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.
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.
The two top mags were Crash and Your Sinclair, both of which are pretty much completely available online.
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.
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
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.