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Gaming Mags Worth Their Ink
eToyChest takes a look back at five gaming magazines worth subscribing to. Tellingly, four out of five are no longer published. From the article: "What can be said about Next Generation Magazine that would truly do it justice? In its seven-year run starting in 1995, Next Generation virtually defined what good game journalism should be in the U.S. Interviews with prominent industry figures, even those unrelated to game-making such as Henry Jenkins of M.I.T. and Senator Joseph Lieberman were erudite and informative. Imagine what fun they would have had with Jack Thompson." As I've said before, Futurenet's Edge is my personal favorite print magazine. What is yours?
Subscription price is a LOT in the USA. You can get it at Barnes and Noble for $8.99 which today is £4.88. A subscription from Edge is £72.00 or $132 a year. I don't care how good Edge is, I can't afford to subscribe to it. If there was a digital version that was substantially cheaper, I would subscribe without a second thought. As it is, I pick up an issue every couple of months.
When you can subscribe to US gaming mags for less than $10 a year by buying the subscriptions on ebay, it is hard to justify $132.
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No nonsense attitudes. They even used to disassemble the latest games to tell you how well they're coded. Unlike today's reviewers that give everything 90+% ratings for utter tripe.
That all said, I don't think a mag like Next Gen would work today; there was a large element of it that was educating a whole class of gamers about the absolute state of the art as we moved from 2D to 3D (I'm thinking about the features we did on AI and AL, 3D, the NextGen Lexicon, that '98 how to get a job feature, the in-depth technical coverage of the machines, etc.) and in a sense Next Gen readers really did know a lot more than readers of EGM or GamePro at the time. That isn't true today -- your average EGM reader is as well informed about games and the game industry as anyone else, and anything you don't understand (mipmapping or perspective correct texture mapping in the old days, bump mapping or normal mapping today), you can learn about with a four second Google search. I loved NextGen, but there's just not as much of a need for that kind of magazine today in terms of the info it presented.
Today, I think Game Informer and EGM and Play all do a great job with coverage that well exceeds what we did on NextGen in every area (compare Play's interview with David Jaffee to anything done in NextGen), but they all have their own unique tone, and I do miss NextGen's hardcore tone. I still think our salture to subscribers, where we ran every subscriber's name in a special HARDCORE campaign that lasted months, was one of the coolest things ever.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Does anyone here remeber Gamer's Republic?
I do. I particularly remember one issue where an in-depth profile of Treasure Games was the cover story. That's hardcore. "Forget about Gran Turismo, forget about whatever the latest movie tie-in is, we're going to put a 2D side-scrolling shooter on our cover and then devote 15 pages to the developer."
Of course, with editorial decisions like that, it's no wonder their run was so short-lived. They really only lasted in that form for about a year. After that, they scaled back to the point where they weren't much more than a pamphlet, hung on for another year or so and then folded.
I wish I still had some of the early GR's as well as some of the early Next-Gens. Both of these magazines could approach 300 pages on a good month, and about half of that was editorial (the other half was ads). EGM was about the same girth at that time, although they were definitely more mainstream, which is why they've stuck around. They've shed about 2/3 of their pages nowadays, though.
One short-lived magazine that I liked was Gamer's Republic. I'd give a link, but there seems to be no decent page to link to anymore.
Game magazines, more than most other magazines, are really getting killed by the Internet. I mean, by the time news comes out in a monthly magazine, it's at least 1 or 2 months old. Even exclusives are scanned and leaked with regularity.
What we really need is a gaming weekly. Something with a fast turnaround time and is cheaper to produce. Heck, it wouldn't even have to be thick and glossy like current magazines. Hm...
Newspaper-quality is too coarse and grainy (and the color is kinda washed out). Supermarket flyers tend to be much sharper and more vibrant -- a good midway point between glossy mags and rough newspapers. It seems to me that such a publication could be widely successful. The only other questions are distribution and pricing.
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Given that the vicious and intrusive copy-protection of Half-Life 2 has pretty much soured me on buying ANY games, I haven't read a gaming mag in a couple of years.
You PAY for a subscription? Really...next time, fill out one of those "product registration" cards as a VP for the retail software division of a random big box store and watch what happens...
Ah, yes, the Official Dreamcast Magazine. The Mag was worth getting just for the gdroms that came with it, most notibly one of the verry few places you could get the upadated browser and the full online compatible version of Sega swirl! Pry my dreamcast and all of the magazine issues from my dead cold hands!
My vote goes to game players. What other magazine covered a design-your-own-game contest with entries like "Fire Dogs" and "Kill your parents?" What other magazine took the risk of publishing the topless screenshots from that Naughty Dog game and the Street Fighter II movie? What other magazine had Gazuga, skullbats, and The Cleansing?
It wasn't so much a game magazine as a secret, hilarious club.
I used to be an avid reader of Die-Hard Game Fan (later shortened to just Game Fan). I stopped reading after Dave Halverson left as editor.
In its heyday, GF had the best quality paper, filled with content and artwork, the best quality pictures, and the the best articles. They had an anime review section and a real funny mailbag.
Today, Dave Halverson is the editor of Play. Play is a gorgeous magazine, dripping with artwork and high-quality screen captures over every milimeter of its pages.
I always get the shakes before a drop.