The Video Game History Foundation’s online archive of old magazines is now my favorite thing. Instead of spending all day at work refreshing a message board to see if any newly announced games remind me of old games, I just look at coverage of old games. Sure, the site fails to load the magazine you tried to view about 75% of the time If you get to it by searching for a specific game, but I’m not busy. And if you just progress by issues through a specific magazine, the site is mildly usable.
There are other magazine preservation websites and even archive.org keeps some in their archivedotorg. But that goes to show the power of PR. Not good PR because Frank Cifaldi comes across as someone who dislikes old games and people who like old games, but PR nonetheless. The guilt of having ignored these other sources and only jumping into old magazine scans because the Video Game History Foundation led me to check out issues of Sega Visions in the previously mentioned archive.
I’ve never crossed into enemy territory and read an issue of Nintendo Power, but I can only assume it’s similar PR fluff to Sega Visions. Visions seems to exist solely as marketing – they cover many shitty games and are critical of none of them, at least in the first half-dozen issues I perused. Perhaps later in the run they will begin reviewing stuff and really taking bad games to task, but I would guess any attacks on games would be strategic to not offend important partners. More importantly, the magazine allowed us to read about the hilarious, well written, and plausible adventures of Niles Nemo, a totally tubular, pizza loving Sega fan. If you thought your favorite soulless, one note mascot character for your favorite product was cool, just wait until you meet Niles.
Back on the VGHF’s site, I’m about 40 issues into Electronic Gaming Monthly. It’s been a fun but rough time. As a fellow octopath traveller, I was surprised to see EGM make the comment “no commies,” in an early issue of their magazine. Sartre must have read Game Pro. Even stranger, the mag then printed a letter complaining about the comment only to double down.
This was the first of many signs EGM was jingoistic and written by stupid people. The frequent honoring of the troops deployed for Operation Desert Storm didn’t help. The kind of people who would lean into vacuous patriotism are exactly the same as those who would argue games shouldn’t be political. The general tone of the editorial section is one of tough frat guy. When they weren’t refusing to ever concede any point, they were bloviating about how amazing their magazine was. The overall tone of the early issues was slightly more literate Trump.
Almost as great a sin as having political opinions I disagree with is writing poorly, unless I am the one doing it. And boy was EGM badly written. It is fun to speculate that it did lasting damage to the discussion of games and players’ perception of the medium as an art. Likely influenced by Famitsu, who also employed the four scores per game style, reviews were strictly product evaluations and were the depth of particularly shallow puddles. Based on the research of dissecting one review, each of the four EGM game reviews average 59 words for a total of 236 words on each title. Every review takes up the same amount of magazine space, so while we all had a good chuckle about my research of one item, my results are fairly representative of the magazine overall. Imagining long form reviews that didn’t say inane things about “smooth play” and “amazing graphics” we can pretend gaming would have evolved in a more intellectual direction, Gamer Gate would never have happened, and Donald Trump would still only be a punchline for anyone unfortunate enough to be aware of his existence.
As I virtually flipped through pages of magazines I was hit by nostalgia but also, at times, more boredom than I expected. I realized that the 8 and 16 bit content interested me less than anticipated. Was this because I was a little too young for these eras and my nostalgia primarily lies with fifth and sixth generation games? Then someone on the internet posted a video of the game section of a Target in 2002 and I found it only mildly compelling and yearned to see the game aisle of a Toys R Us in 1990 (which I then promptly found). So this scientific experiment proved to me that I am nostalgic for NES and Genesis games, I just actually like the games themselves more from later consoles.
Regardless of which generation maximally pleased my emotions, these old magazines have given me a lot of half formed ideas for 300 word posts I will triple in size with the magic of restating and rephrasing, and pics of magazine scans. Watch this space. But not literally, this post is over and won’t get any longer if you sit here looking at it.
