Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 two top mags were Crash and Your Sinclair, both of which are pretty much completely available online.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.