Out of Print Archive.

Preserving your childhood one
magazine at a time.

Anyone can scan an old magazine and post the image online.

If you’re particularly lazy or rushed you might just take a photo on your phone and call it a day. Which is something I’m definitely guilty of…

But there’s a small cabal of online folks who are serious about preserving old video game magazines. These people will spend hours ensuring every page is captured with museum-grade detail.

People like Andy De Wilde. The guy behind Out of Print Archive. The most dedicated of the dedicated.

Sega blue skies 

Andy started scanning magazines and posting them online back in 2009. What began with a desire to preserve and share old copies of Official Sega Saturn Magazine took on a life of its own and the Out of Print Archive website was launched.

Since then he’s built a dedicated following of print magazine tragics. People like myself, who want to know what a random Japanese shmup scored in an old issue of C+VG, or what was happening during the Dreamcast’s dying days in Next Generation magazine. 

While Out of Print Archive began life as a website, in recent years it’s found a wider audience via Twitter, where Andy’s original content and dedication to quality has defined the Out of Print approach.

As he explains, “People who find me on Twitter are constantly surprised about just how much work goes into creating a good looking complete scan. Somehow the idea is that you just slap a magazine on a scan plate and call it a day.”

“While you can do that, if you take the extra step (or the extra 32 steps), the magazines just turn out so much better.”

Working 9-to-5

So how much time does he spend per magazine? 

According to Andy, a complete scanning process takes about 40-50 hours per magazine issue.

While that sounds insane to most of us, he has a strict process that he follows. In Andy’s own words, it breaks down like this: 

1. “The scanning process itself is pretty straight-forward. [But] most magazines are too wide to fit on a standard scan plate. So each page needs to be scanned at least twice. Once from the left and once from the right. Scanning a 100 page magazine like this takes close to 4 hours.”

2. “The next step is to stitch together individual pages from those multiple scans. These get checked manually to see if it all lines up correctly. This takes another 2 hours or so for a typical magazine. During this process I note all the issues I find with each page.”

3. “I then re-scan all the pages that have issues, switch these out with the previous versions, make sure everything aligns correctly, and complete the basic version of a complete magazine. The time it takes for this part varies wildly. For CVG issues 126 -137 it can be 8 hours per issue, since those pages are massive and don’t fit on the scan plate at all, horizontally, nor vertically.”

4. “When everything looks good, all the pages go through a colour correction process which I’ve been trying to perfect for over 7 years now. I think I’m at the point where they look just right.”

5. “The magazine is now ready for a preliminary release [to the public]. This means that it has been through all these previous steps, but has not yet gone through the big preservation process.”

“That final preservation process cleans up every single spec of dust, scratch, tear, stain, or anything else that might have happened to the magazine over its lifetime.

“All of this is done by hand with a variety of techniques and tricks that have been evolving over all these years I’ve been doing this. So a typical magazine might take from 40-50 hours end-to-end.”

Playing favourites 

Given the extensive time required to complete each magazine, Andy has to decide which publications warrant the attention. Followers of his Twitter will know that Dreamcast Magazine, NGamer, N64 Pro and Mean Machines all get a regular run, but his true allegiances lie with the Sega Saturn and the affiliated publications.

As he explains, “Two of my favourite magazines are the Official Sega Saturn Magazine (OSSM) and the Paul Davies years of CVG.” 

“The Saturn was the perfect underdog machine, with tons of incredible games that felt like they were tailor-made for me. While the system was either ridiculed or flat out ignored by most people and a lot of publications, it was [so refreshing] to see the passionate coverage in OSSM and CVG that helped me discover a whole bunch of Saturn games that would become all-time favourites. It was just a magical time.”

“Besides those two magazines, I adore the short lived MAXIMUM, Mean Machines (Sega), Official Sega Magazine, MegaTech, Super Play, N64 Magazine, NGamer and the Official Nintendo Magazine, just to name a few.”

Holding back the years 

That love of old video game magazines has helped sustain Out of Print Archive throughout the years.

As Andy notes, “I feel like these magazines truly deserve every extra little bit of love. Especially when you think about just how much of their lives the people back then poured into them. It all just links back to having respect for the people as well as the content they created.”

That respect is evident in every scanned page Andy restores. In the process, he hopes to capture a moment in time and preserve it for prosterity. 

“These magazines are such great time capsules. Specific images and articles have been seared into my mind in a way that’s hard to explain. They hold so many memories of time, places, people and feelings. They somehow act as an anchor to times that would otherwise be forgotten completely. They have become just as big a part of the hobby for me as the actual games, and add so much to my enjoyment of them.”

“This might seem simplistic and perhaps a little naive, but I just want to see these great magazines preserved in a way that would make the original creators proud. So trying to get them to look as close as possible to the way they did when they were brand new and just hit the newsstands.”

Visit Out of Print Archive online and follow them on Twitter.

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Forgotten Worlds: A magazine about old video game magazines coming soon.