Forgotten gaming magazines
Life isn’t fair. And neither is Twitter.
You might spend weeks trying to track down the former editor of a magazine you loved as a kid. You interview said person, write a whole thing, publish it on social, and get exactly zero interest from the public. Meanwhile, someone posts, “Gamecube, love it hate it?” and everyone decides this is quality content worth engaging with...
But I digress. Also I rant... Seems that unless you’re talking about a handful of video game magazines from back in the day, no one cares.
…And, as far as I can tell, that handful consists of Mean Machines, C+VG, EGM, Nintendo Power, SuperPlay, DieHard GameFan and, well, that’s pretty much it.
So, let’s have a quick look at the magazines that tend to fly under the radar. These are all titles I used to buy as a kid (and plan to cover in the future).
On that note, if you happened to work on any of these titles and are reading this please drop me a line. I’d love to organise a proper interview.
MegaTech. Founding editor Paul Glancey called me out on Twitter for not including him in my C+VG feature. It wasn’t intentional. Paul’s bona-fides are legit, and his name is all over Mean Machines and C+VG. I just always associate Paul with MegaTech, a more ‘grown-up’ Mega Drive publication that I loved back in the day. Paul, if you’re reading this I really want to organise that interview and do a proper feature on MegaTech.
Game Zone. I distinctly remember buying the Super Mario World copy of Game Zone from Pacific Fair shopping centre on the Gold Coast as a kid. That’s a weird thing to remember, but here we are. I recently checked out that same issue via the Internet Archive and it seems like a decent mix of local and import gaming with an attempt at some Mean Machines style irreverence. But you could say the same for 90% of magazines from the era.
Raze: This was a weird one. As far as I can tell the writing was outsourced to a third party ‘content farm’, so there’s zero coherence in the magazine. A bunch of different columns and sections all overlap and compete with each other. Meanwhile, the screen shots alternate between colour and black-and-white. But it did sell me on Rise of the Dragon, which is a great cyberpunk adventure from the DOS era of PC gaming.
Sega Pro. Shadow of the Beast on the Master System is the front cover that immediately springs to mind. I guess that was a big deal back then. Hell, I remember when my local game store used to run looping demos of the game back in the day. I had a Commodore 64 at the time so I could only look on with envy. In any case, Sega Pro was a magazine, I purchased some copies back in the day, and that one cover image is the only thing I can recall about it, so let’s move on..
Videogames & Computer Entertainment. I have a real love / hate thing with VG&CE. On the one hand I’ve spent more time than I should fixating on the former editor’s moustache and data analyst energy than I should. But at the same time I really like their early 90s convergence of video games, personal computers, and more in-depth features about the industry. Apparently I’m the only one, because the article I wrote about the magazine has attracted zero interest.
Compute! I’ve made two attempts to highlight this magazine. I even tracked down the former editor via LinkedIn and arranged an interview. But it seems like I’m the only one who remembers this tech heavy monthly from the late 80s, because honestly, it’s the least viewed content on the site. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mega. All I can remember about MEGA is that I picked up a special ‘best of 1992’ edition, which featured all their collective reviews of Mega Drive titles. This was maybe a valuable resource. Or at least it would have been if I had money to buy more than a handful of games back then.
MegaZone. As far as I can tell, this Australian magazine was very heavily ‘affiliated’ with Sega. Although that was never made public. The former editor was then poached and launched Hyper, which would become one of the world’s longest running video game magazines. I’ve previously covered the demise of Hyper, so if anyone involved with MegaZone is reading this please get in touch so I do a proper profile on MegaZone.
CU Amiga. Back when all I had was a Commodore 64 I’d pick this up just so I could be disappointed by the 8bit conversions of the latest titles. I never did end up with an Amiga, but to this day there’s a handful of games from the CU Amiga days I’d like to try. Top of that list is Breath of the Dragon, which looked awesome.
