Fan art, reviews, ads, games

February 25, 2015 5:56 PM

Old Game Mags is a Tumblr that looks at the way game culture was disseminated before the widespread acceptance of the net: through specialty, hobbyist print magazines. It features snapshots from the past such as the obligatory fan art pages, covers, dev interviews, reviews, advertisements, and special features. The site has fairly regular updates, and features high quality scans.
posted by codacorolla (10 comments total)

I've been following this for a while. If nothing else, it's amazing to read the copy from magazines I flipped through as a kid and realize just how unremittingly terrible the writing was. Not so much like it was written for a fourth grader, but BY a fourth grader. Whatever you think of Polygon/Gamespot et al we sure have come a long way from the glory days of EGM.
posted by selfnoise at 6:27 PM on February 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was talking to a kid about playing games out of a magazine on my Commodore. Frequently I couldn't get them to work and I'd move on to the next one - but once I corrected a syntax error and then could actually play the game afterward and I will never forget how good that felt.
posted by annathea at 6:39 PM on February 25, 2015

XBOX?!? These mags aren't even old enough to rent a car.

Ahhhh, that's better.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:27 PM on February 25, 2015

Not magazines but two videos just uploaded by Justin McElroy are goddamn amazing: Rocketeer video game review and a live report from CES 1992.
posted by kmz at 10:28 PM on February 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

BRB going to see if I can find the EGM review where they give Herzog Zwei a 2/10.

(That was a turning point in my life, where I learned to never trust critics again)
posted by Dr-Baa at 9:45 AM on February 26, 2015

Thumbing through old GamePros or Nintendo Power proves that if #gamergate was about ethics in video game journalism it should have started long, long ago.

Really GamePro? Every piece of shit is a 9.2?
posted by wcfields at 11:28 AM on February 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh man. I love these old magazines. I have a nearly complete set of Nintendo Power, and one of the special issues we got, entitled "Confidential Information," was a sort of all-purpose strategy guide for the biggest games of whatever year it was, 1990 or whatever.

I remember using the maps and item guides in there for stuff like Ninja Gaiden, Startropics, etc. One day many years later I found it in a box of my old stuff and decided to leaf through it again.

I noticed to my astonishment that many of the maps, instead of being screenshots printed small and placed next to each other, were in fact clearly hand-drawn on graph paper in a semblance of the original graphics. I can't find any good pictures of it so I will have to upload my own one of these days, but that just blew my mind.

Damn, now I want to go look at those again!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:20 PM on February 26, 2015

In my day, Gamepro rated games on a basis of how much the game would explode your head.
posted by Dr-Baa at 1:52 PM on February 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Damn, now I want to go look at those again!

Huh, I've definitely seen these before. But I can't bring to mind where, or what they were called! I remember thinking how unique and cool that was.
posted by codacorolla at 2:34 PM on February 26, 2015

I feel like someone should mention the internet archive's collection of computer magazines here, and since jscott hasn't shown up yet, here it is. But also, my nostalgic crack is the zzap bible, from history's greatest video game magazine (I also loved 80's C&VG though, and Mean Machines later).

It's really hard to explain to people now, who have had the internet for twenty odd years, how vital these were keeping up with what was going on in the gaming world. Not just the games, but culturally.
posted by jaymzjulian at 8:01 PM on February 26, 2015