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.'"

Comments

I remember buying Video Game mags in the 90's

[Spy der Mann]

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.

Re:I remember buying Video Game mags in the 90's

[Gulthek]

Unfortunately, this golden era of videogames came to an end with consoles.

When did this golden era end? You imply that this era was happening in 1992, and that it ended sometime later than that. But consoles had already been around for years by 1992. Do you mean that the golden era ended with a later round of console games? If so, what console round caused the end of the golden era? I mean, the Atari 2600 came out in 1977. The NES came out in 1985. The Super Nintendo came out in 1991.

Also, what type of game are you referring to? "Computer" games? Your post implies that a principle point of the golden era was the prevalance of games that you wanted to try out. I believe that the word "wanted" is the key point of that statement. Wanted implies desire that was not satisfied. I conclude that you were reading Computer Game Review and oogling all the games displayed and _wanted_ to play them, but were unable to.

Flash forward a few years when you had more disposable income. You either went back and actually played a lot of those games and discovered they were actually crappy (and many of them were); or you went out and played a lot of the games that were then modern and discovered that many of them were actually crappy (and many of them were) and concluded that something had changed inbetween 1992 and your ability to play any game that interested you.

Now you bitterly rue the days that could have been, dreaming to play: Dune II, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Alone in the Dark, Myst, Simcity, Wing Commander, Wing Commander II, Ultima 7, et. cetera. Truly, if you didn't get the chance to play any of these gems; then you did miss out. But there certainly weren't hundreds of quality games out there.

C64 Game Code FTW!!

[RogueOne]

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. :>

Re:C64 Game Code FTW!!

[gowen]

I remember entering BASIC code from a magazine onto C64, Vic20, Dragon32 and my ZX Spectrum. Man that was a lot of hard work for some fairly lousy games. Learnt a lot about programming though.

I liked Crash! magazine in particularly, and not only for its occasionally pervy cover art.

NMS

[cheese-cube]

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.

The Best Games Mag?

[b06r011]

In My opinion it was "the ONE Amiga", an amiga games mag from the early / mid 90's in the UK. They had pretty good demo discs (ahhh... those were the days...) but the best part was by far the comedy reviews... they never seemed to mince their words, as anybody who read the review of the CliffHanger game would know. In case you missed it, they scored it at 6%.

Anyone else out there read it? Perhaps it just appealed to my childish sense of humour...

Newsfield - more influential than C&VG

[payndz]

I'd say that in the UK, Newsfield's mags (Crash for the Spectrum, Zzap!64 for the C64... oh, and Amtix for the Amstrad CPC as well, I guess) defined games magazines far more than C&VG. They were the first mags to make game reviews the core of the title - C&VG and the other mags of the time 'reviewed' games in a couple of paragraphs (often not even with screenshots) while concentrating on type-in program listings. Crash et al did double-page, full-colour reviews for the biggest games.

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...)

And for Amstrad CPC owners...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The EDGE magazine is one of the best.

[master_p]

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.

Re:The EDGE magazine is one of the best.

[Anonymous Coward]

EDGE is the only games magazine I'm ever even tempted to buy, but there's no reason it couldn't work online. And as far as I'm concerned their appeal lies more in their particular brand of hype than anything else - for solid gaming news and reviews I read the regular websites, EDGE is more for fun what-ifs.

Amstrad Action

[datafr0g]

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.

Totally unrelated

[SmallFurryCreature]

But did other countries also have shows on the radio that aired computer programs? All you had to do is record it on tape for the C64 (if I remember right) and you had yourselve some new programs to mess with. (This was in holland and on public radio)

Offcourse it sucked for everyone else because of the horrible noise :P