New Release - Game Players Nintendo Guide Vol.5 No.08 (August 1992)

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Game Players Nintendo Guide Vol.5 No.08 (August 1992)

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[JHD]

I was not playing console games in the 1990s -- I essentially skipped from the 2600 to the PlayStation -- so I never paid any attention to the NES and SNES magazines.  

That said, does anyone have a sense of how well titles like this sold BITD? Personally, I would only have purchased an occasional issue if there was in-depth coverage of a game that I had (or that I planned to get). I simply could not justify buying it on a regular basis, much less subscribing. There would be many issues with no relevant content. 

Obviously, today with generally much larger collections, and emulation, the situation is much different. 

 

 

[kitsunebi]

3 hours ago, JHD said:

I was not playing console games in the 1990s -- I essentially skipped from the 2600 to the PlayStation -- so I never paid any attention to the NES and SNES magazines.  

That said, does anyone have a sense of how well titles like this sold BITD? Personally, I would only have purchased an occasional issue if there was in-depth coverage of a game that I had (or that I planned to get). I simply could not justify buying it on a regular basis, much less subscribing. There would be many issues with no relevant content. 

Obviously, today with generally much larger collections, and emulation, the situation is much different.

From your comments, it sounds like there was one enormous difference between you and the target audience of this magazine - your age.

If you were a 2600 gamer and then didn't get into gaming again until the PlayStation era, you would have already been grown by the time gaming mags relevant to the PlayStation were printed.  But people buying this magazine were children who owned a Nintendo system.  And unlike older people who are interested in games they own or will eventually buy, children (like myself) looked to these mags NOT for information about the games they owned, but for pictures and information about all the games they WISHED they could own, but probably never would, due to being a child with little to no spending money.  I used to read Nintendo Power and "play" the games in my mind by imagining myself moving along the screenshot-maps they printed, since that was the closest I was going to get to actually playing most of those games.  So pretty much ALL of the content is relevant to a child, I would say. 

 

[JHD]

 

That is an interesting perspective, thank-you. It never would have occurred to me that the target audience was so young. 

 

Yes, by 1992 I was an adult, out of school, and employed. While I had a (modest) income, I also had more pressing things to buy than gaming magazines. 

 

Even back in the early-1980s, I never read gaming magazines -- partially because I had no independent income with which to purchase them, and mostly due to the lack of distribution. Stores in my neighbourhood did not seem to stock them; I certainly do not recall having seen any on local newsstands. 

[kitsunebi]

10 minutes ago, JHD said:

 

That is an interesting perspective, thank-you. It never would have occurred to me that the target audience was so young. 

 

Yes, by 1992 I was an adult, out of school, and employed. While I had a (modest) income, I also had more pressing things to buy than gaming magazines. 

 

Even back in the early-1980s, I never read gaming magazines -- partially because I had no independent income with which to purchase them, and mostly due to the lack of distribution. Stores in my neighbourhood did not seem to stock them; I certainly do not recall having seen any on local newsstands. 

Not being a NES/SNES gamer, you probably haven't perused too many of the magazines that covered them.  If you did, it's pretty obvious they were not targeted at adults.  For that matter, neither were the systems or games.  While there were most definitely adults who played them as well, 8-bit and 16-bit systems and games were exclusively marketed towards kids and teens (in the USA, at any rate.)  During those years, adults who played games did so on computers for the most part.  The PlayStation era is when the age range began to skew older, although it was mostly due to a generation of Nintendo/Sega gamers who had come of age but were still interested in playing games.  And as the age gap between console gamers and computer gamers began to disappear, so did the differences in the types of games which appeared on those platforms.  Fast forward to today when there's virtually no difference between PC gaming and console gaming (again, in the USA.)