Thought about sharing my collection (20,000 scanned mags from all kinds of sources)

[RETROMAG]

3 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I already mentioned them above, coincidentally.  My favorite mag started as "Game Player's PC Strategy Guide" before later changing its title to "Game Players PC Entertainment."  The month following its final issue, the mag was relaunched as PC Gamer (the American mag from GP Publications).  The three titles are really one continuous mag in my mind, and I love them all.  Of course, the UK version of PC Gamer published by Future was never as good, in my opinion, so I was quite disappointed when PC Gamer USA was bought out by Future and became nothing but a reprint of the UK version.  But my gaming interests lie almost exclusively in the late 80s-90s, anyway, so all of the issues I'm interested in were published before the buyout.

Wow, that is amazing. I love to hear about peoples interests.

I know what you mean. A magazine speaks to you and is the collection and combination of heart soul thoughts and ideas. some resonate to you more than others, the artistic nature such as how a page or even a advert is presented means some article can be so different even if on the same game.

I always felt EGM had great covers but not very good content.

Did you read EGM at all? What did you think of EGM?

And what made you start the website? Out of interest..

[kitsunebi]

Early EGM is pretty terrible in my opinion and was strictly of interest to kids.  By the late 90s/early 2000s I think it had improved a bit and while it certainly wasn't mature, it was at least offering much better video game journalism than other popular American video game mags like GamePro and Nintendo Power.

I didn't start the website.  That would be Phillyman, I believe.  I would have to assume the reason was the obvious one - to create a place where anyone interested in preserving these magazines would be able to contribute and share their efforts with others.

[RETROMAG]

5 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Early EGM is pretty terrible in my opinion and was strictly of interest to kids.  By the late 90s/early 2000s I think it had improved a bit and while it certainly wasn't mature, it was at least offering much better video game journalism than other popular American video game mags like GamePro and Nintendo Power.

I didn't start the website.  That would be Phillyman, I believe.  I would have to assume the reason was the obvious one - to create a place where anyone interested in preserving these magazines would be able to contribute and share their efforts with others.

Lol yeah the EGM content was pretty terrible, but I did not want to offend any EGM fans. But the covers were very often amazing! lolol.

Do you have a picture of your game room / collection? You can pm me if you'd like. Thanks for the chat was fun!

[kitsunebi]

1 minute ago, RETROMAG said:

Do you have a picture of your game room / collection? You can pm me if you'd like. Thanks for the chat was fun!

Ha.  ALL of my games and most of my mags are in a storage unit in a completely different country.  So, nope.  No pictures.

Everything I own these days is on digits.

[RETROMAG]

Just now, kitsunebi77 said:

Ha.  ALL of my games and most of my mags are in a storage unit in a completely different country.  So, nope.  No pictures.

Everything I own these days is on digits.

Yeah digital is the future! Do u prefer printed medium or digital?

[kitsunebi]

Digital for ease of access/convenience and storage.  Much easier to find what I'm looking for if all of my mags are at my fingertips on a single hard drive than if they're packed away in dozens of giant cardboard boxes.

[RETROMAG]

22 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Digital for ease of access/convenience and storage.  Much easier to find what I'm looking for if all of my mags are at my fingertips on a single hard drive than if they're packed away in dozens of giant cardboard boxes.

Not only that, you can't search via compute search engines on printed medium. Combination is sweet though you can search on PC but then also sometimes having books on shelves can be difficult to i.e organize, space, etc.

[Hoagie]

13 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I already mentioned them above, coincidentally.  My favorite mag started as "Game Player's PC Strategy Guide" before later changing its title to "Game Players PC Entertainment."  The month following its final issue, the mag was relaunched as PC Gamer (the American mag from GP Publications).  The three titles are really one continuous mag in my mind, and I love them all.  Of course, the UK version of PC Gamer published by Future was never as good, in my opinion, so I was quite disappointed when PC Gamer USA was bought out by Future and became nothing but a reprint of the UK version.  But my gaming interests lie almost exclusively in the late 80s-90s, anyway, so all of the issues I'm interested in were published before the buyout.

I may be wrong, but to me PC Entertainment was rebranded as PC Gamer because they had been bought by Future/Imagine, with almost the same logo but a different editorial line (same thing for the British and US versions of CD-Rom Today, I think). However, when the British journalist Gary Whitta became editor in chief of PC Gamer USA later, it certainly had an impact on the content.

BTW, have you heard that William R. Trotter, the strategy/wargame expert of PC Entertainment/PC Gamer, passed away two months ago ?

[kitsunebi]

4 hours ago, Hoagie said:

I may be wrong, but to me PC Entertainment was rebranded as PC Gamer because they had been bought by Future/Imagine, with almost the same logo but a different editorial line (same thing for the British and US versions of CD-Rom Today, I think). However, when the British journalist Gary Whitta became editor in chief of PC Gamer USA later, it certainly had an impact on the content.

You're partially right.  It's true that Future bought GP Publications and rebranded Game Players PC Entertainment as PC Gamer.  It continued to be published under the GP Publications name and featured 100% different content from the UK edition.

However, after the first year of publication, in June 1995, the owner of Future, Chris Anderson, sold Future to Pearson PLC, but retained GP Publications as his sole company, renaming it Imagine Media and relocating to San Francisco.  Later, in 1999, Future bought itself back out from Pearson PLC, and Anderson rejoined the company, bringing his Imagine Media with him.

So while PC Gamer USA was editorially/content wise a completely different mag right from its launch, from 1995-1999, PC Gamer USA and PC Gamer UK were completely different mags owned by 2 different companies.  During Gary Whitta's era on PC Gamer USA, it had no official ties to the UK version.

[KiwiArcader]

Yeah, the mag was a totally different beast to the UK edition. I know as I have a truckload of the UK version on my scanning pile, and I actually owned the first 90 or so issues of the USA version back in the day before I dumped some at work and burned the rest thanks to shenanigans around here a while ago. Sometime in 2002 Imagine disappeared and Future took over the magazine and it's really been a pale version of it's old self ever since.

I'm only really keen on getting the GP/Imagine versions scanned but as I have a pile of later issues I will scan them, it's just the interest factor isn't really there for those Future branded issues.

[RETROMAG]

On 4/24/2018 at 2:17 PM, KiwiArcader said:

Yeah, the mag was a totally different beast to the UK edition. I know as I have a truckload of the UK version on my scanning pile, and I actually owned the first 90 or so issues of the USA version back in the day before I dumped some at work and burned the rest thanks to shenanigans around here a while ago. Sometime in 2002 Imagine disappeared and Future took over the magazine and it's really been a pale version of it's old self ever since.

I'm only really keen on getting the GP/Imagine versions scanned but as I have a pile of later issues I will scan them, it's just the interest factor isn't really there for those Future branded issues.

Shenanigans? What happened at your work?

Hows life goin?

[KiwiArcader]

Shenanigans were here at Retromags. Work was just a recipient of mags as a result of it. Not worth rehashing old crap!!!

[kitsunebi]

Yes what's done is done.  At least until the day I create a temporal displacement device that will allow me to send my hand back through time and slap your face moments before you give away/burn a complete collection of the mags I most want to see around here.  I have no idea what the shenanigans you're talking about are and I don't want to know.  But I'm fairly certain that PC Gamer never did anything to you.  HOW COULD YOU BE SO CRUEL?

 

 

 

[RETROMAG]

Lol ! You guys have lots of stories to tell!

[Trinity]

On 4/17/2018 at 5:34 AM, LiterallyHitler said:

(Ongoing mags - 4,000 / 220 GB more, but you know about it.)

Did anything ever come of this?

[kitsunebi]

6 hours ago, Trinity said:

Did anything ever come of this?

Read the title of the thread.  He "thought about sharing."  Then changed his mind.

Seriously, it could still be coming at some point, so I don't want to accuse the OP of giving up.

However, I will advise people to take all announcements of intentions to do things to be taken with a grain of salt.  Every year we get a half dozen or so posts from people announcing their plans to throw their hat into the scanning ring and offer up magazine scans.  Less than 1 in 10 or so ever follow through.  Almost all of our first-time scanners don't bother make unnecessary announcements of their intentions to scan something before they do it - they just go ahead and scan and edit the mag and then contact us to find out how to share it.

In the case of scans, people change their mind once they realize how much time it takes, or that they will have to destroy their physical copy in the process.  Since all the OP was talking about doing was creating a torrent or uploading the files to archive, it seems more likely they just lost interest, or perhaps they'll get around to it someday, who knows?

[SuperFancy]

I took a little look through the files he’s offering and quite a lot of them are from Emuparadise - so there is already a archive of them, if you are willing to do a little bit of work.

[SuperFancy]

Was hoping to edit while I checked a source... but doh... anyway most of the computer ones are from http://www.abandonware-magazines.org/liste.php.

[kitsunebi]

Yeah, ALL of them are taken from somewhere.  I don't think he ever claimed to be offering anything exclusive or new.  I think there were 2 selling points:

1. a whole lot of mags, originally from a bunch of different sites, now all in one place
2.  all of the mags have been compressed into lower quality PDFs for people who are more interested in saving disk space than having high quality scans.

But you're right in pointing out that there's no reason to get too upset if this never materializes, since most if not all of the mags can be found elsewhere. 

[gorostilllives]

Has this material ever surfaced?

[kitsunebi]

As stated previously, the original files from which these PDFs were derived is available from the sites on which they originated. 

Unless you hear otherwise from the OP, please consider this a dead topic.

[jonphilmitch]

@kitsunebi77A little while back on my way to work I saw a bunch of PC mags (both PC gamer and hardware mags) all tied up out by the garbage on the street. I would have loved to dig in and see what was there, but in NYC the fear of bedbugs is very real. It was a real shame.