What software did they use to create the magazines in the 90s?

[magazine_guy7]

So if you look at a lot of the gaming magazines from the 90s, such as Gamepro, EGM, GameFan, Video Games, Tips & Tricks etc. etc. You notice that besides just showing screen shots, they use a lot of graphics for the background patterns in the pages, even having cut outs of a game character floating to decorate the page. So what software was used to create all the graphics and designs for each page in the magazines?

[marktrade]

Odds are they used QuarkXPress or Aldus Pagemaker for page layout, which they sent off to the printers, but it sounds like you're asking what illustrator programs they might have used. If any magazine staff worked directly on the art they probably used a combination of Photoshop and CorelDRAW or similar programs. It would be a typical workflow at a magazine or newspaper to take art from promotional material provided by publishers, cut out a shape from it in Photoshop, then import it into PageMaker and adorn an article with it, possibly even having the text wrap around it.

I just had a look at an EGM issue from 1994 and those background patterns look like stock art, at the time referred as "clip art" which could be easily patterned. I doubt anyone at EGM actually created any of those background designs and instead purchased them from stock art providers.

What did those artists use, then? Any of number of things, including scans of their hand-drawn art as a base, 3D programs, vector design programs, and a little photography. Artists do a lot of different things to look fresh and original. It can be a complicated process to create interesting textures, but that's why magazines outsource that stuff to stock art providers.

[Leathco]

When I was in the newspaper business in the late 90's and very early 2000s, I did layout with Adobe Pagemaker. I think Adobe dropped Pagemaker with a product called InDesign.

[Sean697]

Know what would be cool,mid you could ever run across the digital files sent to the printer for the magazine masters, That would make preservation a hell of a lot easier. I bet no one ever saved those.

[marktrade]

Know what would be cool,mid you could ever run across the digital files sent to the printer for the magazine masters, That would make preservation a hell of a lot easier. I bet no one ever saved those.

I'm sure they did, but probably not for this long, or if they did they just didn't keep meticulous records of where they saved them, so the organizations that still have them would have to work very hard to find them. Usually they can't so they just consider them "lost." Then there might be compatibility issues opening it with software and hardware from a different era, not having the right fonts, or the right versions of things. Even if everything did open perfectly, we still wouldn't have the ads. Since the ads are owned by their respective companies, the artwork for them is not included in the same file. If we ever saw the files the magazine staff worked on we would see empty areas labelled "ad space."

[KiwiArcader]

Probably the very reason those DVD collections of Retro Gamer and Games tm had placeholders for the advertising ....

[marktrade]

Probably the very reason those DVD collections of Retro Gamer and Games tm had placeholders for the advertising ....

All the issues of Game Developer magazine that are officially available online appear to have been saved from the master files and the issues from the 90s do not contain ads, however the later issues do. My guess is that happened whenever they started to publish the issues online.

Did those collections include ads in the later issues as well?

[magazine_guy7]

It seems like what remaining gaming magazines there are today (EGM) have gone to a very boring page design. If you can manage to find the latest issue of EGM on the newstand, youll notice that the page is just a plain white page with black text and screen shots. It's like theyre trying to look like all the other "normal" magazines. What happened to all the good looking graphics and artwork, with cool looking background patterns and textures? It looks so ugly and boring now.

[Areala]

Martin Alessi, who was both a reviewer and art director for EGM in the early 90s, has talked before about using Quark Xpress and Photoshop for his layouts. Not sure what other magazines were using at the time, but a stock image subscription coupled with CorelDraw and possibly PageMaker once the mid-90s rolled around aren't bad guesses.

*huggles*
Areala

[E-Day]

Know what would be cool,mid you could ever run across the digital files sent to the printer for the magazine masters, That would make preservation a hell of a lot easier. I bet no one ever saved those.

A member here apparently got a hold of most if not all of GamePros digital files in February 2013. Any inquiries I make to him about it since his initial message about them get ignored.

[Sean697]

A member here apparently got a hold of most if not all of GamePros digital files in February 2013. Any inquiries I make to him about it since his initial message about them get ignored.

Well that's a bummer. Preserving this stuff has very controversial opinions in some circles. Some people just can't get by the legal aspect of it (But probrably have no issue using scans) . Others just want to hoard game mags to themselves. Others want to make their own preservation endeavor, that no doubt overlaps with countless others like the library of congress, strong museum of play, various videogame museums etc. I am just interested in having these resources available (easily and readily) to anyone and not just some archivist. I'm sure in many years down the road it's going to be retromags scans standing the test of time and being used rather than these other resources. Real mags are destructible. Gated systems can be lost. Widely distributed user backups is the way to go. Which is why I support this site.

[TheRedEye]

There's nothing controversial about preserving the GamePro discs, I just haven't been able to recreate a QuarkXpress environment from the 90s (the files absolutely will not read on modern setups), and I have about 50 other game preservation related projects that take precedence over figuring this out right now. I also don't HAVE them, I have access to them.

[E-Day]

There's nothing controversial about preserving the GamePro discs, I just haven't been able to recreate a QuarkXpress environment from the 90s (the files absolutely will not read on modern setups), and I have about 50 other game preservation related projects that take precedence over figuring this out right now. I also don't HAVE them, I have access to them.

I don't think he was speaking about you directly, just the general environment. People have different opinions on how preservation should be done, and believe in them so much they will cause a huge stink if you don't do it their way, or if you don't scan everything because they think just because you can do something gives you the right to do it.

I apologize if I made it sound like you had the discs in your possession; I just know you had access to them, though not if it was direct access or not.

If you are able to send one of their QuarkXPress files along, I would be happy to try and get it to open since you are occupied with other endeavors. I don't mean an entire archive of stuff; literally one Quark file. I am happy to help if you want it, since GamePro is what interests me the most.

[marktrade]

There's nothing controversial about preserving the GamePro discs, I just haven't been able to recreate a QuarkXpress environment from the 90s (the files absolutely will not read on modern setups),

I'd like to help, too. I can emulate various Mac OS's from the 90s and get QuarkXPress running in those to test it out.

[VGBounceHouse]

The Windows versions of Xpress, in addition to being much faster than the Mac OS versions, were also more compatible. Supposedly the need to read Mac OS forks plus compatibility with odd page layout programs of little interest to Mac users meant writing an entirely different import engine. The late '90s versions of Xpress I used read any file I threw at it, so that might be an alternative.

Having access to digital files would be awesome. The only problem is many times advertising wasn't integrated back then leaving pages and parts of pages blank. I'm in it for the ads as much as the writing lol

[Sean697]

There's nothing controversial about preserving the GamePro discs, I just haven't been able to recreate a QuarkXpress environment from the 90s (the files absolutely will not read on modern setups), and I have about 50 other game preservation related projects that take precedence over figuring this out right now. I also don't HAVE them, I have access to them.

Yes I didn't know it was you who has them. Just taking in generalities. I know you are constantly working on cool stuff. But that's cool to know you have access to them.

[KiwiArcader]

I'm sure in many years down the road it's going to be retromags scans standing the test of time and being used rather than these other resources.

That comment implies that other sites like OGM and even OoPA don't provide scans of reasonable quality, something I'd say is incorrect.

I'm guessing you are only interested in USA produced magazines to make a statement like that in which case your opinion might hold water given the preponderance of local content here. If you are interested in any other regions then there are other sites providing far more content out there.

[Sean697]

That comment implies that other sites like OGM and even OoPA don't provide scans of reasonable quality, something I'd say is incorrect.

I'm guessing you are only interested in USA produced magazines to make a statement like that in which case your opinion might hold water given the preponderance of local content here. If you are interested in any other regions then there are other sites providing far more content out there.

And of course OGM and OoPA. I just didn't want to make a list of scanning sites, Again generalizations. You guys are great too.

[marktrade]

The Windows versions of Xpress, in addition to being much faster than the Mac OS versions, were also more compatible. Supposedly the need to read Mac OS forks plus compatibility with odd page layout programs of little interest to Mac users meant writing an entirely different import engine. The late '90s versions of Xpress I used read any file I threw at it, so that might be an alternative.

Having access to digital files would be awesome. The only problem is many times advertising wasn't integrated back then leaving pages and parts of pages blank. I'm in it for the ads as much as the writing lol

Couldn't resist a little bit of the old Mac vs PC debate, huh? Although I admit to never using Quark back then, the Mac OS 9 version was popular enough that it held back adoption of Mac OS X. Evidently it was fast enough and I'm sure my Mac can handle emulating the older versions.

I just got QuarkXPress 3.32 up and running and it's working fine. I should be able to open anything from the early-to-mid 90s. Ready to test.

[VGBounceHouse]

Couldn't resist a little bit of the old Mac vs PC debate, huh? Although I admit to never using Quark back then, the Mac OS 9 version was popular enough that it held back adoption of Mac OS X. Evidently it was fast enough and I'm sure my Mac can handle emulating the older versions.

I just got QuarkXPress 3.32 up and running and it's working fine. I should be able to open anything from the early-to-mid 90s. Ready to test.

Only speaking from experience developing Quark XPress extensions . The lack of virtual memory was the big issue under Mac OS. This may sound like a joke but sadly it was very real: at an office going over what was needed I noticed a row of people with Macs and XPress loaded, but they seemed to just be talking to each other. I found out they waited ten minutes and sometimes more just for their documents to load. I hooked up the laptop I had with me and logged into their network and the exact same document took seconds under Windows. I used XPress myself for one of my underground magazines and even though the documents weren't nearly as complex the few times I had to do last minute edits away from home on a Mac it was a painful wait just to get the document up.

I did talk to one of the devs when debugging a plugin once and that's how I found out about the new code for opening files. It was just a tangent but I had run into an issue where some PageMaker files wouldn't import into the Mac version but loaded up fine under Windows and I was joking about multiple sneakernet trips, copying to Mac floppy, reading onto Windows with one of those special external floppy drives you could get back then, importing, saving and copying it back.

[RobertDuncan]

It seems like what remaining gaming magazines there are today (EGM) have gone to a very boring page design. If you can manage to find the latest issue of EGM on the newstand, youll notice that the page is just a plain white page with black text and screen shots. It's like theyre trying to look like all the other "normal" magazines. What happened to all the good looking graphics and artwork, with cool looking background patterns and textures? It looks so ugly and boring now.

Amen to that. Part of the reason magazines were run to read was because of he artwork and displays they contained not to mention they had content. Heck I would even miss th e ads if they'd remove them because that like removing a part of history to me.

[E-Day]

It seems like what remaining gaming magazines there are today (EGM) have gone to a very boring page design. If you can manage to find the latest issue of EGM on the newstand, youll notice that the page is just a plain white page with black text and screen shots. It's like theyre trying to look like all the other "normal" magazines. What happened to all the good looking graphics and artwork, with cool looking background patterns and textures? It looks so ugly and boring now.

That is one thing that appealed to me about Hardcore Gamer magazine in the last decade, despite its terrible name. They had fantastic, interesting layouts with a lot of great art on the pages.