miketheratguy

It's cool that you called them "Muscle Men". That was my name for them while growing up as well. I actually always preferred the fleshies to the colored ones, I guess because they were the first, but some of the colored figures looked really great as well. If you can get a purple figure of the hand creature (my favorite in the line since day one) you've got some money on your hands Oh MAN, some of my all-time best memories of MKII were at a Pizza Hut. I played that game all the time - we're talking almost every day for months - at every arcade that I could find it at. I traded movelists and tactics with other kids, freaked out whenever a new revision of the game would change the control scheme, impressed crowds with fatalities and the "kill the baby" babality glitch of 2.1...ah man, memories. Anyway in 1994 my mom worked at a Pizza Hut that was about fifty feet away from a place called "Ron's Sports Cards" which happened to have an MKII machine in the back room. I can't count how many summer days I spent hopping on a bus, going to my mom's Pizza Hut for free buffet, then heading over to play MKII with my buddies for hours. For years I've fondly looked back upon 1994 as the summer of girls, Pizza Hut, and MKII. It was the best summer of my life. Yep, I had that very demo disc. It was the first time that I'd ever played Metal Gear Solid, and my time with it unfolded pretty much the same way that yours did, lol. I think the demo ended after you got onto the elevator, or maybe once you reached the building at the other side of that first snow field. I don't recall, I just remember that it was short (but very easy to get a lot of amusement from, as well as see how good the final product would be). I believe that Tomb Raider II was another game on the disc.

If you're anything like me, David Bowie was a prominent part of your childhood. But today, after a lengthy bout with cancer, it would seem that Ziggy Stardust has returned to the stars. Rest in peace and thanks for the memories, man.

Lol if that's the case then he may be right, but for all the wrong reasons.

$5,000 dollars? What economic structure is the seller going by to come up with that kind of figure?

Yes! Always thrilled to fill those pesky gaps in the EGM collection. Thanks!

Pro Wrestling was great, I cut my wrestling teeth on that one. Got it for my...must have been 10th birthday, I think? I don't believe I ever finished it either, now that you mention it. I would then move on to other wrestling games like Wrestlemania, Tag Team Wrestling and MUSCLE, which were various degrees of crappy, as well as Tecmo World Wrestling and World Championship Wrestling which were actually both pretty good. I spent so much time on THQ's forums raving about the intricacies of my favorite titles in the series (which at that time were Smackdown v Raw 2006 and, in particular, 2002's "Shut Your Mouth"). I too started to get burnt out on the series around 2007 or so, but they made a couple of games after that that really made me excited to be a fan again. Then the company went bankrupt, the franchise got picked up by 2K, and...Idunno. My understanding is that in the interest of "realistic simulation" (what's the realistic way for a video game to simulate a predetermined exhibition of athletic choreography?) the series is as complicated as it's ever been. You're probably not missing much.

Thanks, that one rates pretty highly among my "carefree days of youth and innocence" files. It's funny that you mention GPK, I was actually going to put a picture of them on the last page. I definitely remember the gum stick, which was more like a pointy, rigid little shiv that would shatter if you tried to stab someone with it. I've got lots of great memories of GPK but my favorite may be the day when my family and I were enjoying a warm summer day of swimming at the local lake when I saw a kid run by with the all-new ninth series in his hands. Suddenly swimming day at the lake - which was one of my favorite things of all time - was now of far less importance than drying off, getting in the car still in my bathing suit, and finding the nearest gas station to get some 9th series GPK of my own (which I did, after which we came back to the lake, so it was really all win). Was never part of a Big Wheel club though. Man, that would have been cool.

Yeah I thought that Red Faction II was really good myself. I'm a longtime fan of old-school wrestling and for a while there they really had a few great wrestling titles, so I was sad to see them go. To be fair 2K is following in their stead but I don't think that they've gotten the hang of it yet.

Yeah, that's pretty rad...

I remember that show. They once had a really great Three Men and a Baby parody played by Mike Tyson and two other boxers (not the real guys, of course). Fire Marshall Bill and Homie Da Clown were standouts.

Ah, good old JD Roth. Did anyone consider him a celebrity other than his own personal fan club Gamepro?

Cool, thanks guys! Now that I know it's okay to post, here are Youtube links to our first three episodes. Our show is called "The Contra Code", and all the episodes that we've done so far are up on itunes. There are obviously some growing pains in the first episode, we were just beginning to determine our groove and structure so it may not be the best indicator of our quality overall. My first microphone wasn't the best either, but for the most part I think that I'm pretty audible. In general we put forth an earnest effort and I feel that our rhythm and confidence only improved as the podcasts went along, so I'd say that if you listen to the first episode and don't rabidly despise it you'll probably enjoy the rest. Constructive criticism is always appreciated, I won't take it personally if you don't care for what you hear but it always helps to understand why. Anyway that's enough babbling, I hope you guys like our scrappy little show! Episode 1 - Mega Man: Episode 2 - Kirby's Adventure: Episode 3 - The Secret of Monkey Island:

I'm Mike, "miketheratguy" a nickname being given to me during a time when I bred and raised fancy rats. I was born and raised in Kenosha, Wisconsin 37 years ago and have spent pretty much my entire life playing video games. Why, here's a shot of me quite possibly discovering them for the first time on Christmas Day of 1982. Just look at that lovable little scamp, his mind clearly being blown by what could only be described as his first hit of pure, concentrated awesome (in the form of Donkey Kong for the Atari, but whatever. I'm sure it was neat at the time). My favorite systems growing up were the NES and SNES though I played just about everything I could get my hands on, and my system count currently sits somewhere around 25. Obviously I'm a lifelong geek, and gaming is one of my best friends. I subscribed to Nintendo Power from issue 1 in 1988 to issue 80 in 1996, and had three subscriptions to EGM in 1994, 2001 and 2006. Also loved PSM for its first couple of years, and dabbled in Gamepro from time to time. Still have fond memories of Game Player's magazine as well as the informative and cheesy game tapes that they released. I'm a child of the 70s but the 80s are where my heart lies. Playtested a pre-release build of WWE 2K14 back in early 2013, around the time that I had a gig moderating the official forums of now-defunct THQ. Current comings and goings? Not nearly as interesting.

I was actually a super skinny little dude but yeah, now that you mention it, the Big Wheel and the Cheez Balls really do cement that image, don't they?

Hey everyone, my longtime friend and I host a retro video game podcast that we put up on itunes (as well as the first few episodes on Youtube). We grew up with systems like the Atari, NES and Genesis and each episode we spend around 2 to 2 1/2 hours delving into deep discussion of a single classic game. Some of the titles that we've covered so far are Mega Man for the NES, Bonk's Adventure for the Turbografx, The Secret of Monkey Island for the Sega CD, and Street Fighter II for the SNES. For each episode we independently play the game for a week, then get together for the podcast to describe our experiences "live on the air". We stay pretty focused on the game at hand in each episode but we're also really big into nostalgia, so in every episode we also discuss what was going on in pop culture during the year of the game's release. We'll brush through some noteworthy things that happened that year, talk about a couple of contemporaneous movies, share some memories of music or toys. We keep things light (and swear frequently) but we're not particularly obnoxious or immature, we learned from listening to other video game podcasts that we prefer a mood that's humorous but informative, not panderingly comedic (we're also both 37 years old and are trying not to embarrass ourselves, lol). We're far from perfect but we have what we think is a casual and enthusiastic tone, and our primary goals are in-depth discussion of each game as well as enthusing about the past in general. My friend describes it as a podcast "by nerds for nerds", and I can't say that I disagree. We've only been at it for about half a year (we began last February but stopped producing in the summertime, though we mean to get back to it) but managed to put out around 8 episodes. We don't have much of an audience - a few dozen people joined our accompanying forum but many of them are people we know from other places, so we're still really small time. We're okay with that, we know that getting a podcast off the ground takes a lot of time and effort and never expected any kind of fast success, and the truth is that we enjoy doing it anyway. All the same, when we can we check around to see if anyone else is interested. I didn't want to provide the name of our podcast or the forum where we talk about it without knowing whether it would be okay first, I don't want to come across as a solicitor or anything. It's not so important that I want to step on any toes. If no one's interested or this isn't wanted here, that's cool. I understand. We're just always looking for people like us who like to live in the old days of gaming, toys and pop culture, and figured that maybe that would describe some of you.

A nostalgia thread? This is awesome. How did I miss this? I run a whole forum dedicated to nostalgia. One of the earliest memories that I have is of riding through my old hometown on my Big Wheel, chomping ravenously on a can of Cheez Balls, as my aunt Patty escorted me to the drug store that had a puzzle in the window featuring a cast shot of the aliens of Return of the Jedi. Magical indeed.

That's awesome that number 5 was your first issue as well. Makes me feel better knowing that I wasn't the only person who was sitting there for months, waiting to finally get his first copy. To be fair, while I continued my subscription past 1993, I definitely recall feeling a bit embarrassed by the magazine right around that time. There was a stretch that year when the issues had particularly kiddie covers - Mickey Mouse, the Road Runner, Puggsley's Scavenger Hunt, etc. - that made me feel less like I was carrying around around a video game magazine and more like I was going around with copies of "Children's Favorite Saturday Morning Cartoons". That kind of thing is near-fatal in junior high, regardless of how good the games may or may not have been. So Idunno. In that odd year between Street Fighter and "Play It Loud", maybe the magazine's own content helped to turn you off. Despite sticking it through, I know that it did for me.

I definitely do! I was actually going to post that very thing in my post yesterday but was dissuaded when I saw that there was no evidence of it on Youtube that I could link.

The last system that I bought was the PS3, which I picked up sometime around...2012 I think. I already had a 360 and wasn't really interested in anything that was specific to Sony's system, but I figured that I had the spare cash (a rare thing these days) and liked the idea of being able to play games online with my buddy back home, for free. Aside from a little Shadow of the Colossus HD and hundreds of hours of GTA online, playing a small handful of games with my buddy a few times a year is pretty much all that I use it for.

Meaning that not only are year 2000 issues of EGM now eligible for availability, but 2001 issues as well!? Thank you so, SO much! My favorite year of the magazine (2000), which I've searched long and hard to replace, as well as all of my 2001 issues which were lost in a flood, are now something that I can actually look forward to re-acquiring. That's something that I've resigned myself to being impossible for going on a decade. I can't thank you guys enough. Seriously, getting all of these memories back will be something of a dream come true. Thank you for taking a second look at the subject, and thank you for making the decision that you did. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

That IS a pretty cool logo. The the sharp-edged black marble "3" is really evocative of what was then an incredibly exciting cutting-edge game.

Awesome! Thank you!

I thought the same, I drank it when it was available because to me it was basically the same as regular Pepsi (which I love) but maybe a little sweeter, and subconsciously healthier due to its clear nature.

First of all I apologize for posting that question, I did so before I spotted the post discussing the matter on the front page (I have this site bookmarked which goes straight to the forum). Secondly, I appreciate you guys discussing things. It's your prerogative of course, but I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't excited about the possibility. Fingers crossed!

Bummed about the EGM thing. :(