A friend of mine subscribed to an app called Readly and gave me “family access” to it, and to my surprise it has a lot of older German gaming magazines, for example “GAMESTAR” going back to January 2014 (monthly magazine), and I love reading them, but there are also a lot of others from Germany and from other countries / in different languages that I haven’t looked into yet.
I only had a short period of reading such magazines in the very early 2000s and stopped buying them completely at some point (can’t remember why actually) and never got much into their websites because of the ads.
So I wonder if others are still buying and reading them, reading older ones that they still have access to. What are or were your favourites, why did you read them or stop reading them? Do you have a recommendation for one that still makes sense for you? Can you remember old articles that were important for you?
I know I bought a special version of GAMESTAR when Wow came out, that was only about this game and another one for the first addon. I read these so often that they fell apart.
I had every published copy of Nintendo Power yo to the mid-2000s, because my parents subscribed to it for me starting with issue number one and I continued it in my late teens and early twenties. Sadly they were all destroyed in a flood we had a couple years after I stopped subscribing
When I was a kid I’d occasionally pick up a gaming magazine from the store when a cover caught my eye. I remember sampling a lot of them but preferring Electronic Gaming Monthly because it covered everything and had Hsu & Chan comics.
But the first magazine I subscribed to was the Official Dreamcast Magazine. My parents paid for it because it had demo discs and they thought it would be a good lesson in doing research before buying something. My first issue was the one with Ulala on the cover.
When that folded, it transferred our subscription to GamePro, which I let lapse because I didn’t like it very much. Then I got a Game Informer subscription till I went to college.
Years later I would subscribe to Kill Screen, but I stopped finding time to read it after a while. I think it’s hard to devote my free time to reading about games instead of playing them.
I used to read Megazone/ Sega Megazone in the 90s. Bought the UK Dreamcast mag and Hyper for a while. Also collected RetroGamer for a few years. I’ve passed them all on as I found I rarely, if ever, reread them. To have digital copies would be awesome though.
Ah, the Dreamcast Magazine. The only magazine I’ve ever subscribed to. I think I collected all the issues, and played the hell out of every demo disc. Pretty sure I sold them or gave them away eventually… probably shouldn’t have.
I remember rather liking the magazine quite a bit. It was definitely a group of Sega diehards for the team, but they were still willing to call a spade a spade (Sega-made or otherwise) more often than one would expect. They also had some off-the-wall features like a how-to for making the Samba de Amigo maracas look like skulls, and I recall the last issue having a full-blown numbered ranking of every Dreamcast game they ever covered. (I think it was Soul Caliber at #1 – they especially loved fighting games.) Good times. That era of demo discs was a fun one – sometimes you’d even get something extra special like the brand-new Christmas-themed level for Toy Commander.
In particular I was very fond of the magazine’s RPG coverage. I didn’t even like RPGs at the time, for some reason I just loved all the Shenmue coverage and the Skies of Arcadia versus Grandia II comparisons.
It was their articles on Skies of Arcadia that got me to pick that one up! I had never really cared for RPGs before that one. I wanted to get Grandia 2 as well (especially after watching that cool video on the demo disc a bunch of times… felt like an AMV lol), but I didn’t find it at the stores and time passed and I moved on to other things in life. Guess I could pick it up now, since it and the first Grandia were re-released recently-ish…
I read a lot of Swedish PC Gamer magazine as a kid in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. I remember my dad would always buy the latest issue when he came home from work. PC games were so expensive back then that I grew up mostly playing the demos and shareware & freeware stuff that were on the magazine discs. That is until I got more internet savvy lol.
There was also a pretty short-lived magazine called incite PC Gaming that I also read growing up.
I still really love reading old games magazines for the nostalgia. Luckily people have done such a good job preserving that stuff.
I was thinking of this the other day! I have four kids. Two of them are old enough to really understand games (AKA are able to read) and are pretty big gamers. I was thinking they might love getting a gaming magazine monthly but wasn’t sure what the best option for them would be.
Find copies of old gaming magazines and see if that generates interest in playing old games. That might be fun. Get one “retro” magazine a month, and they can pick a couple games from that to try. Might be a pretty enjoyable angle on the hobby.
I was thinking of Game Informer because it’s the only gaming magazine in the states I can think of, but I don’t know if it is age appropriate (8 and 6 year olds who will both soon age up). Similarly I was thinking about Shonen Jump, but I have the same issue.
Any Manga magazines in the US now? My kids like the Pokemon Adventures and Kirby manga, and would dive into something non game related if I gave them the opportunity.
I picked up a few recent issues of Game Informer when I was hunting down the Sonic Frontiers cover, and it is way more age appropriate now than any gaming magazine I read as a kid. They do cover M-rated games, though.
If you’re looking for age-appropriate comics, I’d recommend almost any of IDW’s licensed all-ages titles… Sonic the Hedgehog is phenomenal, for example.
If it’s manga specifically they’re interested in, Viz publishes quite a few family-friendly titles: VIZ | Browse
And I also just gotta mention arguably the greatest all-ages comic ever… Bone, by Jeff Smith. Scholastic keeps it in print all the time.
I really feel for the guy though. Disney wanted to do an adaption, but Disney-fy it with songs and take the harder edges off the story, so he turned it down. Then Nickelodeon wanted to make it “hip” by having then popular songs by (I think) Britney Spears on the soundtrack. They also stopped returning Jeff’s calls. WB wanted to do one, but it never went anywhere, not sure why. Now the Netflix thing.
Can’t blame the bloke for being done with Hollywood. It’s a shame because I think it would make a wonderful adventure film if given the care and respect it deserves, two things Hollywood seems to be in short supply of.
This is actually a really great question and it’s interesting seeing how many people used to sub to gaming magazines!
I never subbed but I bought playstation official magazine occasionally. I never really wanted to spend the money nor commit to buying something every week so buying the odd magazine here and there was perfect for me
One magazine that I did really get into a few years ago and bought almost every month was Wireframe Magazine. It specialised in lifting the lid on gaming and discussing how they were made, the stories behind them, deep dives into gameplay mechanics etc. There was a whole variety of content packed in there, sometimes reviews, focuses on a particular retro game, indie titles, and always a dedicated coding section that would take an iconic gameplay mechanic and teady you how to program it yourself - it was fantastic.
The only reason I stopped buying it was because my local shop stopped stocking it and I wasn’t committed enough to subscribe online.
I much prefer physical content to online magazines personally
I actually grabbed all the files as soon as it was posted because it’s only a matter of time before Nintendo sends them a takedown notice, sadly.