Wanted to Buy: GameFan Station Magazine(s)?

[GameRaveTV]

Hello! 

Looking for The Tomb Raider issue of Diehard GameFan's Station Magazine (pic below) and any other issue of it aside from the premiere issue (blue cover with the system on it).


Thanks!

[Areala]

Wish I could help. I'd love a copy of that issue myself. I'm a giant Tomb Raider fan.

*huggles*
Areala

[SynthMilk]

Can anyone confirm if there were other issues besides the two versions of the premiere?  I recently got a copy of the blue one and was pretty disappointed with both the content and the design/aesthetics.  Sadly, a PlayStation-only Gamefan this is not.  Maybe it could've established an interesting identity if it had survived a little longer, but this was not a great start.

I was reading a Gamefan editorial recently where DH was expressing his frustration with some other PlayStation-centric publication getting the 'official' designation from Sony, and how poor the quality of that magazine was; but this attempt from Metropolis is certainly nothing to brag about.  I can understand why they opted not to include the 'Gamefan Presents' badge on the standard/blue edition.

The Lara Croft cover design is a little less painful.

[GameRaveTV]

12 hours ago, SynthMilk said:

Can anyone confirm if there were other issues besides the two versions of the premiere?  I recently got a copy of the blue one and was pretty disappointed with both the content and the design/aesthetics.  Sadly, a PlayStation-only Gamefan this is not.  Maybe it could've established an interesting identity if it had survived a little longer, but this was not a great start.

I was reading a Gamefan editorial recently where DH was expressing his frustration with some other PlayStation-centric publication getting the 'official' designation from Sony, and how poor the quality of that magazine was; but this attempt from Metropolis is certainly nothing to brag about.  I can understand why they opted not to include the 'Gamefan Presents' badge on the standard/blue edition.

The Lara Croft cover design is a little less painful.

As a Graphic Designer, I can 1001% agree - the magazine is problematic in a ton of ways. It feels like it was slapped together with no real oversight. I wonder if they were just trying to see if anyone would care about the standalone PSX one.

 

[SynthMilk]

12 hours ago, GameRaveTV said:

As a Graphic Designer, I can 1001% agree - the magazine is problematic in a ton of ways. It feels like it was slapped together with no real oversight. I wonder if they were just trying to see if anyone would care about the standalone PSX one.

 

Oh man, just as someone interested in graphic design I cringe hard at the site of the standard edition/blue cover.  So many poorly chosen fonts, and that '50' with all the aliasing that's been tilted to make it look like it's printed on the PlayStation lid.  Yikes.

As far as the reasoning behind spinning up a PS-only publication, this quote from former Gamefan writer Casey Loe (aka Takuhi) talking about their publisher, Metropolis, is illuminating: (https://www.timeextension.com/features/the-making-of-gamefan-magazine-drugged-coffee-pirated-games-and-empty-bank-accounts)

"They were always asking us to expand into new ventures, which led to GameFan creating a lot of spin-off publications that only lasted a few issues. Magazine publishing, in the US at least, lends itself to sleazy business practices because newsstands pay you a percentage of the sales for whatever you ship to them at the point when they receive the product, so you can generate short-term revenue by “stuffing the channel” – sending lots of copies of magazines and strategy guides and whatever to newsstands – get the initial cheque, and then leave the newsstand with a bunch of junk they’ll never sell that ultimately gets destroyed. (Of course, it cost money to get all that content printed, but you can always switch printers and leave the first printer to try to collect.) I suspect that there was a lot of that sort of thing going on to try and make payroll."

[SynthMilk]

I eventually snagged a copy of the Tomb Raider edition of Station and, to my surprise, it's more than just a special edition cover: it's actually a complete reboot of the magazine with the kind of thought and care put into its design and content that really should've been there on the first attempt.  I quite like it and wish they had made more of them.  Not sure it had enough edge/innovation to stand out from the horde of other PS1-exclusive mags that already had some traction, but this one comes across as a nicely polished product for what is basically an issue 1.5.