz was editor I think...Zach somebody. The cover artwork was always hand-drawn, making it look more adult than the other magazines. Most of the reviews were a full page of text just about corner to corner, with maybe two small screenshots on the page, and the reviews were really in depth (which was boring if you weren't interested in the game, but great if you were). They were probably the first magazine to cover consoles and pc games, and I remember basically how dull all the PC games looked back then. I remember a lot of war games and RPGs....but then again I remember seeing a review of the Simpsons arcade game ported to PC and wishing I could play that. The layout was plain but I liked that you could see exactly who wrote what, as I had favorite reviewers. This always irritated me about newer magazines like Next Generation, which would never tell who wrote a review. It's pretty obvious that an entire magazine staff cannot have the same opinion about a game, and the review should reflect upon an individual in my opinion. But that's my second favorite magazine, Next Generation. Very, very interesting articles all about the inside scoop of game development. And when they first started, awesome hard covers on each issue! I own every issue of Next Generation (later NextGen) and about 90% of Video Games & Computer Entertainment. It's pretty easy to cheaply fill video game magazine collections on ebay, no one seems to want them. I don't know why I keep them, but it sure is fun to reminisce.
Posted by yintercept - "...science...[is] the study of the 'divine creation.' "
In the early to mid 90's DieHard GameFan was something special, to me at least. The covers were all frameable and the magazine was full color glossy front to back. As nice as it looked the main reason I bought it every month was for the reviews. Every reviewer had there own personal preference in game styles but always seemed to give honest reviews. For instance if E.Storm gave a 2D platformer 99% I knew I wasn't wasting my money. This was the during the Golden Age of the SNES and Genesis till the early Playstation and Saturn Era. Here's a link to a summary of the GameFanGameFan style and some pics of their cover art.