Whats your favorite classic video game magazine?

[MetalJuggalo]

For me I think it would have to be PC Accelerator... Its fun, irreverent and doesn't take itself all to seriously.. In a way it reminds me of Classic Game Room and CGR Undertow in a way.... and Star Wars Episode I the PCXL edition had me in stitches... But enough about me... Which was your favorite?

[Sean697]

Easy EGM. It had all the coverage I wanted at the perfect time, the dawn of the 16 bit generation. Lasted all the way to last generation. And I guess is still technically going.

[Phillyman]

As much as I love Nintendo Power, I have to go with EGM as well. Nintendo Power only covered Nintendo products and games, and you need to know about everything else!

[chuckwalla]

EGM(1) definitely.

Wish I had kept all the issues, I threw them away many years ago but kept three of the Buyer's Guides thankfully.

Game Players and Game Pro from the early 1990's came in second.

[RexRogers]

While Nintendo Power was my first vg magazine, I really became partial to EGM. They really couldn't be beat in the amount of coverage they provided. I remember the year end issues being enormous. Almost like those women's magazines that are practically a phone book. Well, maybe not that big, but big.

[pmo1985]

I'm gonna join the crowd here and say EGM. They had Japanese games and coverage that other mags didn't

[E-Day]

I will buck the trend and say I was never a huge fan of EGM. I liked it enough to buy it in the summer when I could find it and at around Christmas because they were absolutely massive, but I wasn't a huge fan of the format of their magazine. I was a GamePro kid, and liked their format better. They were more in depth with reviews and previews, even if they didn't preview as many games. For me it was just a more fun magazine overall. So much so that I would read it from cover to cover, including about games I would never get to play.

I never liked Nintendo Power growing up. I did like it when Future took over the magazine from Nintendo. But the 90s format of the magazine did not do anything for me.

[twiztor]

i've said this before, but as far as i am/was concerned, Nintendo Power IS gaming mags. they were my go-to source, had the best info, the best maps, the funnest articles.

[mbkerr]

Growing up, Nintendo Power was my favorite magazine. I would actually do a ritualistic chant the closer it got to the next issue's arrival in the mailbox.

In college, I really dug PSM Magazine. The humor and design kept me coming back.

Nowadays, I check out Retro Gamer Magazine because not only are the articles incredible, it feels like reading old school magazines, but the articles show us how things were. Just great stuff.

[Areala]

Different magazines for different phases of my life, I suppose.

When I was younger, and before video game magazines were really a "thing", Nintendo Power utterly blew me away. I can't tell you how many times I read that first issue.

As I got a little older, EGM became my go-to mag for info and stuff. Ridiculous amount of content, huge mag size, they were everything you could want.

When I was a junior in high school, my brother discovered Diehard GameFan on the racks at one of the bookstores in the local mall and suddenly it was like, "Holy crap, these people are INSANE and talk about stuff GamePro and EGM wouldn't touch." Hooked.

Once I hit college, PSM (and hell, the PlayStation itself) was making its big splash. Heavy use of Adam Warren (who I knew from my comic obsession for his work on 'Dirty Pair', 'Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal' and later Gen13) for cover and interior art helped sway my hand and yup, 'twas love at first read.

Naturally PC Gamer was pretty much my go-to bible for everything computer-related in the 90s, back when Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Diablo, and Tomb Raider rode roughshod over everything else in the industry.

Post-college though was when the magazines really started to fizzle down. EGM changed almost its entire staff and it didn't feel the same. Nintendo Power was for systems like the GameCube which I wasn't playing at the time. GamePro likewise underwent a format shift. PC Games went under, half their staff joined PC Gamer, the other half went elsewhere or switched to the internet. Stuff changed, and being a woman in her mid-twenties, the magazines weren't being written for people like me any longer. I wasn't a target audience. I continued to play video games, of course. But I was also working on growing my writing skills, and that left less time for reading and gaming. I joined up with a couple of amateur gaming websites, writing content and participating in their forums, and mags just fell by the wayside for a few years.

*huggles*
Areala

[PC509]

EGM, with Gamepro coming in second. There were some others, too, but those two really stick in my head as the best during the dawn of the 16-bit era and I have the most memories with. I stopped reading them in the mid 90's, though.

The others aren't bad by any means, though. Just those were my favorites.

[dragonz]

Mine would be a tossup between EGM or Diehard Gamefan. I didn't discover Gamefan until later on but thought it covered the import scene much better then EGM did.

[pablumatic]

Electronic Gaming Monthly would be my pick. They seemed to have all the scoops back then.

Diehard Gamefan came a little later and while I liked the quality of Gamefan more than EGM, the difficulties I had in getting issues I paid for via subscription soured me a bit on it.

[acer]

I started with Nintendo fun club then onto gamepro and loved it! Sometimes I moved back and forth with EGM and GP early nineties had a sub with NP early too.

It was Die-hard Gamefan that made me serious with the hobby. Yes I did import from japan when I could, I even lived there for two years get my games from the source. It is too bad DGF is not part of this great site!

[Areala]

I started with Nintendo It is too bad DGF is not part of this great site!

Yeah, I wish we could archive GameFan here as well. Sadly, the owner and publisher told us things would not end well if we went down that road, so...

*huggles*

Areala

[kitsunebi]

Well, as a kid, it was pretty much Nintendo Power and Game Player's, but the mags that mean the most to me are EGM and PC Gamer, even though I was in high school by the time I was reading those.

The reason for both was the reviews. I liked EGM's review crew format (copied from Famitsu), but more than that, I always got the feeling they were giving their honest opinions, not just some shallow line of ad copy followed by an arbitrary score (which is the feeling I always got from GamePro, hence why it is my least favorite mag.) And of course it would be hard to complain about the in-depth multi-page reviews in PC Gamer, which I always felt was the superior mag to Computer Gaming World.

[miketheratguy]

Different magazines for different phases of my life, I suppose.

When I was younger, and before video game magazines were really a "thing", Nintendo Power utterly blew me away. I can't tell you how many times I read that first issue.

As I got a little older, EGM became my go-to mag for info and stuff. Ridiculous amount of content, huge mag size, they were everything you could want.

Once I hit college, PSM (and hell, the PlayStation itself) was making its big splash. Heavy use of Adam Warren (who I knew from my comic obsession for his work on 'Dirty Pair', 'Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal' and later Gen13) for cover and interior art helped sway my hand and yup, 'twas love at first read.

This pretty much mirrors my own life. As a kid it was Game Player's and Nintendo Fun Club News, which soon morphed into Nintendo Power (which, to a kid, was pure uncut magazine cocaine). I adored the hell out of that mag until around 1992-3 when I became more interested in EGM. I don't really know what made me make the switch, I think I just liked EGM's relatively more adult tone and review structure. It didn't hurt that by this time I had multiple systems, not just a NES.

EGM remained my favorite magazine for years, especially in the late 90s and 2000, but then PSM came along at around the same time. While I never saw the first issue I happened to spot the second one at a grocery store and, being a huge fan of Castlevania, bought it for the Symphony of the Night cover story. I was quickly impressed by the magazine's clean, colorful layout, rebellious sense of independence (tempered by a genuine love for the Playstation), and amazing pack-ins like stickers for the Playstation lid and memory cards. I quickly subscribed to PSM and stuck with it until around 2001, when I again had acquired too many systems to stick to a magazine devoted to a single one. But man, I loved PSM. Their content had just the right tone of friendliness and enthusiasm, and you're right - the cover and interior art was often astounding. J. Scott Campbell, one of my favorites (and the best at capturing the beauty of the female, in my opinion) did several pieces for them.

I didn't read any mags from around 2002-2005 but then I started getting back into EGM again, eventually subscribing. Soon, however, I would realize that I didn't like the magazine nearly as much as I used to. Much of the staff had changed and I didn't care for the snotty frat boy attitude that they often displayed, most commonly in snarky responses to reader letters. I didn't like their changing review style. And, especially around 2006-2007, I didn't like how thin the magazine became. Long gone were the days of 300 page behemoths, at this point an issue of EGM would frequently top out at around 100 pages (sometimes failing to crack even that), roughly 30-40 percent of those pages being ads.

Throughout the 80s and 90s Gamepro was always kind of a constant second or third place choice. I liked it, but it was never my favorite.

[Areala]

This pretty much mirrors my own life. As a kid it was Game Player's and Nintendo Fun Club News, which soon morphed into Nintendo Power (which, to a kid, was pure uncut magazine cocaine). I adored the hell out of that mag until around 1992-3 when I became more interested in EGM. I don't really know what made me make the switch, I think I just liked EGM's relatively more adult tone and review structure. It didn't hurt that by this time I had multiple systems, not just a NES.

EGM remained my favorite magazine for years, especially in the late 90s and 2000, but then PSM came along at around the same time. While I never saw the first issue I happened to spot the second one at a grocery store and, being a huge fan of Castlevania, bought it for the Symphony of the Night cover story. I was quickly impressed by the magazine's clean, colorful layout, rebellious sense of independence (tempered by a genuine love for the Playstation), and amazing pack-ins like stickers for the Playstation lid and memory cards. I quickly subscribed to PSM and stuck with it until around 2001, when I again had acquired too many systems to stick to a magazine devoted to a single one. But man, I loved PSM. Their content had just the right tone of friendliness and enthusiasm, and you're right - the cover and interior art was often astounding. J. Scott Campbell, one of my favorites (and the best at capturing the beauty of the female, in my opinion) did several pieces for them.

I didn't read any mags from around 2002-2005 but then I started getting back into EGM again, eventually subscribing. Soon, however, I would realize that I didn't like the magazine nearly as much as I used to. Much of the staff had changed and I didn't care for the snotty frat boy attitude that they often displayed, most commonly in snarky responses to reader letters. I didn't like their changing review style. And, especially around 2006-2007, I didn't like how thin the magazine became. Long gone were the days of 300 page behemoths, at this point an issue of EGM would frequently top out at around 100 pages (sometimes failing to crack even that), roughly 30-40 percent of those pages being ads.

Throughout the 80s and 90s Gamepro was always kind of a constant second or third place choice. I liked it, but it was never my favorite.

EGM really took a nose-dive around the time Hsu took the helm. Nothing against the guy, I don't know him, it just seemed like the old guard left and all they had were a bunch of new writers trying to take an old magazine in too radically different a direction. He worked with what he had, but ultimately what he had was far less than the sum of its parts unlike the earlier Harris era where everybody seemed to mesh much better.

PSM under Chris Slate (who is some kind of editing wunderkind, having done more in the world of video game magazines by the time he turned 21 than some people did in a lifetime), always walked a fine line of amusing condescension among the staff tempered with a vaguely-serious-but-we-might-be-kidding sense of snark with their readers. You got the sense they were joking around and it was all in good fun. EGM's staff, on the other hand, just sounded like a bunch of assholes trying to one-up each other, and Seanbaby, while he was amusing, did not help that image in the slightest.

Hoooo boy, J. Scott Campbell. Yeah, he can draw a purty, purty woman, and nobody did Caitlin Fairchild of Gen 13 better. But my heart always belonged to Roxy Spaulding and her punky pink bangs, and nobody but nobody drew Freefall like Adam Warren. Campbell always made her breasts far too large to suit her frame, making her look like a pin-up girl. That worked for Fairchild (and Rainmaker to a lesser extent), but that's not Freefall's body type.

Plus, look at the way the man draws leather with nothing but a pencil.

I rest my case.

*huggles*

Areala

[kitsunebi]

I'm also more of a Adam Warren fan (love Empowered), but does anyone else remember when J.Scott Campbell won an art contest in Nintendo Power issue 6? I definitely had a WTF moment flipping through that issue years later after he'd become famous.

[miketheratguy]

EGM really took a nose-dive around the time Hsu took the helm. Nothing against the guy, I don't know him, it just seemed like the old guard left and all they had were a bunch of new writers trying to take an old magazine in too radically different a direction. He worked with what he had, but ultimately what he had was far less than the sum of its parts unlike the earlier Harris era where everybody seemed to mesh much better.

PSM under Chris Slate (who is some kind of editing wunderkind, having done more in the world of video game magazines by the time he turned 21 than some people did in a lifetime), always walked a fine line of amusing condescension among the staff tempered with a vaguely-serious-but-we-might-be-kidding sense of snark with their readers. You got the sense they were joking around and it was all in good fun. EGM's staff, on the other hand, just sounded like a bunch of assholes trying to one-up each other, and Seanbaby, while he was amusing, did not help that image in the slightest.

Hoooo boy, J. Scott Campbell. Yeah, he can draw a purty, purty woman, and nobody did Caitlin Fairchild of Gen 13 better. But my heart always belonged to Roxy Spaulding and her punky pink bangs, and nobody but nobody drew Freefall like Adam Warren. Campbell always made her breasts far too large to suit her frame, making her look like a pin-up girl. That worked for Fairchild (and Rainmaker to a lesser extent), but that's not Freefall's body type.

Plus, look at the way the man draws leather with nothing but a pencil.

I rest my case.

*huggles*

Areala

See I actually liked the early Hsu era of EGM, but that's probably due more to my overall excitement about the industry at that time (as well as my overall enjoyment of life. I had a good girlfriend during those years. She later became a stripper. Story for another time). But yeah I can see that you came away sensing the same jerky attitude of EGM that I did. In the old days, when the magazine was put together by guys like Martin Alessi and Ed Semrad there seemed to be a less aggressive tone. Their writing was poorer but they seemed more professional overall, they simply didn't seem to have the attitude that came with the Hsu crew. By the early 2000s I began to notice that EGM projected a vibe of self-assurance, or perhaps even cockiness, running throughout every issue. It was a slow process but that helped to sour me on the magazine. Plus I just hated how John Riccardi looked. I don't know how to explain it, I just wanted to smack that kid.

PSM, by contrast, seemed to have a confidence that was more casual and accessible. They didn't have swelled heads or strike me as elitists. They were just passionate fans having fun, and I liked that. Chris Slate was great, I liked that guy. I also liked the Japanese correspondent (can't remember his name, unfortunately). I even liked their silly mascot Chibi-Chan. I liked just about everything about PSM, truth be told. I thought that it was a fine magazine. I wish there were more here in the database (I have every one of the first 50 issues or so, minus number 1, and I constantly struggle with whether I should donate them. Sacrifice my prized collection for convenient digital preservation and the enjoyment of my fellow retro gaming fans? It's incredibly tempting, but it's hard to want to part with them).

J. Scott Campbell does lean towards the top-heavy, and even though I'm an insatiable boob fiend even I don't need to see giant jugs everywhere. I find the small just as attractive as the large, so when I see someone throwing beach balls onto every female it gets kind of tiresome and seems a bit immature. Still, I love the almost sketchy look of the girls that he draws, and find myself primarily a fan of the faces. My god, the man draws such beautiful faces. He creates spunky personality with nothing more than a nose, a mouth, and a pair of eyes. I mean how could a man not fall in love with this?

I'll give this to you though, that is one fine looking pencil-rendered jacket. Great light reflection on the leather.

I'm also more of a Adam Warren fan (love Empowered), but does anyone else remember when J.Scott Campbell won an art contest in Nintendo Power issue 6? I definitely had a WTF moment flipping through that issue years later after he'd become famous.

Ha, I had the EXACT same experience. I remembered thinking that his Nintendo Power game concept - "Lockarm" - seemed incredibly ambitious and creative and I couldn't wait for it to get made. It never did, so I forgot about both the name and the kid who'd come up with it. Then years later, after becoming familiar with Campbell by falling in love with his work in Danger Girl, I happened to be going back through the old issues of NP and did a literal double-take when I read his name. It was kind of amazing to connect my childhood memories of thinking about his game concept to my familiarity with his artwork years later as an adult.

Apparently in issue 200 he came back to the magazine for a retrospective. I'd love to get my hands on that issue and read his article.

[KHANV1CT]

EGM was my gateway mag. I used to love them all though, I can't really choose one.

[Areala]

I'm also more of a Adam Warren fan (love Empowered), but does anyone else remember when J.Scott Campbell won an art contest in Nintendo Power issue 6? I definitely had a WTF moment flipping through that issue years later after he'd become famous.

https://community.retromags.com/blog/6/entry-230-lets-read-nintendo-power-6/

I wrote about that in one of my blog entries a mere...holy crap, five years ago? Good gawd...where's the time gone?!

In the old days, when the magazine was put together by guys like Martin Alessi and Ed Semrad there seemed to be a less aggressive tone. Their writing was poorer but they seemed more professional overall, they simply didn't seem to have the attitude that came with the Hsu crew.

Martin and Ed did so well with EGM, I think, because they were just so passionate about everything. Ed's editorials about CES and E3 read like a kid breathlessly relating to his mom everything he saw in the candy store the other day: "Ohmigawd then Konami took the stage and the guy he showed off this HUUUUUUUUGE alien boss at the end of the new Contra, and then Capcom was all 'Street Fighter II' and Sushi punched, like, four people before security threw him out but he snuck back in through the vent system and got these pictures here, here, and here! Oh, but Nintendo had this big, big, big booth like bigger than the biggest thing ever and I sat in the arcade and played with people half my age and lost so much but I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT AND I WILL BE BACK NEXT YEAR AFTER I SLEEP!!" Those guys were hobbyists and would have been writing about video games even if they weren't getting paid to do it, but they WERE getting paid, and having the time of their lives.

PSM, by contrast, seemed to have a confidence that was more casual and accessible. They didn't have swelled heads or strike me as elitists. They were just passionate fans having fun, and I liked that. Chris Slate was great, I liked that guy. I also liked the Japanese correspondent (can't remember his name, unfortunately). I even liked their silly mascot Chibi-Chan. I liked just about everything about PSM, truth be told. I thought that it was a fine magazine. I wish there were more here in the database (I have every one of the first 50 issues or so, minus number 1, and I constantly struggle with whether I should donate them. Sacrifice my prized collection for convenient digital preservation and the enjoyment of my fellow retro gaming fans? It's incredibly tempting, but it's hard to want to part with them).

That was Bill Paris-san doing the Japanese correspondent thing, at least at first. I think he kinda got swallowed up and merged with Banzai Chibi-chan (kinda of like a Sushi-X in reverse) as the magazine went on, but at least for the first couple of years it was Paris in Tokyo with Chibi as the NESter-like mascot.

J. Scott Campbell does lean towards the top-heavy, and even though I'm an insatiable boob fiend even I don't need to see giant jugs everywhere. I find the small just as attractive as the large, so when I see someone throwing beach balls onto every female it gets kind of tiresome and seems a bit immature. Still, I love the almost sketchy look of the girls that he draws, and find myself primarily a fan of the faces. My god, the man draws such beautiful faces. He creates spunky personality with nothing more than a nose, a mouth, and a pair of eyes. I mean how could a man not fall in love with this?

I'll give this to you though, that is one fine looking pencil-rendered jacket. Great light reflection on the leather.

"Insatiable boob fiend." *ROFL* Yeah...we're gonna get along just fine.

Somebody needs to start a petition to force Nintendo to make Lockarm today. I'd sign that.

*huggles*

Areala

[miketheratguy]

Martin and Ed did so well with EGM, I think, because they were just so passionate about everything. Ed's editorials about CES and E3 read like a kid breathlessly relating to his mom everything he saw in the candy store the other day: "Ohmigawd then Konami took the stage and the guy he showed off this HUUUUUUUUGE alien boss at the end of the new Contra, and then Capcom was all 'Street Fighter II' and Sushi punched, like, four people before security threw him out but he snuck back in through the vent system and got these pictures here, here, and here! Oh, but Nintendo had this big, big, big booth like bigger than the biggest thing ever and I sat in the arcade and played with people half my age and lost so much but I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT AND I WILL BE BACK NEXT YEAR AFTER I SLEEP!!" Those guys were hobbyists and would have been writing about video games even if they weren't getting paid to do it, but they WERE getting paid, and having the time of their lives.

That was Bill Paris-san doing the Japanese correspondent thing, at least at first. I think he kinda got swallowed up and merged with Banzai Chibi-chan (kinda of like a Sushi-X in reverse) as the magazine went on, but at least for the first couple of years it was Paris in Tokyo with Chibi as the NESter-like mascot.

"Insatiable boob fiend." *ROFL* Yeah...we're gonna get along just fine.

Somebody needs to start a petition to force Nintendo to make Lockarm today. I'd sign that.

*huggles*

Areala

I think that's a good summary of the Ed and Martin days. All eras of EGM had enthusiasm, but there was a sense of childlike wonderment to the first crew. I think it's because the industry was expanding, new things (such as CES) were being introduced, and the guys at the magazine were generally just having lots of fun. Later EGM...Idunno. I have to make the frat boy comparison again. It just seemed like they displayed more entitlement and cynicism. Probably the best example of the fun enthusiasm of early EGM that I can remember was when, in the little self-introductions that the crew would open each issue with, Ed's box read something like "Old Ed is getting used to married life but he misses those greasy nights of pizza and Super Mario 3".

Ahh, right, Paris-san. I remember now. I'd also forgotten that Chibi-Chan was called Banzai. The mascot wound up kind of usurping Bill? Did he start disappearing entirely?

Wait, we're going to get along fine because I'm an insatiable boob fiend? Is that because you too are a fellow boob fiend? But you're a female right? So wait...does that mean that we're going to get along so well because you yourself have stupendous boobs? Lol maybe I shouldn't try to question any of this..

[Areala]

Ahh, right, Paris-san. I remember now. I'd also forgotten that Chibi-Chan was called Banzai. The mascot wound up kind of usurping Bill? Did he start disappearing entirely?

Bill eventually left the magazine, although the Nihon Game Otaku column lasted a little longer than he did. Banzai Chibi-chan, as I recall, went the way of the dodo by the time they started their serious PS2 coverage around their third year but before he did, he and Paris kind of merged personalities. Early PSM, Banzai and Bill were supposed to be two separate people, much like Howard and NESter from Nintendo Power. Later Bill continued to write the column but it was all under Chibi-chan's by-line.

Max Everingham took over Nihon Game Otaku by 2001, though at that point it was less a column and more a sidebar, and half the information was reprinted from Famitsu's sales charts at press time; the column was gone entirely circa 2002.

Wait, we're going to get along fine because I'm an insatiable boob fiend? Is that because you too are a fellow boob fiend?

Yes.

But you're a female right?

Last I looked.

So wait...does that mean that we're going to get along so well because you yourself have stupendous boobs?

Well, I've never had them described as 'stupendous' before, but my wife likes them well enough, so...

Lol maybe I shouldn't try to question any of this..

It just means I'm a lesbian. Nobody around here seems bothered by it, but I forget newer members probably aren't reading the backlog of forum posts where I announced my wedding and such. No worries.

*huggles*

Areala

[miketheratguy]

It just means I'm a lesbian. Nobody around here seems bothered by it, but I forget newer members probably aren't reading the backlog of forum posts where I announced my wedding and such. No worries.

*huggles*

Areala

Ohhhhhh, okay. No, I haven't gone too deep into the archives so that helps things to make a lot more sense. Well belated congratulations on your wedding then! Boobs FTW!!!

When did PSM actually end? Did you follow it that long? I never really followed system-specific magazines after that so I don't know exactly what happened next but as far as I could tell the magazine folder and then a different one (simply called Playstation, or Playstation Magazine) eventually showed up in its place. I'm probably wrong about the details.