What Was Your First Video Game Magazine Subscription?

[Phillyman]

As a kid.....what video game magazine did you subscribe to first?

I started off with Nintendo Power, My earliest issue that I have was the Duck Tales Issue (008), I kept a subscription with them until Issue 075, In the mean time I had also received Sega Visions (a few issues) and a few issues of EGM, Next Generation and Gamepro......but by far nothing in comparison to my Nintendo Power collection.....I used to be able to sort my Nintendo Powers by the covers alone.....I didn't even need to look at the issue number

[E-Day]

As a kid, I didn't have a subscription. My parents subscribed to Nintendo Power for a year. I just bought GamePro at the store every month since a subscription was a hassle with the extra shipping charge and exchange rate, but eventually I got a year's subscription in 1995. It was still good in those days

Right now I have a free 1-year subscription to EGM

[Phillyman]

As a kid, I didn't have a subscription. My parents subscribed to Nintendo Power for a year. I just bought GamePro at the store every month since a subscription was a hassle with the extra shipping charge and exchange rate, but eventually I got a year's subscription in 1995. It was still good in those days

Right now I have a free 1-year subscription to EGM

I have a sub to EGM until 2015 :laughing: (didnt pay)

[modgeezer]

For me it was a video games mag from the early eighties cant remember the name what i do remember though is the company went out of business about 2 months into my year subscription. After that my first real collection was EGM bought it every single month for about 5 or 6 years.

[wildlele]

I had Nintendo Power for a few years, then I bought EGM & GamePro & Video Games & Computer Entertainment until around 1993. At that point I did not buy another console until Xbox in about 2004 at which point I subscribe now to EGM, PC Gamer and Official Xbox Magazine

[E-Day]

I have a sub to EGM until 2015 :laughing: (didnt pay)

Where you get that from? I am looking for something like that once my year subscription is up.

[wildlele]

Where you get that from? I am looking for something like that once my year subscription is up.

shoot me an pm for my patented cheap usa magazine subscriptions for canadians technique

[E-Day]

I already know how to get that to happen thanks to redflagdeals.com; I bought two 5-year subscriptions on eBay already for less than $10 each. I want to know how he got EGM for that long. I wouldn't mind having years worth of EGM and Nintendo Power and Game Informer arriving at my house

[aristotle]

My first was Nintendo Power... Tetris was my first issue, though I remember the Dragon Warrior supplement in far more detail. That's probably because I read it cover to cover no less than twenty times. I loved that game (and gaming guide!)

Looking back through the old NP issues, it's amazing to see how the sophisticated marketing angle was built into the mag... using pictures of "cool" looking kids about 4-6 years older than the target audience, using polls and rankings to shape gamer perception, and of course, Nintendo had final editorial say on every last word. Amazing to think how much power they had in the millions of subscriptions this mag sold.

Of course, recognizing this, I still retain fond memories of this magazine. There was nothing so exciting as receiving one of these in the mail. Especially around the cornerstone shift from the 8- to 16-bit SNES console. It seemed like the industry was just exploding, there was always so much new exciting news, and it was a rush to get the new issue and feel like I was on "the edge" of it all.

[meppi]

For me it all started with the Benelux version of Club Nintendo magazine, which I got bimonthly for sending in a registration form for me NES.

A couple of years later it transformed into a subscription magazine, so I signed up for that.

Then in 1993 I stumbled upon a small shop which apearantly carried import games, but at the time I was completely oblivious to the imports scene. As a matter of fact I never found that little shop again.

I got lost somewhere when I came across it first. :laughing:

There was where I first saw the NeoGeo AES system, playing Last Resort.

From that day forward I had always dreamed about owning an AES.

Picked up a French magazine called Joypad there, which covered just about everything, including Japanese games. So I immediately fell in love with it.

I only recently found out that they completely copied the British Mean Machines magazine back in the day, (just look at the layout of the reviews for instance) which was quite a shock for me and part of the reason why I started hunting for the full sets of MM and MMS. :happy:

A couple of months later when going to my local toy shop where I picked up all my games at the time, the son of the shopkeeper, who worked in the capital picked up a copy of EGM and let me take it home to read through it.

Being in English it immediately had the advantage that I could more or less fully understand everything that was written, so that was a big plus in and of itself.

Bugged my local newsy to get the magazine in, so that I didn't have to always wait for the issues from the other guy.

After a year or 2 I noticed a magazine called Computer and Videogames at the newsstand and picked it up, this was issue 166 and while it was not bad, it certainly wasn't near as good as EGM at the time, so after getting 167 and seeing the same things, I stopped buying it.

Then a year later I picked an issue up again, this was 180.

To my amazement this was a totally different magazine then it was the year before.

I fell in love with it and bought it religiously until the crew got booted out 3 years later to make the magazine appeal to the casual gamer.

Came across the Official Sega Saturn Magazine while I was at my regular import shop.

(Thanks to reading CVG, I had taken the step to get myself a Saturn, so as many of you will know, many of the best Saturn games are japan only. So it was only natural that I slowly started delving deeper and deeper into the import scene)

Sadly, the issue I picked up was issue 36, so the next time I bought the magazine it was already time to say goodbye.

I almost always picked up Nintendo only magazines as well, since they tend to have great features and lots of specials. (I'll have to make a couple more wiki sections for those soon after i dig them out. :wink: )

A year or so that CVG died as well (to me at least) as I described above.

So I tried various different magazines like Games Master, Power unlimited and many others I can't even remember, but they were all pretty much worthless to me after being used to such great mags.

After all this I started buying the unofficial Dreamcast magazine from the UK, which was very good, but just not the same. Well, nothing has been the same after that quite frankly.

Had a couple of Official Dreamcast magazines, but those were very hard to find and very expensive.

Also a couple of DC-UK mags, but I don't remember too much about them.

Which brings us to today. In the last several of years I've watched how the old crew from Joypad all left, and how the mag turned into an EDGE wannabe magazine. Not surprising since it's been taken over by Future.

So last month I finally canceled my subscription after many, many years.

Now the only new magazine I buy, and subscribe to is RetroGamer, which I wish would do more import coverage and less computer games. But that will probably never happen...

In the meanwhile I'm trying to catch up to some of the classic British magazines which I have recently discovered. And I actually get a much bigger kick out of reading those than any other magazines that was written the last 5 years. But being a retrogamer probably has much to do with that.

Now if you don't mind, I'm off to find a publisher for this small novel. :tongue:

[perudon]

As a kid I never had any subscriptions :(

I was always the guy reading over the shoulder of my friends and borrowing strategy guides.

[Gnash]

Nintendo Power for years. It was the best back then. Now I look at it and have good memories but realize that it was a big marketing scam.

[Kung Fu Man]

Tips & Tricks was my first, though the mag changed over the years and I ended up canceling. Only since then got one to Game Informer thanks to my edge card at EB Games, though given how they are lately this will probably be my second go around.

[Twist]

The Official Xbox Magazine That was about it, man I don't have a single mag left!

[wtshaffer]

I had Nintendo Power from issue #1, and was an EGM fan from 92 and up, before the 1up and suckage started. It's funny how many of these old mags are helpful with today's Wii VC releases. A lot of the maps and info are not found online anywhere.

[h0gg1e]

nintendo power issue #1

Kept the subscription going into my late teens ... wish i still had all of the hard copies

[Yukon Jack]

Nintendo Power was the first for me, I think it was 89ish, still had the issues up till about a couple years ago. Which leads to thanks for the memories with this project.

[sekhmet85]

The official playstation magazine. I started buying the dutch and Uk version. Now that I think about it, the quality really wasn't that great and they were ridiculously expensive, but at the time I loved it.

I still browse through the occasional OPM at the supermarket and I've bought a couple of Edge magazines over the years.

Now I only have a subscription to egm, just got the May-issue

Edited April 4, 2008 by sekhmet85

[Gnash]

Ranger Rick

I can't remember the name of the other, some kids puzzle thing.

Nintendo Power

[BBH]

As with many others in this thread, my first magazine subscription was to Nintendo Power. I would be so excited when a new issue arrived, and then read it from cover to cover. Especially in the beginning when the magazine was bi-monthly and there was a longer wait between issues! It was a great magazine because there were practically no advertisements, it was all game coverage. Ok, so there was a sneaky bias towards anything published by Nintendo, but still...

[SuperCheeser]

Mine was Nintendo Power when it first premiered after I saw the first Issue. It was great.

[xxdaznboixx]

Gamepro during the late SNES era, but then PSM October 1997 till now actually, although it just doesn't quite feel the same now that it's official and Chris Slate left.

[TheUpsetGamer]

I loved GamePro. It was sweet. Too bad I missed out on Nintendo Power.

[SHADOVV]

I subscribed to EGM on a 2 yr deal about 4 yrs ago (But due to the fact I was living in a caravan park (Thieves) at the time only ever received about 6 of the 24 issues!!)

[jesus666]

I had a subscription to club nintendo when i was, like, 9 or 10 years old, I never subscribed to any magazines other than that though, my mother threw all of those mags away when I was young, it's really nice being able to download them from this site and read them again now