[COLUMN] Old Game Magazines Are the Absolute Best | by Marty Sliva

It’ll probably come as little surprise to most of you that I absolutely adore old video game magazines, especially from the ‘90s and early ‘00s.

This love was only further calcified last week, as I spent several days laying in bed and attempting to get over the flu. The brain fog + 103 degree fever meant that I didn’t have the mental capacity to really engage with any complicated game, movie, TV series, or anime. I was growing bored of drifting in and out of sleep while some podcast droned on in the background. So I decided to grab a handful of old game magazines from my newly-reformed collection to see if I had the energy to thumb through them, and man oh man, what a joy they are. 

My history with video game magazines stretch about as far back as I can remember playing games themselves. Back when the SNES occupied most of my free time, I remember having issues of Nintendo Power strewn across my bedroom floor. Reading about cheats and tips for my favorite games of the moment was only overshadowed by the brief screenshot glimpses of some exciting new project.

I remember seeing a strange marketing campaign for a quirky JRPG that Nintendo called EarthBound. Instead of really showing off what it played like, the ad featured a series of scratch-and-sniff panels where you smell various enemies and elements of the game, including a giant pile of puke named Master Belch. Suffice it to say, EarthBound would go on to become one of my favorite games ever made, and that weirdo ad campaign will always be a part of my love for it.

Beyond oddities like these, magazines were also a portal into the future of the medium. I remember seeing blurry screenshots of a 3D Mario game for the upcoming Ultra 64 console, and being amazed that games could ever look as good as this tiny stamp-sized image. It’s easy to forget in the current age of the never-ending firehose of information that is the internet, that there was a time where our view of the larger world of gaming was limited to what a handful of folks who worked on these magazines decided to print on a monthly basis.

Nintendo Power also had the added bonus of giving out a gift item whenever my parents would renew my subscription around the holidays. These ranged from official strategy guides for a big first-party Nintendo game of the moment, to the occasional promotional VHS tape that truly felt like the holy grail of marketing material. If the still images of an upcoming game were enough to wow us, imagine what offscreen footage of something like Star Fox 64 and its newly-introduced Rumble Pak would do to my fragile brain. 

A few years later, once I dipped my toes into the waters of the original PlayStation, I also expanded my magazine consumption outside the world of Nintendo Power and into Electronic Gaming Monthly. Unburdened by the shackles of being an official Nintendo product, EGM felt like a magazine where the inmates were running the asylum in the best possible way. 

Apart from its platform agnosticism that allowed coverage of all home consoles, portables, and arcade cabinets, it also opened a doorway into the world of Japanese culture at large in the form of brief import sections, usually tucked away near the end of a given magazine. Gundam model kits, Dragon Ball Z figurines, anime wall scrolls, and games I’d never even heard of adorned these pages and piqued my curiosity into a world of weebdom that would continue for the next several decades.

The hundreds of pages that preceded the import section included all of the standard culprits – deeper cover stories into a singular topic, quick-hit reviews of dozens of new games every month, and if you were lucky, coverage of young industry events like E3. But peppered between all of these were a slew of absolutely insane advertisements that made the aforementioned EarthBound scratch-and-sniff feel tame by comparison.

I don’t know what it was about this era, but advertisers loved nothing more than creating a strange, hyper-sexulized fever dream of a two-page spread where you needed to squint and read the fine print in order to figure out that you were looking at an ad for the upcoming Legend of the Mystical Ninja game. But hey, I remember that specific ad nearly 30 years later, so I guess they were doing something right.

As gaming pressed on and my collection of consoles expanded, I fell hard for the short-lived Official Dreamcast Magazine that ran during the brief window of that console’s life. While the magazine itself didn’t feel like that much of a departure from what I had been reading in EGM, the big draw here was that each issue came with a demo disc featuring a handful of game previews, both playable and non-playable. Again, something that seems so silly and quaint in the modern era, but having a chance to go hands-on with multiple games every single month felt futuristic in a way that’s hard to put into words. A huge evolution from the tiny screenshots that were standard just a few years prior. 

This time period also ushered in the era of the internet becoming ubiquitous, and in doing so, marking the slow decline of magazines. Once the internet came around, it sucked a lot of oxygen away from these monthly periodicals. They couldn’t compete with the 24/7 news cycles in the way that an IGN, 1UP, or GameSpot could, which was especially noticeable during E3 season. The websites would give you live updates, where the magazines had you waiting weeks for the info. This was only compounded with the introduction of audio podcasts and then the video-centric shift that so many of these outlets took throughout the late ‘00s.

I got rid of my old collection of magazines when I moved out to the west coast after college, but in recent years I’ve slowly been amassing a small bit of it back. I found various ebay listings for dozens of issues of Nintendo Power and EGM from the ‘90s and early ‘00s, and have reclaimed a nice little collection that I still adore casually thumbing through. There’s something about the tangibility of the magazines that can’t be replicated online. They’re a snapshot of a moment in time that can be held in your hand. Flipping through each page lets you feel the work that an entire team put in over the course of a month (or much more than that if you count specific longer cover stories).

One of the issues I randomly paged through while I was sick was the EGM from January 1999. This featured a cover story on South Park 64 that dove into the larger cultural impact of the series, previews of Castlevania 64 as well as the Dreamcast launch lineup, reviews of games like Brave Fencer Musashi and Crash Bandicoot: Warped, and of course, a slew of genuinely nonsensical ads. I loved every single page of it.

Thankfully, I know I’m not the only one who feels this way about the auxiliary physical media that used to surround video games so prevalently. I love seeing individual projects like the Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium or Hand-Drawn Games: Mega Man guide absolutely blow up on Kickstarter. Companies like Lost in Cult and Limited Run are still carrying the torch with boutique projects that replicate the magic of that era. But still, nothing beats picking up a random issue of an old game magazine, and for that brief window, being transported to a different place at a different time.