Missing Magazines in the Database

[lytron]

Dunno if you have this here, just a list of everything I can think of.

 

Germany

• TOTAL! - Different from the British version, ran from June 1993 to December 2000
• Club Nintendo - German Nintendo power, chief of staff were Nintendo employees who also worked on the German translations of the games. Ran from 1989 to 2002.
• MAN!AC - Started in November 1993, changed name in 2008 to M! Games
• N-Zone - Started in June 1997.
• Retro Gamer - started in August 2012

South Korea

• Game Power
• PC Champ
• Net Power
• Meca Power Zine

Japan

• Satellaview Tsushin - Famitsu Spin-off
• Gameboy - Too bad it actually was called that way. Hard to find
• Family Computer Magazine - AKA Famimaga
• Hippon Super!
• And some MSX/PC stuff, like Login, Basic Magazine and so on...

[SuperFancy]

I'm in Tokyo for a few weeks soon - I plan to find some of the Game Boy & Famitsu magazines and i'll be happy to share some scans

[kitsunebi]

I've got Japan covered.  I have a list of about 50 different Japanese titles I need to add covers and databases for.  Obviously this will take some time.  By the time I finish, I expect we'll have more Japanese covers than USA and UK combined in our galleries.

As for other countries, we can create a cover gallery for anything you'd like to add covers to.  There isn't much point in creating empty galleries, but if you've got covers to upload, let me know. If you have complete information on a title we could add a database as well (how many issues, publishing frequency, dates (if other than monthly), numbering conventions (issue xxx, vol.xx no.xx, etc.)

[lytron]

Thanks alot!

I just found out that besides the aforementioned "Gameboy" magazine, there is -of course- the "Gameboy Tsushin" (which translates to... Gameboy magazine), which adds to the confusion. I add a pic of the "Gameboy" magazine I meant (from a Japanese auction), where exactly that issue is of particular interest for me (because it definitely contains development screenshots of Secret of Mana).

Some of these Korean mags seem to be scanned here, but I don't know if I should link this. If not, remove this line. BTW had Korea a quite big mobile gaming market around the second half of the 2000s (which is pre-smartphone-era), so I guess there were quite a number of magazines focussed on that which cover games that mostly are lost (Like the very Legend-of-Mana-lookalike "Dragon Lord EX"... seems like my game preferences are obvious by now).

Besides that - is it of help to post auction pictures of magazine covers and their TOC, or do you get in trouble because they are done by someone who is not asked if we use his picture?

[kitsunebi]

8 hours ago, lytron said:

Thanks alot!

I just found out that besides the aforementioned "Gameboy" magazine, there is -of course- the "Gameboy Tsushin" (which translates to... Gameboy magazine), which adds to the confusion. I add a pic of the "Gameboy" magazine I meant (from a Japanese auction), where exactly that issue is of particular interest for me (because it definitely contains development screenshots of Secret of Mana).

Some of these Korean mags seem to be scanned here, but I don't know if I should link this. If not, remove this line. BTW had Korea a quite big mobile gaming market around the second half of the 2000s (which is pre-smartphone-era), so I guess there were quite a number of magazines focussed on that which cover games that mostly are lost (Like the very Legend-of-Mana-lookalike "Dragon Lord EX"... seems like my game preferences are obvious by now).

Besides that - is it of help to post auction pictures of Magazine Covers and their TOC, or do you get in trouble because they are done by someone who is not asked if we use his picture?

Thanks for the link.  I've never seen Korean mags before.  I would have expected them to have Starcraft on the cover of every issue. Korea is definitely focused mainly on PC and mobile gaming, a pretty big difference from Japan, where mobile is huge but PC gaming nowadays is just some sweaty guys reading adult VN's full of naked anime girls.  Not sure why PCs are shunned as legit gaming machines in Japan, but I always assumed Korea kept their distance from consoles due in some part to their Japanese manufacture.  (Surprise, there's still quite a bit of animosity between the two countries.)

I only looked at it briefly, so I could be wrong, but it seems that those Korean scans are being offered on the publisher's website.  So there's obviously nothing wrong or illegal about reading them.  They aren't packaged for downloading and they've disabled right-clicking, so anyone wanting to save copies would have to put in a bit more effort, but they can be browsed on-site.

Regarding the Game Boy magazine(s) you're referring to, I'm aware of them and will add them when I can (did I say I have a list of 50 Japanese titles to add?  I just counted, and it's actually over 100)

As for eBay photos, I doubt those people would ever notice.  First they'd have to visit our site.  Then, they'd have to go to that issue's DB page.  Most of our users probably don't even know we have a magazine database - they just go to the download section to download our scans, and never once venture into the other sections of the site.  That said, I try not to use eBay photos if I can help it, not because I'm worried about someone getting upset, but because they're almost always poor quality photos taken on a phone.  If I can find nothing else, I might use one, after editing it, but only as a last resort.  It doesn't really hurt anything to upload an image to the TOC - it can always be deleted once I get around to adding the cover to that issue.  But I wouldn't spend too much time doing stuff like that - as I said, very few people are going to ever see it in the first place.

 

[lytron]

Yeah, that adult visual novel PC audience exists since the MSX/FM Towns/FM Marty era. I think mostly because Sony and Nintendo both censor the few adult games they allow on their consoles. Besides that: Maybe it was a kind of downward spiral - no Japanese game developer cared for the PC, because there is no big PC audience in the first place, because not many games for the Japanese audience are produced for the PC and so on. My first thought was: "PCs are big, and they take up a lot of space, and Japanese homes don't have a lot of space", but there are enough photos on the internet that prove: Many Japanese are inventive enough to get whole gamesets into their flats.

Yeah, maybe the Koreans simply put everything StarCraft-related into its own magazine. Unbelievable that this game got THAT big. Even though it is excellent.

Can you provide the names on that list, or would that too much work (work time that you rather want to spend on actually scanning those ;D)?

I guess I'll stay back from uploading those covers/TOCs then. It's no use when nobody uses it.

[kitsunebi]

2 hours ago, lytron said:

Yeah, that adult visual novel PC audience exists since the MSX/FM Towns/FM Marty era. I think mostly because Sony and Nintendo both censor the few adult games they allow on their consoles. Besides that: Maybe it was a kind of downward spiral - no Japanese game developer cared for the PC, because there is no big PC audience in the first place, because not many games for the Japanese audience are produced for the PC and so on. My first thought was: "PCs are big, and they take up a lot of space, and Japanese homes don't have a lot of space", but there are enough photos on the internet that prove: Many Japanese are inventive enough to get whole gamesets into their flats.

Most everyone in Japan owns a PC, they just don't use it for games.  I feel like computers used to be quite popular for gaming back in the 80s, but once consoles like the PC Engine came out with a CD attachment, many of those users started switching to consoles.

My theory is this: in America (the only other gaming scene I'm familiar with), games are bought mostly by gamers.  And while that may be a lot of people, it still isn't mainstream, and developers don't mainly cater to a casual audience.  Mainstream is when those gamers' kid sister and parents are also buying/playing games.  Which is what games are in Japan: MAINSTREAM.  In the west, we get a lot of Japanese games made for the Japanese gamer, but we get almost none of their mainstream (i.e. casual) games.  The reason being that we simply don't have the market for the thousands of games released in Japan aimed at mom, dad, and little sis.  There were a total of 1850 PS2 games released in America.  Meanwhile, in Japan, there were 2875 games for the PS2, and 1890 of them were never released outside of Japan.  That means 66% of Japan's PS2 library was exclusive to Japan.  And most of those were casual games.

PCs have always appealed to the hardcore gamer.  In America, this is a significant portion of the game-buying audience, so it makes sense for developers to support the PC.  In Japan, however, the largest percentage of game-buyers fall into the casual audience, and so it makes more sense to develop for the much cheaper and less intimidating consoles.

Recently it's all becoming moot anyway, as mobile devices continue to eat away at console sales.  Pretty soon, consoles will be in the same situation as the PC - a device considered something only a hardcore gamer would have an interest in.

[kitsunebi]

Reply part 2

6 hours ago, lytron said:

Yeah, maybe the Koreans simply put everything StarCraft-related into its own magazine. Unbelievable that this game got THAT big. Even though it is excellent.

The first time I visited Korea was in 2009, and there was a station on TV that aired Starcraft matches 24 hours per day.  There were still giant billboards for Starcraft in downtown Seoul.  It was insane.

6 hours ago, lytron said:

Can you provide the names on that list, or would that too much work (work time that you rather want to spend on actually scanning those ;D)?

Sorry, they're all written in a notebook I keep by my computer or I could just copy/paste the list here.  It's just a list of titles I need to add covers and database entries for, though, not a list of magazines I actually own and will scan.  I've got plenty enough already to keep me busy scanning until I die, though, so don't worry about that.

[lytron]

That's a good point. And with that argument ("PC is for hardcore gamers") we can re-unite the threads with the StarCraft boom of Korea! They had recently a short report about Gaming in South Korea on television. The players moved on to League of Legends and such, they play about two years professionally and make their fortune in that span. But, well, for that time, they have to do nothing in their lifes but play. Which defies my personal definition of the value of games, but hey, who am I to judge, and besides that, its business, not entertainment.

I heard of that StarCraft TV channel, too. I think I read on wikipedia that it closed down now (of course, Blizzard officially stopped the support of the original StarCraft around the turn of this decade), or it moved on. But there was a twitch channel that had re-runs of those matches all day! xD

If I could make a wish, please look for Japanese mags around mid-1993 and mid-1995. That would be very helpful for my "research" in Beta screens. Mid-1993, as I mentioned, because of Secret of Mana, and the mid-1995 because Sep/Oct 1995 was the release time of a big load of most-important-SNES-RPGs-ever: Tenchi Souzou, Tactics Ogre, Bounty Sword, Seiken Densetsu 3. But actually everything from Japan would be great; I surely will find something of interest in almost every mag!

[snatcher123]

Hello lytron,

most of the German magazines you mentioned (all apart from Club Nintendo) can legally be downloaded on this site: http://www.kultmags.com/

There is a ton more stuff to get from that site, I highly recommend it!

Cheers

[lytron]

Just wanted to say that I found another Japanese one, the "Super Soft Magazine". Don't know if this might be a spin-off of the Basic Magazine. Did you have that one on your list?

[kitsunebi]

9 hours ago, snatcher123 said:

Hello lytron,

most of the German magazines you mentioned (all apart from Club Nintendo) can legally be downloaded on this site: http://www.kultmags.com/

There is a ton more stuff to get from that site, I highly recommend it!

Cheers

Er...what is it exactly that makes you think it's "legal?"  They make it clear (in English, even) that they aren't associated in any way with any publisher.  That makes them no more legal than we are.  Not that I have a problem with it, of course, I'm just sayin'.

[kitsunebi]

6 hours ago, lytron said:

Just wanted to say that I found another Japanese one, the "Super Soft Magazine". Don't know if this might be a spin-off of the Basic Magazine. Did you have that one on your list?

Yep, but it isn't actually a separate magazine.  It was a supplement included with Basic magazine that covered arcade games.  You can actually download several scans of that one from archive.org.

[snatcher123]

9 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Er...what is it exactly that makes you think it's "legal?"  They make it clear (in English, even) that they aren't associated in any way with any publisher.  That makes them no more legal than we are.  Not that I have a problem with it, of course, I'm just sayin'.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but contrary to your retromags.com (which I like a lot by the way), the owner of the site got in contact with all of the respective copyright owners of the magazines he offers for download to seek for approval to do so. For those magazines, he was unable to identify or get in contact with the person/entity that holds the rights, he will remove them immediately as soon as he receives a complaint from them.

This information can be found in the 'Das Projekt' and 'Neuigkeiten' sections of his site which are in German, so you may have missed them.

The responses from the old publishers have been very positive with the consensus that he is conserving a part of gaming history with his project and many even offered him old issues they had lying around to complete some of his series.

His project is non-profit also and he even puts in his own money to buy old stuff to put online. He is also reliant on donations from personal magazine collections, which I gladly offered myself to help fill gaps in his database.

I deliberately left out Club Nintendo Magazine in my answer to lytron since Nintendo would never give their approval to distribute their IP of course. But all other magazines from lytrons original post except Retro Gamer, which is too recent to even consider, are safe to obtain from kultmags.com in my opinion.

[kitsunebi]

I admit I know nothing of German copyright law, so you may be right and getting written permission from a magazine's editor or publisher may be enough to grant full authorization.  In America it's a bit more of a tangled web where it's kind of impossible to pin permission down to a single person when dealing with a publication like a magazine where dozens of people contributed to it in different capacities under different types of contracts granting them different amounts of ownership rights over those contributions.  And that doesn't even cover the advertising.   Still, you're right that the above website has at least reached out to someone to get their blessing (whether that makes it 100% legal or not is a question for a lawyer, I guess.)

I wonder if any of the mags being offered on the site are still being produced?  If so, kudos to them for being so generous.  Once a mag and/or publisher goes out of business, they have less reason to be so strict, of course.  We've had several people who worked in the industry in the past come to the site and express interest in obtaining scans of issues they worked on but no longer have copies of.  But for mags still being produced, it's usually more complicated.  American publishers generally won't openly allow free distribution of anything they have the potential to charge money for, even though they almost never make older content available, even at a price - in large part due to the copyright clusterf$%# mentioned above.  Unlike books, things like magazines are generally meant to be printed once and sold for a strictly limited time, so how to go about dividing any further profits down the line from reprint sales is something that usually isn't taken into account when drawing up contracts, which is probably why official digital archives of mags are so rare.  And if digital reprints ever do show up, they're almost always incomplete (the ads are usually the first thing to go.)

The bottom line is, with permission or without, fan preservation sites are the only real hope we have of getting these mags out there.

Btw, I LOLed a bit at the part about the guy at the above site spending his own money to buy stuff to scan like that was something unusual.  I thought it was obvious, but that's what we ALL do.  Aside from 3 issues I received as a donation, I bought every single mag I've ever scanned, as well as my scanning equipment, with my own money when I decided it was time to stop being a leecher and start giving something back.  Projects like these have to be non-profit.  The minute we or anybody else charges money for their scans is the minute they start begging to be shut down and possibly litigated against.  By being non-profit, we generally avoid the ire of any of the myriad assortment of people out there who may have a stake in the rights to the issues.  And we also have the exact same policy of immediately removing any content at the request of a rights-holder, as stated on our home page.

All talk of download legalities and copyrights aside, for the record, this thread is about missing magazines in our database.  Our database section has nothing to do with scanned magazines or our downloads section, and is simply a database of information.  Our goal is to have ALL gaming mags archived in our database, regardless of how old or new they are, or whether they're owned by Nintendo or ex-publishers of Gamefan. Mags that are not allowed to be scanned still need to be in the database, so there's no need to withhold information about a mag just because it doesn't meet the requirements to be allowed for scanning.

[lytron]

Well, that's a in-depth discussion I started here, as it seems.

First of all: Thanks to snatcher123 for the link, I didn't recognize your post when I wrote the last answer.

@kitsunebi77: How is the Japanese copyright law on this stuff, do you know that?

On "If these German mags on that page are out of print": I'm pretty sure it's a mixed bag. Mags like "Dos-Trend", "ASM" and all the Amiga mags are surely long dead, while things like the PC-Games and PC-Action will still be around (but they are published at least since the 90s, so these scans there might be no current issues). But it might even get a bit more complicated, I remembered that when I asked in a kiosk for the "Total!" magazine, the owner told me that the "Man!ac" is the follow-up to it. I highly doubt that this is true, but one has to do some bigger research if any of these old mags are just rebranded and now property of a rebranded publisher or another publisher who bought up the original one... big headaches promised for that.

Besides that, just a random thought: Have you ever thought about a tag system where you can tag magazines in your magazine database with games from your game database, which makes it easier to find magazines easier which cover these games?

[kitsunebi]

2 minutes ago, lytron said:

Besides that, just a random thought: Have you ever thought about a tag system where you can tag magazines in your Magazine Database with games from your game database, which makes it easier to find magazines easier which cover these games?

ＩI'm not sure if the software would allow for that, but perhaps Philly knows the answer?  If the contents have been logged in the description, you can just set the drop down search bar to "issues" and search for mention of whatever game you're looking for.  Unfortunately, very few mags have had their contents logged.