Leaderboard

Relaunching a magazine into the current marketplace doesn't make much sense. It's hard to believe they would be successful when all other gaming mags have failed. And it makes sense that they would charge money to access the archive, especially if they had to spend money paying for scanning services or for the services of someone assembling the original digital assets. And even if they just swiped everything from here (fingers crossed that isn't the case), they still have to create and operate a site to host those scans and make them readable and searchable online. It's not a free venture, so why would they offer it for free (they're a business, not selfless patrons of the arts like ourselves). But as to the point about the ads, it wouldn't surprise me to see them missing, unfortunately. Whatever contracts may have existed regarding them, so far as I know, they would have applied to print publication and not to digital reproduction, unless that was also specifically stipulated in the contract (extremely unlikely, especially on older mags). There aren't a lot of mags that offer digital archives of their old issues to provide examples (I'm not talking about mags that were released digitally concurrently with their print issues, but rather digital editions of long out of print mags created after the fact.) The UK's Retro Gamer strikes me as a good example of the potential pitfalls of such an endeavor. First of all, the PDFs they sold of their older issues were incredibly low resolution, which they did to keep the filesizes small. And second, ALL ads were removed from the issues. If that's the kind of digital archive that is provided, I think it's safe to say that no one's going to be dumping our scans from their hard drives for theirs. But we shall see. A high-res, cover-to-cover fully-complete archive of mags created from original assets would be a welcome upgrade, and worth paying for.