Video: The way we read about video games has changed a lot over the last couple of decades, a rigid previews-features-reviews magazine format giving way to…whatever the hell the internet decides to write about at any given second. For the most part this has been an improvement, but there will always be those misty-eyed for the trappings of the past.
If that’s you, here’s Serenity Seeker (via Attract Mode) flipping gently through a bunch of old copies of EGM for 50 minutes. Ads, reviews, scores, ’90s fonts – there’s a lot to get through.
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17 responses to “Relive The ‘Glory’ Days Of ’90s Game Magazines”
Saw the headline, thought that Kotaku had been rummaging through my bookshelf. It’s either OCD or a little bit hoardy, but I reckon I still have every 90s game magazine I ever bought.
I wish I still had all my old N64 Gamer mags! Those were classic and I regret getting rid of them. Always excites me when one of the writers pops up on here though :p
I still have two boxes full of N64/Nintendo Gamer magazines in my cupboard and even though they’ve been unread for years I just don’t have the heart to throw my childhood away.
Did he break into someone’s house to make this video? Why is he whispering?
I reckon. I wanted the nostalgia hit, but his friggin’ whispering creeped me out so much I couldn’t even make it to the first page. 🙁
It’s almost like a pedophile crawled into our childhood to show us our memories
Holy crap… That made me laugh!
http://www.oldgamemags.com is pretty good for Aus content.
Hell yeah, they have Hyper!
And as you say that issue 2 appears.
I miss my many GamePro’s from the 90s.
I still pick up the odd game Informer every now and then.
I Used to collect Hyper magazines. i think i started in mid to late 90s but stopped about 10 years after that. still got them all though. a part of me wants to get rid of them, the hoarder/nostalgic part of me wants to keep the, so i can look back and exclaim how bad the graphics were back then.
Dude u gotta keep them! I still have all of mine, going back thru them sometimes is a real laugh and an eye opener.
Heck I still have a heap of my old Australian Commodore and Amiga review mags from the 80’s and 90’s. Good times, good times.
I really don’t think many working for Kotaku are qualified to really assess any kind of improvement, especially with the kind of emotionally manipulative writing they’re known for. Games magazines used to represent everything for a specific audience, dismissing and discarding anything different and basically stood as an advertisement for several core ideas. You may have your preference but the idea that there’s any kind of transparency or improved quality of writing is like Fox News calling out “liberal bias”.
Gawd, I spent way too long in the gaming mag section of various news agencies from the mid 90s to very early 2000s. I used to read Hyper, Official PlayStation Magazine AU/UK, Official PlayStation 2 Magazine AU/UK, PLAY, Total, Edge, EGM, and a bunch of minor gaming mags that quickly came and went. With the exception of Hyper, the only gaming mags I bought were the Playstation mags for the demo discs. I really liked how the OAPSM mag made a real effort to put faces to the names behind the content, especially the non-review content.
I think by the early 2000s is when gaming mags began to die. I stopped buying mags sometime in 2002. I felt that Hyper and OAPS2M had lost something. In the years afterwards up to 2007 I would one-in-a-while peruse the gaming magazine section, flick through EGM, but that was it. Once podcasts came along (specifically 1UP Yours) I lost interest in gaming mags altogether.
I definitely miss the good ones, online news and reviews is just a little cold and impersonal I find. Super Play was fucking awesome, cvg was good as was mean machines. A lot of the u.s. ones like egm were mostly just pictures but!
And then there’s hyper. Oh how I miss hyper. It’s like one of my best friends had died when they shut up shop. Could count on their reviews being accurate 99.9% of the time, they got a bit pretentious by the end but the quality of the writing was always good. Sigh. I still have over 100 odd issues in a cupboard somewhere at least