['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

There's a lot to discuss this week, including a new mag launch and another UK non-game-mag that US readers will be interested in pursuing anyway, but I have to start with the most humorous piece of game-media news to break this month: Ziff Davis Media selling Electronic Gaming Monthly's subscriber base to Maxim. Some loyal EGM readers started getting Maxim back in April, I guess, but my sub didn't begin until this July '09 issue.

Steve Harris wrote on the new EGM's Twitter last week that this deal "happened prior to my deal," so he didn't have a chance to score the old EGM's subscribers and move them to his mag. It's a bit of a shame, too. Thanks to all the game magazines Ziff has bought out and/or folded in their time, my subscription to EGM had been extended, and extended, and extended to dizzying levels over the years. This means that as of now, I am owed issues of something until March of 2012, according to my mailing sticker.

I would have much preferred that something to be the new EGM instead of Maxim. Not that I dislike Maxim. I subscribed to it for a while in the mid-aughts as part of a package deal I got off some clearinghouse website. I think boobies are great. Especially covered ones, because I'm from Texas and we don't believe in exposing ourselves down here. You know who likes seeing bare nipples? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that's who. Think about that.

This mag is, demographically, a decent enough fit for EGM readers, who (according to Ziff's still-active online sales kit) were 93% male and 86% over the age of 17. But Maxim ain't what it used to be.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 6/27/09" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I finally got around to obtaining a copy of Japanese entertainment (including video games) magazine Otona-Fami when I was in Chicago, so I thought I'd look into it in depth a bit -- especially because it's the sort of mag that we were aiming for with PiQ, although I wasn't aware of it at the time.

The name "Otona-Fami" is a blending of otona (Japanese for "adult") and "Famitsu," and that about sums it up, really. In contrast to Weekly Famitsu -- whose pages are still mainly devoted to previews and strategy features, although the amount of hard-nosed industry news has slowly expanded over the years -- Otona-Fami is almost entirely features, and even what straight-on previews/reviews they deal with are mixed up with the regular columns in the back sections.

Here is a very basic rundown of Otona-Fami's content for the issue I have:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Famitsu for Grown-Ups" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Greetings from lovely, straight-from-the-1950s suburban Chicago! Absolutely nothing I did here has to do with game magazines, or games, or magazines, but I thought the picture was too nice to keep to myself.

For game degenerates, however, there is quite a lot to look at with this update, including one cover redesign and one enormous subscriber bonus that I had to whip out the camera to capture in its full glory.

PC Gamer July and August 2009

   

Covers: BioShock 2 and the Fresh Prince's dad starring in Left 4 Dead 2

Hooray! My PC Gamer subscription finally fixed itself (sort of -- it claims it expires in October when I just renewed it a few weeks ago), and so I got these two issues within a few days of each other. Convenient, that, because it allows me to show off one rather important difference between the two issues.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 6/13/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

A few notes and topics to mull over as everyone sleeps off E3 and I prepare for a two-brewery-tour weekend (i.e. by exercising a lot):

- The announcement of Electronic Gaming Monthly's "resurrection" was overshadowed by the rest of E3, which was sad but unavoidable. No particulars have been announced by Steve Harris, who's intimated on his Twitter that he's been bouncing around doing Hollywood work in the past couple of years, but details are promised in the next week or so.

If Mr. Harris is that serious about it, and if he has the money to launch a successful video-game media presence and keep it running until it has a chance at becoming profitable, then I see no reason why he can't be a success. However, not many people can show such dedication against the economic realities facing media these days.

What's more, unless Harris has some secrets up his sleeve, none of the things that made EGM the most respectable name in modern game media -- ie. the editors and artists who worked for it -- are returning to the new presence. (My impression of Harris was that he was always more the behind-the-scenes business guy at Sendai, letting Ed Semrad and crew drive his mag library's editorial direction, so it's whoever he hires for his projects that'll make the real difference here.)

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Post-E3 Zen" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

It's sub-renewal time for me! Here's a kind letter I received from my good friend Dave Halverson in the mail earlier this month. I can tell that he wrote it personally, to me, because he makes the same sort of grammar errors that I see in his magazine all the time.

The fortunes of the print-magazine business being what they are these days, publishers in all fields are falling over themselves inventing ways to retain their subscriber base. A lot of the mags I subscribe to (including Wired and all of Future's publications, until recently) begin sending subscriber renewal notices to me starting about six issues into my subscription. This is merely annoying, but some slightly more unscrupulous mags are even worse.

I subscribed to Armchair General a while back and let the subscription expire earlier this year. Two months later, I received a very official-looking "bill" from the publisher, talking about how "payment is due" for another year's subscription and failure to send this payment would damage "my personal credit" with the company, whatever that means. I, of course, didn't owe the publisher anything, something I confirmed when I contacted customer support and told them to stop bothering me. From this, I can only conclude that Armchair General's circulation department is looking to confuse the elderly military nuts who are the mag's main audience by thinking they are past due on a bill when they're actually just getting an invitation to resubscribe.

No publication in the game biz has gone this low, fortunately, and so I am resubscribed once again to everything that I can in the genre. Read on to find out about every game mag that's come out in the past couple weeks (and that I care about). Things are generally pretty slow in this month's stack, given how there wasn't much to talk about before the E3 rush:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 5/31/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

   

I got some feedback the other day that asked a question I've thought about off-and-on over the years but never seriously arrived at a conclusion for. It's a simple one, but deceptively so, and I'll paraphrase it for the purpose of this column:

Why didn't the US have any equivalent to CRASH or Zzap!64 or the other big UK computer-game magazines of the 1980s?

Someone in Europe looking back at American personal computer mags of the 1980s must feel pity for us. The UK had witty, engaging, (largely) editorially sound magazines concentrating exclusively on video games just as early as the US did.

But unlike their American counterparts, they kept growing and evolving after the Atari crash, outselling the business-oriented Euro PC mags easily and becoming immensely popular beginning in 1984 and '85. The "golden age" kept on going until well into the late '90s in the UK, and with mags like Edge and Retro Gamer still crankin' in Britain, you could argue that it's still there.

Meanwhile, for better or for worse, the dominant US consumer PC mags of the age -- COMPUTE!, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, RUN, assorted other platform-specific titles -- were all about either business or programming. Games were shunted into a small column, if covered at all, and both editorial staffs and letter-writers shunned them as a presence to be tolerated rather than to be celebrated. This despite the fact that the largest, costliest ad spots in well near every 8-bit computer mag in the US were occupied by game companies.

If the advertising was there to support a Zzap!-ish like publication in the US, then why didn't it happen? After some thought, here's what I came up with:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Where's My Zzap?" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

If only Game Mag Weaseling was around in 1977! Then I could've covered books like this!

While clearing out my closet, I came upon my one and only copy of Video Games by Len Buckwalter, very possibly the first third-party book devoted to games (and, if you reeeeaaaally want to stretch the definition, the first strategy guide ever written).

The book actually predates the Atari 2600, so the majority of its coverage is devoted to dedicated Pong consoles. It's packed with great photos of 70s people in their 70s living rooms and 70s electronic stores playing 70s games, and it's a killer collector's item -- you generally won't find copies online in good condition for under $50. (I think I got mine back at a swap meet in 1996 for a couple bucks.)

But enough about the past! It's the present I must worry about now -- specifically, the three game mags that have crossed my desk in the past fortnight, to wit:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 5/16/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

         

A small bit of advertising this week. After what I guess is a couple years' worth of dormancy, I've realized that I'm never going to have the time to create the ultimate game- and computer-magazine database I envisioned with Magweasel, my personal site.

So I've decided to make it into a weblog instead. Not exactly the most original concept, I know, but the coverage I'm planning -- old mags, old games, Japan stuff, ridiculous industry insider stuff, and other things that may be familiar to people who remember my weblogs from the early part of the decade -- should be unique enough. You can take a look to see what I've done so far.

One of the things I plan for Magweasel in the future is to post selected articles both from my magazine collection and my file cabinet full of old E3 and CES flyers, a collection that extends back to circa 1989.

I have a wide variety of stuff, from sales sheets to licensee lists to pamphlets for console copiers and unreleased games, covering nearly every facet of video game history from the NES forward. And yet the only thing anyone ever requests from me is AMAZING SETA HELPS RETAILERS.

People remember it from when I first posted this 1990 fold-out comic nearly a decade ago, and the pure destructive effect of its contents is still etched into their minds today, apparently.

I can't deny the effectiveness of it, no. Japanese game publishers have gained a lot of prestige and influence over the industry in modern times, but I miss the...shall we say...fly-by-night-ed-ness of the small-time 8-bit licensees sometimes.

(Note: That really is what Japanese people look like. Honest. I've been there, so I know this for a fact.)

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

The latest DVD set from Mort arrived in the mail last week, and it's quite a big one -- the complete run of CU Amiga, the mag that (after Amiga Format) was the largest Amiga-exclusive title in the UK.

CU can actually boast a long and uninterrupted publishing history in Britain, starting with VIC Computing in 1981 and continuing for 194 issues until CU's closure in 1998. It was very much a mag that reflected its times -- starting out with a largely technical bent for the nerds who bought a Commodore 64 at full price, shifting focus to games toward the late '80s as the C64 became the UK's most popular "game console," and then starting the cycle over a few years later with the Amiga.

Like Amiga Format, the title got very programming and tech-oriented in the latter years when the diehards were all that was left; unlike AF, it arguably went away at its prime, when it was still healthy-looking and had a lot of stuff to report on. There is a lot of raw material to sift through here, and I'm very much looking forward to spreading that effort out over the next few months.

Anyway, on to this fortnight's column, one that I might as well slap a "Sponsored by Future US" sticker on because they're responsible for nearly everything this time around:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 5/2/09" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

For the first time in about three years of writing Game Mag Weaseling, I'm going to not talk about magazines at all. Hopefully you will forgive me; I've been on vacation in the lovely CA Bay Area for the past few days, largely basking in the nostalgia, and my mind hasn't been on the subject.

I lived in San Francisco from '01 to '05, working first for GamePro then Ziff Davis, and as a result I spent a lot of time in SF's downtown district, home to some of America's most expensive real estate...and, also, some of its most vacant presently.

I was particularly interested in revisiting the Metreon, the urban shopping center established by Sony in 1999, for the first time in a few years. I always sort of saw the Metreon as the most unique symbol of the PS2/GC/Xbox era of console games, chiefly because I went there all the time for industry events.

Konami and SOE held their big video presentations for their Gamers Day events in the "Action Theater" upstairs; Square Enix and Bandai held big public game launches in the PlayStation Store on the street corner. There is the Walk of Game, a catwalk on the second floor with some tiles that say "Sonic the Hedgehog" and "EverQuest" on them.

For a while in '03-'04, game press and developer rank-and-file gathered in the bar/lounge area for semi-regular industry networking events, which I went to mainly 'cos a new kind of liquor would be half-price every night.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': The Lost Ultimate Entertainment Experience" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Ad pages for consumer magazines dropping by 25% in the space of a year! - Print mags closing up not for being unprofitable, but for not being profitable enough! - The industry grasping at straws for ideas, most of which seem to involve that astonishing new "Twitter" thing for some reason!

These, and more, are some of the topics that are not on my mind this week, because nobody told the game industry about this and therefore I have a stack of magazines to write about that's three inches high.

At the top, for some reason, is the latest newsstand copy of Nuts and Volts, a mag I've covered now and again in the past. I picked up this issue not because there's any hilarious Photoshop errors on the cover, but because it covered the RetroGame, a handheld "game system" that's so straightforward from an electronics perspective that a third-grader can put it together.

It's been picked up by tech blogs on an on-and-off basis ever since its inventor produced it in 2007, but making the cover of a nationally-distributed magazine has to be a bit of a coup for it.

I have a tendency (as you've noticed) to buy pretty much any magazine that has video game stuff on the cover. A melding of hobbies that combines modern entertainment with obsolete media, you could say. And speaking of, how 'bout we discuss the 12 other pieces of obsolete game media that crossed my desk over the past two weeks?

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 4/18/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I'm a bit annoyed at Future's subscription department as they seemed to have stopped sending me all magazines except PlayStation: TOM even though my subscriptions don't expire for another few months on any of them.

Luckily, my rage was distracted a bit by Braid (PC), Tower of Druaga (Wii; still cannot beat level 41 with any kind of consistency after all these years) and the March '09 issue of UK design magazine Computer Arts Projects, which you ought to be able to find right now at Barnes & Noble if you're in the US.

I have never read this mag before, but it's devoted to all manner of art and graphic design, and as you'd expect, it's impeccably well laid out and very much arranged to look visually pleasing. This is apparently the first time they've devoted an issue to video games, which is a surprise considering it's been around for 120 issues, but it's a treat to read nonetheless. Some of the highlights:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Your Moment of Art Culture" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

It's kind of a tiny installment for Mag Roundup (only two issues), so how about a little light reading to occupy your time? There's no web page for it, but have a look at this directory for a couple tantalizing peeks at "Arcade Alley," the column written by Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz that ran in Video magazine (a monthly devoted to VCRs and such) from 1978 and provided the first mainstream print coverage of console games in the US.

The column directly led to the 1981 launch of Electronic Games, the most well-known and celebrated of titles that ran during the pre-crash era. In this directory there's a column about the Intellivision from 1979 and a video buyer's guide from 1981 that includes all kinds of obscure computer platforms. Superbly interesting stuff.

Anyway, click on to find out about the two mags that arrived on shelves in the past two weeks.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 4/4/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

   

If there was such a thing as a "scene" of people scanning in old computer magazines and releasing them on the Internet, then this guy DLH would be the hot new rising star in it. His site offers torrent/newsgroup links to all manner of neat old US mags, not to mention PDFs of all manner of old Commodore 64 and Amiga books and hardware data.

UK fans have already scanned in every great game and computer mag of their past (and lots of not-at-all-great ones), but the Americans have always been behind the trend. A lot of the mags DLH has been scanning and/or collating have been pining for a full digital version for years now, two of which you see the premiere issues of above -- COMPUTE! and the Amiga-exclusive Amazing Computing.

Both of these mags started out with two feet firmly planted in the user-group scene, COMPUTE! originally a newsletter devoted to Commodore's PET machine and the first issue of Amazing typeset off a dot-matrix printout (they went for laser printing starting with issue 2). Both got enormous in their heyday, the December '83 issue of COMPUTE! clocking in at 392 pages.

Both also launched all kinds of spin-off mags, from the equally-successful COMPUTE!'s Gazette to Amiga programmer reference AC's Tech. COMPUTE! was one of the few consumer computer mags to weather the brutal post-game-crash era of 1984 and beyond, but it was never quite the same, eventually fizzling in 1990 and being reborn as a PC-centric mag. Amazing, on the other hand, kept right on truckin' through 1999, long after the Amiga market died in America, a feat that shows the sheer tenacity of the Commodore faithful in the '90s.

Thumbing through COMPUTE! from a 2009 perspective, one may wonder why this mag got popular at all. It was aggressively multiplatform, devoted space to a lot of quixotic subjects (including one infamous multi-part feature that attempted to implement a computer language in Commodore 64 BASIC) and was often so text- and program listing-heavy that it looked like a Sears catalog from the turn of the century.

The same could be said of AC, a lot of the relevence of which is lost if you aren't in tune with the state of the computer it was covering. But they are both undeniably valuable primary sources for the US home computer scene, and the enthusiasm both mags are packed with is something you're never going to see again, now that computers are essentially furniture. Besides, there are one or two good games among COMPUTE!'s endless BASIC listings. I think.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

The 200th issue of Edge (which I write more about after the cut) arrived in my mail this week. It reminded me of all the reasons why I love Edge and would continue my subscription to it even if I weren't writing this column, but it's worth putting down an extra word or two here about their well-publicized massive 200-cover split run.

Despite what readers may think, it's actually pretty simple to do a split-cover run like this. Magazines do it all the time, occasionally producing different covers for different regions. Tips & Tricks, for example, did a Canada-only cover one month in 1998 -- their main strategy guide was for a game based off the TV show ReBoot, which was only running live up north at the time. I probably would never have been aware of this fact if it weren't for EIC Chris Bieniek himself being nice enough to give me a copy. Thanks much.

I think EGM's Super Smash Bros. Melee was the largest split-cover run in game mags until now, a record held before them by Official PlayStation Mag and their Def Jam: Fight for LA 20-cover collector's nightmare. Edge's cover selections are nothing all that special when taken individually -- basically, pieces of clip art on a simple color background -- but in terms of drumming up hype for the mag, I think the split run's already served its purpose. (You'd have to be nuts to collect them all, though, because -- assuming an even distribution of all covers and checking Edge's ABC figures and sub rates -- there are likely only 120 or so of each one being distributed.)

My favorite of the covers, despite all the nostalgia of the first 199, is still #200, the subscriber-only piece:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/20/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

The first details on the new Future-produced game mag launch are beginning to expose themselves a bit. Called Nvision, the title (a sponsorship of some sort with Nvidia) covers "visual entertainment," which seems to mean a mix of PC games, hardware, video tech, and a bit on movie CGI and such. It's a seasonal mag, and sub cards are in the current issue of Maximum PC (or you can subscribe online right now).

There are still some questions I have about this mag's main thrust -- it sounds basically like an Nvidia-branded Maximum PC to me, just going off the media blurb -- but I look forward to seeing the first issue nonetheless.

This isn't all that's up in Future land, though -- PC Gamer is all new and spanking and everything, so click forward to see how it looks.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/7/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Something's been bothering me lately. Not the economy, or my job, or my car's transmission, or how I'm gonna find the money to keep my weasels feasting on their diet of chicken necks and pre-frozen mice. No, lately I've been concerned that I've been too harsh on Tips & Tricks Video Game Codebook.

As erstwhile readers may know, the bimonthly Tips & Tricks of today is exactly what the title suggests: lots of tips and even more tricks, along with a couple of multipage strategy guides, some previews, and four game-themed pencil puzzles in the non-glossy middle pages for those long car rides in the station wagon.

It was something different before the summer of 2007, however. Strategy was still the main draw before, but alongside it were all kinds of regular columns, covering topics from classic game collecting and merchandise to WoW and game soundtrack CDs.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Where's My Tips?" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Usually I write something that tries to be pithy or witty to kick this column off, but this time I'll just begin by introducing a new Future special right off: 20 Years of Nintendo Power, which you should be able to find at any bookstore chain right now.

This is, to be succinct, the sort of thing I wish I saw more often in the US marketplace. It's all original content, and it essentially tells the story of Nintendo through spreads from old Nintendo Power issues -- as opposed to the year-long feature series that ran in NP throughout '08, which covered the history of the magazine itself.

The effect is at once nostalgic and very authoritative, and the text's not at all throwaway -- it's filled with very tiny little behind-the-scenes tidbits and neat (and also surprisingly honest) commentary from Scott Pelland, the man who's hung around NP for nearly its entire history.

This is a great piece, to sum up, and I think everyone should buy it. My only qualm is the price. This sucker's only 68 pages long, and yet costs ten bucks, which is more than even what an imported issue of Edge rolls in at. The pages are nice and thick, yeah, and that's 68 pages of ad-free content, but I can't help but think this woulda been twice as good if it were twice the size. Regardless, well done on all ends.

With that done, let's move on to the other mags that hit stands the past fortnight. It's been a busy one, too:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 2/21/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

It was noted in the comments for last week's column that Play Magazine is, perhaps, a misunderstood title in the US marketplace.

I want to set the record straight on this one as soon as possible, especially because assuming Dave Halverson's little game mag makes it to May '09, it will have published more issues than the infamous Die Hard GameFan, the publication that made him gamer-famous.

There are many good things to say about Play -- mainly, its unique design and ability to take any kind of game asset and make it look pretty. There are a few bad things to say about it -- mainly, the fact that the staff seems to not believe in copy editing, perhaps for religious reasons.

But the greatest attraction that the mag has going for it is undoubtedly Halverson himself. If you think the publisher and former EIC of Play has changed his writing style any from the age when he wrote things like "Atari is back, come pet the cat......", you are blissfully incorrect. His penchant for snappy, occasionally nonsensical closing lines has aged like fine wine over these past 15 years, and in recent times, it's only been improved by his new-found undying love for games starring either furry animals or girls with big breasts.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I subscribe to Play half because of its visual design, and half because of Dave's whimsical writing. The man is such a stud that he wrote a report for Play's E3 coverage in the September issue without actually attending the event, something he freely admits in the text. Does your favorite game media outlet have anyone ballsy enough to do that? Of course not. That is because they are not hardcore.

Don't believe me? Just take a look at these actual excerts from Dave's 2008 work:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Dave Halverson's Greatest Hits '08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I'm back from vacation and my mind is frazzled!

A copy of The 25 Most Influential Games of All Time arrived in the mail earlier this week, something I've been looking forward to for a while since it's done by the GamePro gentlemen and I was expecting something like Edge's Top 100 Videogames special from two years ago -- still among my most favorite specials.

This book isn't quite so ambitious as Edge's massive piece, however. It's actually a pretty small tome, and there's little more than a robust paragraph about each of the 25 games it covers, along with a few "sequels and competitors to this game" sidebars. It's very well-designed and fun to thumb through while it lasts, but the lack of content makes the book seem a little...I dunno, puny for the coffee-table-style prices being asked for.

But, then again, this might just be my foul mood talking. Newsstand distribution of most Future UK and Imagine titles (including Retro Gamer) seems to have stopped in my local area entirely, which makes me extremely despondent -- and soon poor, too, since I'm probably gonna shell out for a sub to RG. Ah, well, that's the peril of being a degenerate game-mag aficionado -- and on that note, click on to read all about the new game mags of the past fortnight.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 2/7/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I am in the midst of madly preparing for a long vacation. Everything always seems to happen last-minute when you've got one of these vacations, so my mind is frazzled right now.

Fortunately, I don't have to say very much in order to introduce Amusement, a French mag that's perhaps best described as a mixture of Edge and a European fashion magazine.

I'm surprised I haven't read a lot more about Amusement before now (although it's been mentioned on prominent blogs once or twice).

This is especially true because it does a lot of things that I think print-based game media needs to start doing right now -- be more visual, take angles that nothing else on the market approaches (online or off), and keep readers excited instead of bored and uninspired to continue reading.

Amusement EIC Abdel Bounane did an online interview last month where he lays the mag out bare for English speakers. Bounane says in the piece that an English-language version will get US and UK distribution in 2009, and already I can't wait for that moment. Hopefully, the English version is as well crafted as the French.

That's not the only good news in print land -- I've heard from a couple of industry people that Future U.S. has something new going on in '09, printwise. What, I don't know precisely, and it may not be quite as exciting as a standalone independent-editorial mag launch, but I'm looking forward to it regardless.

Or, that is, I'll be looking forward to it once I'm done packing and getting the ferrets situated for my vacation. Oh God, all these loose ends...

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I had a doctoral student from Texas mail me the other day asking if I could track down any issues of RePlay and Play Meter magazines from the mid-70s until 1983 for her. She's writing a paper about the economics of the classic-era arcade industry, and she's interested in looking through all the little fine-print distributor advertisements in the back of both mags.

I'd like to help her out, but I regrettably don't have much of either publication. I used to own a fair bit of RePlay from the late 1990s, but I sold them out many years ago because the contents weren't of much interest to me -- endless pages about redemption games and Chuck E. Cheese kiddie rides and not very much you'd care about if you aren't a working operator. They are also very heavy and large, making storage a pain in the arse.

Still, both it and Play Meter (which, sadly, had most of its back-issue library destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, I hear) would be a nice resource to have available for reasons exactly like this, especially issues from the early years. If anyone has any sort of collection of either magazine, by all means let me know (kgifford at magweasel dot com) and I'll get you in contact with her -- 'ell, I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who collects either mag anyway, given that both have circs in the 5000-ish range.

Moving back to the modern era, click through to see commentary on all the mags that crossed my desk in the past fortnight. This is the first month without any EGM, sadly:

(Don't ask me when the retrospective piece I wrote for their phantom final issue will go up on 1UP, 'cos I sadly don't know. I did get paid for it, however, proving that Ziff is far nicer to its freelancers than most publishing houses that close mags. Thanks, gentlemen.)

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 1/17/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day. Following his initial report on EGM's closing earlier this week, Kevin returns to discuss the state of video game print magazines in North America.]

Have you ever been around the offices of a magazine just after it closes? I highly recommend it. It can be fun sometimes, particularly if you were well aware the day was coming soon. Such was the case for PiQ.

While I'm sad the mag failed, I still heralded PiQ's closure with open arms, 'cos it meant that I didn't have to report to work at 9am and deal with irate ex-Newtype USA subscribers any longer. A definite boon, and a very practical one for my sanity as well.

The picture above is from that fateful day when ADV laid everyone off, but the mood was ebullient 'cos everyone had already made plans for their next job anyways. I imagine things were a tad more muted in San Francisco earlier this week.

As you've likely noted, the past few days have been dominated by news about the game media, mostly bad. Ziff Davis Media's game division is no more; now it's UGO's recently-downsized San Francisco office.

Game forum honks don't like it -- though there's not much they really like about professional game media, when you get down to it -- and nostalgia for 1UP podcasts is spreading like a storm across the Internet.

Continue reading "Opinion: Print Game Media - [Still] Not Dead, [Maybe] Getting Better " »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Happy post-holiday malaise! I'm feeling it in full force, and so is my postmaster, apparently, because he only gave me three mags to write about in this installment. Let's get straight down to business, the three mags that hit newsstands in the past two weeks:

PC Gamer February 2009 (Podcast)

Cover: Diablo III

Staff-shuffling time at PC Gamer! EIC Kristen Salvatore is stepping down (but apparently "moving to a different spot on the masthead"), and in her place is coming Gary Steinman, formerly of PlayStation: The Official Magazine and also, coincidentally, my ex-boss at Newtype USA. Joy! I look forward to tormenting him endlessly about PC topics instead of PS3 topics in the future.

A pretty basic 2009-preview issue, one spiced up by MMO Extra, a four-page advertorial that I presume replaces Future's occasional cell-phone section. There's also a very nice bit on the Russian game development scene, not unlike the one PC Zone did a bit ago...or was it PC Gamer UK? Either way, it's written by UK freelancer Jim Rossignol and pretty fun to read.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 1/3/09" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

It's the last column of the year, and as always, my mind turns to final issues of magazines. (That and drinking beer, but you didn't ask about that.)

I've written about final issues a few times in the past, from famous last words to the swan song of the Official UK Playstation [One] Magazine in 2004. In lieu of repeating myself (and also because I have nieces vying for my attention right now around the Xmas tree), I'd like to point you to what I think is some required reading for any mag-fan: the final issue of Your Sinclair, a British computer mag that influenced the entire print industry there for years to come.

YS's last installment is, in my opinion, the ultimate final issue of any game mag ever published. By 1993, there was no professional software scene for the ZX Spectrum; it was dead in the marketplace and whenever other mags referenced it, it was about how old the machine was or what a wonderful doorstop it makes.

Your Sinclair's circulation was almost certainly in the low thousands, and there was no way Future Publishing would've let that continue for long, so September 1993 marked the mag's last installment. But what an installment it was! The editors raised the price and dumped the cover-tape to fill the mag with as many pages as possible, featuring cameos from nearly all its top contributors and a complete guide to the past, present and future of both YS and the system it covered.

Instead of reading this column, jump over to World of Spectrum and read YS #93 in its entirety online. It'll make you feel warm even if you've never touched a real Spectrum.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Ho ho ho! Are you in a jolly holiday mood yet? No? Well, neither am I, actually, thanks to looming tax deadlines and the thought of dealing with my entire extended family in a few scant days. But even my hearts' frigid cockles were warmed by the above print ad for Nyko's Wing wireless controller for Wii -- a page almost certainly modeled after NES-era accessory ads, one which gave me flashbacks to the Freedom Stick and the seemingly dozens of controllers Beeshu released. Bravo! (I don't mind the cord on my Classic Controller that much, though...)

This is the last Mag Roundup of the year, and it's a packed one thanks to all the specials and such. Let's see what's out on stands right now...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 12/20/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

It's almost Christmas time, so how about a few stocking-stuffer-ish tidbits of magazine trivia, picked from the two most recent additions to the collection?

Veteran game-media person Christian Nutt sent me this copy of French magazine RPG Univers the other day. Here's what he had to say about it on his personal blog:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Merry Xmas from Magweasel" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

My love affair with PC Zone continues unabated during these cold evenings, a torrid romp I began during puberty in 1993 and rekindled after finding a reliable local source for the British title a few months back. I think that if any Brit-mag is keeping up the tradition that all the really good ones of the distant past built (I'm thinking about Your Sinclair, Zero, Amiga Power despite how shrill it got sometimes, that sort of thing), this is the one.

The mag celebrated its 200th issue last month -- top congratulations go out to all involved! Buy a copy and make some financier at Future UK happy for a change!

This fortnight's update brings a bumper crop of mags and specials, so click on and be entertained for at least ten or so minutes:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 12/6/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Everyone needs a break now and again -- I know I do, after having written about what seems like 20,000 magazines over the years here -- so for this holiday, I thought I'd cover a couple electronics-themed mags I picked up earlier in the week, one of whom I love with all my heart and two I at least enjoy a fling with now and then:

Make Issue 16

If there is hope for print media about video games, or for that matter any kind of very nerdy topic, then this is it.

Continue reading "Column: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Thanksgiving Break" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Many game outlets on the web reported -- a little gloatingly, perhaps -- on comments that Ziff Davis Media chief Jason Young made to the New York Times on Wednesday.

In case you zoned out on it, the report (mainly about PC Magazine's move to an online-only distribution format starting January) mentions that Young is entertaining the idea of taking EGM online-only as well, though no decision on the print mag's ultimate fate will be made before the end of the year.

To most gamers, the reaction was probably "Well, duh, I get all my news and reviews from forums." (That or "Oh nooo my bathroom reading!!", which I never quite understood. Quit spending so much time in the bathroom, people!) My reaction, though, is a bit more nuanced.

If I had to spout it out in one sentence, I'd take a deep breath and say: "Well, duh, EGM's ad pages have plummeted over even last year when they were already getting pretty sparse, and it's published by a company still recovering from bankruptcy, and given that EGM is the only remaining print magazine in the brands they own, it's plain that dead trees aren't anything like priority one over there any longer." Then I'd breathe again.

Sad, but true: Ad pages are down for every rag in the video-game market, and out of all the US mags coming out this month, only Game Informer and Play (who prints some anime and Geek Monthly-runoff ads the rest don't) have book sizes over 100 pages.

A distressingly interesting 2009 in store, eh?

Continue reading "Column: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 11/25/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

How much does the Japanese PC game industry not matter outside of girl-themed, usually pornographic adventures and sound novels? It matters so little that the one completely PG-rated magazine in Japan that covered the scene -- and, in fact, the oldest and longest-lasting game magazine in Japanese history -- folded this summer after 388 issues and I completely failed to notice.

LOGiN launched in May 1982 as a quarterly magazine from ASCII, the biggest computer publisher in Japan at the time. It was the first computer mag ASCII published that wasn't primarily targeted at an IT/business/industrial tech audience, and therefore it was written at a much more casual and engaging tone, sort of like what Creative Computing was simultaneously doing for the industry in the US. (LOGiN didn't coin the term "otaku," but it was one of the first national publications to use the term in print to refer to PC and anime hobbyists.)

In April 1983 LOGiN went monthly and shifted its focus from programing and tech topics to video games, a restructuring that proved to be a major success. This shift accelerated when Fumitaka Kojima (later the founding editor of Famitsu) took on the EIC job in September 1984.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Whoops, I Was Logged Out" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas from all your friends at Game Mag Weaseling! Unfortunately, what's good for your holiday wish lists isn't necessarily so good for game mags, their pages filled with year-end shopping guides and endless reviews and not much in the realm of really interesting content afoot. 'Tis the season for distributor circulation statements, though, and I'll be doing a full piece on those once I have 'em all -- a couple are already out below, and heavens, GamePro's dropped a bit.

Anyway, click on for all the details of the game mags that hit US mailboxes in the past fortnight.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 11/8/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Following up their previous Retro Gamer collection, Imagine Publishing recently put out a DVD that contains PDF files of the first 50 issues of gamesTM, their multiformat magazine in the UK. The package (which includes a bunch of bonus wallpapers, mostly retro-themed) costs £23.99 shipped to America, which I'd consider a pretty honest deal; it's less than a buck per issue. Since the mag started in late 2002, the content on this disc is mainly from the PS2/Xbox/GC era.

Launched as a rival to Edge (which was undergoing some serious editorial turmoil around that era), gamesTM's main "gimmick" is the fact that you get a 180-page issue every single month, approximately 150-160 pages of which are editorial content -- something that's sadly never going to happen again in US mag-land.

It's also arguably the first professional magazine (Retro Gamer not appearing until early 2004) to have really extensive classic gaming coverage that wasn't an afterthought compared to the rest of the mag. For these two traits alone, gamesTM has my eternal respect, although I sometimes find myself skipping past the endless pages of humdrum previews so I can get to the columns and retro section.

At one point in 2006, gamesTM's future was in jeopardy after Highbury, its original publisher, went bankrupt. It wound up being one of the 24 titles in Highbury's family that Imagine bought (the other game mags being X360, Play (no relation to Halverson's Play) and strategy magtitle PowerStation, all still in business).

I'm definitely glad it's still around -- it's good for Edge to have some kind of direct competition, and even if you don't care about the old content on this DVD, there's no better and cheaper way to sample modern UK magazine design than by browsing through these PDFs.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thank you all for your kind feedback in my last column. I guess I'll keep this sucker on rolling, then, and cancel my previous plan to start covering the illustrious history of ferret magazines instead. Sorry, Simon.

As I've discussed earlier, this isn't such a merry holiday for US print mags, most of which are peaking just a wee bit above 100 pages even though the number of games they're expected to cover continues to balloon. They're doing the best they can, though, and I'd like to take a look at the holiday editions I didn't get around to last week -- including Game Informer, which I continue to foster a love/hate relationship toward.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 10/25/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

   

I picked up Mort's latest DVD in the mail a day or two ago -- this one a full collection of FORMAT, a British fanzine devoted to the ZX Spectrum that ran from 1987 to 1998. It's great stuff. I've gotten heavily into collecting local computer user-group newsletters and the like lately -- all that laser printing, local advertisements, and flamewars waged with the user group two towns away make for tremendous reading if you're as nerdy as I am.

FORMAT I'll discuss later, because there's 132 issues to read and I'm busy with work and preparing for a weekend vacation, but there was a bonus included with the disc: the first two issues of Load Runner, a British comic published on a biweekly basis by ECC in 1983.

I have never read a British comic magazine that wasn't Viz, but this 40-page title is familiar enough -- a collection of small ongoing stories, none running over five or six pages, with a few text articles thrown in here and there. (If you remember The Adventures of GamePro, the Load Runner comics are very similar in size and storytelling style.)

The difference with this comic is that everything is themed after the home computers, making Load Runner both extremely dated and extremely valuable as a historical curio. Remember, this was a time when computers were seen as "the future" (exactly what kind of future, nobody had fully worked out yet) and half a dozen 8-bit PCs were vying for consumer dominance. The results are just as chaotic as the local marketplace at the time.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': The Adventures of Load Runner in the 198th Decade" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Not strictly related to video games, but is this not the best magazine cover you've ever seen? The Cooper Black font, the eerie CGI bits, the way everything fits together like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces broken and crushed in a vain attempt to make them snap together? This is what we need more of, people! (And yes, I really did buy the mag just for the cover. I dig reading about electronics projects, yes, but I don't buy these mags regularly.)

On a slightly related note -- do you folks really like me doing these Mag Roundups? I'm beginning to get the impression that I'm repeating myself in most of these -- US mags are tiny and their preview sections are boring, Britmags are nice but expensive, Nintendo Power interviewed this guy, hooray. Do you readers want me to continue with this, or would my time be better spent covering fewer things in more detail instead of giving a more general view? Feel free to leave your replies below.

Until then, however, here's a look at all the mags of the past fortnight. It's the big ad-sales season for game mags, not that you can really tell anymore...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 10/11/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I noticed the other day that a project to scan every InterAction and other Sierra in-house newsletter ever published was completed as of July, so I finally downloaded the ones I didn't have physical copies of and gave them a gander. The one you see above is from the summer of 1998 and features a Gordon Freeman who doesn't seem all that terribly alarmed to see aliens and soldiers around the lab.

InterAction holds a special place among fans of old adventure games, being the official mouthpiece of the most prestigious adventure maker in the US. Like Infocom's newsletters from a generation past, they were remarkably laid-back affairs, letting designers talk about their games freely and even addressing tricky issues brought up by pushy fans. Everything from Outpost's blatant bugs to King's Quest IV getting a crappy Apple IIgs port was duly covered and commented on by the company president, although not always to the liking of everyone involved.

Back before the Internet, this is how companies like Sierra gave its audience an inside view of the company. It's nice to see, in retrospective -- and it's a lot more permanent a record of what life at Sierra was like than your typical modern publisher's website, which tends to be extremely corporate and boast forums which shut down the moment something controversial happens.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, after many years of on-and-off trying, I am finally to the point where I consider my Japanese Mega CD collection complete. I am counting a total of 117 releases. (I'm missing one or two demos, but oh well.)

Mega CD is fun because it's not that large a library to collect, it's mostly cheap, and there are more than a couple of hidden classics to be found. I'm especially proud of this because, for the most part, I did it the "hard way" -- going around shops and flea-markets in Japan when I lived there and whenever I came back for business and such. I didn't go to the auctions or to other collectors until I needed 3 or 4 titles to finish up.

Above are all the games laid out on the futon (plus a dog's leg). On the bottom-most row are the games I had the most trouble finding: Surgical Strike, Fahrenheit, Psychic Detective Series Vol. 4: Orgel, and Sing!! Sega Game Music. (The first two are really the only Mega-CD games that go for serious premium prices in Japan.)

Exciting? Ohhhhh yes it is! But not half as exciting as all the new magazines on the stands I have to cover this installment. Onward!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 9/27/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well, readers, you're in luck -- I got power back post-hurricane just a few hours ago, so I can submit a column safely and soundly after all! Sadly, I don't have much to write about at the moment, chiefly because I'm busy cleaning up my pad and trying to get the week-old mildew smell out of my putrefied, possibly self-aware bedroom carpet.

Without the wherewithal for a magazine update, I thought I'd instead profile a somewhat related Japanese book -- the fall 2000 edition of Kougien, a Japanese catalog of console games and cheats/passwords/info on unlockables (referred to collectively as urawaza in Japanese).

These volumes, released twice a year, are published by Mainichi Communications, which at one point had five or six regular game mags in Japan but nowadays has whittled them down to only one, Nintendo Dream.

The name "Kougien" is a pun on Koujien, one of the definitive dictionaries of the Japanese language (the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary), with the character for "word" replaced with the one for "skill" or "technique" -- i.e., secret cheats.

Kougien is sold mainly as a collection of cheats in Japan, but at one point it was also a complete listing of every console game ever released in the country from 1982 forward, complete with release date, publisher, a short description, and cheats.

This fall 2000 edition, a book roughly the size of the Houston white pages that weighs in at a head-spinning 1540 pages, was the last one to have a full entry for every game ever; later editions include only those consoles that're still actively sold in the Japanese marketplace and are quite a bit smaller in size. A total of 9982 games and 15,100 cheats are listed in this book.

If you know Japanese and collect old games, this edition of Kougien is practically a must-have, an instant reference on nearly every system that Japan saw in the 20th century. (The Sega Mark III/Master System is the only major omission, a somewhat odd one considering that Kougien includes listings for systems as obscure as the 3DO, Virtual Boy, PC-FX and Neo-Geo CD.)

Even today, when all the info in Kougien can be found on the net if you look hard enough, I still refer to this volume at least once a week, part of the reason it's in such "well-loved" shape.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bad news, game mag fans! If CNN and Fox News are to be believed, by the time you read this, I am going to be dead, my bloated, bleached body floating listlessly in brackish mire, surrounded by waterlogged issues of Game Players' Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. I'm writing this on Thursday, and I've already put all my affairs in order -- my ferrets are going to the rescue, my dog to science, and my game mag collection's headed to the recycling center. Gotta save the environment, you know?

So while you're mourning my untimely death, why don't you click on and read all about the game mags released to US newsstands in the past two weeks? There's a bloody ton this time around from all corners of the world, and if you need something to read at the shelter in Austin, you're totally spoiled for choice. See you in the next life, everyone!

(Note: None of this is actually going to happen to me, since I'm not that close to the coast -- where I'm at, the worst I have to worry about is power failures -- but I was reminded of that CBS classic Category 7: The End of the World the other day and thought I'd channel it a little bit.)

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 9/13/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Instead of the traditional round-up or magazine focus for Game Mag Weaseling, there is just one page I'd like to share with you: the review of Genesis classic Gunstar Heroes, printed in the very first issue of UK magazine Edge, way back in October 1993.

Modern Edge is written a lot better, I promise!

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Hello! My name is Akemi Kamio and I work PR at Konami! Or, at least, I did back in 1986 when Famicom Tsushin did this very small portrait of me back when they were trying to start the "Akemi Kamio Fan Club" in an attempt to give the 8-bit video game world a sexy idol of its very own.

Like I think I've said earlier, the magazine that would eventually be renamed Famitsu and become the most influential game media outlet in Japan was pretty kooky in its early years. Remarkably, this wasn't some kind of joke, either -- Famitsu really did cover Kamio off and on for the first few years of its existence, and while she was no Howard Philips, she became known enough that other magazines would introducer her as "that" Akemi Kamio whenever Konami-related news came up.

I bring Kamio up this week because, frankly, there isn't a heck of a lot else going on in magazine-land lately. All of the October '08 Future mags are out, most of them are still 100 pages, and half of them have a cell-phone ad insert, this one sponsored entirely by...Konami. Whoa, I've got a theme going after all! Damn, I'm one hot writer!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 8/30/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I am feeling morose. Yes, morose. Morose at the long summer heat, morose by the fact that I can't seem to make people pay me money without doing any work, morose because I just marathoned Ken Burn's The Civil War, and morose at how I am out $550 since I needed to replace the notebook PC I use to write Game Mag Weaseling after its horrible death last week.

So I've spent the afternoon getting to grips with Vista, washing all the crap off the hard drive, and generally realizing why nobody buys low-end Vista laptops. Wanting to find some solace, any solace, I picked up off the shelf the premiere copy of onComputing, a magazine originally from the Byte folks that ran seasonally from 1979 to around 1982.

Byte was always a heavily nerd and tech-oriented hobbiest mag, so onComputing was the editor team's shot at making a title for more casual, applications-oriented users -- the sort who were buying TRS-80s and Apple IIs because they wanted to accomplish something via software, not tinker with circuit boards.

This first issue of onComputing has something that caught my fancy -- a complete buyer's guide to the personal computer scene as it existed in the summer of 1979, complete with retail prices. They say the good old days were never actually good -- if I was a writer in 1979 and I wanted a computer to help me with my work, would $550 be enough?

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': How to Spend $12,000 on A PC" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's been a lot going on over the past couple weeks in magazine-land (not least of which being the destruction of my laptop, which is why this column is a little late), but I'd like to start instead by officially inaugurating the UK's Retro Gamer into the regular rotation of what I cover in Mag Watch. It's only fair, after all, given that I cover the extremely rough Video Game Collector and RG beats it in every single aspect -- content, features, industry access, art design, and covers -- except for price.

(People on classic gaming forums in the US complain constantly about the $11.99 newssstand price, but considering the direction that retro-game collecting is going, you can't help but wonder about the hypocrisy afoot.)

I think it finally dawned on me that I ought to be discussing RG more often with this issue (the 53rd one, not the 50th one above -- sorry, blame the laptop). This isn't just because of the cover (which I adore) or the massive Konami retrospective or the beautifully-designed history of Boulder Dash.

Mainly it was the interview with Mark Cerny where he discusses the development of Marble Madness, his maiden effort. Back when I worked for GamePro I tried several times to get him to talk about this game, one of my all-time favorite "game-as-art" pieces, but he always dodged the question 'cos he was too busy plugging Jak II or whatever he was busy consulting on at the time. But Retro Gamer did it! Cerny didn't talk to "the world's #1 multiplatform gaming magazine" about it, but some piddly 20,000-circ pub in Britain? Sure!

But you can totally see why when you read the thing. If this were Video Game Collector, then all you'd get is 4 straight pages of Q&A text, denser than the 1897 Sears catalog, with maybe one or two blurry screenshots that are heavily JPG-artifacted for no apparent reason. Not here. You get a beautiful art design modeled after the game's distinctive isometric look, lots of smart-looking screenshots, and even a step-by-step through every level complete with Cerny's commentary on each one.

It's not just a great piece -- it's a piece, and a magazine overall, that's truly worthy and respectful of the subject matter it's talking about. RG's approach takes a subject that often bores younger gamers and makes it engaging and fascinating. There are things I don't like about it, including the occasional factual miss and a still-prevalent UK bias (the cover piece opines that Imagine Software's 80s computer conversions of Konami's arcade games were better than Konami's own NES efforts, which makes me wonder exactly which NES games they could possibly have been playing).

But -- and I've said this before -- this mag is so good, and so worth the money, that there's no point in any US publisher launching a retrogaming magazine now because there's no way it could outclass this one. Between this and Edge and PC Zone, it's amazing to me that the UK gets the best in game mags but the worst (oftentimes) in support from game publishers.

Anyway, moving on to the rest of the past fortnight's game mags:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 8/16/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Look! Raku is playing with free crap that came with a UK magazine! That must mean it's time for another Mag Roundup, Brit-edition!

   

N-Revolution (Imagine) and N-Gamer (Future) are the two kid-oriented Nintendo mags in the UK; Future also publishes the slightly more upscale Nintendo: The Official Magazine in the region, much like it published both MEGA and Sega Power at once 15 years ago. (Tone-wise, Nintendo Power is somewhere in between the two, leaning a fair bit towards N:TOM territory.)

In terms of freebies, N-Rev wins by a country mile, thanks to my ferrets (and dog) going crazy for the packed-in miniature beach ball. There's also an enormous -- I'm talking movie theater-sized here -- double-sided poster for Opoona and Viz anime MAR; nothing interesting content-wise but I've never seen any mag in the US pack in such a massive poster. N-Gamer has more "stuff" -- one SSB:B guidebook, one Mario iron-on patch (randomly inserted from a set of four), stickers from New International Track & Field, and a Guitar Hero On Tour-themed Nintendo DS decal -- but plainly my animals can sniff out the better freebie out of the lot.

Between the covers, both mags have the usual reviews, previews and silly features. N-Rev seems a little bit more packed, with lots of tiny columns interspersed throughout, while N-Gamer occasionally seems to stretch out its text to fill up its 112 pages (though it's admittedly a slow time in N-Land over in Europe).

Advantage: N-Rev

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Beach Blast British Style" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Welcome to Mag Roundup, my regular roundup of all the game magazines that hit newsstands and/or mailboxes in the past two weeks. Excited? Sure you are! And so is Washington Redskins rookie Devin Thomas in this not-at-all-Photoshopped picture of him holding the latest issue of Beckett Sports Gamer...that was published inside the issue of Beckett Sports Gamer he's "holding." It's a time paradox! Help meeee!

The past couple weeks have been bountiful for more than silly 'shops, however. So keep reading and find out about the one magazine you must get this month -- and the five squillion or so you probably shouldn't.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 8/2/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Explaining why something like Let's Compute! exists is going to take a few sentences. Bear with me here.

In the UK, one of the major 8-bit computer formats in the realm of education was the BBC Microcomputer System, made by Acorn Computers Ltd. for the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of a computer-literacy campaign in the early '80s.

For a generation of British kids, the BBC is the equivalent to the Apple II -- every school computer lab had tons of them, and despite its high price (about £375) compared to the C64 and Spectrum, it was popular enough in the home market to support a decent-sized games scene. The Acorn Electron, then, is sort of to the BBC what the Apple IIc was to the full-sized IIe -- somewhat cheaper (£175), a fair bit cut down in capability, and geared more exclusively toward private use in advertising.

Database Publications' The Micro User (later BBC Micro User) was the predominant BBC mag in the UK. Electron User, a spinoff mag devoted exclusively to the home machine, launched in October 1983 as a Micro User pull-out and became its own publication soon after.

The Electron was never a success on the scale of the Spectrum or C64, but retained enough of a userbase to support a burgeoning games marketplace all the way to the early '90s. It was never a very mature audience, though, and by the time 1990 rolled around, the editors of Electron User realized that most of its readership was very young. So it compensated.

Let's Compute! is the rebranded version of Electron User, with program/game listings suited for all the BASIC-speaking computers of the day but Acorn's assorted systems still getting top billing. It is unabashedly a magazine for children -- almost exactly like CTW's Enter or Scholastic's extremely short-lived K-Power in America.

You have very simple programs, very simple tutorials, a bunch of game reviews and hints, and even some puzzle and comic pages. The cover feature is also not exactly the sort of thing you'd see in PC Magazine, either -- if you can't guess it from the art, it's a piece with tips on earning computing badges if you're a member of the Cub Scouts.

I think in 1991 I was mainly interested in NES games and having Kayla from English class be my girlfriend, so even if I happened to be British and reading this mag when it came out, it wouldn't have been of much use to me.

By all indications online, Let's Compute! stopped publishing after issue 12, one after the issue pictured above. Not too hard to see why -- I have the feeling the editors' hearts were in the right place, but their idea of a kid-oriented computer mag was about five years too late considering the state of the 8-bit marketplace in 1991.

There...did all that make sense to you?

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Busy days abound in magazine land...just not in the U.S. right now (I only have four mags to cover in this installment).

First off, I was delighted to find a store nearby that stocks UK mag PC Zone, so I bought another copy. Very nice, very funny, and (like I said the last time I mentioned it) I wish they'd drop the DVD because I can't justify $15 per issue. Total PC Gaming is still around, too (on issue 8 right now), and it's still consistently high quality.

So is Retro Gamer, which put out Volume 2 of the Retro Gamer Collection recently (I think it's Barnes & Noble exclusive around these parts). At $25 it's pricey, but it's quite a nice compilation of old RG stuff nonetheless and will look tremendously chic on your coffee table, assuming you've cleared out the Dr. Pepper cans and pizza boxes from the surface.

In America, though, not much going on right now besides Future Anime, a one-off anime/poster magazine put out by America's biggest game-mag company that came out of nowhere into stands this week. That's a little off-topic for this column, but here's coverage on the rest of the new US (ok, and one Brit) game mags...

Edge August 2008

Cover: DC Universe Online

Between the giant cover story featuring a universally-popular pop-culture icon and the eight pages of Cliff Bleszinski talking about himself (not to mention the opening piece on iPhone 3G gaming which was out of date before the date of publication), you might be excused for thinking that this month's Edge is actually a copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly in disguise -- except, you know, larger and covering lots of Brit stuff for some reason.

Not that I am complaining much, because Cliffy is a hunky dreamboat and there's a very neat and compelling story behind DCU Online -- Sony Online Entertainment's Austin studio trying to take what they learned from Star Wars Galaxies (the Edge piece says that "subscriptions are stable and the community is largely happy" with SWG, which seems to contradict all given evidence) and produce a more exciting MMO with this pop-culture license.

For ubernerds the highlight this month is undoubtedly "This is how you make successful games," a retrospective on Segagaga with Tez Okano, the producer (there seems to be some net confusion on his last name, but it's definitely Okano, not Okada). It's a great little piece that portrays the game's creation and the massive changes going on in Sega all around it. Okano is a relentlessly interesting guy, and I wish him luck on Thunder Force VI, which he's working on right now...and speaking of somewhat obscure old devs, there's a similar "reminisce" piece just a few pages later starring John Romero, in which it's revealed that he got married to a Romanian lady he met on the Internet in 2003! Woo!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 7/19/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

   

I've seen some scary magazine covers in my time (EGM whenever they covered a Resident Evil game, for example), but I think I may have found a new all-time scary-cover champion in the April 1984 edition of British mag Your Computer.

The cover story is about a suite of software that teaches you languages through mnemonics like the one pictured ("monkey" is "mono" in Spanish). Magazine conventional wisdom says that having the cover subject look directly at the viewer helps attract people's attention on the newsstand, but this is ridiculous. And what's that thing sitting on the middle of the keyboard? A raisin? That better be a raisin.

I've always wanted a few physical copies of Your Computer for my collection because being the most popular multiplatform PC mag of the time in the UK (its ABC figure for the second half of 1983 was 122,642 copies, making it more popular than even most US computer mags back then), it is a perfect snapshot of the utterly chaotic European computer marketplace of the early 80s.

Despite being late spring/summer issues, both books I have are over 200 pages and packed with advertisements from literally every major player in hardware, software and games at the time, including many from big Euro players that hardly (if ever) existed in the US like Sinclair, Amstrad, Memotech, and Acorn Computers.

(Then there are odd surprises, like an ad from Renault that promises a free Sinclair ZX Spectrum if you buy their new sedan. Considering a Spectrum went for £99 new at the time, this was really not much of a deal.)

Contentwise, Your Computer is probably most similar to COMPUTE! in the US, although with a traditional British design of multiple columns per page marching all the way down to the margins and lots of interstitial artwork. The mag can be cleanly divided into two parts -- one with letters and hardware/software reviews, and one with lots and lots of program listings.

If you thought COMPUTE! had a lot of BASIC listings circa 1983, it has nothing on Your Computer -- there's a good dozen in every issue for all kinds of different computer platforms. The mag is somewhat infamous in the UK for publishing listings that didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of working, even after one or two corrections printed in future issues, a problem exacerbated by really tiny program printouts and a lack of any automatic-proofreader program like every US mag had by this time.

Nearly every program includes a notice from the author that he'll send you a cassette with the software for two or three pounds to save you the trouble of typing, and I can't help but wonder if many submitters made more money this way than through the standard £35/page rate Your Computer claimed to pay.

(I am through with typing in BASIC listings for now, but judging by the screens, some of these games are pretty good -- there's a Commodore 64 Pac-Man clone that looks rad but is made of a massive ocean of hex code that scares me.)

Your Computer's heyday was in 1983-84, before the computer-industry slowdown of '84 and the advent of platform-specific computer and game mags in the UK took away much of its audience.

Its last issue was in 1988, by which time mags like Your Sinclair and Zzap!64 were easily outselling it. As a resource on what the UK's "wild west" computing era was like, though, I can't think of anything better than this one.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's been a busy past little while in mags, even though you'd think it wouldn't be what with all everyone in the August-issue doldrums. My collection is beginning to outgrow the room it's in, so I'm working on clearing out space and getting rid of stuff I'm not completely sure I need after all, such as that near-complete collection of 80 Micro (a magazine devoted to Tandy's TRS-80 computer line) that spans over 100 issues.

It also seems like all my mag subscriptions are coming up for renewal right at the same time. It's not such a bad thing, though, as the renewal process has been perfectly smooth for every mag I get...with one exception. I can't find any easy way to renew Game Informer -- there's nothing online, I'm not gonna write my credit card information on the renewal card they sent and put it through US Mail, and I tried to get through to a human being on their support line three times in two days and failed completely.

Odd how the nation's biggest game magazine has unequivocally the worst customer service, huh? Ah well...I suppose I could always hit the local GameStop to renew, but I wanted to avoid that if I could, because who wants to go to a GameStop really?

Anyway, read on to read all about the new US game magazines that hit shelves this past fortnight. Despite the low page counts, there's actually a lot of new and exciting stuff going on, from anniversaries to somewhat major internal redesigns.

Nintendo Power August 2008

Cover: MadWorld

The polybag covering the newsstand edition of this month's NP is arguably a lot more exciting-looking than the real cover, boasting a huge starburst about how this is the best issue ever and so forth. I'm not completely sure on that, but it's certainly a good one. There isn't quite as much anniversary-type stuff in this particular book as you'd expect -- mainly, a feature covering the top 20 games on all of Nintendo's systems past and present (plus a very, very brief Virtual Boy shout out) and a 2-page comic that revisits the all-grown-up Nester as he plays Mario Kart Wii with his son. Awww. Kind of a funky art style, but the content is funny -- I particularly like how it's set up exactly like an old Howard & Nester comic (ie. with a hot game tip saving the day at the end) even as it parodius the concept.

There's a party September 13 at the Nintendo World in New York to celebrate 20 years of NP, but sadly this column isn't quite the blockbuster financial success it'd need to be for me to afford a plane ticket. Ah well. Until then, I can at least enjoy all the lovely interview-driven articles this month on games like MadWorld and Mega Man 9, which is so radical it hurts.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 7/5/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A couple weeks back I was laid off from my lavish high-roller job (no, really, I mean it) at PiQ, an entertainment and media magazine I helped found and run for the past four issues.

It wasn't a wholly unexpected closure -- the parent company is more-or-less run by the creditors at the bank, my 401(k) got cut off a couple weeks earlier and health insurance was undoubtedly following soon after, and the office was more empty and barren than most of New Mexico -- and I'm already just as busy with assorted freelance work.

(To get an idea of the state my old company is in, notice how they still haven't taken down our web page, with the final entry from the creative director placing all the blame for the closure on mismanagement up above. Ooooh burn.)

Going through the experience of launching and maintaining a brand-new, nerd-oriented print magazine in this modern era has taught me a great deal about how to survive in that marketplace. To be more exact, you can't.

Forget about the return of GameFan or Next Generation or anything else you may've liked in the past -- the video-game realm will be lucky if it sees any sort of new magazine launch in America at any time in our lives.

Why? The usual suspects:

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Where is The Future?" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Wow, it's a hot month, isn't it, GSW readers? It's hot for me, at least. PiQ (the exciting entertainment magazine I founded and ran) has folded, and I'll have more about that next week, but I don't even have any time to enjoy the usual unemployment ritual of sitting around the couch naked and watching The View -- the freelance is piling up around me, and I'm working all weekend to fend it off. Ah well.

Anyway, let's check out all the game magazines released in the past fortnight, of which there are way too freakin' many. Don't you people realize how much all these mags weigh, publishers?! All the gas I have to use transporting them home...ugh...

Edge July 2008

Cover: MadWorld

This is, in many ways, your typical Edge issue. You've got a feature on Alpha Protocol, the usual case of Edge doing a game preview feature a little later than GI and the results beting a little more in-depth and worth reading. You have your way-out-there alternate feature, this one on the new PlatinumGames, which has a lot of concept art, crazy visuals, photos of game developers posing in front of (or inside) silly futuristic-looking photographer studio setups, and text that's less to do about any game in particular and more about thegame industry in general.

You have a gaggle of less flashy but much more nerd-core pieces, like the one on eight old Yaroze developers who now have jobs in game outfits, or the large ad-supported subsection on the Singapore game industry, one which bulks the book size up to 164 pages (which is practically unheard of these days in America). You have the always-interesting retro stuff, this time around a look at the making of Carmageddon -- which seems to have been very much a (if you'll pardon the pun) "garage" operation, comparatively.

Great stuff as usual, and worth saving up for.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 6/14/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

To celebrate the two-year anniversary of Game Mag Weaseling, I thought I'd attempt something that I haven't had the stomach to try in at least 16 years: type in a game from a computer magazine.

   

For those of you who lack the benefit of being my age or older, some explanation might be useful. Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, program listings in BASIC or machine code were a regular staple of many home computer magazines. Bearly all home machines back then ran BASIC as a sort of "operating system" and were much simpler in design than modern PCs, so it was easier for even average users to learn a computer's innards, produce a decent game, and send it off to magazines for fame (sort of) and fortune (around $100 if they were lucky).

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': My Second Birthday" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

When it rains, it pours in Mag Roundup. Two weeks, there were hardly any magazines to talk about -- this time around, everything came into my mailbox all at once, even the two flight-sim magazines whose subscriptions are (thankfully) about to run out.

We're beginning to enter the boring season not just for mags, but for games, too -- but that's a good thing, because it means we'll see more creativity and originality from mags as they attempt to fill the pages with fresh content instead of the usual previews and reviews. Ostensibly. It'd be nice, anyway.

Let's go forward and see what's new in the mag scene -- and if there's any controversy to be found in the MGS4 reviews that're starting to creep out...

Electronic Gaming Monthly July 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Gears of War 2 (split cover)

People may think the GoW2 piece is the highlight of this issue, but it's not -- even though Shoe goes above and beyong, asking Cliffy about a million questions from message-board posters and presenting the usual boring "new guns, new modes" information in neat and eye-catching ways.

It's not the Metal Gear Solid 4 "review," although that's generating the most discussion online -- the editors decided against giving out scores due to "the limitations Konami wanted to impose on our comments," so they just printed a five-page roundtable instead, one mostly filled with praise but also throwing a few jabs (the control system's not as good as Splinter Cell's! Oh noooooo!). It's not even the "Gun Show" spread, where they ask military advisor Hank Keirsey for his take on the Gunblade, the Gravity Gun and other fanciful video-game weapons -- hilarious stuff.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 5/31/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Well, it's summertime once again -- great for barbecuing and replacing air conditioning units, but never very good for US game mags, especially now that the advertising market has bottomed out across the board for dead-tree publications.

Still, that doesn't mean the newsstand can be completely avoided until October. There's always England to the rescue.

Two new Brit-mags on the stands right now caught my attention this week. The first is CVG Presents, a new project that, if I'm not mistaken, marks the first time the Computer & Video Games name has seen print since CVG's original closing in 2004.

This special 178-page history of the Grand Theft Auto series kicks off what's set to be a bimonthly series of CVG Presents mags, each devoted to a single subject much like Future US's recent newsstand-only mags devoted to Halo and Metal Gear Solid.

This mag isn't quite as impressively printed as the specials published on the Edge label between '06 and '07 (lacking the coffee-table qualities of that stuff), but it's still a great piece of work.

Pages of textless art are not what you'll find here -- it's utterly packed with top moments from the games, top pop-culture references, soundtrack retrospectives, reviews from old Future magazines, interviews from old Future magazines (including one with a positively cherubic Dan Houser from 1999), and boundless amounts of trivia from the series' decade-long history. It's huge, clever, and totally worth the $12.

Speaking of things that are $12, the fiftieth issue of Retro Gamer fits the bill nicely, too. To celebrate their 50th cumulative issue, the editors have done the expected thing and turned their regular "making of" spotlight to the early years of the magazine, when it started as a 2004 one-off and managed to survive low sales, nonexistent freelancer wages and the bankruptcy of its original publisher to be the robust monthly it is today.

Between physical issues and the classy DVD set Imagine Publishing sells on their website, I have every issue of Retro Gamer and buy it every month off the newsstand. I frankly thought their first couple years were positively atrocious and a waste of a great opportunity, but since the publisher shift it's been a wholly new magazine, one that treats its beat with more professionalism, dazzle, and pure enthusiasm than any previous English-language effort.

Where they used to just talk about games much like any old schmo with a blog could, now they get seriously in-depth with every feature they publish, interviewing old devs and illustrating each page profusely.

It's consistently wonderful, and the only complaint I have is that there's no point in any American publisher doing a similar magazine -- given current magazine economics, there's simply no way we could do better than this and make it solvent.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also executive editor at PiQ magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

It's another exciting installment of my biweekly look into the beguiling world of video-game magazines! Huzzah! Except -- hang on -- there are only three mags to cover this time around. Curse Future Publishing for putting out all four of their mags at once and wrecking any sense of balance I had with these updates!

Still, this update is still remarkably interesting for one important reason: Edge and Game Informer both have the hot world exclusive etc. scoop on the new Prince of Persia, and since each mag wrote their coverage off largely the same access, it's the perfect opportunity for me to compare how the USA's top-circ game mag's approach to game features differs from the world's smuggest most dedicated game publication.

Edge June 2008

Cover: A new Prince of Persia

Out of all the Edges I've read in the past few years, this is probably the cover story with the least amount of meat to it -- a far cry from the GTA feature of two months ago, which had enough content to write an entire coffee-table book with. Meanwhile, this eight-page feature is illustrated with six screenshots, a couple pieces of concept art, and some glamour shots of the development team.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 5/17/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

   

Mort, one of the kind and dedicated folks at zzap64.co.uk, has finished scanning yet another complete run of an old British game magazine. This time around it's TV Gamer, an obscure title that has the honor of being the UK's first mag devoted entirely to game consoles...or that was the original idea, anyway.

Launched in the summer of 1983 by London-based Boytonbrook Ltd., TV Gamer began as a quarterly buyer's guide for the 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, and so forth, its pages filled to the brim with capsule game reviews and tiny little black-and-white screenshots.

This lasted three issues before the title expanded to a full-on monthly in March 1984, adding a slew of features on arcades, portable games, and computers. In this incarnation the mag took on a noticeable resemblance to Electronic Games, the US title that pioneered game mags worldwide -- both shared an affinity for long, text-heavy articles adorned with lots of original artwork and surprisingly few screenshots for a mag covering such a visual medium.

The formula was there for TV Gamer, but the audience arguably wasn't. Consoles were largely seen as a luxury item in the UK back then; for most gamers, the hot platform was the cheap, versatile Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which launched in 1982 and was easily Britain's number-one "game system" by 1984, the year TV Gamer ramped up to monthly printing.

The mag responded by upping its computer content, but by then it was too late, as the audience was used to consulting other mags for that sort of coverage. Eventually TV Gamer merged with multiplatform mag Big K (itself a very obscure title) before closing entirely with the March 1985 issue.

It reportedly took Mort a good three years to track down all of TV Gamer, even though the thing only lasted 14 issues. Funny, it feels like it's taken at least that long for me to find any issues of JoyStik, much less the whole set...but regardless, if you'd like to know how the UK handled console game coverage during the "golden years" of gaming, you could do far worse than to order the DVD from Mort or track down the scans on the net somewhere.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also executive editor at PiQ magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A busy past couple weeks in game mags! Not only is the biggest game of the year out in stores, but in a rather magnanimous gesture on Rockstar's part, nearly all the print mags had enough access to GTA4 to get timely reviews into the issues in readers' hands right now. Of course, seeing this $100 million game project that's been all over the mainstream media for weeks get covered by these dinky little 100-page mags is... well, quite a juxtaposition, but...

Anyway, read on to discover how all the top mags handled their GTA4 coverage this month, and how all the non-Xbox/PS3-related mags prepared their counterprogramming. Ciao for now!

   

PlayStation: The Official Magazine and Official Xbox Magazine have almost the same cover style, PTOM featuring Niko Bellic circa dawn in Liberty City and OXM depicting him in the Matrix behind a big GTA4 logo.

OXM has 13 pages of coverage (which includes everything but the kitchen sink and even has a few pages of strategy added to the end) and the blasphemous score of 9.5 out of 10, while PTOM's "exclusive review" (maybe they were the first ones with access to the PS3 version, I dunno) runs seven and plays it a bit more straight, concentrating on the full experience instead of all the little details. (PS3 owners might be disappointed by its lack of discussion about topics particular to the system, but those sort of hardcore folks are probably reading online reviews anyway.)

Both OXM and PTOM have hot exclusive stories on Shaun White Snowboarding, and both even pitch the pieces on their respective covers. Otherwise, highlights include OXM's "Franchise Re-Animator" (a look at old games that could use a revival), PTOM's exquisitely titled "6 Racing Games That Aren't Gran Turismo 5," and their back page written by John Davison, who discusses the obsession of developers to go "mainstram" with their titles.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 5/4/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As promised, I bought every (well, ok, most) game mag in Japan while traveling there on holiday, and I thought I'd tell you a bit about what I've found.

A quick history of J-mags

From the late 1970s, video games received coverage in Japan's PC mags and kids' manga anthologies. The first mags entirely devoted to games popped up in 1982, starting with ASCII's LOGiN and Kadokawa Shoten's Comptiq and continuing with Softbank's Beep, the first mag to also cover arcade and home console games.

In 1985 Tokuma Shoten opened Family Computer Magazine, the first fully console (i.e. Famicom)-oriented magazine in Japan. With a design that shares a lot in common with early-era Nintendo Power, it was a massive success and spawned all manner of imitators, including ASCII's Famicom Tsushin (originally a column in LOGiN), Kadokawa's Marukatsu Famicom, and JICC's Famicom Hisshoubon. This situation remained largely the same throughout the Famicom/Super Famicom's reign, with these multiplatform mags dominating the marketplace and maybe one or two mags covering the Mega Drive and PC Engine.

Things changed in the mid-90s when the PlayStation and Saturn became serious forces in the game marketplace. Along with their "flagship" multiplatform mag, every existing game-mag publisher in Japan also launched an arrage of single-platform mags -- which, when thrown in with all the new multiplatform mags hitting stores, made for an extremely crowded marketplace. The saturation point was reached pretty quickly, and closures began in the late 90s and extended all through this decade, with the rise of the Internet only serving to hurry things along.

These days, the game-mag scene in Japan is in a state of near-monopoly, thanks to Kadokawa's purchase/merger/whatever-you-wanna-call-it with Enterbrain bringing production of the Famitsu and Dengeki stables under the same umbrella.

For the purposes of my survey, I bought every video-game magazine on regular rotation, ignoring any one-offs or specials (zoukan in Japanese), PC game mags (LOGiN is the only one left that is not "adult"), mags devoted entirely to MMO's (there's around five these days), and mags devoted entirely to girl or BL games (of which there are about fifty million).

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Japan Mag Roundup 2008" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well, it's been a very hectic past couple weeks for game mags, hasn't it? While I was out cavorting in Japan (and, of course, buying all the local mags so I could write a survey for GameSetWatch -- but that'll be next week), Dan Hsu left Ziff Davis and Games for Windows closed its doors, meaning that ZD has gone from publishing six regular game magazines (plus specials) in 2003 to only one in the space of five years. And also filed for Chapter 11. (The biggest surprise here is that Chapter 11 happened after all that downsizing, not before.)

Not even Simon Cox, the man behind what ZD's print mags were like in the early '00s, thinks print mags have much of a future with the company, if his comments to Kyle Orland are any measure. I would agree with them -- for a company like Ziff Davis, which (even after all the downsizing it's done) has a great deal of debt, a great deal of overhead, and has been put the brunt of its attention on an online strategy for the past three or so years, print mags aren't the way to the future.

The lack of advertising in the PC game marketplace is no doubt one reason why the marketplace couldn't support both GFW and PC Gamer at once, but I wonder if being published by an outfit as large as ZD -- and not, say, a much smaller company like the ones behind Play or Beckett MOG -- meant that it had to be a lot more profitable to stay alive than what would otherwise be the case.

(I also wonder if taking a magazine aimed mainly at hardcore gamer fans and naming it after after a Microsoft-driven initiative that most of the audience sees as half-baked was such a hot idear, but hindsight is always 20/20 with these things.)

Hsu's departure is also momentous because he, along with John Davison, was the main force behind the transformation of Sendai's old and (let's face it) amateurish rags into seriously well-writen and well-designed publications, stuff actually worth reading if you were over the age of 18.

One could argue that out of all the people in U.S. game print media, he had the most influence over what we have today, both in print and online, looks like and reads like. I first worked with him during that fleeting dream known as Gamers.com back in 2000 and later did a bunch of EGM freelance for him, and never had I had a boss more friendly and even-handed, even though I'm sure I made him want to choke me to death on more than one occasion. I'll be interested in what he does next, and I'll be even more interested in how this affects the hierarchy of things at ZD once April 25 (his last day) passes.

Anyway, read on to get my take on all the game mags of the past couple weeks. Frankly, with GFW gone, and as pretentious as it must sound, it's almost getting to the point where even I have to admit that Edge is the best there is in print-land...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 4/19/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm in Japan right now and therefore don't have much interest in sitting down and writing a full column about esoterica game magazines right now (forgive me, Simon, there's just too much beer to drink and it's not going to drink itself!), but I thought I'd at least share a few of the things I've procured while I'm here.

In this picture you can see two items that you probably wouldn't be able to find in your typical used bookstore. On the left is the first issue of Famitsu Comic, a magazine that compiled and expanded upon the assorted manga that Famitsu printed in its mag circa 1991. It lasted a whopping two issues before getting relaunched as Fami-Comi, which enjoyed existence as a seasonal title for a year or two afterward.

On the right is issue number 13 of Game Freak, a fanzine about video games from the early 1980s that was chiefly edited by Satoshi Tajiri with illustrations by Ken Sugimori. This, of course, is the same Game Freak that later became a developer and invented the Pokemon series -- Tajiri designs/executive-produces the games, and Sugimori drew all 151 original Pokemon himself.

Game Freak the fanzine lasted from 1981 (when Tajiri was just beginning college) to circa 1986, by which time both chief contributors had enough professional magazine work to quit the doujinshi scene.

The 28-page zine, mostly written longhand in Tajiri's loopy handwriting, offered advanced strategy and tactics for arcade games; this issue I found teaches me all about getting high scores on Gaplus, the overlooked (and extremely difficult) Namco arcade shooter.

Otherwise, I'm mainly taking my parents to all the touristy bits of southern Honshu until next weekend. See you later!

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also executive editor at PiQ magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Can you solve the Mystery of the Video Game Scores? I know I can't. It's kind of a mystery to me why magazines care so much about their review score systems and score this and score that. Though, of course, the public's kind of at fault, too. Who remembers how many stars Roger Ebert gave Movie X?

You probably don't; if you remember anything, it's that he either said it's good or bad, along with maybe a couple zingers here and there. If game writing has produced text as memorable as Ebert's, then that's collectively our problem, isn't it?

And now that I've written enough text to (hopefully) clear this opening image, let's move right on to all the game magazines released within the past fortnight. This update may be a mite on the short side because I'm rapidly preparing for a trip to Japan, where I will be this time next week.

Hopefully I can visit all the secret places I know I can find old game mags for sale. (No, I won't tell you where they are. I can't have you go buying them all up before I get there!)

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/29/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

    >

I had the intention of writing this week about Hard Drives, the greatest magazine that Larry Flynt Publishing ever produced (I kid, I kid, but it's close), but I can't find my sole example in the bookshelves. So, how about a little Brazilian programming instead?

Collectors of obscure old video games know that Brazil was an extremely unique game marketplace during the 8 and 16-bit eras. The Odyssey2 somehow emerged as the top console of the classic era, Tec Toy produced all kinds of Brazil-exclusive Sega Master System and Genesis titles, and the marketplace until approximately the mid-90s was mainly occupied by the SMS, the MSX computer, and half a dozen NES-compatible pirate consoles.

There was no dedicated game mag in Brazil during the 80s, when arcades and pinball was where the main action was in the country. (Odyssey Aventura, the locally-produced newsletter for Philips' console, lasted eight issues.) This changed in 1990 when publishing outfit Editora Abril produced Ação Games, a special one-off edition of kids' sports magazine A Semana em Ação (The Week in Action) devoted entirely to console stuff. One more one-off was produced in 1991, and then Abril went out of business. The Ação name was bought by rival publisher Editora Azul, and beginning in October 1991, Ação Games became a monthly publication.

Ação was arguably the most influential game mag of the era in South America. It had an officially translated edition (called Action Games) in Argentina, and before a year had passed, it had no less than four monthly rivals in Brazil: Games, VideoGame, Supergame (Sega-exclusive) and Game Power (Nintendo-exclusive). The latter two combined into a single multiplatform title, Super Game Power, in 1995.

Thumbing through these mags, one gets the idea that Brazilian editors and publishers really loved GamePro. Supergame and Game Power both had official licenses to translate content from IDG's mag, and Ação's visual design was basically a clone as well -- the difference, of course, being that instead of ads for the TG16 and Super NES games, these titles had spots for pirate NES consoles and shady-looking mail order places.

What makes Brazil mags unique, though, is their art -- unlike most other countries where the game industry mostly revolved around pirates, the magazines here were pretty high-quality productions, with lots of original articles and artwork (most of which is actually good, remarkably).

Sadly, most of these mags went belly-up in the late '90s once the Internet took over as the chief source of game info. I admit to not knowing much about modern Brazilian mags; titles I'm aware of currently in existence include EGM Brasil, Official Xbox Magazine, PlayStation (a homegrown PS mag), Gamemaster (another homegrown multiplatform mag), and Nintendo World (which appears to be Nintendo Power in translation). If you know of any more publishing right now, I'd love to hear about them.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also executive editor at PiQ magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Being a packrat is a dangerous thing. Don't worry -- my place is not a mess, overrun with stacks of magazines to the point where you can't navigate it anymore. Everything's still nice and neat; I can still keep a facade of normalcy as long as I don't show guests my home office/ferret habitat/magazine room.

But I've worried that I'm picking up a new hobby, one that I don't really need right now. I stop by used bookstores almost whenever I pass one, and lately I've been buying whatever $1 Choose Your Own Adventure books they have.

I do this for the same reasons I collect magazines and collected video games before that -- part nostalgia (I devoured these things as a grade-schooler), part gotta-catch-em-all psychology, part sheer nerddom. Now I'm even starting to peruse eBay and AbeBooks for deals on CYOA and other gamebook series. (I have a strict policy -- don't pay more than a buck for anything -- and so far it seems workable.)

Is this the plight of the geek? The desire to collect stuff of no vital value? Where does it end? In my case, it ends once I run out of shelf space -- which, sadly, I still have a lot of. Could be worse, I suppose -- I could have a taste for all those $60-and-up anime figurines I write about all the time for my magazine. As shelf filler, gamebooks give you far more bang for the buck. (PS: You got any extras, drop me a line at kevin@piqmag.com. Wait, don't. You'll just be encouraging me if you do!)

Anyway, click on for my views on all the new US game mags of the past fortnight. Big things are happening this month (except to book sizes, those are still small) -- nearly all the mags are livid with GTA4 coverage, but one stood out above the rest...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/15/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I sometimes feel a little embarrassed writing this column because although I'm arguably one of the most vocal cheerleaders for print game magazines, my actual information consumption habits couldn't contradict that more. Most all of my buying decisions on games are driven by what I read on forums.

If I want to cheat in a game, learn more about an upcoming game, or bitch about a game because I can't cheat in it, then the Internet is right there. (I also subscribe to the local Houston paper mainly because they had a good deal for a year's delivery a while back, newsprint is great for lining ferret litter boxes with, and I just can't get enough of that Family Circus.)

Eagle-eyed readers may have noted by now that I almost never talk about reviews in video-game magazines. That's because, in my opinion, traditional reviews in game magazines should go to the same place that cheat and strategy-guide pages went -- i.e., somewhere where I don't have to pay money for them.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Down With Print-Mag Reviews" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

It cost me many weeks of hard work, much endurance, and quite possibly my sanity, but we finally receieved printed copies of PiQ Issue 1 the other day. What a relief! I actually have been working on something for the past little while, and not just been ferrying my bloated body to and fro between the office and my condo for no reason! What a refreshing experience!

I don't want to reveal the cover until readers begin to receive the mag, but you can see a small snippet of it to the left. As you can see, we've got a thrilling expose into the world of dirty toilet seats. I'm thinking about a multi-spread feature on graft and corruption in the plumber's helper manufacturing industry for Issue 2, so stay tuned.

Anyway, enough tooting about my own mag -- let's start looking at all the lovely game magazines (and also Beckett Massive Online Guide) that were released over the past couple weeks. I wanted to do more commentary, but I've got a deadline-induced cold, so I'm going to lie on my couch right now and watch RoboCop.

Electronic Gaming Monthly March 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Revenge of the PS3!

Fortunately for all of us, the cover is not devoted to a preview feature. It's divided into eight "reasons" why the PS3 will do lovely in '08, and doesn't descent into preview-land until the final reason -- the games, of course. The rest of it is a nicely researched, well-written look into the full situation surrounding the system right now.

The other bit that caught my eye: "Funny Business," three pages of game developers telling humorous stories about their careers. fun, although for some reason the images on one of the pages are all pixelated, as if someone saved a PDF at the incorrect compression setting or somesuch. Ah well.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/1/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

   

This is something I've been tracking down a long time -- examples of Japanese magazines Yugekishu and its unofficial continuation Bug News. They are rarer than hen's teeth in Japan and tend to cost the most money I've seen thrown at old computer/game mags on Yahoo! Auctions when they pop up -- sort of the Japanese equivalent to Electronic Games and old Creative Computing, you could say.

Yugekishu, an A5-sized monthly from publisher Nihon Micom Kyoiku Center (Japan Microcomputer Education Center) that premiered June 1984 and closed up shop with its ninth issue in February/March 1985, is unlike any other PC game magazine I've seen from the era anywhere in the world.

How can I describe it succinctly? Let me give it a shot: You know how people sometimes whine that there's no video-game equivalent to Roger Ebert or Lester Bangs, no truly unique-sounding game pundit whose views are trusted and influential in a way that transcends whatever publication they're written for? Yugekishu (which is Japanese for "shortstop," as in the baseball position) was an attempt to attract the wannabe Eberts of video games and gather their longform reviews and commentaries into a single magazine, one meant for hardcore gamers and industry insiders. In 1984, I remind you.

(Bug News, picked up for publications by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in August 1985, kept the same theme but focused on the entire PC industry, not just games. It lasted for several more years before morphing into a Macintosh and desktop-publishing mag in the late '80s.)

What makes these magazines special? Besides the fact they cover much of Edge/Next Generation's beat nearly ten years before either of those magazines existed, it's also one of the few examples of a nationally distributed Japanese game mag that actually, uh, says things. There are, and have been, tons of game mags in Japan, but (from my admittedly removed perspective) they are in even more of a symbiotic relationship with game publishers than their US and European counterparts.

Famitsu's cross reviews are about the only chance you have of seeing any non-cushioned negativity thrown against a game in the entire mag, for example, and they can get away with that because like EGM, they've established a brand name for their reviews that goes back decades. Other mags can't, and real opinions are surprisingly rare -- often, even when they're there, they're concealed in the form of user-submitted reviews and such. To put it a more charitable way, game mags are meant to be a guide and resource that happens to be entertaining, not the video-game equivalent to Cahiers du cinéma.

Yugekishu and Bug News were different. The editors wore their biases on their sleeves -- they loved Infocom and most of the big-name American RPGs; they hated nearly the entire PC game output of Japan, which at the time was mostly porn and knockoffs of overseas games (hey, the more things change, huh?). They didn't bat an eye at writing six-page reviews of games like Castle Wolfenstein and Softporn Adventure, discussing the role of war in games and other forms of media and so forth.

They published extensive strategy guides with professionally-drawn maps and exhaustively-researched enemy and item lists. They ran multi-page interviews with industry figures, some original and others translated from Softalk, which they had an informal licensing agreement with until that mag's closure. All this in 1984!

US computer mags hated reviewing games in the 8-bit era -- the great majority of the time, the reviewers saw it as something beneath serious criticism. This mag was different. Not even the British mags of the time treated game coverage this seriously. Yugekishu was a magazine at least 15 years too early, and its existance as an obscure mag, just barely supported by a tight-knit contigent of hardcore fans in its native country, is almost as sad as the lack of a real tradition of game criticism in America.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also Executive Editor of PiQ, a new magazine hitting stands in March.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I must admit to not paying a lot of attention to Retromags, a project to scan up old, historically interesting game mags and distribute 'em over the net. I feel a little ashamed because they've uncovered more than a few things that surprised me, because I hadn't really seen examples of them elsewhere. Case in point: all the places the name "Nintendo Power" showed up where you wouldn't have expected it.

  

Nintendo Power Flash was Canada's equivalent to the Nintendo Fun Club News, a free newsletter distributed to NES buyers that sent off for it. The difference is that the seasonal, 16-page Power Flash is quite a bit younger than that, premiering with the Summer 1988 issue and continuing on for at least five more installments until 1990, when the US-based Nintendo Power received official Canadian distribution.

Why didn't they just publish Nintendo Power up there from the start? Because Nintendo of America had no Canadian distribution until 1990 -- they handed that job over to Mattel, as they did with certain parts of Europe. I have heard that the Canada arrangement came to a halt when Mattel sued NOA over grey-market imports of NES hardware and software over the US border or something like, though I haven't found any details behind this claim.

Regardless, Power Flash is an interesting anomaly, partially Canada-made content from readers and partially a clone of NP content, right down to the screenshot maps and Japan-style original art (except the art's different from what was in NP itself). I'd like to get some issues of my own, but they seem to show up only rarely on eBay and it's not like I'll just happen to run into any here in Texas.

Neither, likely, will I run across examples of this Australian edition of Nintendo Power, another 16-page newsletter that was presumably distributed for free to buyers. This summer-1991 issue is the only one I've ever heard of; the content is mostly straight from the US Nintendo Power, so I assume it's an official publication from whoever distributed the NES in Oz at the time. (I have to assume because there's no contact information within the mag itself, which claims to be "edited" by Mario in the table-of-contents page.)

Finally, here's something I'm a little embarrassed hasn't been in my collection until now -- Pocket Power, a free booklet distributed by some theaters to anyone who bought a ticket to see The Wizard (as shown in this TV ad). Pocket Power is essentially a 40-page edition of NP, offering a couple features on the movie and Fred Savage and filling out the rest of the pages with quick, NP-style game previews. The content seems to be sponsored (every page features large company logos in a way that the real NP never would), but it's also mostly original, which makes me wonder if you can really call an NP collection complete without this little thing on the side. I wonder how many of these they distributed?

Regardless, thanks to Phillyman and the other people at Retromags for bringing this stuff to my attention.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also Executive Editor of PiQ, a new magazine hitting stands in March.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

   

I'm back! And holy cow, take my advice, don't launch a new magazine! It takes a lot of work and you wind up forgetting to clean the litterbox too often!

I have a ton of mags to catch up on, all of which you'll find under the cut; apologies I don't write my usual depth, but there's a huge stack to get through.

But before we begin, I thought I'd show off something I found amusing. On the top left you have the Japanese box art for Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. On the right, you have the US magazine ad for the game, as seen in this month's Nintendo Power. Holy cow! Shiren's gotten kind of edgy! And Koppa (his white weasel companion) went from cute and merchandisable to eat-the-faces-off-babies demented! I haven't seen such a breathtaking concept-art transformation since the glory days of the NES! Thumbs up, Sega! Moving on, though...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 2/2/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I didn't notice for a whole month (the publisher sent an email announcement that wound up in my junk folder), but Hardcore Gamer magazine is lowering its frequency from monthly to quarterly:

"Due to the massive shift in the video game journalism industry to a more online-focused strategy, we have decided to also shift our main focus for Hardcore Gamer to a a model that better takes advantage of our website, HardcoreGamer.com.

At the same time, we will be providing unique content within the printed version of Hardcore Gamer so that the two no longer conflict with each other."

All current subscribers will get extended to the Winter '08 issue, which is nice. Not so nice is the fact that subscriptions still cost $24.95, meaning that if you subscribed last month expecting to receive 12 issues, well, you're getting four instead - sorry! Don't like it, here's a refund!

Of course, subscription fulfillment houses are like this for every magazine in the US, so I can't complain too loudly. What I'm wondering about is what the editors will do with the quarterly issues -- they haven't said much publicly, other than they'll concentrate on non-timely things and really, really hope the paper quality can remain the same. How's that for optimism?

Now, HGM has been an anomaly for its entire run, starting up in 2005 at a time when print mags were just launching their current shrinking contest and offering up a design/writing formula that went out of style when the GameFan generation grew up.

Still, I can't help but like the little guy anyway -- it shows spunk and enthusiasm, and it plainly couldn't have survived this long unless it had decent support from its readership and ad base.

Nonetheless, I think it serves as the latest reminder that while video game magazines printed on paper are not a thing of the past, game mags that follow the tried-and-true, outdone-by-the-Internet-a-decade-ago formula of previews and reviews most certainly are.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also Executive Editor of PiQ, a new magazine hitting stands in March.

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As some of you may've heard, Newtype USA (the mag I worked for) will be discontinued with its February 2008 issue, which will be on stands in a little while. In its place, we will be launching PiQ, a magazine that covers the entire range of (for lack of a better term) "genre entertainment".

There's still much work left to be done on PiQ before I have anything more interesting to say about it, but this re-launch is one reason why I've been following the discussion around EGM and (pictured) editor-in-chief Dan Hsu's public revelation of his title's occasionally rocky relations with game publishers. He discussed his views of game PR and his duties as EIC with the Media Coverage corner of GameDaily, and the whole thing is worth reading, so go have a look. One long quote in particular caught my notice:

"The thing that always guides me is something my first editorial director told me on the day I interviewed at EGM...I brought up an old EGM editorial where the editor said that Capcom has pulled advertising [they later reinstated it], but EGM wouldn't change its ways to win them back. I asked the editorial director about that, and how can EGM survive without advertising...how does the magazine deal with that pressure? He told me, 'As long as you write for the readers and not the companies, the readership will come, and the advertisers will have no choice but to advertise with you'...Eventually, the companies all come back because they need to reach our audience...I know that sounds cocky, and I don't mean it to be, but that's what keeps me going, even when things are looking bad and down for us...We are unwilling to bend on this. I'd drag EGM down with me or quit before we compromise our integrity."

This is a very commendable credo for Hsu and his staff to work under, especially given how much prestige his mag's review scores are often given online. EGM's editors ought to be proud of their boss; I know I was back when I freelanced for EGM in 2003-05 [ish], when I couldn't imagine myself ever wanting a job in any other print-media game mag. And yet, the contrarian part of my mind, the part that can't help but play the devil's advocate (or simply wants to be a prick), can't help but say: Does not compromising your integrity mean having your average book size go down 40 percent between 2002 and 2007?

I'm not suggesting that EGM is suffering for its policies needessly. In fact, the ABCs will tell you that its circulation is higher than it's ever been, and I still think it's the most influential mag in the US -- a position that's the result of many years of consistency in its policies. However, every print-mag editor is facing a reality where they are almost nobody's first choice of media on any given game title -- not readers', nor professionals'. Very few gamers buy a game because EGM said it was hot; they buy a game because an amalgamation of websites, magazines, and their friends said it was hot. More than ever, they're a cog in a machine of hype -- and the way print media can escape this machine is by playing up the inherent advantages of print, concentrating on features, opinion, pretty pictures, the complete package, and not fighting an unwinnable battle with online.

So what does "writing for the readers" mean at this point, then? Every mag grapples with this question, and they all have varying degrees of success at dealing with it. I give nothing but the highest of praise to EGM for doing things like publish opinionated previews -- and being willing to deal with the fallout afterward. That sort of thing we need to see more of. However -- and I say this with the utmost of respect -- I wonder if basing so much of the integrity of one's magazine on what amount to a bunch of numbers is really the best place to put one's efforts. Would it perhaps be better to take some other approach, concentrate on other parts of the mag and so forth? Didn't Gerstmann-gate teach us that an over-reliance on scores in your media trivializes your content and could even set you up for trouble?

These are rhetorical questions and not for me to answer, but obviously, we at PiQ are trying our best to come up with a product that interests and entertains the readers we want to attract. I think that it's time game-mag editors rethink this fundamental topic, too, especially considering that book sizes (not to mention reader mindshare) ain't getting any bigger anytime soon.

That said, here are all the mags of the past couple weeks. Back to the tiny issues again, sadly...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 1/12/08" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Best New Trend in Game Mags: A serious effort -- particularly in Game Informer's part -- to bring serious industry news back into print media, after several years of aping Maxim. Edge is no longer the only place in print for intelligent trend coverage.

Worst New Trend in Game Mags: Your choice: the endurance of boring preview features, or 100 pages becoming the new standard size for mags outside of Christmas -- at least until "88 pages" replaces it.

Biggest Surprise: Official Xbox Magazine bustin' out some really informative and funny features, the best of which remains Dan Amrich's quest to get kicked off Xbox Live as quickly as possible (without busting out the obvious racial slurs and potty-mouth antics).

Biggest Disappointment: Strategy Plus -- and, to be more exact, MASSIVE/MMO Games -- closing. The MMORPG-specific spinoff of Computer Games was exploring a beat uncovered by nearly all professional media and successfully made MMO's seem fascinating to everyone without assuming a raft of jargon knowledge on the part of its readers. MASSIVE is a classic example of how launching a mag is like opening up a new restaurant -- you can do everything absolutely right, from the location to the decor to the food itself, and still fail through no fault of your own.

Most Improved Magazine: GamePro. Sure, its new design (introduced with the February 2007 issue) hasn't been perfect -- the magazine still has a tendency for standard, easily overlooked covers, and its page count is still down from the rest of the game mag crowd. However, thanks to trashing all vestiges of the old GamePro and aggressively expanding the range of its coverage, GP has succeeded in not only being relevant to its target audience again, but actually being readable (and enjoyable) by gamers of any age.

Least Improved Magazine: PlayStation: The Official Magazine when compared to PSM, its predecessor. The late era of PSM always seemed short on content compared to its multiplatform rivals, and P:TOM has inherited the gestalt fully. Hopefully 2008 will see the mag settle down, find its voice, and start really rockin'. (I still wonder what happened to that Blu-ray demo disc, though.)

Best Cover: Probably Play Magazine's June 2007 cover, the one with Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles on it. Although Game Informer's GTA4 cover (May 2007) comes close.

Worst Cover: Game Informer's September 2007 issue, featuring some blurry guys in black and some really cheesy PR-speak coverlines to advertise Borderlands.

Cover The Editors Probably Regret The Most Now: Play's Bullet Witch cover (March 2007), a title later heralded as "worst of 2007" by GamePro.

Best One-Off Special: Edge's The 100 Best Videogames, which is bigger, cheaper, looks fancier, and reads more engagingly than most real video-game books.

Best Launch: Future's Nintendo Power. They changed nothing, which means they retained all the benefits of the world's most underrated game magazine without so much as breaking a sweat.

Best Thing About 2008: There probably won't be quite as many game magazines closing this year. Maybe.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Happy new year, everyone! How were all of your holidays? I'm still sifting through all the junk I got and/or bought for myself, not to mention all the game mags of 2007 in preparation for my year-in-review piece, which I'm planning for next week.

For now, though, I'd like to talk about the last few mags of '07, the first January issues. Hot exclusive features seem to be the order of the day right now, and none are hotter presently than...

Electronic Gaming Monthly January 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Street Fighter 4

This issue is the hype of the moment, no doubt, and everyone inside is incredibly excited about the main subject. ("I'm still rubbing my eyes over the fact that this sequel even exists, much less that we got the world exclusive on it," Shoe writes in his editorial.) However, even Shoe admits that the game is "extremely early" (his emphasis), and the 13-page feature preview is mainly a long, narrative interview with producer Yoshinori Ono about how he'd like this project to unfold. Still, the feature works because Shane the writer shows off his deep fighting-game knowledge, asking Ono intelligent questions (covering everything from combo mechanics to Chun Li's thighs) and keeping things interesting despite the monotony of the screenshots, all featuring the same characters fighting in the same battle scene.

Otherwise the main highlight is a bumper Afterthoughts section featuring postmortem interviews with the crew behind Halo 3, Mass Effect, The Orange Box (again, after GFW's bigger retrospective last month) and Uncharted.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 12/29/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

   

A few quick notes before I sign off for Xmas and all that nonsense. First off, my review of Total PC Gaming last month (Issue 1 can now be found at most Barnes & Nobles, by the way) where I noted I haven't seen an issue of PC Zone in years attracted the attention of PC Zone's editors, who were nice enough to send a couple issues in the mail. (British PC game magazines seem to love this column for some reason. I can't complain.)

PC Zone was the first magazine in the UK devoted exclusively to games on x86 machines, debuting in April 1993 and going up against PC Format, a mag meant to cover the entirety of the home-PC marketplace but in practice mostly concentrated on games back then. Its most immediate predecessor was Zero, a multiplatform rag that was, in some ways, a spiritual successor to Your Sinclair -- all magazines known for having highly irreverent writing and building a diehard community of readers, although not necessarily being huge money-making successes (Zero died after three years). I own a few issues from PC Zone's first year that I bought off the newsstand back in the day, and in its early years, it was often a very silly magazine, with reviews taking very strange offroads and Duncan MacDonald's "Mr Cursor" column on the back page often descending into crazy nonsense.

Wikipedia tells me that the mag largely kept this tone going all through the 1990s, and indeed, even if I hadn't looked at the cover of these two latest issues, I'd be able to recognize the PC Zone influence in the pages. PC Zone is still irreverent, definitely -- regular columns include a Jackass-inspired bit where they try to break whatever game is on the demo DVD as much as possible and "Tat Zone," where they sell off the swag game companies send them on Ebay (for charity) and see how much it goes for. (A notepad with the Crysis logo on it sold for £27.07, causing PC Zone to comment that "you lot are moneyed beyond sense".)

It's not unusual for a game mag to try to be irreverent. What's unusual is the ability on editorial's part to consistently maintain this tone of irreverence across the entirety of the mag, from the cover to the reviews to the DVD coverdisc section to the little fineprint on the masthead. This is one of those few mags that I can turn to any page and any article -- even a review of some gaming mouse or another -- and rest assured that the text will be just as amusing as the big Gears of War review up front. It's a surprisingly rare accomplishment, in this age of every mag doing the exact same holiday shoppers' guides and the exact same preview features, and PC Zone really ought to be paid more attention for accomplishing it. (I can't help but think that dropping the cover DVD and lowering the £5.99 price would go a long way towards that goal.)

   

In other news, PC Pilot has put out a winter special meant to introduce people to the world of flight simulation. You should be able to find it at B&N and elsewhere right now.

It might surprise some people to hear that there's not one, but two internationally distributed mags devoted exclusively to flight sims -- the bimonthly PC Pilot out of Britain, and the monthly Computer Pilot out of Australia. Both mags have been around for a while (Computer Pilot launched in 1996 and is celebrating its 100th issue next month), and both even have their individual niches that they cover. PC Pilot is the more "serious" mag of the two, concentrating on reviews of new planes, scenery packs and hardware, while CP is more about the "experience," featuring extensive reports of flights across this or that stretch of terrain and even including what I can only describe as flight-sim fanfiction -- the past three issues have chronicled the story of Dr. Betzy Wong, flight sim therapist, as she helps a hopelessly neurotic man come to terms with his family and improve his ATC and landing-approach skills. I'm not making this up.

Whenever I develop a curious interest in something, I tend to wind up picking up a magazine or two about the topic, even if I have no intention of seriously pursuing the subject. This is how I've found myself with subscriptions to everything from Make to Armchair General (which, by the way, seems to survive mostly off video-game advertising -- funny, eh?), and it's given me no lack of odd things to read about before falling asleep at night. If you've ever thought "My god, how can they fill up an entire magazine about flight sim crap?", why not pick up this month's PC Pilot and find out? At the very least, you'll satisfy your curiosity.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Astute mag readers will probably note very shortly that PC Gamer and PlayStation: The Official Magazine (and presumably OXM, too, but I haven't confirmed that yet) have yet another Cellplay "bonus insert" inside the January 2008 issues. This one's only 12 pages long (as opposed to the mammoth 30-page section that appeared in the Holiday '07 ishes of Future's mags), and it's also gotten a bit of a redesign, having a very busy look reminiscent of late-90s PC Gamer.

Seeing Cellplay two months in a row is frankly a little off-putting. Is this going to be a monthly thing now, or what? I don't mean to pick on the people behind the Cellplay section -- in fact, the editorial director of the insert is none other than Julian Rignall, a name dearly beloved by any game-mag aficionado. I also don't deny that cell-phone gaming is a big, exciting marketplace and the games on it are becoming more and more fascinating by the moment. But as a subscriber to all of Future's game mags, all I feel is that this is a bunch of unasked-for filler that could've been better occupied with more PC, PlayStation, or Xbox coverage.

I remember back when the late Computer Games debuted the "Now Playing" arts and entertainment section in 2004. Readers were up in arms about the presence of light movie/DVD/comic book coverage in an otherwise fiendishly hardcore PC game mag, but the editors countered that there was no game coverage that could've gone into those pages -- a pretty plain lie, considering how CGM had no problem refilling that real estate once Now Playing finally spun off into its own (ultimately unsuccessful) publication.

In a way, I wonder if the existence of Cellplay is just another testament to the disappointing advertising situation US game mags face these days. Unlike Now Playing, Cellplay does attract a fair number of ad pages that the publisher probably wouldn't get otherwise. But is this extra revenue so important to the continued survival of Future's mags that the higher-ups are willing to sacrifice such a hefty percentage of their flagship titles' pages to this completely off-topic content? Is the corresponding loss in reader satisfaction (and perceived loss of purchase value for newsstand buyers) worth the extra ad bucks?

I'm sure it's a touchy topic for editorialships industry-wide, so I'll leave it for now and get to breaking down all the US mags (plus Edge) released in the past fortnight. It's the last pre-Xmas rush! How are magazines coping?

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 12/8/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Here's a complete collection I'm proud of, and I think justifiably so, too -- a complete run of 99'er/99'er Home Computer/Home Computer Magazine, a title that ran from 1981 to 1985 and had one of the loopiest histories I've ever seen in classic computer mag-dom.

99'er, launched in the late spring of 1981, was the only nationally-distributed magazine in the US devoted to Texas Instruments' TI-99/4A, a full-scale computer system that captured a pretty significant chunk of the PC market for much of its early life. (These days, it's known chiefly these days, if at all, for being the first home computer with a 16-bit processor.) It was a pretty eccentric computer, with lots of murky circuitry under the hood and very little public documentation at first, and 99'er was just as quirky from the get-go. It was edited and published by Gary M. Kaplan, a Eugene, OR-based entrepreneur who enjoyed peppering his magazine with long, drawn-out editorials about the computer, the marketplace, and anything else that struck his fancy. (He's not the Gary S. Kaplan who was arrested for offshore-betting shenanigans last year, by the way.)

Gary's magazine experienced its heyday from late 1982 to '83, when 99'er was published monthly and its pages were packed with dozens of teeny-tiny advertisments from garage-based software outlets across America. Like most PC mags of the time, its primary focus was on BASIC program listings, with some software coverage and tutorial content rounding out the book. Trouble began in October 1983, when TI announced the cancellation of the 99/4A series and 99'er abruptly disappeared. It was relaunched in early 1984 as Home Computer Magazine, a book which continued TI99 coverage but also include stuff for Apple, Commodore and IBM systems, making it a multiplatform magazine in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

The magazine begins to achieve legendary status in my mind starting in mid-1984. That's when Home Computer abruptly stops carrying any form of outside advertising, lauding itself by calling it an "unprecedented move" that "will set the standard for editorial quality, integrity, and readability for the entire industry." Kaplan's motives may not have been entirely noble here, however -- the move coincided with the settlement of several lawsuits filed by advertisers who claimed 99'er misled them about the magazine's circulation. (Kaplan simultaneously launched Home Computer Digest in September 1984, a subscription-only supplement to Home Computer Magazine that did include ads.)

Home Computer continued in this fashion until late 1985, when the magazine abruptly went under again. No word was issued from Eugent until April 1986, when subscribers received a letter stating that HCM had folded and their subscriptions would be fulfilled by Home Computer Journal, a new magazine that came with a disk of software. The catch: Each issue of HCJ was valued at $25, meaning that that company could mail a single issue out and immediately settle all outstanding subscriptions, no matter how long. Many customers complained to the US Postal Service about this, but only a few allegedly received any monetary reimbursement. (HCJ itself lasted four issues before closing.)

So in short: crazy publication history, nutty editorial team, tons of goofiness between the pages. What more could you ask for out of an early-80s computer mag?

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

   

A couple of developments in PC game mags occurred recently that're more related than you'd expect at first glance. First, Imagine Publishing's Total PC Gaming debuted on British newsstands this month with a print run of 40,000, becoming the first computer games magazine to launch over there in many, many years (over a decade, maybe?). Editor-in-chief (and, apparently, Game Mag Weaseling fan) Dave Harfield was nice enough to send me a copy of Issue 1 in the mail for review.

Visually and stylistically, TPCG doesn't stray too far from the Brit-mag norm. You've got bright, long reviews and previews done up with a clean, white background and featuring all sorts of little extra gubbins on the side -- spec discussions, development status, how the game looks at different detail levels (a neat addition), and so on. Reviews are scored out of ten and seem by-and-large forgiving so far, with only one game -- sleep-inducing Taiwanese MMORPG Bounty Bay Online, which gets a 2 -- scoring below the "average" mark. Hardware reviews get a lot of page space in this mag, too, signifying a dedication to covering the after-market modding marketplace with a fervor you don't see in print too often.

TPCG's innovations include:

- No disc. US mags mostly shed their discs a couple years ago, but the British PC mags still sport them. This one drops them for obvious reasons (you can get it all on the Internet! Duh!) and is subsequently two pounds cheaper than PC Gamer's UK edition, despite its larger page count and book size.

- A dedicated MMO section. GFW and PC Gamer US both have regular MMO coverage, but TPCG features 20 pages of it in its own "sub-magazine" after the reviews well. "MMO Worlds" reminds me a lot of the MASSIVE of old -- it's intelligent writing about MMOs present and future, with this month's installment mainly devoted to the Tabula Rasa launch. These 20 pages alone are already better than anything Beckett Massive Online Gamer's done.

- A dedicated retro section. Classic game coverage has served fellow Imagine mags Retro Gamer and GamesTM exceedingly well. TPCG's "Redux" section includes bits on System Shock 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Amiga emulators, and Portal, the 1986 Activision game that invented the "visual novel" genre eight years before the Japanese popularized it. A great start, I'd say, especially considering how many obscure old PC releases are out there waiting for someone to discover them.

Speaking from what experience I have with Britmags (I have yet to see an issue of PC Zone), I'd say TPCG is among, if not the best UK PC mag already. It's big, nicely written, dedicated, and never too boring. I'd love to see something like it over here, but given the American mag industry's situation these days, I'm sure it'd never happen without extensive modifications.

TPCG is also notable for featuring the work of Lara Crigger and Kelly Wand, both of which used to contribute to Computer Games magazine. There was pretty extensive online talk that CGM and sister mag MMO Games (formerly MASSIVE) were going to relaunch in some way sooner or later, but sadly, the idea seems dead in the water now -- this month's issue of Games for Windows includes a notice (reproduced above) that old CGM subscribers will receive GFW for the outstanding remainder of their term. Having been both a CGM and MMO Games subscriber, my GFW subscription now extends into late 2009. Brilliant! It's sad to see CGM go permanently, but with all the main contributors to the mag having moved on to bigger and better things, the party was definitely over long before Ziff bought up the subscription list.

After that lengthy intro, let's move right into the US mags of the past two weeks. Click onward for more!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 11/24/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 6:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The first issue of PlayStation: The Official Magazine arrived in the mail a few days back, and since it's the first major US mag launch in a while, I thought I'd devote a full column to it.

Future Publishing's PTOM (the replacement for PSM) is grossly divided into five sections:

- System Update: The news section, encompassing a couple interviews, Blu-ray movie reviews, Adam Warren's comic (formerly on the back page), and a digest of the latest happenings. The two main bits this month are a piece on the PlayStation Eye (with Dr. Richard Marks extensively quoted) and a post-Tokyo Game Show talk with Kaz Hirai.

- Previews: Your typical magazine previews section. This one kicks off with three pages on Soul Calivur IV and continues with large looks at MGS4, Haze, Crisis Core: FFVII, and so forth. A "PlayStation Gallery" at the end fills out the section with some capsule previews.

- The feature well: The cover story on Gran Turismo 5 takes us to Polyphony Digital HQ in Japan, where Kazunori Yamauchi discusses his goals with the new game and shows off all the incredible detail going into the models. A holiday buyer's guide (titled "Holiday Buyer's Guide," which should offer some insight to its originality) is the typical game and gadget-themed Xmas gift roundup.

- Reviews: PTOM rates its games on a five-star scale with three stars set as "okay" and five signifying "exceptional" and earning the game an Editor's Choice award. No review is larger than two pages (as opposed to the multi-page cover features reviews sometimes earn in PSM and OXM), and there's a small page of hardware reviews in the rear.

- PlayStation Network: The "miscellaneous" section of PTOM, similar to the one GamePro has in the back of its book. This issue has multiplayer strategies for Warhawk (online tips will be an ongoing part of this section, it looks like), letters, and quick reviews of PSN titles. A welcome-to-the-mag piece by SCEA head Jack Tretton fills up the back page, which you can tell was written by a true PR aficionado because the name of Sony's current top console is spelled out as "PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™)" in the article, a custom the rest of the magazine thankfully avoids.

And that's the long and short of it, basically. The mag is 132 pages, 30 of which is the AT&T cell-phone game "special advertising supplement" appearing in all Future game mags this month, so it seems safe to expect the usual book sizes and ad ratios here as in most other titles.

PTOM is about what you'd expect from a US game-mag publisher. The mag has a very clean look, making it look like a cross between EGM and Future's PlayStation Official Magazine UK, and many pages and reviews feature small captions on the sides with some random piece of trivia related to the article it's near, a nice little touch. (The mag is also about half an inch wider than PSM, although it's still got nothing on Ziff's super-wide OPM.) On the writing and coverage end, however, not a great deal has changed from the PSM days -- the text style is authoritative, if not all that excited, and it's not terribly different from the way a lot of online game sites are written.

The biggest surprise might be that the Blu-ray demo disc promised in Future's press release is not included or mentioned, something the editors confirmed on the psmonline.com blog (PTOM doesn't have its own website yet for some reason). There's some confusion in the blog comments about whether the mag will ever have a demo disc, but I'm willing to bet it'll get one as at least a special bonus once in awhile eventually. Otherwise, where's the major, killer advantage in being Official? Or is it more the case of Future saying to themselves "Well, we're the only PS mag left in America now, might as well bite the bullet and pay the licensing fee"?

It's also worth noting that the "FREE Two-Sided Poster" touted on the cover isn't quite accurate, unless it's referring to something available on newsstands only. [ADDENDUM: The newsstand PTOM does come with a real double-sided poster. Odd that it still got advertised in both the newsstand and subscriber editions, though.]

Overall, PTOM is a nice leap forward from PSM visually and undoubtedly serves the needs of its PlayStation-fan subscribers well, but those expecting something revolutionary will have to go expect somewhere else for now.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The holiday season for game mags is right upon us, and that means plenty of review covers, ad pages, Ken Levine interviews (he and/or his game appear in nearly every mag this month except Nintendo Power)...and, for most titles, circulation statements.

Around this time of year, you'll often see mags publish an official-looking circulation statement toward the rear. These statements of ownership have been popping up in U.S. mags since the early 1970s, and for the dedicated statistician they're a treasure trove of information -- especially if the mag in question doesn't otherwise release any official circulation figures. So why do publishers print them? It's the law -- required by the U.S. Postal Service if the mag wants to take advantage of their special Periodicals Class mailing rates, which most US game titles do. (The exact numbers are way too complex to get into here, but we're talking about a postage discount of up to 40 percent compared to plain ol' regular mail, depending on assorted circumstances.)

Despite the discount, not all game mags go for the Periodicals Class discount. This can be for one of two reasons: it's not worth all the extra paperwork and USPS bureaucracy, and/or the publisher just doesn't want to make its circulation records public at all. Still, these statements are valuable for mag dorks like myself -- I'll list circulation figures for all the mags below, then comment on historical trends in some future column.

For now, let's check out all the US mags of the past few weeks. Prepare for more BioShock coverage than you ever imagined...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 11/10/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

   

There was an interesting article written the other day by Rebecca McPheters, who used to be the publisher for Child, Fitness, and assorted other mainstream magazines. What she had to write about is something that game magazine publishers have had to wrestle with for much of the 21st century -- circulation (the number of copies you distribute every mont) is actually a pretty crap way to measure how many readers you have.

"Because the strength of a print brand is in its ability to generate audience -- and stronger brands tend to produce more readers-per-copy than brands that are less strong -- circulation-based pricing has done more than any other single factor to reduce the range and quality of print options available to advertisers... Our current circulation-based system has both reduced advertising revenues and increased circulation costs. It has put print into a dangerous downward spiral as consumers increasingly expect to receive media content for free and yet magazines' advertising pricing is predicated on a paid circulation model." (my emphasis)

In other words, Rebecca's saying that maintaining a large circulation (and charging advertisers based on that circulation, independent of whether there are real pairs of eyes to back that up) shouldn't be first priority for magazines anymore. To back that up, she brings up the MRI -- Mediamark Research and Intelligence, a surveying firm that releases readership data for magazines. This data includes something called the "readers-per-copy" for a magazine, showing how much a mag gets passed around or how many people take a look at any given issue, whether passing it around friends, picking it up at the dentist's waiting room, or just browsing through it on the newsstand. Comparing the MRIs with the circulation figures, Rebecca notes in the article that "overall audience has increased by 2%, while circulation has declined by 7%" in the past decade.

What do MRI's stats look like? You can download a sample off the net, which includes a couple of game mags on it. For the spring of 2007, MRI said that Electronic Gaming Monthly had a total adult audience of 3,441,000 people, about 3 million men and the rest women. GamePro had 3,836,000 people in its audience, while Game Informer cleaned up with 5,039,000 audience members. Note that Game Informer's MRI audience is "only" about 68% larger than EGM's, despite having over four times the paid circulation. If you put enough credence to the MRI's numbers, it means that GameStop is spending a lot of money printing, mailing, and distributing those two million-odd copies of GI each month, yet not being as efficient in attracting an audience with those printed copies as EGM and GamePro is.

Which begs the next question: How realistic are the MRI's figures, and how much do advertisers care about them? Judging by GI's current position as the game mag with the most ad pages in the US (and also the one with the most non-game-related advertising), it doesn't seem like ad buyers consider them a heck of a lot when making their decisions. GamePro boasted about its MRI figures on the cover between 2002 and 2006 (you can see two examples of that above), but dropped it since many folks ina nd out of the industry assumed the "three million readers" claim was a fabrication or massaged number, somehow.

Still, if Rebecca has it right in her article, GamePro -- and, really, a lot of game mags -- might have the right idea. It's little secret that many mags (not just in games) have lost a ton of circulation over the past handful of years. However, an increasing number of publishers are arguing that the treadmill of keeping circulation up only serves as a needless expense that doesn't do anything for the audience or the bottom line. So perhaps we'll see a trend unfold over the next little while of game mags dropping circs and telling advertisers not to worry -- the eyes are still there, they just read the product differently than before.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Man, is there anyone out there in the US who has bothered to collect more Japanese magazines than me?

I'm running out of shelf space in the "study," so I finally decided to move the brunt of the Famitsus into the closet, since I refer to them the least these days. So now they lie in storage, waiting patiently for the day when I get a hankering to find out what review score they gave to F-Zero or Terranigma. Someday.

Anyway, we're rapidly approaching the holiday season in magazine-land, and already we're seeing some mags up their page counts rather dramatically. This particular update is a little light after the monster one last week, but it's only going to get more interesting from here on out...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 10/20/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I haven't been trying all that hard lately for the simple fact that I'm running out of sensible shelf space, but my mag collection continues to grow -- numbering 6671 individual volumes, if my Excel files are to be believed. A lot of this is explained by the fact that I get everything released in the US regardless of how silly it is, but I am also rapidly approaching completion on a lot of titles...the most recent of which being Play. The US one.

You wouldn't think it'd be so hard to get all the Play issues, but I had trouble with it for some reason. I'm sure it has to do with the fact that Dave Halverson's mags never have astronomical circulation figures, but at the same time, it's not like Play is ancient history -- it only started in 2001, after all. Yet, to get the very last issue I needed (February 2002), I wound up having to beg Play staff 'cos I just couldn't track down a copy anywhere else.

(It doesn't help that Play's numbering is a little confusing at the start. The first issue in 2001 is the "Premiere Issue"; Feb '02 is then "Issue 1", and so forth. The staff must've realized this was a little odd, because the May '02 edition is "Issue 5", skipping the number 4 entirely and more accurately representing the actual number of issues released.)

Play is the sort of magazine that quite literally no other publisher could release right now. That's because big-time publishers, like Ziff or Future, have higher standards for what they consider a "successful" magazine -- to a large company that publishes multiple mags, a title merely being profitable isn't enough. Let's say that Magazine X makes around $500,000 in profit per year after everything's accounted for.

To a large magazine publisher, one whose revenue goes into the tens of millions, that may not be enough to make it worth their time to continue the title. (Ziff, at its height, was infamous for cancelling magazines that still had positive cash flow, including the still-missed Creative Computing in 1985.)

But to a more small-time, private operation -- such as Halverson's Fusion Publishing -- any mag that pays the salaries, covers costs, and earns a bit of extra on the top is worth keeping in circulation. I'm not going to start spouting nonsense like "Play has passion, the big publishers don't" because that's oversimplifying things to the extreme, but it's a fact that small publishers have different priorities from the big fish in the mag biz.

And certainly, I'm glad that Play is still going strong after 70 issues. The first year or so frankly wasn't all that good, but once Halverson and crew got into the groove, the mag really began to succeed covering the "hardcore" angle of GameFan and Gamer's Republic while actually looking like something you'd want to read.

I've talked in the past about how I consistently love their cover design, and their internals are always nice and subdued, too, letting the pictures do the talking. They'll undoubtedly face continuing challenges in the future -- the rapidly-contracting anime marketplace, for example, which provides a fair chunk of their ad pages -- but I hope they'll be around for a long time to come.

(PS. Did anyone keep their copy of GameGO! or Stuff Gamer? I'm looking for both, so email me if you have 'em.)

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Ohhhhh Doga, there's no excuse for yawning! Not when there's all this amazing mag-stuff happening!

First off, despite the pretty ho-hum Internet reaction the news seemed to get, Future's procurement of the "official" title for their US PlayStation mag is enormous news for the entire media. It, along with Nintendo Power, means that Future is the biggest name in US print media (something that would've been impossible to imagine half a decade ago), and no matter which way you slice it, it's something of a blow to Ziff, who gave up the title almost without comment late last year.

But it's not as if Future is invincible here. First, the presence of a Blu-ray disc with each issue will make the new P:OMUS (?) quite a bit more expensive than PSM was, which may erode profitability if it cuts down the circulation too much. Second, I worry that the new mag probably won't be that much different from PSM, with largely the same staff and largely the same design decisions going into it from before. I'll look forward to seeing the first issue, definitely -- if it's less PSM and more like the official UK PS mag, I'll consider it a great success.

But let's move on to the rest of the November-issue mags, in which we'll find that NP and PSM are far from the only mags to enact major changes under the cover...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 10/6/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

   

The November Nintendo Power arrived in my mailbox the other day, and as managing editor Scott Pelland writes in his opening letter, it's officially the last one that Nintendo of America is producing. As was widely reported elsewhere, after 20 years and 221 issues (only one of which Pelland himself isn't on the masthead for -- the very first one, July/August 1988), production of NP will be handled by Future, which has already been producing Nintendo: The Official Magazine in the UK for nearly two years now.

I think Scott's editorial letter is worth reading even if you don't read NP regularly, so I'll reproduce it here:

"For nearly 20 years I have had what many people would consider to be the best job in the world. (No argument there.) And the same thing could be said of my talented colleagues -- the writers, designers, editors, and incredible support staff that have weated the details every month to bring you the world's first and best official video game magazine. Nintendo has been our home, and our parent, too, supporting and guiding us as we have tried to tap into our passion for both the games and the print medium to inform and entertain our loyal readers.

In fact, although some masthead names will change, I am convinced that Future's new team is not only dedicated to carrying on with the traditions and quality you expect, but will deliver exciting new content and benefits, such as an annual holiday bonus issue. Subscribers will continue to receive NP monthly in the mail, and newsstand patrons will find NP in more locations than ever before. So please join me as I say welcome to the future, and to Future US."

So not a heck of a lot of information on what Future will do with the mag, other than the fact it'll be 13 issues a year just like every Future title. This issue of NP has a full preview of games covered in next month's edition, so I'm assuming we'll see the December issue right on schedule, though I don't know what the editorial lineup looks like yet.

Perhaps not all that much will change with the new publisher, but I still think it's a good occasion to look back on what Nintendo Power accomplished. At its peak, NP was the premier outlet through which gamers got their info and strategies. For a time from its inception to around 1995, having a game make the cover of NP was a major advertising coup for whatever third-party publisher managed the feat, because full coverage in the mag had a direct effect on sales of the sort that good reviews in Famitsu are purported to have over in Japan.

Its total circulation was in the millions until the N64 era proved harsh for Nintendo (and the Internet made traditional tips-n-strategy mags obsolete), and few game mags ever did more to define the tastes of a generation of console owners. Even now, the mag remains pretty unique in the marketplace, with a very singular approach to coverage, interviews and game-preview coverage you don't see anywhere else, and a general feeling of "fullness" (sorry to be vague here) even though it's the same number of pages as any other game mag these days.

Not bad, really, for what's supposed to be a glorified company newsletter. I hope that Future is able to keep the tradition of excellence going.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The local B&N decided to get in a few copies of PlayStation Official Magazine UK this week, so I decided to pick up one and see what's up.

PS:OMUK (not to be confused with PlayStation 2 Official Magazine UK, which is also still in operation and comes with a PS2 demo disc) is the only mag in the world, not counting the assorted continental European versions, to include a PlayStation 3 Blu-ray demo disc with each issue. I'm sure Future must've paid Sony quite a lot of money to convince them to put together a disc just for the European marketplace, and it's not a terrible disc either -- this one includes demos of many of the really important PS3 games released so far, including Ridge Racer 7, Resistance, Genji, and so forth. Nothing hugely new (and nothing you can't find on the PSN, really), but then again "official" UK mags love to pack their discs with ancient demos, filling them up as much as possible.

What's the mag look like inside? Well, a lot like how it looks outside, in fact -- extremely light 'n airy, with nothing but white backgrounds, easy-to-read text, and the occasional bit of original clean-line art demonstrating this or that feature of a game. The content is nothing terribly special, although there's a heck of a lot of it: ten pages on Resident Evil 5 (which seems to have all been written based off the old trailer and a lot of clip art), a couple of neat features on assorted topics (Folding@home, of all things, as well as a roundtable discussion of guitar/music party games), and then the usual previews and reviews.

Will I buy it again? Not for $15, no, but compared to -- uh -- the only PlayStation-specific magazine left in the US, this is an extremely high-quality product.

Anyway, let's check out all the mags released in the past fortnight! And God, all these specials! They're driving me to the poorhouse!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 9/22/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

   

If anyone remembers the IBM PCjr today, it's as a major market failure and as one of the computer industry's greatest examples of hubris coming to bite a company in the arse. Originally announced in 1983 and launching in March 1984, the PCjr ("PC Junior") was IBM's first attempt to market a computer for the home -- a system that was kinda-sorta compatible with the more business-targeted IBM PC, with enhanced three-voice sound and 16-color 320x200-pixel graphics.

Heavily rumored for months before its official announcement, the PCjr was presumed by many industry wags to do the same for IBM in the home market what the original PC did for the business sector -- i.e., allow the companay to completely dominate it. It's easy to forget, but this really was the general opinion of much of the industry in early 1984 -- you could say that Apple's January '84 Macintosh Super Bowl ad was appreciated more by the general public than by people who drew their salary in computers at the time. The magazine biz was no different, as two different magazines debuted on US newsstands before the PCjr was even available for purchase: PCjr. from Ziff Davis, and jr from Wayne Green Publications, later CW Communications. (Only one Mac mag -- IDG's Macworld -- debuted with Apple's computer.)

For Ziff, launching PCjr. was an easy decision. Even by that point, PC was their most successful magazine ever -- purchased in 1982, ballooning up to 500 then 600 pages within half a year's time, and becoming the de facto outlet for advertising and commentary on IBM computers. IBM was now launching a home computer, and undoubtedly it'd be a huge success, so Ziff went in on the ground floor, debuting its mag in February 1984 with a surprisingly large 176-page book. Everything about PCjr.'s look exudes professionalism, from the in-depth writing (with largely the same adult and business-oriented outlook as the original PC) to the art-laden and remarkably colorful graphic design. It's a fun mag to read, in other words, and it's obvious from the start that Ziff put a ton of money into producing it.

jr, on the other hand, is kind of an odd duck. Launched in May 1984 just before Wayne Green sold his New Hampshire computer-mag empire off to IDG, jr is written from a serious beginner's perspective, more so than any other non-kiddy computer magazine I've seen from this era (yes, including Family Computing). Every term is exhaustively defined (from "RAM" to "word processor"), and the editorial team's target seems to be people who have never touched a computer in their life before, much less the PCjr machine itself. This leads to a lot of neat original art and photography showing off the PCjr's innards and how computers work in general, but it's not the most interesting thing to read through.

   

Both PCjr. and jr are decent enough mags in their own right, but at the risk of being blunt, they were charged with the task of taking a turd and polishing it all over again, month after month. There were a number of hardware issues on the machine, including a lack of easy expandability and a frustrating wireless keyboard that was impossible to touch-type on. Even the entry-level PCjr model (which lacked a disk drive and was largely useless for anything except running game/productivity cartridges) cost $669 sans monitor, less than an Apple II but far more than the Commodore 64 or an Atari computer, both companies in the midst of a debilitating price war that drove other 8-bit PCs out of the market.

IBM redesigned the PCjr in late 1984 with a new keyboard and better expansion abilities, but it was too late in the public's eye. There was never a mass audience for the PCjr, which means few companies were interested in making products exclusively for it, which means ad dollars plummeted for both PCjr. and jr over 1984. I can't confirm exactly when both mags ended, but the last jr I have is September '84 and the final PCjr. is dated November, and both are later than any date I can find on the Internet, so I'll say they're both final issues and leave it at that. Even as book sizes shriveled toward the end, though, both mags maintained a surprisingly high level of writing and illustration. It's a surprise, in fact, as most computer mags show a pretty marked quality decline once it's plain the subject platform has no marketplace.

The really interesting thing about all this is that funneling cash toward PCjr. instead of a Macintosh magazine in early '84 arguably cost Ziff dearly for the rest of the decade. IDG's Macworld had that computer all to itself for almost 14 months before Ziff finally launched MacUser in 1985 -- and even that was a UK license deal, not an original project. MacUser was successful enough, but always played second fiddle to Macworld's lead in the marketplace before getting closed down and merged with its rival in 1997. If Ziff launched a Mac mag first, the tables may've been turned...

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No time to lose, let's get right to the highlight of the newsstand over the past two weeks:

PCXL Fall 2007

Cover: The Frag Dolls

As Simon mentioned earlier this week, PCXL is a one-off from Future that, while not a clone of the old PC Accelerator (1998-2000), at least tries to recreate the spirit of the old magazine. The book is roughly divided into six sections:

- Gear, pages of gadgets and other gamer-type merchandise, the great majority of which is from ThinkGeek.com
- Trends, the "feature well" of sorts that includes bits on game-related cons, how to run a LAN party, gaming tattoos, and other stuff that'd be at home in the front end of EGM or GFW
- Game Faces, the interview section that's mostly dominated by the Frag Dolls (Ubisoft's team of competitive-gaming hotties) but also includes a bit on the CGS gaming league and a humorous look back at PC Gamer's Nov. 2000 "Game Gods" issue, the one that identified Stevie Case as a shining light of the PC scene's future
- Games & Tech, the previews and hardware section
- The Internets, a few quick one-off bits on net trends and wacky online stuff
- Popular Culture, bits on comics, movies and action figures

Add in a few columns from ex-PCXL staff about the old magazine and the current state of gaming, and you've got your brand-new, 100-page PCXL. It's all well designed, and the text ain't bad, which makes this a very neat (and very unique) one-off. Would I want to see a regular publication like this? I don't think so, and I doubt Future does, either. It's been proven several times by this point that throwing girls into a game magazine in an attempt to snag a broader audience actually serves to narrow it instead. Kicking off the magazine with unadorned, catalog-like pages of gadget photos is also really uninteresting.

Perhaps looming the largest, though, is the fact that the mag PCXL looks closest to in terms of design and general tone is Stuff, the US edition of which is closing with its October '07 issue. If Dennis couldn't keep Stuff going, then I doubt Future could do it with PCXL in this newsstand environment, either.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 9/8/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

   

On Ebay the other day I got a complete collection of Amiga Game Zone, the United States' first, last and only magazine devoted entirely to Amiga games. A complete collection's only three issues, yes, but it was still a major feat in my book -- after all, publisher/editor Geoff Miller states in his page on the mag that the title had a subscriber base of about a thousand and a total circulation of 5000. I remember seeing it on the newsstand once, at a Micro Center somewhere outside of Philadelphia, and the sheer novelty of discovering a US-produced Amiga game magazine was such that I still remember the encounter today.

It could be said that launching any sort of Amiga games mag in the US was a pretty foolhardy idea. The platform was big in Europe, especially after 1988 or so, but whether through sheer bad luck or due to Commodore's well-documented inability to market the machine in its home country, it was never a mainstream success in America. I remember seeing demo units maybe around 1990 or so at software stores, but that was about it. And this situation was doubly true in 1994, the year Amiga Game Zone was launched -- Commodore declared bankruptcy early in the year, which pretty much eliminated any advertising base AGZ would've had even in the best of times.

But Geoff wasn't pessimistic enough to let these little details stop him. Amiga Game Zone is very much a one-man production -- Geoff was the editorial, publishing, and sales department, wrote a lot of each issue, and also ran a mail-order Amiga software store from the magazine's pages, all while toiling as a grad student at the University of Illinois. Thumbing through the three issues (which range in size from 40 to 48 pages) really gives you a feel for how much enthusiasm he had for both the print medium and the Amiga. The internals are black-and-white, but the design's obviously inspired by the British Amiga mags of the day, and every page is packed with eye-pleasing screens and catchy headlines. It really reads like a cut-down version of Amiga Power, which is pretty high praise in my book.

Sadly, the market was beyond not there, and although Geoff states that the magazine was profitable in the limited scope he was working in, the "bimonthly" magazine was released haphazardly in 1994 and closed up shop with its third issue.

A pretty cool mag, and reading it, I can't help but think in "what if" scenarios. Namely, what if there was a 100% games magazine devoted to the Commodore 64 in the US, like there was in the UK with Zzap64? There were several home-oriented C64 mags, of course, including RUN, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, and Transactor, not to mention Commodore's own self-titled rag. But the funny thing was they all acted like reviewing games was beneath them, giving them only small, text heavy coverage and often talking very little about the substance of the game they were reviewing. It was obvious that no one in the regular editorial staff were real gamers -- this, despite the fact that at least half (if not three quarters) of advertising in these mags was for recreational software by the late '80s. What if there was the Commodore, or Amiga, equivalent of Nintendo Power on the stands in 1988? It could've made a mint for the mag publisher willing to try it out.

PS. Condolences to the Game Informer staff for losing circ manager and long-time writer Paul Anderson, who passed away Tuesday from ALS at the age of 38. He had been working for the mag since 1992, making him one of the title's most experienced veterans alongside Andy McNamara.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I got a bit of free spending money a week or two ago after being paid for some freelance, so I decided to use some of it to complete my collection of 2600. This is no arduous feat, since every issue (dating all the way back to January 1984) is available for purchase on their website.

If you're at all interested in the topic of underground computer activity and its history, I think you should definitely make this (admittedly kinda pricey) purchase. The mag has never been the flashiest, but ever since its inception it's always been about half serious hardware/software issues and half civil disobedience. I can't get enough of its rhetoric, and I hope it'll continue to defy death in the current magazine marketplace.

By the way, the ferret in the picture is one I've been fostering lately. Her name's Princess (blecch), she is almost seven years old, and she'd like to have a home. Why not contact Forever Homes Wanted Ferret Rescue if you're in Houston? I bet she'd be happy to hear if you did.

Anyway, click on to read all about the game magazines of the past couple weeks. This month marks most mags' "E3 issues," which for me are consistently the most boring editions of the year these days (it's all been on the internet for a month, I mean duh magazine editors), so not much commentary from me this time.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 8/25/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

On US newsstands right now (finally) is Edge Presents The 100 Best Videogames, Future UK's latest "collector's edition" mook. It hit America about a month and a half after going on sale in England, but on the plus side it's only $12.99 for 260 pages of glossy, beautifully designed, coffee table-style content, a massive discount compared to the £10 UK price.

Unlike Edge's previous "top 100" features (both of their previous attempts, from 2000 and 2003, are reprinted in the back), this one is based off input from the mag's readers and from industry members in the UK and abroad in addition to the editorial staff. Each entry covers at least two pages and features a lovely bit of narrative on the game, a handful of reader comments, and some kind of full-page art piece that personifies the game -- a neat little ghost thing for Pac-Man Vs., a collection of neighbor clip-art for Animal crossing, and a virtual diorama of the game's events for Zelda: OOT, which takes the number-one spot.

The selection (based on games that "stand up to scrutiny today," so almost nothing classic-era) is a bit Euro-centric by necessity, including such titles as Darwinia and Football Manager 2007 beside the more obvious choices, but regardless what you think of the ranking, this is a lovely volume to look at a lovely piece to read. It's also exactly the sort of thing I think magazine publishers in the US should be focusing on instead of yet another 20-page roundup feature telling me nothing I care about, but you've heard that rant before.

Regardless, click on to check out all the new mags that hit stands and mailboxes in the past fortnight. It's August, and Halo fever is raging in magazine-land...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 8/11/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

   

Couple things to report on this week:

- I've recently picked up the complete collection of PC Ace magazine, which you can see above. Yes, there were only two issues published in early 1996.

It's surprisingly difficult to find old US computer game magazines online or from other collectors. And when I say "old," I'm not even talking about 1980s-era Computer Gaming World issues (which I haven't even seen offered for sale in months) -- I'm talking about stuff from the '90s. Try to track down issues of PC Gamer (or, for an even stiffer challenge, Game Players PC Entertainment) before 2000. It's nearly impossible. I know, 'cos I've been looking. (If anyone at Future would like to make a charitable contribution to Magweasel, I'd be delighted. Not expecting it, but.)

PC Ace (nothing to do with the UK kids' mag of the same name) is particularly interesting because of the folks involved with it. The editor-in-chief is Bill Kunkel, veteran of Electronic Games and VG&CE and all sorts of other mags, and the publisher is the late Jim Bender, former ad director at the classic-era Electronic Games.

Kunkel's book Confessions of the Game Doctor tells a long story of Bender's EG days and the amount of drugs he did back then -- it's a good book, by the way, and not just for this story -- and it also reveals that after Jim straightened out a bit, he and Bill got together to form the magazine. It's not a bad read, with articles by folks from CGW and Strategy Plus and a focus planted squarely on simulations, strategy games, flight sims and anything with a sci-fi plot to it. Nothing too exemplary, but worth checking out if you dig the dry, wordy style of PC game mags back then.

The magazine folded after only two issues, chiefly thanks to money problems on the part of its publisher, California-based Vector Publishing Group. Kunkel quickly went on to better things, helping build HappyPuppy.com into one of the largest early game sites.

- Folio is reporting that Ziff Davis Media has named Jason Young as its CEO, replacing Robert Callahan (though he'll stay on as chairman). Along with this personnel change comes an announcement that the publisher will focus less on trying to sell the Games Group (which handles EGM, GFW and 1UP.com) and more on operating them directly, which is an about-face from where the company's been for the past year or so.

In financial terms, Ziff is kind of between a rock and a hard place here. It's still working under fairly big debt (something Callahand had to deal with for years), but the Games Group as is doesn't seem to be enough to cover for it, even after Ziff sold off the Enterprise Group (which publishes a gaggle of tech-industry titles) for $150 million. It'll be interesting what further steps ZD takes to grow it.

- I received the revamped, bimonthly Tips & Tricks (now permanently renamed Tips & Tricks Codebook) in the mail the other day. I'll save the details for the mag roundup next week, but essentially T&T without the columns, fewer previews, and lots more codes, as well as the typical Codebook non-glossy paper. But at least the pencil puzzles are back for good, right?

- Still no word on Nintendo Power's future, but I had a friend point out to me that Picross DS does not come with any NP subscription offer packed inside -- probably the first Nintendo-platform game to have that distinction since 1988.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the more hum'rous editorial mistakes in recent memory arrived last week in the August issue of Play magazine, where the table-of-contents page inadvertently uses the exact same artwork (in the exact same configuration) as the advertisement right next to it. Den-chan is just as confused about it as I am.

A question that's often thrown around magazine circles is how aware the editorial department is of the advertising that's placed in each issue of the title they work on. The answer is a firm, unequivocal "it depends." Namely, it depends on the magazine in question, the way the publisher and editor-in-chief run it, and so on. In my particular case,

I'm dimly aware of the advertisers for the issue of Newtype USA I'm working on, but that's not because I'm actively searching for that info -- it's because we deal with generally the same advertisers month in and month out, so I can predict what stuff they'll be advertising each month with relative ease. That knowledge has never influenced what I write about in the mag itself, because I'm an ethical professional with a responsibility to my readers, and furthermore we're located too far away from all the game publishers to go to any of their junkets.

So how did a gaffe like this get into Play? I'm not too sure, to be honest. Any number of things could've happened -- maybe the ad was a really, really late addition and no one thought to check where it was located. But it's just a small, amusing thing in what's otherwise a superb issue, so hopefully no one at Play will be too angry at me for pointing it out.

But that's not the top story in this roundup -- not when there's eleven new US magazines to catch up on this time around. Click on for the complete spread!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 7/28/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

In the picture above, you can see all 12 issues EGM published in 1994 (left) compared to the magazine's twelve 2006 issues (right; multi-cover variations omitted). You can just ignore that pizza box in the background, if you don't mind.

In pretty much every net discussion on game mags, the first thing someone always mentions is "EGM used to be 400 pages! Now it's a pamphlet!" I think it'd be useful to explain why, since the answer's a lot more complex than "mags aren't popular anymore. (In fact, EGM's circulation today is about double what it was when it produced its largest-size issues in 1994-95, to say nothing of Game Informer.)

One of the many problems facing game mags these days -- and, by extension, tech-oriented mags in general -- is advertising. Namely, not much of it. As a very general rule, magazines need advertising to survive far more than they need readership. Companies try to bolster the readership of their magazines (via cheap subscriptions, free bonuses, distribution to dentists' waiting rooms, and so forth) mainly so they can attract advertisers.

Having lots of readers is a good thing, of course, but when you factor in all the postage and printing costs (and, if you're an "official" magazine, licensing fees) on top of editors' salaries and all that, the $14.95 you're paying for a subscription probably isn't covering the actual cost of getting those 12 issues to your mailbox.

However, advertisers have become more and more aware over the past decade that there's way more audience on the net than off it. That's where their ad money's been going, at a consistently accelerating rate -- across all industries, online advertising is an industry that grosses over $17 billion a year these days. The result? Game magazines get fewer advertisements, which means they have to cut out pages from each issues, which means fewer pages of content.

Game mags in the US used to consistently average over 160 pages. Four years ago, that average fell to 120. Now? All the game-mag issues dated August 2007 are 100 pages except for Game Informer, which manages 112 thanks to some non-endemic advertising form Honda and Old Spice. (This, despite the fact that the price of many mags has gone up by a dollar even as they lost 20 pages.)

The problem's even worse with vanilla computer mags, which lack the dedicated, hardcore, and (most important) money-spending readership most game mags enjoy. That's partly why PC Magazine lost 38.8% of its ad pages between March '06 and March '07, one of several issues that prompted long-time EIC Jim Louderback to step down a few days back. If you're some crazy software or hardware startup, there's not much point in advertising in PC -- it's much easier to build up buzz online and capitalize on that instead of paying out X thousand dollars in the hope that someone doesn't flip right past you.

The other problem? Arguably it's the post office. They keep on raising rates! It's terrible! So magazine publishers respond by using lighter paper -- and lighter paper is smaller, thinner paper. I mentioned this last week, but EGM (among other mags) doesn't use anywhere near the quality of paper stock their 1994 issues featured, and that's a major reason why magazines seem thin nowadays -- even if EGM was 400 pages today, the mag would still be thinner than a 400-page issue from ten years ago.

That, in a nutshell, is why mags seem like pamphlets nowadays. It's also part of the reason why launching a new game mag right now seems like such a ludicrous idea. Umm... straining to end this column on a positive note... hmm, hmm, hmm...

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Considering that four US magazines have folded this year (or in Tips & Tricks' case, downsized into a basically automated codes mag), I'm faced with fewer titles to cover on a biweekly basis. As a result, I think it's about time I started covering the UK's Edge in these little mag roundups, since I buy it every month and there's an official US subscription distributor -- one that, depending on how the exchange rates run, actually allows colonists to buy Edge for cheaper than the Brits can get it.

At its core, Edge isn't much different from US mags. There's news and columns up front, previews and features in the middle, reviews in the rear, and screw-around stuff in the way-back (in Edge's case, dev profiles/classifieds, letters, and retro coverage). Certainly the way that it approached game coverage was revolutionary when it launched in 1993 (back when EGM was still 85% previews and strategy guides), but nowadays pretty much every US mag has taken on an Edge-style mix of serious industry newsmongering and hard-hitting game coverage.

So why is Edge worth importing? I'd argue that it's a combination of design and writing. US magazines have improved their visual look vastly over the past few years, but Edge still has a simple, clear look that makes each page immediately enticing. This, coupled with a robust page count (130 pages every issue), nice thick paper, and Edge's traditional lack of back-cover advertising, make the magazine look proud on your father's coffee table, rather than the toilet racks many game mags end up lurking around in. The text, meanwhile, is also great -- its complete and total uniformity in style (there are no bylines anywhere) means that if you can dig its intellectual, sometimes dry feel, then you're guaranteed to enjoy anything written in the mag, no matter what it's about. (I've always thought that people who think Edge is pretentious should go back and read GameFan from around 1995 forward. Now that's pretention, and without the writing talent to back it up either.)

Edge is hardly a perfect magazine. Their copy editing isn't flawless. They published a piece on Saboteur this month that extols the WWII action game's unique use of color, but does a very poor job illustrating the tricks in the accompanying screenshots (GamePro, of all mags, performs far better in its own Saboteur feature). However, there's still no other magazine out there that takes such a deliberately intellectual-yet-casual approach to game coverage, and for that alone I think it's important.

Anyway, click on to read about all the US mags of the past two weeks -- all very good mags in the own right, too, I hasten to add.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 7/14/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now - this week's column clarifies shutdown specifics for Tips & Tricks magazine and offers a new possibility for the takeover of Nintendo Power's publishing rights.]

As has been widely reported online, Larry Flynt Publishing's Tips & Tricks is shutting down... at least, in the form we have it now. According to the staffers I talked to, September will be the last issue of the 13-year-old title; however, LFP will continue to publish T&T Codebooks in a bimonthly format for as long as they're profitable. All of T&T's editors have been laid off, but some will continue to work on the Codebooks as freelancers.

The sudden-but-not-all-that-unexpected closure of T&T apparently stems from a drop in sales and ad revenue over the past few months, a trend that recent incremental redesigns and new features weren't able to reverse. It marks the fourth US game-mag folding in six months after OPM, Computer Games and Beckett Spotlight: Cheat Codes (yes, I count that as a magazine), with little sign of new launches happening anytime soon.

Recently I've wondered if the greatest threat facing video-game print media isn't rising costs, the Internet, or a jaded readership. Instead, it may be the magazines' own sense of momentum, and the resulting reluctance on the publishers' end to make major changes, lest the gamble fails to pay off. I know T&T's staff over the years to be a smart and talented lot, but I wonder if T&T is a good example of this.

It's been clear for almost a decade now that online was where people will go for video-game help, but the magazine didn't make an honest, all-out effort to revamp itself until last year. I don't think that's because the editors were lazy bums -- I'm sure they wanted to chuck the old T&T and put as much stuff as they could into whatever new title resulted. Instead, I think Mr. Flynt and the other publishing highers-up didn't want change because change brings the unfamiliar, and it's hard to write a sales projection based on the unfamilar.

Ultimately, it should serve as warning to other publications that failing to adapt to the times will be the doom of your title. Sometimes I wonder if the British approach to game mags -- lots of new titles instead of just a few, all with runs of over 100 issues -- is healthier, serving to keep ideas fresh in the industry. But that's speculation for another time.

In the meantime, click on to read all about the new US mags of the past two weeks.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 6/30/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

   

I recently spent a great deal of money (I'm not going to tell you how much, but it was a reasonable percentage of my weekly salary) to buy a stack of Arcade Express issues. These were the first issues of AE I have seen on the marketplace in years, and it's an almost complete run of the newsletter before it changed names to Electronic Games Hotline. The last time I saw AEs for sale, it was 2002 and I was attending the auction at the Classic Gaming Expo. A whole stack of them, which I think Bill Kunkel signed no less, went for around $90 -- a paltry sum -- mainly because I don't think anyone in the room really knew what they were.

Launched by Reese Publishing in 1982 and edited by Joyce Worley, Arcade Express was a sort of supplement to Electronic Games, the first mass-market video game magazine in the United States. It was a typewritten, subscription-only, eight-page newsletter devised to keep readers as up-to-date as possible on game industry news, something difficult to do with the long-lead-time Electronic Games. "There is a vast amount of information crossing our desks everyday at Electronic Games magazine," Worley wrote in the first issue. "Arcade Express will rush this information to you every two weeks, to help you keep aware of what's happening in our favorite hobby."

While AE lacks much in art or purple prose, it's the primary source when it comes to getting a bead on the gestalt of the video-game industry during the age it was published. When it launched in August 1982, everything was roses and honey for consoles. Emerson was announcing a new game system; Coleco had just launched their own; Tiger, Fox and Mattel were becoming 2600 third parties; and Atari was signing a blockbuster deal with Lucasfilm to market and publish the film giant's first video games. The party rolled on through the end of the year, with new game rollouts and arcade license announcements consistently dominating the Arcade Express news pages.

The first piece of negative news doesn't come until issue 9 (December 15, 1982), when 2600 third-party game maker Apollo announced that it had filed for Chapter 11. A more sinister sign of the impending shakeout appears in issue 11, where news arrives that Atari exec Perry Odak has resigned after a report that his company will miss its earnings expectations for the second half of 1982.

As you proceed through 1983, you can't help but notice how much of each issue is filled with (a) price drop announcements (b) early coverage of products that never made it to stores, like Magnavox's Odyssey3 and Mattel's Intellivision III consoles. By issue 26 (July 31, 1983), the newsletter is looking downright gloomy: Atari and Mattel lay off over 1200 workers; Fox Video Games slashes 2600 cartridge prices in response to "the current market glut of VCS-compatible games"; and Atari is resorting to hiring an ex-cigarette company vice president as their new chairman and CEO. I can only imagine how gloomier -- and more interesting -- things get with future issues.

Arcade Express changed its name to Electronic Games Hotline with the August 14, 1983 issue; Reese went on to publish 27 more biweekly newsletters before folding the title with the August 12, 1984 edition. It's my plan to scan in my issues for public consumption (a project I've already received Worley's permission for), as this is a seriously fascinating look into a facet of the video-game industry I never had a chance to experience for myself.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Oh, drat! Beckett Spotlight: Cheat Codes has ceased publication with Issue 17, June/July 2007, and now I (as a subscriber) will get yet more copies of Beckett Massive Online Gamer crammed into my mailbox every other month. Not that anyone, even me, will miss it much -- there was absolutely nothing inside of it that online wasn't doing better 12 years ago.

When a magazine ceases publication, that's usually my cue to try to collect every back issue I'm missing. But I don't know where to begin with this one. I didn't start buying it until Issue 12 last fall, and it had been going for two years previous. Does anyone actually have any back issues of this title they'd be welling to sell? For that matter -- hey, Beckett writers! I know I've said a lot of bad things about your mags and all, but c'mon, how 'bout we let bygones be bygones? I mean, here's a guy who actually wants a complete collection of all your cheat-code mags. How many other readers do you think were that dedicated to your publications? Not many, I can tell you that.

With that bit of sad news behind us, let's take a look at all the US mags that hit mailboxes and bookstores the past fortnight. Game Informer leads the pack with Fallout 3 coverage, but one gets the idea GI's editors had other games on their minds...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 6/16/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 1:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

   

I know I'm running the risk of sounding like a game-industry version of Andy Rooney here, but am I the only one who's utterly sick of sneering armored soldier types on the covers of video-game magazines? It looks like the same cover over and over and over again, because they're all set up the exact same way -- vaguely threatening futuristic fighting man, either armored or skinheaded, looking directly at you.

Can you really call it "cover design" to have a character from whatever flavor of "space marine" game it is this month in your face like this, when it's quickly turning into a major cliche? (And before anyone says it, yes, I know Bioshock and Fallout 3 are not set in space. I'm exaggerating to prove a point about the general design trend here.)

Of course, I know why this trend's taking place. In terms of shifting issues on the newsstand, it's common design sense. There are several rules of thumb used by art directors at nearly every commercial magazine, outlined most neatly in a 2002 article from Folio, a magazine devoted to the magazine industry. These include:

- Your logo is your primary selling point, so make it prominent and don't obscure it unless your name is as recognizable as Time or National Geographic. (EGM used to let game art overrun their logo all the time, but the title's been completely unobscured in every issue since their last redesign. Game Informer and Play often color their logos to make them "transparent" over the cover art.)

- The cover image should be unique, bold, uncluttered, and taking up as much of the cover as possible. If there's a person on the cover, he/she should be making eye contact with the reader (fashion/lad-mags routinely Photoshop their model pics to accentuate this).

- Coverlines (the text on the cover that advertises what's inside) should play second fiddle to the art. They should make the reader want to see what's inside. Coverlines with numbers in them ("2000+ Game Codes") are easy to write, easy to understand and suggest "value" to the reader. They don't even have to be particularly big numbers -- "12 Page Sports Spectacular," for example, or "60 autographed Penny Arcade goodies". (GamePro used to fill every available space with coverlines, but they've laid off of them in recent years.)

- The top three inches across the top of the cover are the most important, because often the rest of the cover's obscured by other mags on the newsstand. Pretty much every game mag has coverlines above the logo to deal with this; corner snipes (a diagonal coverline in the top-left corner) are hallmarks of 70s/80s cover design, but you still see them now and then.

As you can see, angry space marines seem to satisfy that second rule rather well. They're mean, they're edgy, they stand out, and they're usually looking right at you on the magazine rack. But design choices get played out fast if everyone uses them all the time. There's the Great Pro Wrestling Epidemic of 1998-2000, for example, not to mention a certain run in the mid-1990s when EGM did 8 fighting-game covers in the space of 12 issues. Neither are known as wonderful times for game mags.

I'm hoping that I'm not just being a crusty curmudgeon and there really are other people at least somewhat annoyed by this. I love Games for Windows magazine dearly, but since its debut last December, five out of seven GFW issues so far have had anonymous army dudes of some sort on the cover -- and one of the others was WoW, which isn't exactly an original cover either. It's gotta stop!

(This brings up the question of what I like in game mag covers, which I'll cover next time.)

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

I have to admit, I'm late for something that I really need to be out the door for, and so let's waste no time and get right to covering all the lovely US mags that have hit stands in the past fortnight. It's the summer of our discontent in terms of page counts (and Nintendo Power's future is still pretty darn murky), but there are some highlights here and there...

Electronic Gaming Monthly July 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: BioShock

The cover does nothing for me (the art's just too small; it's barely bigger than the EGM logo), but the contents are quite nice this month. The main previews are all games done by Game Informer earlier (GTA4, Splinter Cell: Conviction), but EGM treats them better. The GTA4 feature attempts to match publicly-released screenshots with their real-life counterparts, which is a brilliant idea and one of those wonderful only-a-print-mag-can-do-this articles that I wish I saw more of. BioShock goes as detailed as possible on the internal game process, which is pretty nice to read even though this is one of those games where still screens can only portray so much of the experience.

There's also a great deal of new little columns and side bits here and there, from a business column written by ex-freelancer Scott Steinberg to an Onion-style point/counterpoint between Sonic and Amy regarding the former's ring obsession.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 6/2/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

To begin with show-and-tell this week, I'd like to show you a typical ABC pink sheet, the document which advertisers rely on to give them an accurate picture of a magazine's circulation details.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) is an organization that gauges and measures circulation, readership, and audience information for magazines, newspapers, and other publications. There are multiple ABCs around the world; the American ABC was founded in 1914 and is based in Schaumberg, IL, with offices in New York and Toronto. It's funded with fees from its members, mainly comprised of media companies, advertisers, and some universities.

Generally speaking, the ABC audits a magazine by first receiving a stated circulation number from the magazine's publisher, then comparing that number with records from retailers, wholesalers, and other links in the magazine distribution chain. ABC publishes its results every six months to members, but a full auditing process can take up to nine months for each six-month period, by which time the situation of the magazine being audited may have changed greatly.

In order to provide timelier numbers, the ABC takes the figures submitted by magazines at the end of each six-month period and publishes them as "pink sheets" without any extra auditing. These pink sheets are available two to three months after the reporting period. (If a pink-sheet figure turns out to be too much higher than what the ABC finds with its audit, the publisher may be warned and eventually have its membership revoked for repeat offenses.)

Game publishers are not required to report ABC-audited circulation figures to the general public. Instead they report their own figures -- usually in the form of "rate base," or the average sell-through figure they guarantee to their advertisers. Also, due to the expense involved, most general-interest magazines in America do not apply for an ABC audit unless their circulation is around 125,000 copies or greater. Once a magazine reaches its point, it usually raises its ad rates to the point where outside confirmation of their sales figures becomes vital. As a result of this, most of the "second tier" of game magazines (such as Play or the Beckett titles) do not have ABC-audited figures, offering their own figures to advertisers instead.

I've redacted any identifying information of the magazine in this particular pink sheet, but I thought you'd be interested in having a look at how the front page of such a report is set up anyway.

And now I'd like you to tell me something -- what's up with Nintendo of America such that they want to "license" out Nintendo Power and keep it a print magazine? This, according to Perrin Kaplan in an interview published at Game Informer. I mean, Ziff's allegedly been trying to sell its mag-heavy portfolio for ages with little success, right? Are you telling me that a company's more interested in licensing Nintendo Power than one of several mags which sell more than that? Crazy!

I'll refrain from further comment until I hear the whole story, but if the mag's moving, then I do feel pretty bad for one new editor up at NP, who got laid off at the Official PlayStation Magazine, moved to Redmond for the NP job a few months ago, and may be facing another difficult decision right now...

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Before kicking off, I thought it'd be a good idea to discuss the rumors that Nintendo Power is closing, first reported by IGN.

The rumor seemed to come as a pretty big surprise to the rest of the industry, even with the recent unclear state of which Nintendo of America sections are moving to which new area of the US from Redmond. However, everyone I've contacted who'd be in a position to know what's up with NP isn't saying anything -- a "no comment" state of affairs, where you'd think that folks would be denying it up and down if things were sailing along smoothly over at NP.

I don't have any evidence to back up the following claim, but I think this indicates that NP is either folding or could theoretically be turning into a Wii channel. The latter option makes absolutely perfect sense to me personally, the more I think about it. NOA and NP produce the exact same content they're producing now, except they charge 200 Wii Points or whatever for every fortnight's update. Their overhead's drastically reduced (no postage, no printing costs), and their target audience -- remember the teenage male "fanboys" discussed in NP's own media guide? -- is served on a more direct and personal basis.

With OPM dead in the US and off sharply in the UK thanks to a lack of cover disc (and OXM rapidly reinventing itself thanks to a 360 coverdisc not being that big a deal to Internet-ready households), an elves-leaving-Rivendell type exodus to online seems like the ideal next evolution for "official" publications. Nothing is going to compare to Nintendo Power as a magazine, but would Nintendo Power the Wii channel have access to a wider audience and potentially be useful to far more people than "fanboys"? I hope so.

You can hear me pontificate more on this subject tomorrow when Episode 30 of the Player One Podcast is uploaded. I'm on there as a special guest, and in addition to Nintendo Power's situation, I'll be discussing the modern state of magazines, great old mags, how I managed to pack over 6000 issues and three ferrets into a single room, and much more. Listen, you!

Until then, click forward for a rundown of all the game mags of the past two weeks.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 5/19/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

   

Well, you're not hardcore, because otherwise you would've subscribed to Super Gaming, Sendai Publishing's magazine devoted entirely to Japan-only video games.

Here is how Sendai advertised Super Gaming in their own magazines, including Electronic Gaming Monthly and Mega Play:

Are you the type of video game player who has always wanted to know about the latest games and systems but could never find a magazine devoted entirely to what's new and in the future? Not just games for the Genesis, Turbo and Nintendo, but also previews of Japanese titles that won't arrive on these shores for years -- if ever!

Now the editors of Electronic Gaming Monthly, always the first word in video games, has created a magazine especially for you! Super Gaming will take you where no other game magazine has ever gone before, with the latest news and game previews for your Sega 16-bit, NEC or Nintendo systems! With Super Gaming you will know about the hottest carts of tomorrow today, as well as new developments and game systems!

   

All four issues of Super Gaming released were only 32 pages long, but they were available both on a subscription and at the newsstand, as the Electronics Boutique price stickers on my issues indicate. The contents mostly read like a "lite" version of the EGM of the time -- lots of little previews divided up by console, a handful of large features packed with colorful screenshots, and not a heck of a lot of real in-depth content. Starting with issue 2, the magazine had its own review section, covering nothing but Japan imports and featuring scores from editor Mike Riley, associate editor Ken Williams and someone named "Samrye" (get it? huh?!!).

Unfortunately, this sort coverage meant that the only advertisers interested in such a magazine were mail-order shops that specialized in Japanese games. The magazine failed to become a marketplace success, and so with the third issue Super Gaming repositioned itself as a "video game preview" magazine, with early coverage of both Japanese and American games. This failed to make much of a difference, though, and the magazine folded after one final issue, which dropped the Japan stuff entirely and devoted most of its pages to 1991 Winter CES coverage instead.

So there you have it -- probably the most obscure Sendai Publishing title, and one that folded before it could find any sort of niche in the marketplace. It's certainly not a good magazine by any stretch of the imagination. So why do I care? Because I'm trying to get everything Sendai ever published -- and completing this Super Gaming collection was damned difficult, because the mags go for way too much money online and are impossible to find elsewhere. So, that's another Sendai title complete...now I just need to figure out where to find copies of Hero Illustrated and Internet Underground...

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 6:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Hah! Even Nintendo Power admits it in their media kit! It's true!

And with that bit of silliness out of the way, click on to read all about the US magazines that have hit newsstands in the past two weeks. I've got a long update this week, but I suppose you could say I had a lot on my mind...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/24/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Any regular reader of GameSetWatch knows about Simon and I's infatuation (some would call it obsession) with Mr. Dreamcast. Easily the most charming name for a game magazine ever conceived (with Japan's Beep running a close second), Mr. DC is a fairly obscure publication even in its home country of Britain, publishing only two issues before disappearing -- but I was lucky enough to pick up the second issue from a UK fan who sent it along to me with some other magazines.

Mr. DC (which is the name of the blue swirly thing on the top left corner of the cover) was published by Magical Media, an outfit run by longtime UK computer/gear-mag writer and publisher Simon Rockman. Simon hired a handful of people away from Future Publishing to found the mag, including editor Caspar Field, who (up to that time) was running DC-UK, Future's Dreamcast title.

Field and Rockman answered questions from UK computer-trade title CTW back before the launch in 2000, a time when the DC's fortunes were already slipping and the idea of not just a new DC mag, but a kid-oriented DC mag, was seen as a little daft:

"I think the key difference with Dreamcast is that it’s been launched at £199, and I think they’ll be announcing definite UK price cuts at E3. We just felt it was good to be in the market early and to see if we could challenge some of that received wisdom, I guess. Certainly the feedback we’ve been getting from readers and from kids has been fantastic.

Everyone’s been growing up and wanting to make magazines like DC-UK and [Official Dreamcast Magazine] that are aimed at 25-30 year-olds [...] when you talk to any games player about playing games in their youth, you forget how passionate you were about it then. That’s really, I think, forgotten, that kind of passion –- I think even I’d forgotten it -– and I hope we can tap into it."

So what does Mr. Dreamcast have in store for the potential reader? A lot of color and bright screenshots, for one. The issue starts out with a wealth of large previews, all done up in that classic old Future style where the text is kind of divided into three or four of what you'd normall call sidebars. "Club zone" occupies the mid-part of the magazine; it's filled with strategies, reader art, crosswords, a regular two-page column on the Neo Geo Pocket Color scene, and even a long sidebar that explains 60hz television modes to the young audience.

The mag's rounded out by the reviews section, with games rated out of 25 in graphics, sound, control, and "ideas," added up to a total score out of 100. There's also four pages titled "Your shout," which is probably the most original part of the mag -- a jury of 16 gamers (aged 11 to 15) play a game and state their opinions on it, complete with lots of pix of excited kids around the TV. (Almost no one liked Chu Chu Rocket, shamefully enough.)

It's really a nice little 84-page magazine for its audience, but as Field himself commented the last time Mr. DC was mentioned here, it was likely in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Myself, Craig, Jon and Camilla were proud of Mr. Dreamcast," he wrote. "It was for kids, it was written 'to a level', but it was packed with more info and less condescending-bollocks than any other kids' games magazine at the time [...] And by the way, we sold 12,000 copies of issue one... So it can't have been all that shit... Can it? Maybe it was just the free waterpistol..."

Still, I commend Caspar and his crew for giving us the magazine with, at the very least, the most whimsical name in all of history. Thank you!

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Very few new US mags hit shelves the past couple weeks, but that's all right because everyone was too busy dissecting GI's GTA4 feature anyway. I have the entire magazine on my mind, though, and click on to read my views on how the world's top-circulation game mag is doing in its quest to keep itself relevant...

Game Informer May 2007

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 4/21/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

We all want something that we just can't have. Me, I want to have more time and money to source old magazines I need to complete my assorted collection runs. Does anyone have the November 1990 or April 1995 issues of AmigaWorld, for example?

Regardless, click forward for coverage of all the fine magazine that hit US shelves in the past two weeks. Everyone's abuzz about Game Informer's GTA4 cover, but it won't actually reach readers for just a little bit longer, so hang tight.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 4/7/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

   

From the best to the worst, this week's GMW is all about the game mag scene in the United Kingdom, which has taken a beating in recent years but still outclasses the US in terms of sheer quantity. Read on and discover what's worth throwing out the big bucks for and what's got to be avoided at all costs...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': The Bluffer's Guide to Britmags" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Oh, there are just so many magazines!

This installment of Mag Roundup is absolutely enormous, thanks to a sudden spate of strategy specials. It's also quite an important one, since it marks the closing of one magazine (MMO Games, formerly MASSIVE) and the launch of a new one (Beckett's eSports).

I recently went crazy with my credit card and bought all the Britmags I could find locally, so you can look forward to me tackling the British game-mag industry next week. For now, though, let's have a look at all the US game mags on the newsstand right now...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/24/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Reports that Computer Games and MASSIVE Magazine (recently rechristened MMO Games due to a legal dispute) have been shut down met with unprecedented furor and wailing across the entire Internet. Just kidding. Actually the response was tepid nearly everywhere it was reported, with these comments posted to Kotaku being pretty representative of prevailing opinion:

"I stopped reading game magazines before I hit high school. Years, and years, and... years ago. I didn't even realize there were still so many around. Waste of paper and money if you ask me. Just my opinion."

They should have just switched to an online company, rivaling IGN or Gamespot."

One could argue that the PC game-mag marketplace is a tad more moribund than its console counterpart since it's shrinking and increasingly moving to online experiences that print mags can't report on fast enough. However, I think the real problem is these commentors' general way of thinking, which is likely far more prevalent among gamers casual and hardcore than most EIC's would like to admit. To sum it up, video game magazines are old, and all they have is old news, and I can get news on the Internet, and therefore magazines are dumb.

Putting this another way (and perhaps in an unfair manner), you could also say this: Magazine publishers are failing to communicate to their potential audience that their magazines just aren't like that anymore. A lot of mags, from EGM and GFW to Tips & Tricks, try to de-emphasize news in favor of longer pieces on the industry and trends in general. But as long as you are EGM or GFW or any other long-standing game publication, you can't get rid of the cookie-cutter news and reviews and previews -- readers will complain about it mightily if you do, no matter how wrong they are on the issue.

With that in mind, I've given some thought to what I'd do if I had the editorship of a brand-new game mag and ten billion dollars to build it with.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Introducing Your Game Mag of the Future" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

We're getting into the April issues, and already most magazines are at their smallest for the year, around 100 pages for most titles. This means that (for many mags) most space gets taken up by humdrum game previews and reviews, and pages used to give the magazine some sense of personal touch tend to get short shrift. It's always a drag, but some mags (particularly GamePro and OXM) are learning how to deal with the restrictions pretty well, I think.

This mag contraction made me give a little more thought on what kind of magazine I'd run in my wildest dreams, and I'd like to lay out my proposal to the GameSetWatch-reading audience next week, but for now, click on for a rundown of all the game mags to hit shelves and/or mailboxes in the past fortnight.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/10/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

As I mentioned last week in a rather derisive fashion, both Future and Imagine Publishing in the UK have been experimenting with what I suppose you could call "boutique" game magazines, high-priced one-offs printed on top-of-the-line paper and meant to attract hardcore gamers. In the US, though, things are a little bleaker -- the number of one-off specials has plummeted in the past two years, and only Future puts out a large quantity of them these days.

I realize that most US specials are pretty forgettable to all but hardcore collectors, mostly consisting of recycled content from the "mother" mags, so I'm not exactly lamenting this turn of events. Still, even if pretty much all of the US-printed specials in my collection are not great triumphs of literature, a few are memorable in their own way. Witness:

GamePro's Celebrity Gamers (1991)

This is 68 pages of pure silliness, here -- sort of like the celebrity corners of early-era Nintendo Power, except multiplied to silly proportions and lacking most of the top-name celebrities. Published chiefly to advertise the JD Roth-hosted GamePro TV show (which premiered September 1991), most of the magazine is devoted to Roth interviewing a series of stars and getting tips for their favorite video games from them. These stars (none of whom are above 20) are a veritable who's-who of 80s sitcom kids -- David Faustino, Mayim Bialik, Soleil Moon Frye, Sara Gilbert, the littlest Huxtable, the older sister from Full House, the little girl from Growing Pains, Corky's sister on Life Goes On, and so forth.

The big star of the show (besides Roth, of course, who has a full-page ad for his fan club in this issue) is Macaulay Culkin, who's not so great at PR apparently -- when asked if he knows about the three Home Alone games THQ is making, he replies "They're making Home Alone games? I hadn't heard about them." Figures. If only Culkin had input into them! They maybe they could've been saved! (His favorite games, by the way? "Splatterhouse, DEFINITELY ...oh, and Bloody Wolf." The ESRB, if they were around back then, probably would not have approved.)

EGM's Player's Guide to Summer Gaming (1998)

Summer Gaming is almost singlehandedly the work of Crispin Boyer, veteran EGM editor and one of the nicest folks in the industry, and reading the issue you can't help but be a little jealous. The brunt of it chronicles a car trip Boyer took with a photographer earlier in the year, driving the frog-green "New Beetle" on the cover (on loan from Volkswagen) and visiting game centers across the country. If you don't know what Crispin Boyer looks like, you'll be fully aware after reading this 30-page odyssey -- it's packed with pix of him playing Virtuality, stuffing his face with Dave & Buster's food, morphing his face with that of an albino monkey, and checking out the World's Tallest Thermometer in Baker, CA.

The article's interesting for research purposes if you're into old arcade stuff, but just seeing Crispin -- who looked kind of like Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen back then -- doing all this stuff is enough to make you want a Beetle and an expense account of your own.

Game Player's Sports for Kids (1989)

Not strictly a special, the bimonthly Sports for Kids reportedly lasted until publisher Signal Research went bankrupt in late 1991, although I've never ever seen an issue besides the one I own. Although the advertising is all from video-game companies, there's only a few pages of game info in this 100-page mag -- the rest, as you'd expect, is a sports magazine for kids, similar to the Sports Illustrated spinoff that launched not long before this one.

Unlike Celebrity Gamers, Sports for Kids was damn good at picking its talent to profile. On page 8, the mag kicks off with a piece on 13-year-old, skinny-as-a-rail Eldrick "Tiger" Woods, who's already got his goofy grin and "Ooh, I wish I had that shot back" expression at this point in his career. Michael Irvin, the late Hank Gathers, Alonzo Mourning, and Elvis Grbac (who had a great college football career and an okay NFL one) also get profiles and interviews -- all names I still recognize today, which is more than I can say for more of Celebrity Gamers' lineup. (There is also a spread of photos showing Mario Lopez in a wrestling championship, but I'll forget I saw that.)

EGM 3-D (1995)

"The book that you are now holding in your hands is a concept book," writes Ed Semrad at the start of EGM 3-D. "It is an experiment of sorts, and you just happen to be the guinea pig. For all intents and purposes, you shall be the final judge as to whether or not this little 'experiment' is a success or an abysmal failure. However, we think you're like it. No, let me rephrase that, we think you'll be tickled pink!"

Since I'm the only person I know who owns a copy of the $9.99 EGM 3-D, I think it's fair to say that the magazine was not a major success. The title comes packed with a pair of ChromaDepth glasses, diffractive lens that makes red colors appear closer, and blue colors farther away, from the wearer. This works on any photo, in theory, but in reality, it just seems to make EGM 3-D's game spreads a total mess. Peraps it's because my pair of glasses are old and a little dirty or something, but as far as I can tell, it just makes the magazine look blurry instead of providing any sort of 3D effect. Ah well.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 7:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

I figured I should mention that in addition to the magweasels that hang out in my magazine room, I have also added a magdog to my house. So say hello to Smith -- who was sleeping in a most indecent position on my bed this afternoon, so I decided to cover him up using this copy of The Top 100 Videogames, distributed by GamesTM and Retro Gamer's Imagine Publishing.

This one-off is available now at Barnes & Noble stores, but I'd recommend against buying it. In fact, this is just about the worst case of buyer's remorse I've experienced in recent memory, short of that Bowflex I bought off of the Game Informer ad last month. This is just a collection of the top 100 games reviewed in the five-year history of GamesTM -- not of all time or anything -- so it's really just a compilation of old GamesTM magazine content, with a very small 2007 preview section in the back.

All this, once again, for $30 in the US. Thirty dollars! Oh, why didn't I bother thumbing through this before buying it? The UK price is £12.99, and I think gamers get gypped with this special issue on both sides of the pond. (For sake of comparison, Edge's FILE special issues cost £8 in the UK and $12.99 in the US, which actually beats the current dollar-pound exchange rate to the point where Americans pay less for it than the Brits. Plus, FILE is interesting reading.)

Anyway, it's been a slow couple weeks for US magazines, but click on to see what's new in the world of print publications...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 2/24/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

   

Following up my guide a little while back on the history of Famitsu (Japan's largest game magazine), I thought I could expand on the subject a little bit by covering some of the competition Enterbrain's title has faced since its inception in 1986. That's what I thought I'd do, anyway, but the sheer number of titles was too much for me. So I'm sticking only to multiplatform and Famicom-specific mags for this little overview -- the number of platform-specific mags published after 1992, when the Dengeki brand was launched, is just discombobulatingly large.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': The Bluffer's Guide to Famitsu's Competition" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

What you're looking at here is the completion of something of a Holy Grail for myself -- a full run of the first incarnation of Game Player's magazine. I wound up spending $25 to get the final issue I needed to finish this run, but it was worth every penny to me, since finding pretty much any individual issue in this run seems to be nearly impossible these days.

For those unfamiliar, Game Players began in 1989 as a multiplatform magazine and lasted until 1991, when publisher Signal Research went bankrupt. It was resurrected in 1993 once Future Publishing bought Signal's assets, and continued unabated until 1998, renaming itself to Ultra Game Players and finally Game Buyer before folding. The 1993-96 run of Game Players is well known for its off-the-wall humor (there's even a fan site for it), but the original 1989-91 version was damn hard to find on newsstands even back in the day.

Far outsold by its sister publication Game Player's Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games, the frugally-designed, cheap-looking title tended to toil in the shadow of flashier mags like GamePro and Nintendo Power. Hell, even I never bought it back then, although Strategy Guide was a must-read for me every month. Now, though, I've finally managed to collect all 28 issues of the original run -- and in this picture, I've also included my cherished copy of Game Player's Sports for Kids, an athletics mag from the same publisher that comes complete with a profile of 13-year-old Tiger Woods. (If anyone knows how many issues of that mag there are, let me know.)

Enough bragging, though -- there are mounds of new U.S. magazines to cover this time around, so click on to see them all...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 2/10/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

A recent article posted up on foliomag.com (a magazine that covers the magazine industry) has a bit more to say on the sale of Ziff Davis... or the attempts thereof:

First-round bids on Ziff’s gaming and consumer/small business groups, which are being marketed separately, were due to the company’s advisor, Lehman Brothers on January 19. “I’m not sure how many people bid,” said one source, “but I do know that their price expectations are over the top" [...]

The source said the company is looking to make 3X-revenue on the gaming group alone, which has annual revenues in the mid-$20 million-range and break-even earnings. “Asking for 3X-revenue on a company that’s breaking even is very, very over-the-top,” said the source.

I don't want to spend this column talking about how game magazines have no future, etc., because I'm sure you have heard that from a thousand other people by now. What I'm more interested in is how this move compares to the rest of Ziff Davis's history, one that until recently was playing the role of the 800-pound gorilla in every genre it explored.

Ever since it got into "enthusiast" publishing in the 1950s (it bought Car & Driver magazine in 1956 and published it until 1985), ZD's always managed to capitalize on specialization. Half a century ago, they were smart enough to notice that general-interest magazines like Life or The Saturday Evening Post were becoming outdated -- with the concept of leisure time taking shape in the postwar boom, a massive market in hobbyist publications took off, and Ziff was at the forefront of it with titles like C&D and Popular Electronics.

It was with largely the same attitude that ZD swooped into the computer magazine business. In 1982 alone they bought PC Magazine (which began as a startup), Creative Computing (arguably the most influential consumer-market computer mag of the era), The Color Computer Magazine, and a bunch of smaller publications. PC grew to become a massive, 800-page juggernaut every month, and Ziff soon earned a reputation for either outmuscling competing titles on the newsstand or simply buying them and shutting them down entirely.

The most illustrative example of this for gamers is Ziff's 1996 purchase of Sendai Publishing Group, founders of Electronic Gaming Monthly. The buyout couldn't have come at a better time for Sendai -- EGM was a hit, with an average circulation of 400,000 copies, but the rest of Sendai's lineup at the time (including EGM2, Computer Game Review, P.S.X., Fusion, Electronic Games, Internet Underground, comic book mag Hero Illustrated and movie mag Cinescape, plus one-offs) didn't push 200,000 copies combined. They were a publisher with way too many titles, and Ziff was swift to lay down the law, shutting down everything except EGM, EGM2 and P.S.X. (which evolved into Official US PlayStation Magazine) within the space of a few months.

Flash forward, though, to 2007. Ziff Davis, in its entirety, publishes only six magazines now -- PC, EGM, Games For Windows, and three business-to-business computer industry titles. I joined Ziff in 2003 at the height of its game-mag empire, but since then GameNOW, XBN, GMR, and OPM have all shut down with nothing replacing them. Nothing, that is, except 1UP and a wide variety of PC and game-oriented websites, including the whimsically-named Gazerk.

With such a rapidly diminishing print presence, it's little wonder that potential Ziff buyers are a little apprehensive about the dead-trees side of the business, especially its long-term outlooks. Again, I don't want this to become a "Why game mags should die out" discussion -- I think that EGM/GFW are doing a very good job at proving why they should continue to exist, and indeed, why it's a great idea to keep on reading them. It's just interesting, I think, to see a company that rode the wave of enthusiast publications find its core business eroded by the ultimate resource for enthusiasts of all kinds: the Internet.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

   

The first issue of Rocket is available on newsstands right now. There's barely any video-game coverage in it, but I thought I would give it a mention anyway because it's a product of Fusion Publishing, edited by Play boss Dave Halverson and featuring the usual gang of Play and GameFan standbys (Casey Loe, Nick Des Barres, Greg Orlando) on its masthead.

In terms of content, the bimonthly Rocket is an extension of the non-video-game stuff in the back of Play each month -- namely, in-depth coverage of hardcore fanbase-oriented movies, TV shows, anime, DVDs, and a little music. It's all done in the classic Play design, so it should be familiar to fans of Halverson's game mags. (As should the occasionally lazy copy editing -- at one point, "inaugural" gets misspelled "innagural.")

Rocket is interesting not just because it's an expansion to Halverson's publishing enterprise, which also includes the plainly successful Girls of Gaming/Girls of Anime one-shots. It's significant because it's the second time in recent years that a game-mag publisher has tried to branch out into the entertainment-publication business. Computer Games tried it first by introducing Now Playing, a "magazine within a magazine" that launched as a 16-page insert within CGM in 2004, much to the consternation of its readers (who were presumably too busy playing WoW 16 hours a day to watch movies). The title spun off into its own seasonal magazine in 2005, but Strategy Plus (publishers of CGM) decided to sell the title the following year, and two more issues were published independently by an outfit called Now Playing Entertainment LLC.

Despite covering largely the same turf as Rocket, Now Playing wasn't a great success, perhaps because of its traditional Computer Games-like text-heavy art design. It was nothing new in that field, in other words -- but Rocket, with its highly visual look 'n feel, might just be. (That, and it's already got a great deal more advertising support than Now Playing ever received.)

Getting back to games, click on for a look at all the US video-game mags of the past two weeks. We're getting close to February now, so it's back to the wafer-thin issues until next Thanksgiving...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 1/27/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I just realized that I have an entire bookshelf in my magazine/ferret room (plus part of another) devoted to nothing but Japanese-language magazines, but I have yet to write about any of them. I figured I'd put a stop to that this week and write up the history of Famitsu, Japan's most prestigious console-game rag, as well as give you a quick look of its very first issue back in 1986.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': The Bluffer's Guide to Famitsu" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

A bit of advertising kicks off our magazine roundup for this week. For those of you deeply interested in all the little nooks and crannies of magazine history, the unofficial DVDs on sale from zzap64.co.uk are really a must -- the complete runs of over 20 British game and computer magazines are available in scanned-JPG format, including the twin publications (CRASH and Zzap!64) that pretty much defined what UK game mags would look like for the next quarter-century.

Three new magazines have been added in the past couple weeks that are well worth looking into: Mean Machines Sega was the premiere Sega-console mag in the country for the late-Genesis/early-Saturn era (and also features some of Julian Rignall's last writing for print mags); Commodore Disk User is a tech-oriented Commodore mag; and Computer Age is a very early (and pretty short-lived) computer-hobbyist title in the style of Byte or Creative Computing.

It's all available for sale on their non-publisher-supported site (and the cash helps them track down and scan other mags), but you can actually find many of the series available free for download if you poke around long enough -- for example, the World of Spectrum archive contains all of the mags from the zzap64.co.uk collections that included any coverage for the 8-bit Spectrum computer. Have fun.

With that out of the way, click on for a full look at all the new US game mags of the past fortnight.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 1/13/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

As the new year dawns and I try my best to rediscover the work ethic that I think I may have side-armed off the 4th floor balcony while enjoying my third Baileys the night of the 31st, I can't resist the desire to put on my mortarboard and goggles and try to predict how '07 will go for game mags. However, there's no way to get an interesting column out of that, because by now the challenges facing the print side of games media are blantantly obvious to any game enthusiast. With up-to-the-minute news, demos, and discussion available on dozens of websites, most mags scrambled back around '01 or so to find another reason for their continued existence. And, for the most part, they've found one -- whether it's a demo disc, or exclusive coverage of faraway titles, or an editorial staff that attracts a sizable fanbase of some sort.

However, not all mags have been so lucky. For example, GamePro. According to the statement of ownership in their February 2007 issue, GamePro had an average paid circulation in 2006 of 430,386 -- however, paid distribution of the November 2006 issue (the issue presumably out when GamePro filed the statement on October 1) was only 322,238, a pretty large dropoff to experience just before the holiday season. Both of these figures are down from the over half a million copies GamePro regularly sold from its inception all the way to 2003 or so. And the number of ad pages per issue has also fallen over the years -- while the February 2004 issue has 120 pages total, February '07 has only 100. (Electronic Gaming Monthly managed 126 in January versus GamePro's 112.)

Anyway, GamePro has hired on George Jones (ex-EIC of Computer Gaming World) as its new editorial director, and a redesign is in store for the March 2006 issue. But let's pretend that that redesign wasn't in the cards. Instead, what if, in a shocking move, I were suddenly hired on as editor-in-chief and asked to turn the magazine's fortunes around and make it a recognizable brand once again, all while keeping the original GamePro name?

Some may argue that I'd be a huge sucker to take up that task, but I like a challenge -- besides, I worked for GamePro (mostly the online side) from 2002 to '03, so I feel a sense of duty for the mag that got me into the business in the first place. Once I got settled down in San Francisco again (and smuggled my ferrets across the California-Nevada border), here's the five-point plan I'd try to push through the board of directors:

1. Trash the final vestiges of old-school GamePro. The "persona" portraits and smiley-face-based rating system were dropped years ago, but I've always been surprised that they didn't just go all the way and cut out things like editor pseudonyms and Protips completely. I believe the main reason isn't that the editorial staff wants them, but that the higher-ups at IDG see them as too intertwined with the GamePro brand to let go.

I say bullhockey. Nobody cares about Protips anymore (the age when a mag sold based on how many strategy tips were inside ended with the PlayStation) and there's little point to editors writing under nicknames when so little of their individual personality is reflected in their text. Dropping Protips has an additional side benefit -- it means that review screenshots for games on systems without integrated frame-grabbers (i.e. the Wii) will be far, far sharper. Why? Because we wouldn't have to take screenshots that match our Protips, which means we can have the publisher send us crystal-clear screens instead of the blurry manual grabs on Wii titles. This makes reviews more interesting to readers.

(I would also drop the useless Brady Games strategies entirely, but it seems that GamePro has already done that, at least in the February issue. Bravo!)

2. Knock off all that text. GamePro's features and reviews are incredibly text-laden. There's far more text per page than on any other console mag, which makes GamePro look a lot like Computer Games at times. This is fine if you are a hardcore PC games rag, but not if you're a mag that ostensibly caters to the younger reaches of the marketplace. Edit down the text on features; let the visual aspects tell more of the story.

3. Get a good designer. GamePro's design since 2000 or so has always been very by-the-book, featuring plain columns of text, uninteresting visual design, and extensive use of boring clip-art game characters and the Glow function in Photoshop. There needs to be more money and manpower put into the mag's design, something that the Ziff and Future titles have recognized for years now.

This point goes hand-in-hand with the previous one. It doesn't matter if you have Mr. Miyamoto himself writing in your video-game magazine; if the page doesn't look interesting to the reader, where's his impetus to spend the time and brain cells to read it?

4. Let the editors speak for themselves. GamePro's editorial philosophy has always been team-based. When you read the mag, the idea is that you are getting the unfiltered, utterly infallible wisdom of The GamePros beamed into your mind, not the individual opinions of Vicious Sid or Major Mike or whomever.

Again, this made more sense back during GamePro's infancy, when gamers cared more about strategy than reviews or industry features. Nobody expects a magazine to be the end-all be-all source of game information any more, however -- that's what the Internet is for. Instead, they go to mags for the same reason anyone goes to any mag -- because they enjoy the editorial focus, or slant, they find inside. So give the editors more space to craft their individual styles... and if they don't have an interesting individual style, find some who do.

5. Don't be afraid to skew younger. Remember back in 2002 when GamePro fended off the threat from Ziff's kid-oriented GameNOW with barely a sweat, even though GameNOW was better designed and arguably more interesting to read? That's because the editors of GameNOW lost their sense of focus after just a few issues and drifted back to standard, run-of-the-mill college-student-focused coverage. I don't think it was necessarily anything GamePro did to respond.

Although the younger marketplace definitely isn't what it used to be, it is still there, and it still drives an impressive amount of sales. I think it's possible to implement all four previous points while keeping number five in mind. It's something that truly separates GamePro from the rest of the pack, and if actively capitalized on (instead of taken for granted, which seems to have been the case for a while), it's probably the best chance the mag has at regaining readership.

Tune back into this space next month, when the March issue comes along and I get to see exactly how new this "reboot" of GamePro is.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Since GamePro's settled that issue for me, I'll just get down to business -- the last Mag Roundup of the year. Click on to read all about the magazines that have hit stands and/or mailboxes over the past two weeks. Happy '07!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 12/30/06" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Ho, ho, ho-ly cow there are a lot of magazines out the past two weeks! Before I get to all of them, I wanted to point out a few British selections that you might be able to find at your local newsstand right now (the Barnes & Nobles near me seem to stock all of these regularly).

First off, GamesTM celebrated its 50th issue a month ago -- no small feat, considering its original publisher went bankrupt in January 2006. This would normally stop a US game magazine in its tracks, but the title (which focuses on Edge-type "mature" coverage and boasts exactly 180 pages each issue) got purchased by Imagine Publishing soon after and resumed regular printing in March. This sort of thing has been happening a lot in England lately, as dwindling sales has set off a great deal of consolidation in a marketplace that thought it had already gone past all that, now that Future owns about fifty squillion game mags and the other publishers are just collecting the crumbs. Regardless, it's a good magazine with a fine retro section every issue, and my congratulations go out to it.

Second, Edge released the first edition of File to stands a little while back. A relative steal at $12, File no. 1 is a compilation of all the good features, reviews, and so forth from the first 12 issues of Edge, from 1993 to 1994. It looks like they'll be doing one issue of File for each year in Edge's history, and this first one is a must-get if you aren't familiar with the Edge of this era, covering chiefly 16-bit titles with the same hardcore gusto that it covers the state of the art today. There's also a remarkable retrospective piece that goes over the prehistory of Edge and interviews the editorial and design team behind the first issues -- itself a reprint from 2003, but who's counting? The reprint quality isn't perfect (it's obvious they had to scan physical issues instead of going back to long-lost Quark files), but it's still an invaluable resource for mag fans.

Third, Retro Gamer is still awesome. Just in case you had forgotten that.

Anyway, click on to read all about the magazines that reached U.S. game maniacs over the previous fortnight. And merry pre-Christmas!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 12/16/06" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

These days, the video-game and computer magazine industry is a lot more consolidated than it used to be -- not just in terms of number of publications, but also in location. Nearly every magazine in the field is based in San Francisco or its suburbs; there are only a few major exceptions, including PC Magazine (New York), Nintendo Power (Redmond, WA, for obvious reasons), and Game Informer (Minneapolis, former headquarters for Funco Inc).

Sendai Publishing was based around the Chicago area, and most of the magazines stayed there even after Ziff Davis bought the outfit in 1996. The offices weren't fully moved to San Francisco until 2002, when Electronic Gaming Monthly finally got around to the cross-country trip -- losing a chunk of the old-guard editorial staff in the process.

I'm going over all this because I want to introduce to you a very strange situation that existed in magazines during the early 80s -- nearly a dozen of the nation's top computer mags being published by two rival firms, both headquartered in a sleepy New Hampshire town with a population of about 5000.

   

How did this happen? It's all thanks to Wayne Green, who started up an amateur-radio magazine called 73 in 1960 and moved the operation up to beautiful Peterborough, NH in the summer of 1962. Green, a WWII Navy vet who's now retired and still lives in New Hampshire, is arguably one of the most outspoken magazine editors to ever work in the business -- each issue of 73 included up to five or six pages of editorial, which rambled from topic to topic and often had very little to do with ham radio at all. Starting in the early 1970s, Green's favorite topic in the editorials shifted to the IRS, as he was busy waging war with them over an extended period of time. The situation only got worse when 73 published plans for assorted phone-phreak technology (including the "blue box" that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs would later sell for pocket money) in their June 1975 issue, which elicited an AT&T lawsuit and a later out-of-court settlement.

BYTE Magazine was founded by Green in early 1975 with Carl Helmers, a New York native who had self-published a hobbyist computer 'zine for two years previous, as editor-in-chief. The magazine premiered in September 1975 with a run of over 50,000 copies and was an immediate success, quickly becoming the definitive hardware magazine for the then-brand-spaning-new personal computer industry. Green didn't keep the magazine for long, though -- in later 1975, he lost BYTE and the magazine moved to a different house in Peterborough. The exact reasons for this schism are a little murky -- some sources suggest that diverging BYTE was part of Wayne's settlement with the phone company, while others say that Virginia, general manager of BYTE and Wayne's ex-wife at the time, just did it to spite Wayne. (The two Greens battled it out legally for most of the 1980s, but the matter was also ultimately settled out of court.)

Wayne, not the sort of person to take this sort of thing lying down, retaliated by launching Kilobaud, a "computer hobbyist magazine" that covered largely the same beat that BYTE did, albeit with just a dash more coverage of consumer-oriented products while BYTE stuck squarely with the tech stuff at this point. The two magazines shared a rivalry for the next seven years that was often anything but friendly. "For a while," BYTE executive editor Rich Malloy later wrote, "employees at one magazine would be afraid to mention that their spouses worked at a rival magazine. The competition was so intense that one Christmas, Green posted a large sign outside one of his buildings: 'Merry Christmas to all but one.'"

   

While BYTE didn't expand its magazine roster much (it was bought by McGraw-Hill in 1979 and stayed in Peterborough until its closure in 1998), the fledgling Wayne Green Publications aggressively grew as the 1980s came around. 80 Microcomputing, a magazine devoted to Tandy's TRS-80 series that launched January 1980, was billed as the first magazine devoted to any single model of computer. It was an enormous success, with issues going over 400 pages in 1982, and it lasted all the way to 1988 on the stands.

Other magazines launched directly by Green include inCider (an Apple II mag launched January 1983) and HOT CoCo (a Color Computer mag launched June of that year).

   

In 1984, just as Green had launched Commodore 64 publication RUN, the publisher decided to sell his operation to CW Communications, a division of IDG (which publishes PC World and GamePro nowadays). Green became a member of IDG's board, which allowed him to oversee the launch of AmigaWorld later in 1985. In addition to his IDG job, though, Green maintained an independent publisher in Peterborough, which he used to continue producing 73 as well as launch new mags in the fields of laptop computers, desktop publishing, and CD-ROM technology. (He kept on publishing 73 until 2003.)

The funny thing about all of Green/IDG's computer magazines of the era is that almost all of them were enormous successes, and all of them are still great reading today for classic computer nuts. They were almost all super long-lived, too -- RUN lasted until 1992, AmigaWorld until 1995, 80 Micro until 1988, and HOT CoCo until 1986 (when it was incorporated into 80 Micro). The only real laggard of the lot was the original Kilobaud -- unable to strike a balance between "hardcore" coverage and the emerging consumer market, the magazine was folded in 1984 without many people noticing.

I've never been up to Peterborough myself, but I bought my run of Kilobaud off eBay from a reseller based in that town, so I'd like to think that these issues were the ones kept in the Green Publishing offices. As far as I know, there are no magazines left in town, but I'd still like to take a trip... or a pilgrimage... up there someday, just for kicks.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 1:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Welcome to Mag Roundup. This update includes the last few mags of 2006, and luckily for me there aren't too many -- just GI, OXM, and a couple of specials.

Future Publishing recently released two more specials to newsstands, both cheat compilations (one for Xbox and the other for Sony systems) and both largely filled with recycled content. I'll be saving these for the next update -- I've got a kind man sending them to me in the mail, which is great for me because frankly, I'm sick of paying $10 a pop for Future's recycled-content "specials," and I'm the Magweasel for chrissakes. (Though I must admit, the cover design on their specials is consistently neat. That PS3 launch guide a couple months back really sticks out on the stands.)

Anyway, click below to find out about the four new mags released in the past two weeks.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 12/2/06" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

It's post-Thanksgiving in the US and I'm sure everyone's still feeling too sick to move, so I thought I'd spend this weekend with less text for you to read and more pictures for you to look at.

This week I want to talk about newsletters, a concept that's likely completely alien to people who began their game careers anytime after the SNES. During the classic era, and especially during the NES years, free newsletters were a common way for third-party software makers to build a mailing list and advertise directly to consumers. The Nintendo Fun Club News started out as a newsletter in 1986 before ballooning into Nintendo Power two years later, and Atari Age is one that still attracts big bucks whenever issues appear on eBay.

Lesser coveted are the NES-era company newsletters, of which there were approximately a billion. Nearly all the top NES licensees (and quite a few of the smaller ones) had some form of newsletter, ranging from low-budget to what amounted to mini-versions of Nintendo Power. Let's take a look at a few I have in the file cabinet...

[Click through for more.]

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': The Lost Art of the Newsletter" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 7:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

   

Don't tell me you don't recognize the above two advertisements, or at least the basic style of them. They have been running in US game mags for 15 years now, with almost the same ad copy even, and they're such an ingrained part of many readers' psyches that the question "Does anyone actually win any of this stuff?" must have been asked rhetorically to no one in particular thousands of times across the country over the years.

Yes, it's the seemingly continuous contest to win the Ultimate Gaming Rig -- either all the current consoles plus games, a "tricked out gaming computer," or a giant-arse TV with all manner of media hardware attached to it. The contests, held by Oregon-based Baindramage Inc. (AKA Pandemonium Promotions Inc. AKA Puzzle Me Inc. AKA Rattlebrain Inc.), have run uninterrupted since debuting in the August 1991 issue of GamePro, save for a lull in 2001-3 due to a reported bankruptcy.

The basic idea, amply explained in the latest ad (found in the 2006 Tips & Tricks Video Game Codebook), is this: You solve the ridiculously simple Mystery Word Grid in the ad and sent it off with your entry fees to join the contest. You then receive four more puzzles of only slightly increased difficulty (and must pay to submit each one), then one final tiebreaker to determine your score and the ultimate winner. (It's not mentioned in the ad, but everyone who completes the final tiebreaker round wins a free magazine subscription -- though, considering you'll be out at least $12 by that point, it may be a more economical use of time to just buy that subscription yourself.)

The big question, then: Does anyone really win in the end? Answer: Yes, I'd imagine so. Otherwise, as contest director Rick Lund is quick to point out when you email him, the company would not be in business. However, two important little niggles prevent the great majority of people from winning. One, Baindramage can't take responsibility if you receive a round of puzzles after the entry deadline's already passed, and if the Internet is any indication, this happens all the time with this contest (though Lund offers refunds in this case). Second, the final tiebreaker puzzle is much harder than the previous rounds, requiring you to use your own words and fit them into a much larger grid of clues.

It may be for these reasons that the majority of game magazines stopped printing Ultimate Gaming Rig ads after 2000. I had heard from fellow editors that reader complaints led to ads being refused, but I never talked with a magazine sales rep about it personally, so I can't confirm that. However, it is true that pretty much the only mag you'll find their contests nowadays is in Tips & Tricks' semi-annual codebooks. Shame, really. Mag ads these days...they're so, well, non-manipulative, you know?

For the sake of research and nostalgia, I've collected and scanned in all the Ultimate Gaming Rig ads I could find. You can browse through them at your leisure by clicking below. (NOTE: I could have sworn that I saw a largely identical Japanese-language version of this ad in a Famicom Tsushin from 1993-4, but after two hours of leafing through my collection, I couldn't find it again. If this rings a bell with anyone, let me know.)

[Click through for more!]

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': 15 Years of Not Winning The Ultimate Gaming Rig" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 2:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

A remarkably lean past two weeks for new game mags, as only five new issues hit my doorstep. Kind of a shame, really, since I wanted to see Games for Windows and the redesigned EGM (which I hear looks a lot like the old GMR on the inside) before today's Mag Roundup deadline came along. Ah well.

Regardless, click on to read all about the latest US game mags, including (much to my chagrin) two new Beckett titles.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 11/4/06" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

This column is late as all 'eck, but there's a good reason for it. That's because I've spent the last couple hours poring over my computer-magazine collection (numbering over 2500 these days, and I'm proud to say there isn't a single PC World or Wired in it) in order to build something I've meant to create for a few days now -- The Top 10 Silliest Computer Mag Covers in History.

Now, keep in mind that when I say "silly," I don't necessarily mean "crap." I have a deep-seated love for nearly every home-computer mag from the 1970s and 80s, and it always pains me, in a way, to think about how boring the PC industry has become these days. Mag editors had real enthusiasm and ideas about the revolution they were fomenting back then. What they didn't always, however, was the top caliber in cover design. This occasionally leads to covers that, while normal-looking or even eye-catching in their day, look just plain silly in 2006. Hence, this list.

This ranking is based entirely off my own magazine collection, which is heavily geared toward the classic era of computing, so naturally it's not gonna cover every silly mag out there. If you have a magazine you think I'm missing, though, by all means leave a comment (and a picture, hopefully) and I'll cover it later.

[Click through for more.]

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Top 10 Silliest Computer Mag Covers in History" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 1:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

This doesn't have much to do with game mags per se, but I thought I'd update you on the status of my collection. Since I got paid for some freelance work I did long ago, I splurged a bit and bought a couple of historically important items I've been lusting after for a while. First up, there's the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, the issue that introduced the Altair 8800 (the first really useful and successful home computer) to the world. I got this as part of a package that also included a practically mint-condition issue of "Radio & Television News" from 1952, which has enough awesome advertising to be worth a column all to itself. (Both mags were from Ziff Davis Publishing, by the way.)

Second up is Computer Lib/Dream Machines, a seminal, Whole Earth Catalog-style book from 1974 that takes a counterculture approach to the computer industry and successfully predicted such technologies as hypertext, versatile home machines, and a worldwide information network freely accessible by anyone. This printing dates from 1978 (my birth year), and I guess I'm not the only one who thinks the book is kinda neat, because the bidding on eBay went up to a figure I'm a little embarrassed to admit. (You can go search for it if you're really curious. I ain't telling.)

Enough bragging for now, though -- let's take a look at all the game mags that hit US store shelves in the past two weeks. The biggest surprise this month: Apparently nobody's reviewing Bully or GTA: Vice City Stories early. Did Rockstar turn everyone down, or was it the other way around?

[Click here to read further.]

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 10/21/06" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

   

A number of enthralling things are happening in the mag business this week. Even better, it's all good news.

First off, get your favorite download manager ready -- you've got a lot of reading ahead of you. To commemorate the final issue of Computer Gaming World before it changes names to Games For Windows: The Official Magazine, Ziff Davis has graciously put up full PDF versions of the first 100 issues of CGW, as well as cover scans of the 168 that followed afterward.

For fans of old game mags, this is like manna from heaven. CGW's first 100 issues (which ran from November 1981 to November 1992) are a treasure trove of history -- each one covers Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari games with pretty much the same depth as modern CGW, which is amazing when you realize the games they cover are usually no more than 48k in size. The earlier issues also have columns on game design theory from some of the most well-known figures in game history, including Chris Crawford, Richard Garriott, Jon Freeman, Danielle Bunten, and more. All this, of course, written in that classic, dense CGW style that made some call it the "New England Journal of Medicine of video games."

These aren't just any old cheapo scans, either. These PDFs are the result of a project by Stephane Racle over at the Computer Gaming World Museum, and the care that he's given to the files is utterly exemplary. Stephane collated scans (I contributed one issue myself, though I forgot what number), scanned a bunch himself, and OCRed all 7438 pages, producing an index that lets you look of anything you please within the first 100 issues (or, at least, you will be able to once he puts the index up on his site). Every PDF includes bookmarks to each article in the mag, and Stephane even included internal links in the table of contents and on every "Continued on page XX" blurb, which is a godsend in the early issues where articles jumped all over the place.

Tracking down copies of these early CGW issues (most of which were printed only in the four figures) is an enormous challenge for any collector, but Stephane's scanning project -- and Ziff and the CGW staff supporting him -- has provided an enormously helpful resource for anyone interested in the '80s computer scene. I'll be using these scans extensively in future columns here, definitely.

(By the way, that final issue of CGW arrived at my mailbox today. It's superb, but I'll go into more detail on that next week.)

CGW isn't the only Ziff mag undergoing renovations for the December issue. Electronic Gaming Monthly is undergoing a major redesign of their own, the first one since 2002, and it's also set to debut next month. You can see some of the mockup covers EGM's design team has going in the picture above, which was posted on 1UP as part of something related.

Although these mockups are almost certainly not final, it's interesting to note that while the mag's official title won't change, the initials "EGM" may form the most noticeable part of the logo from now on. I can think of two reasons for this: (a) most readers call the magazine "EGM" anyway, and (b) the name "Electronic Gaming Monthly" is incredibly fuddy-duddy. It doesn't tell you very much about the mag's content, it's too long, and it sounds very old-fashioned (like "Popular Mechanics") in an industry that's always about slicing away at the cutting edge. Besides, the term "elecronic games" passed out of common usage twenty years ago.

The only disadvantage to this is that the word "game" wouldn't be as prevalent in the main logo any longer. This is the sort of thing that puts sales and circulation departments into a bit of a funk, because they may fear that consumers will pick up the magazine at the rack, be unable to figure out what the mag is about, and put it back down without a second thought.

If the new EGM logo winds up being like these mockups, then, it'll be Ziff Davis betting that the buzz a radical new look for the cover will offset any confusion that may occur. Now I'm excited to see how the new mag looks from the inside.

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

The rush of autumn special issues seems to have abated a bit, so I'd like to start out by showcasing a couple things that caught my eye. First off, Retro Volume 2 may be found at some newsstands right now. A compilation of the Retro sections from the past few years of British magazine gamesTM, this is 260 pages' worth of full-color classic game coverage, from Sonic and Shadow of the Beast to interviews with all sorts of old UK game folks. It costs thirty dollars in the US (!) but is still quite a nice volume to have by the bedside.

Second off, could whoever it is who keeps on sending me issues of Ferrets magazine stop, please? Yes, I know I subscribed to it, but that subscription should have run out 10 months ago. I don't want to dress up Dena in a foppish winter cap, for Chrissakes! Arrgh! Why do my subscriptions to mags I don't like never run out, yet my subscriptions to mags I sincerely want to subscribe to take over half a year to get processed? Someone needs to do a scathing expose' of some sort, I swear...

Regardless, coming right up is coverage of the six US game mags that crossed my desk over the past two weeks. Read on, please. [Click through for more.]

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling’: Mag Roundup 10/7/06" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

With realism in video games ever-increasing, the rating system unevenly enforced in game shops, and everyone from the Federal Trade Commission to some lawyer dude from Florida picking on innocent ol' Take Two Interactive, the reputation of our hobby is being assailed upon from all sides. Perhaps, however, all we need is a PR boost of a different sort to turn the tide. Isn't there anything that us dead-tree enthusiasts can do about these attacks?

Well, the last time video games faced scrutiny for their violence, one noble publisher stepped up to clear their name. They wanted to show that games weren't some horrible plague, that gamers are perfectly well-adjusted, and games are just as wholesome as corndogs and Hummers. They did this...by publishing a newsletter for the parents of gamers.

   

PlayRight, a subscription-only magazine published bimonthly for (I think) four issues from 1993 to 1994, made no bones about its target audience. "With thousands of video games on the market," stated a 1993 advertising flyer, "how can parents keep up with their kids' games? They can't. They have to stay ahead of them. That's why GamePro, the industry's leading game players magazine, has taken the lead once again with GamePro's PlayRight Newsletter...the first video game publication written expressly for parents."

GamePro! I knew they wuz rattin' on us! Mom confiscated my friend's copy of Mortal Kombat II and it's all GamePro's fault!

As you might expect from the above, the target audience of PlayRight were parents (and, in particular, mothers) who were scared. Yes, scared of their kid going straight home from school and playing video games all evening, then presumably growing up to become socialists. Written mainly by GamePro editors LeeAnne McDermott and Wes Nihei, each issue includes reviews of nonviolent games (pointing it out Christian Spotlight-style whenever a game has particularly bloody scenes), pieces on game companies engaging in public-service activities, and Q&As with people like child psychologists. The first two issues also include a sheet of nine "PlayRight PlayTime" tokens, the idea being that you'd give your kids these tokens as a sort of allowance for video-game time.

The style of the newsletter is never that overbearing, with one exception: the "Potential Concerns" column in the reviews. Here's what this helpful box has to say about the top hits of '94:

NHL Hockey '94: "Electronic Arts removed the fighting action, so players no longer duke it out over disputes."

Cool Spot:: "Overt commercialism may be a concern."

Prehistoria (a multimedia CD-ROM about dinosaurs): "Animated dinosaur battles are realistically graphic and bloody."

   

For fans of obscurity, the first issue of PlayRight has two can't miss features. One is a two-page spread on Raya Systems, maker of Captain Novolin, Bronkie the Bronchiosaurus, and other disease-fighting Super NES games. "I recently sat in on a focus group of 12 asthmatic kids for Bronkie," recalls Raya director of development Aaron Baker in the article. "The minute the kids saw how the game worked, their faces lit up. They said their friends didn't understand why they couldn't do things like pillow-fight."

The other is "Parents in the Know," a one-page article covering three "industry insiders" who talk about how they deal with their kids' gaming habits. One of these insiders is none other than Howard Phillips, ex-Nintendo Fun Club president and (at the time) Director of West Coast Creative Development for Absolute Entertainment. (Did you know he has two daughters? I didn't.) Here's his take on game ratings circa 1994:

"Who should rate the games -- Sega or Nintendo? Players? Rental stores? An industry watchdog group? People answer the question differently depending on what information they want out of the rating. For me, therein lies the key. I think that the more information available the better. I do not suggest, however, that we rely on one source alone. We should encourage previews and ratings from a variety of sources, and we as individuals choose which ones to listen to."

GamePro apparently agreed with Phillips, because even when the PlayRight newsletter ended, the name lived on in a GamePro column that commented on the violent particulars of T- and M-rated games. I remember the staff occasionally debating whether to keep the PlayRight page in, but it managed to survive in the mag all the way up to 2004, when declining page counts presumably made it impractical to continue. I guess it lasted that long because it was a unique feature among game mags, but man, I don't think anyone at all actually read it.

Of course, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut -- now that I've spilled the beans on the removal of PlayRight from GamePro, maybe IDG Entertainment will get sued for pushing violent games on children. Sorry, guys.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 6:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

If I'm any later submitting this it will no longer be Saturday, so let's drop the pleasantries (and the ferret pix) and get right down to business. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Since I'm still in Japan and on weird hours, it wasn't Saturday by the time this was published! But just wanted to praise Kevin on the amazing job he's doing with these round-ups. I feel like I learn things, and often useful things, too! Yay.]

Every other week, I cover all the game magazines that hit US shelves, complete with cover images and commentary I almost always regret on Sunday morning. Click on to, er, read on...

[Click through for the full column!]

Continue reading "COLUMN: ‘Game Mag Weaseling’: Mag Roundup 9/23/06" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 3:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

   

"I'm in the position of building a game magazine, but whenever I look at the writers and editors around me, I can't help but feel that they really like what they're doing. They may all approach their work from different stances, but a lot of people around here try their best because they truly enjoy what they're doing...I think it's important in all aspects of life to be able to find whatever it is that you can find enjoyable."

-- Editor-in-chief Zenji Ishii in the final issue of Japanese arcade-game mag Gamest, dated September 30, 1999. The magazine's publisher filed for bankruptcy a week later, and most of Gamest's staff moved over to Enterbrain to found ARCADIA, which still publishes today.

"So, you've probably already noticed that this issue of ODCM didn't come with a demo disc. What's the deal? It's pretty simple, actually. Sega is working on developing a new way of distributing Dreamcast game demos. It's definitely a disappointment to us (and, we're sure, to you!) not be [sic] able to include the demo disc as standard...but I think you'll agree that as the console wars start to heat up this year, we all want Sega to win."

-- Editor-in-chief Chris Charla in the final issue of the Official Dreamcast Magazine (US), March/April 2001. Sega dropping Dreamcast support on January 31, 2001 (which isn't mentioned in the mag) probably had more to do with this decision on their part.

"In the three years I've been at Next Generation, I've always hoped that, one day, I'd be that guy at the front who tells you what the issue's all about. Never did I think it would be like this, though. You see, it's Sunday, I'm really tired and haggard, and I need to get this column in before the magazine ships...Honestly, though, I just had to see how Halo ended."

-- Blake Fischer enjoying his breakneck one-issue run as editor-in-chief of Next Generation before it folded with the January 2002 issue.

"It was brought to my attention via the Usenet newsgroups that another magazine took shots at editorials that say 'It's your magazine' to readers...All the other magazines can take their shots at us, but it's all vapor next to any letter from a reader who tells us we're doing a good job. And we'll keep working on making VG&CE the best for you. Thanks for reading -- and writing to -- VG&CE."

-- EIC Andy Eddy in the final issue of VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, August 1993. The magazine was drastically revised and renamed to simply VideoGames in the next issue, dropping Eddy and most of the original staff.

"A special thanks to our competitors, who despite all their flaws, mistruths, and downright empty-headedness make it that much easier for us to look good month in, month out. It's almost like we don't have to work some issues -- thanks!"

-- EIC Eric C. Mylonas in the final issue of GameFan, December 2000.

"Despite our tremendous growth and enormous popularity, the games market just might not be big enough to handle so many magazines, especially good ones."

-- EIC Tom Byron in the last issue of GameNOW, January 2004. He'd be presiding over the last issue of GMR a year later. He edits the Official US PlayStation Magazine nowadays, which as of today doesn't appear to have folded yet.

   

"With the new decade rushing up to meet us, the eyes and ears of Atariland are waiting for [Atari head Jack] Tramiel to pull a white rabbit out of his hat. Tramiel has promised new equipment, dealer promotions, hardware and software improvement and overhauled marketing to make 1989 the year of the Atari resurgence. The sheer variety of Tramiel's pledges makes one wonder if any of his ideas will materialize."

-- EIC Frank Cohen in the last issue of ANALOG Computing, December 1989, one of the last mainstream magazines devoted to Atari home computers.

"My prediction is that the industry is unlikely to emerge from the doldrums for several years, but when it does it will be more knowledgeable, more secure, and better able to take the strides necessary to grow in our increasingly information-oriented society."

-- EIC David H. Ahl in the final issue of Creative Computing, December 1985. His magazine, launched in 1974, was the first devoted entirely to personal computing, and its folding was the beginning of the end for non-business-oriented general-interest PC magazines.

   

"We terrorized crap games, appreciated many female figures, took over 100 pot shots at Daikatana, illegally used photographs, drank a shitload of beer, wrote 1540 folio fillers (sideways bits on each page), mentioned Pamela's breasts 18 times, insulted flappy-headed Canadians on 37 different occasions, made up at least 35 new words, insulted and/or offended pretty much every type of person on the face of the Earth, made you laugh out loud at least once an issue, and pretty much wrote whatever the hell was on our crackified, more-than-slightly-deranced, minds. More than anything, we never gave in to "The Man" and, I'll be damned if we didn't have a fucking blast."

-- EIC Mike Salmon making the most of his ability to curse in print in the last issue of PC Accelerator, June 2000.

"Out of a job again...I can't believe it! Four years ago, I ended my own newsletter because a new magazine offered me a wider forum...18 months ago, I gave it up for The Color Computer Magazine. Now here I am, out on the literary street."

-- Writer Dennis Kitsz in the last issue of The Color Computer Magazine, October 1984. The EIC of the magazine didn't mention the title's closing since Ziff Davis, who took over the magazine and immediately shut it down, didn't give him a chance -- only Kitsz had the opportunity to stick in a little text in his hardware column before the galleys went away.

"I love this dear magazine that was born so small, grew so large, and has become so small again. I am sure many of you few thousand who are still with us do as well...Weep not for The Rainbow. It forged a community of spirit. A commonness of purpose. A wonderful adventure. It was the instigator of lasting friendships. It touched us all, and we were all a part of it. It was the greatest."

-- EIC Lonnie Falk in the last issue of The Rainbow, the longest-lasting of the great 8-bit computer magazines, in May 1993.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 5:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)