GameCentral readers discuss their favourite old school video game mags, from Zzap!64 to Mean Machines.
The subject for this weeks Hot Topic was suggested by reader stanley71 and follows the news that GamesTM and GameMaster are to close next month. But with the era of the games mag nearly over we wanted to know about your fondest memories of pre-Internet games fandom.
May were very upset to hear about the closures, and the inevitable decline of the industry, but all had very happy memories of the golden age of games mags, and many still consider magazines to be the best format for long-form articles.
Made with love
Two video game magazines have been important to me. Back in the old days Crash: Micro Games Action (later the suffix changed to ZX Spectrum) was a brilliant mag.
The allure of Crash was in its character, the publication had a welcoming homemade feel yet it was obviously produced by real enthusiasts. Oliver Freys hand-painted covers always provided a strong lure but the publications content was so readable and informative.
If I hadnt been a Crash reader I might have missed out on one of my favourite games of all time, Rebelstar which was a Crash Smash.
Years later I became an avid PSM2 reader (I think I bought nearly every issue) and again I liked the magazine because of its personality. PSM2 was fun and occasionally frivolous but most importantly it offered real expertise.
I never buy magazines these days, one of the reasons is that my eyes arent what they used to be and to read anything in print I have to reach for my glasses. But the Internet is so fast and informative, the concept of a gaming magazine seems a bit retrograde.
I do miss the charms of Crash and PSM2 though because online gaming sites and the comments of their readership can verge on the obnoxious. Obviously this site is (for the most part) an oasis of politeness and quality journalism which is why I keep using it…
msv858 (Twitter)
Monthly premium
Growing up in Australia I used to read a lot of our local rags; Hyper in particular was a fave, until I discovered a newsagent in the city that sold direct shipment editions of current UK magazines rather than the ~three month delay issues that most other newsagents got. These magazines were sold at a distinct premium, but when the magazine was Edge it was completely worth the extra cost. Edge felt like such a grown-up magazine for gaming, like they respected my pastime more than my parents at least did! I got hooked up my monthly Edge and would read it cover to cover and then lovingly stack it with the rest.
I havent bought a gaming magazine in many, many years though; with the advent of the Internet there is just no way that monthly print media can be as up to date as online news sources in the I want it right now generation. Occasionally a magazine will score an exclusive, but it will all be online before the issue even hits newsstands thanks to subscriber copies.
Plus, as one reader mentioned this week, Edge has basically gone up its own ar$ehole.
Other pretty brill mags from back in the day are GamesTM (spot-on screenshot quality, lovely paper, great classic gaming sections) and Game Informe,; again, great page quality and layout design, etc. I also had a soft spot for Electronic Gaming Monthly – what a quaint name it had, whos up for some electronic gaming?! Doing a Google image search for egm magazine really gives me the chills.
aelfin
Crash Smash
Back in the day my fave games magazine was Crash.
I used to buy it from WHSmith in the Elephant & Castle. My monthly pilgrimage would begin after secondary school, walking to Smiths and having a cursory browse through Sinclair User and Your Sinclair/Spectrum.
However, it was Crash with its gorgeous cover art that I would buy. Getting home and after dinner and homework I would pour through each page of reviews and Crash Smashes (always fair and very similar to GC in their writing style in my humble opinion), stories on future releases, ads for peripherals and games, letters pages, tips, pokes, and going through it again and again until the next issue.
As I got older and the Spectrum led to Sega, Nintendo, and finally Microsoft I used to buy associated mags and also Edge. But none of them could match that certain something that Crash had… good times.
bilup (gamertag)
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The ghost of Stuart N. Hardy
This is a difficult Hot Topic as Ive been reading game magazines since the Spectrums holy trinity of Crash, Your Sinclair, and Sinclair User. And even choosing between those former two is tough.
For the record, despite Crashs scores feeling more definitive (and the gorgeous cover art) I have to give it to Your Sinclair for being absolutely bonkers, although Im still irrationally angry at how Crash ended up being little more than a leaflet strapped to a tape.
The next generation I only picked up Amiga Power, which was wonderfully passionate, especially Stuart Campbells absolutely scathing reviews from time to time. Matt Bielby was a safe pair of hands as editor since Id followed him from Your Sinclair, so naturally when he moved to Super Play and I got The Best Console Ever
, that was my magazine of choice.
Id say this was my favourite game mag ever, and although it certainly didnt hurt that the quality of SNES games was so high, it was the expansive mandate that really opened my eyes, as it also reported on Japanese anime and imports.
Edge came out shortly after, and completely blew me away with how authoritative and serious it was and helped to usher in *cough* the future of interactive entertainment, which for me meant the PlayStation.
However, although I picked up a fair number of The Official PlayStation Magazine, I was slightly underwhelmed by this one, so it was Edge and then GamesTM that stood me in good stead for years (together with Digitiser then GC, natch) till fairly recently when I stopped buying games magazines full stop. Well, I say full stop, but its quite nice symmetry that my last magazine purchase was Retro Gamer with the free copy of Super Play to celebrate the release of the Mini SNES.
Andrew Wright
PS: Whatever happened to serial mag letter writer Stuart N. Hardy?
The gaming mag decade
I have extremely fond memories of video games magazines, especially in the 90s.
There was Super Play, a SNES magazine which was really key in getting me into Japanese role-playing games. Id played some on the NES, but I only really got stuck in after reading their extensive articles on the genre. A lot of them were not released in the West, so it really got me into importing games from other regions too, something Id not done before. Its successors (N64 Magazine and NGC magazine) were pretty good as well.
Official Sega Saturn Magazine was the best official mag ever. Once had the first CD of Panzer Dragoon Saga (a four-disc game) free with an issue, which was mindboggling to me at the time. With a paucity of UK releases to review, it put great focus on import games (the Saturn was very strong in Japan, though a lot of the games that made it so never came West). Apparently Sega were not happy with the import coverage, which may be a reason they didnt get the official Dreamcast magazine license.
I really enjoyed Total!s (early 90s Nintendo mag) weird sense of humour (and the hilarious controversy when they gave Super Mario All-Stars 99%, and then Super Mario 64 100%), and marvelled at the incredible art layout of Maximum, a short lived 32-bit focused magazine very early into that era.
Then there were the tips magazines, like Sega XS and Super XS. In a time without (or with very limited) access to the Internet, these were invaluable for those very expensive games that youd bought but just couldnt manage to crack no matter what.
And finally my absolute favourite – Computer & Video Games (better known as C&VG). This was a long-standing and generally mediocre magazine, but this all changed when Paul Davies became editor in November 95. Within the next six months he brought in a completely new team and relaunched the magazine. With the relaunch (interested readers can search for issue 174), C&VG became the best video games magazine that I have ever read. The writing quality shot up, and it was the first magazine I remember abandoning the 100-point scale, changing to a 5-point scale. It kept up this high quality until mid 99, when the publisher foolishly ordered them to change the whole format and tone of the magazine. The crew left and C&VG lost half its readers in a couple of months.
Games magazines were very important to me at the time, and in the mid-nineties when there were far more consoles then there are now, I sometimes bought three magazines a month. News and reviews were the most important thing. SNES games, for instance, cost £40-£60 new, and thats £80-£120 with inflation, so you really needed to ensure you didnt pick up a clunker. Most of my purchases were second-hand at places like Cash Converters to try and save some money.
Retro Gamer is the only magazine I buy now, mainly for the excellent interviews and in-depth pieces – longform articles are the things magazines generally do better than websites. Its sad to admit that I cant imagine magazines that only cover modern games surviving given the amount of free content available online. Retro Gamer gets to talk to people you dont see doing interviews that often and is the only magazine I can really see surviving since they do something that isnt easy to find in such a concentrated format even online. I hope Im wrong and more do.
Lord Darkstorm
New Magazine Day
I cancelled my subscription to GamesTM about two weeks before the news broke that they were shutting down. I felt very guilty! When I was younger, new magazine day was my favourite time of the month. As a big Nintendo fan Super Play/N64 Magazine/NGC/NGamer were just fantastic. The fact that they remained so interesting to read even during Nintendos darker days (Im pretty sure they had no games to review one month) was a tribute to the teams working on them.
I especially enjoyed their coverage of the import scene, their sometimes strange features, and the sense of humour throughout that meant the reviews of the rubbish games were often as entertaining as those of the best games.
So now Im left with a subscription to the evergreen Retro Gamer and to the fanzine Switch Player. For those of you missing a dedicated Nintendo magazine, Switch Player is defiantly worth picking up. The production quality is excellent and the amount of games they review is impressive. You can subscribe via Patreon and pay around £5 to £6 an issue.
Jamie G
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Magazine memories
Ive never written in for a Hot Topic before but this one got my nostalgia buds tingling, so Ive donned my best pair of rose-tinted glasses and here goes.
My gaming life and gaming magazines have been inextricably linked. So I sat down and thought of what mags I read through the years, and what did they each bring. Ive also done a bit of research and added their dates of publication for context, although this ages me too. My first memory of a gaming mag was Crash (1984-1991), as we only had a Spectrum in the family at that time. My stand-out memory was the cover art, which Ive always assumed to be original. I cant remember getting Your Sinclair or Sinclair User, although I do remember typing in code from a mag to get a free game, and I dont think Crash did this, so maybe I did read other mags from time to time. You read correctly. Typing the gaming code. By hand. To get a game. How big would the mag have to be to type in all the code for GTA V?
Around the same time I got into Computer & Video Games (1981-2004), which latterly become known as C&VG. I remember the tone being similar to Crash, and as consoles became more prominent in the UK they had a dedicated section called Mean Machines. This became so popular that it soon became a mag in its own right (1990-1992). I actually have more memory of Mean Machines than C&VG for some reason, probably because it was very glossy, had a ton of stuff on imported games (exotic at the time) and relied on the personality of its writers as much as the content. You knew who was reviewing a game and from that their individual tastes – Edge did the exact opposite.
As the 16-bit era took off, a new slew of magazines came to the fore. One that I have some of the fondest memories of was Super Play (1992-1996), which was dedicated to the SNES. The manga-style covers, informed yet playful style and in-depth features were the stand-outs for me. As the games industry matured, no magazine catered for this older audience that grew up gaming in the 80s more than Edge (1993- ). I got the first issue and immediately subscribed for a number of years.
It was definitely more serious in tone, had more in-depth features and opinion pieces, plus developer interviews and behind-the-scene sections. Sometimes it did seem more of a trade magazine than a retail one. However, I felt it got too serious over the years and reading it became a bit of a chore, not a good sign, so eventually cancelled my subscription. At its peak it was excellent though.
The most recent mag I read was GamesTM (2002-2018) and for me this was the most well-rounded publication I can remember. The reviews struck the right balance between information and an entertaining read, had a great Retro section, was not overly serious, but catered for a wider audience.
I now dont read any magazines (other than the odd special), all of my gaming diet is online from the likes of GC and Eurogamer. The commonality with these sites and the mags mentioned above is that, over time, I trust their reviews. Im not saying reviews elsewhere are untrustworthy per se, more that my views seem to align with them. And that along with well written pieces is the most important thing any publication can deliver.
TheTruthSoul (PSN ID)
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