I know my content is all digital, but I've always considered myself a print media first kind of person. It's getting harder and harder to be that way as more and more news outlets and magazines shift to online-only models or simply shut down outright. It certainly made the big gaming media news this month hit really close to home. After 33 years of publication, Game Informer is officially ceasing production.
Originally started as a newsletter by everyone's favorite games retailer Funcoland, Game Informer eventually blossomed into a full-on magazine featuring game previews, reviews and walkthroughs. It would even survive the company's purchase by Barnes and Noble, which would merge Funcoland with its existing game retail store Babbages and rechristen their new Frankenstein monster with the name we know it by today, Gamestop. If anything, this was a boon for the magazine as it quickly became a package deal with the company's Pro membership. At its peak, Game Informer had a circulation of around 8 million, which is absolutely insane for a special interest magazine. It was far from my favorite gaming magazine, but it was an important one and I'm sad to see it go. It oftentimes felt like it was more interested in generating pre-orders and selling AAA games, but it still typically offered some solid articles and excellent imagery.
Remember, there wasn't really an internet back in the late 90's, and I could argue that the internet didn't truly become the way it is today until the late 00's. If you wanted to learn about new games being released, or wanted to see what people thought of the latest title, you had to turn to a magazine. Stuck in a game? You were very often picking one of these up for a guide, or potentially even a cheat code to help you get through. Even in the early internet days, when GameFAQs had become a firmly entrenched source for free strategy guides, you still often looked to gaming magazines for help. Their walkthroughs were often more concise and presented with pictures or maps, something that was difficult to do with GameFAQs' limitations. I love an ASCII art version of the Spencer Mansion map as much as the next person, but it just isn't as visually appealing or practically useful as seeing one on the pages of a magazine. Some magazines did certain things better than others, but each had its unique charm and place in the industry. I figure now is as good a time as any to talk about some of the gaming mags that were an important part of my gaming journey.
While it's still top of mind, I discussed it last week, I figure I would start with PC Gamer. As I said, I didn't play too many computer games growing up. However, I still had a subscription to this mag, a British publication that came stateside in 1994. As one might expect, it focused on PC games. I always found PC Gamer to be very in depth with its previews and reviews. What would have been granted a paragraph or two in the console-centric publications would sometimes get full, detailed writeups here. I didn't really know the difference at the time, but after studying international media over the years I realize the magazine's style was very much on par with what you would see in the UK, with longer form content and more in depth analysis. But perhaps the most memorable part of PC Gamer, at least for me, were the demo discs. I touched on these in the Might and Magic VI review, but they were so much more than just a few shareware games to download. These things were almost like games themselves, even containing some story continuity as PCG mascot Coconut Monkey lamented his struggles in trying to get his new (fictional) game, Gravy Trader, published. Of course, there were actual game demos on here and I played a ton of them. This is where most, if not all, of my PC gaming experience came from and all of these years later I am still trying to track down titles I played ever so briefly on these things.
I think I was a bit young for PC Gamer's target audience, which skewed a little more mature. That makes sense, PC gaming in the UK was much further along in its development than console gaming in the US, largely helped by the fact that the entire industry didn't crash in the 80's. As such, I had something of a love/hate relationship with the magazine, kind of like I did with our next publication. Electronic Gaming Monthly, better known as EGM, certainly had a lot going for it. It always had multiple editors review games, which is a better approach journalistically than just having one person do it. They generally did pretty good previews and ocasionally did some unique one-off articles that really had some weight to them. They also had a lot of interesting interviews as well. But the whole tone of the magazine was just not to my liking, it overdid the whole late 90's-early 00's snark thing to the point where it came off as forced and arrogant. There was a lot of forced edginess and a lot of, for lack of a better term, "bro humor" that I never found funny even as I approached the intended 18-35 demographic. A lot of this attitude and culture I found to be reflected in the reviews, I just knew anytime I saw another Tony Hawk or GTA or Halo game that they were going to gush over it like it was the second coming. Still, you can't blame the editors for liking what they like and they did do a very good job of keeping their journalistic integrity intact. I gained a ton of respect for the staff when they gave Brute Force, the kind of frat-bro-focused XBox title they would normally swoon over, the middling review it probably deserved. Overall, I would say the relationship with EGM was more love than hate, and I also have to give them credit for having what I always felt was outstanding print quality.
I touched a little bit on journalistic integrity, which I think is important here. I don't think I want to go into it too much further, it's a topic that has become way too politicized and something I could rant forever on. I will have to bring it up a little bit here though, because it's time to talk about the company specific publications. Two of the biggest were PlayStation Magazine (PSM) and Official US PlayStation Magazine (OPM). Yes, they were different, OPM was a publication of EGM's parent company Ziff Davis, while PSM was under the umbrella of Future, publisher of PC Gamer. To add to the confusion, when OPM went out of business in the early 00's, PSM rebranded itself as PlayStation: The Official Magazine. Confusion all around. Of course, there were similar magazines for XBox and even Dreamcast, but I specifically subscribed to the more Sony focused mags. Their names may have been similar, but the two publications were far, far different. OPM had a more serious tone, often taking a just the facts approach with its game previews and even reviews. A lot more of its content focused on the general goings on of the industry and how the PlayStation brand would continue to grow with it. They also tended to shy away from actual game walkthroughs or strategies, opting instead to operate more as a straight news source.
On the other side of the spectrum, you had PSM, which definitely took the whole "unofficial" thing as far as it could go. If EGM dabbled in bro culture, PSM embraced it fully. Sure, you had the standard game previews and industry news. But they had all sorts of other features that other publications wouldn't go near, probably the biggest being the time they did a "swimsuit issue" section. They were extremely plugged in to pop culture, to the point where they were doing album reviews of music featured in certain games. Still though, there was plenty of good writing to be had. Their reviews tended to be short, sweet and to the point, in a good way, not a "lacking detail" way. They also had a unique art style, focusing on stylized cartoons with bold and bright colors rather than 3D art or game images. Both publications were actually fairly journalistically sound (as were their Xbox counterparts), despite only focusing on one brand. At the end of the day, neither PSM or OPM were actually owned and operated by Sony, they were just third-party publications focused on their product.
But now comes one of the big ones, the magazine I am absolutely sure you knew was coming when I started yammering about journalistic integrity and company specific magazines. Because it's time to get the power...of course, we are talking about Nintendo Power. This was an iconic magazine for a lot of 90's kids, I even knew a handful of non-Nintendo kids who subscribed to this just to see how life was on the other side. It was certainly more skewed towards a younger crowd; it had a far brighter and child friendly aesthetic than any of the other publications. That was cool, but we can't avoid discussing the elephant in the room here. Unlike OPM or PSM, Nintendo Power was actually owned and published by Nintendo. As such, you kind of knew that certain games weren't going to get low scores and you knew exactly what games those were. Even as I kid, I very clearly saw that there was almost never a bad word uttered about Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda or any of the big N's (or 2nd party developers Rare's) IPs. Even as a kid, like a really young kid, I kind of realized what was happening, so I'm sure it was incredibly obvious to an adult. I will say that they were much more objective with their non-Nintendo reviews. And while their closeness with (or I guess status as basically a PR arm of) Nintendo definitely left the integrity of their reviews in question, Nintendo Power did a lot of things really well.
For one, that closeness with Nintendo allowed for some truly unique exclusives about their consoles and games. Even though some of these read almost more like press releases than journalistic interviews, they are almost always well done and provided lots of details about the product in question. Again, this is pre internet, so a lot of new Nintendo initiatives were introduced for the first time right here. It also allowed them to create some of the best, most comprehensive game strategy guides and walkthroughs of any of these magazines. Nintendo Power offered some truly memorable spreads, often with full maps and detailed hints that were a cut above what other magazines were providing at the time. It's also stunning visually and it did a really good job of making you want to play games you otherwise never would have touched. I remember the series/walkthrough they did for Secret of Mana to this day; it really made the game feel appropriately epic. They usually reserved that kind of treatment for their first party games, but sometimes they went above and beyond for others. In many ways, Nintendo Power was more than a video game magazine with all of the different things they included. It was more like an experience, for better or worse. It may have had some level of questionable journalistic value when it came to reviews, but it did a lot of things well and was truly memorable for anyone that grew up with it.
By the time I'm done here, I will still have barely scratched the surface of all the video game magazines that were around back in the day. But I had to stop somewhere and I might as well do it with my personal favorite gaming magazine. Nintendo Power may have been my first, the PlayStation ones may have gotten more of my time as I got older, but I don't think any publication captured my attention quite as much as GamePro. I have talked a lot about what all of these publications had to offer, how some were better at reviews, some at previews or articles and others at effective walkthroughs and strategies. But I think GamePro did all of these things well and it did its best to include gamers of all kinds. The magazine was definitely skewed to 18-34 year old men, but it didn't immediately dismiss games aimed more at younger gamers. It obviously focused on bigger name titles, but it made an effort to include as many genres and consoles as they could. They did everything they could to include the more obscure consoles, I even remember them occasionally discussing and reviewing Sega Pico games (remember that thing?). They had some consistently great strategy sections and I think the cadence of their walkthroughs was always spot on. I remember one they did for the first Resident Evil that was absolutely perfect for taking someone through that game step by step.
GamePro even had some consumer advocacy content, with their Buyer Beware column that focused on defective or misleading products (and there were a lot of them in the 90's). I didn't always like that they had one editor speak for the entire board during reviews, but at least they had multiple people review each game. I also have to shout their aesthetic, I always liked how all of the editors had personas that they wrote under, which would eventually become part of the magazine's branding. It had just enough of that 90's snark to give it an edge, but it didn't overdo it like some of the others. Even the more quirky feature content that felt forced in other magazines seemed to work out when GamePro's staff did it. I always looked forward to the annual LamePro issue each April. My friends and I were making President Evil jokes long after it was funny. I know it isn't going to be the same for everyone else, but GamePro was always my favorite gaming magazine. It covered the most genres for the most platforms and offered the most variety. It was also another publication I always felt had great print quality.
As I mentioned before, these were just a few of the many gaming magazines out there in the 90's. These were certainly the ones I had the most experience with. But there were countless others, from Game Players to Tips and Tricks to the wide variety of spinoffs to the ones we already talked about. Alas, nothing lasts forever. as with just about all media, more and more publications either ceased to exist or went online only. Honestly, I think it's kind of sad. Again, don't want to get too far into the whole "journalistic integrity" thing, but I'm not sure it's to the level it used to be when we had all those magazines turning out content. There are so many people out there just throwing out reviews, myself included. I hope I make it clear that I don't consider myself a gaming journalist, my content is far more my opinion than it is objective analysis. But a lot of people don't make that distinction and it's hard for some readers to determine that. Either way, it's kind of sad that so many of the magazines we grew up with are gone. Unfortunately, Game Informer is just another in the long line of fallen publications. I have to credit them for holding on so long, but it kind of felt like an inevitability with the way the industry is going. While I do think it's important to move forward, and there are certainly major advantages to digital content, it's sometimes nice, and also necessary, to look back at the way things used to be. For us 90's kids, it's time to say yet another "thanks for the memories" to another part of our gaming lives.
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