marktrade

I'm sure they did, but probably not for this long, or if they did they just didn't keep meticulous records of where they saved them, so the organizations that still have them would have to work very hard to find them. Usually they can't so they just consider them "lost." Then there might be compatibility issues opening it with software and hardware from a different era, not having the right fonts, or the right versions of things. Even if everything did open perfectly, we still wouldn't have the ads. Since the ads are owned by their respective companies, the artwork for them is not included in the same file. If we ever saw the files the magazine staff worked on we would see empty areas labelled "ad space."

Odds are they used QuarkXPress or Aldus Pagemaker for page layout, which they sent off to the printers, but it sounds like you're asking what illustrator programs they might have used. If any magazine staff worked directly on the art they probably used a combination of Photoshop and CorelDRAW or similar programs. It would be a typical workflow at a magazine or newspaper to take art from promotional material provided by publishers, cut out a shape from it in Photoshop, then import it into PageMaker and adorn an article with it, possibly even having the text wrap around it. I just had a look at an EGM issue from 1994 and those background patterns look like stock art, at the time referred as "clip art" which could be easily patterned. I doubt anyone at EGM actually created any of those background designs and instead purchased them from stock art providers. What did those artists use, then? Any of number of things, including scans of their hand-drawn art as a base, 3D programs, vector design programs, and a little photography. Artists do a lot of different things to look fresh and original. It can be a complicated process to create interesting textures, but that's why magazines outsource that stuff to stock art providers.

Retromags Presents! GMR Issue 09 October 2003 Database Entry! Download Directly!

Ha, if it weren't for you, I wouldn't have scanned all those issues when I did. Things can get really slow here without community feedback and I was looking for some indication of what people wanted. So you really did play a huge part.

Although I posted issue 08 of GMR earlier in this thread, today's upload contains the alternate cover and once again I took the opportunity to straighten a few pages and clean up some edges. The file on my ADO page has been updated as well.

Retromags Presents! GMR Issue 08 September 2003 Database Entry! Download Directly!

Excellent! I've talked to the seller and the only issue that won't be up for auction is issue 01, which VGBounceHouse has. If he scans that, then we should have all the issues in a couple weeks.

The missing issues are up on eBay now with individual week-long auctions. Please do not bid on them OR let me know before you do so that I don't bother trying to outbid you. If someone else here really wants physical copies of those mags, I'll let them get it, but otherwise I'll just be posting the scans here in a couple weeks.

Retromags Presents! GMR Issue 07 August 2003 Database Entry! Download Directly!

Sounds good, Phillyman. On the note of changes to the community over time, one of the reasons I'm scanning magazines now is because of "Back to the Future Part II." In fact today is the day in the movie when Marty arrives from the past, about 20 minutes ago on the west coast October 21, 2015. I imagined a lot of things about "the future" and this day in particular. One of them was that everything would be digital and easily accessible on computers. We would never have to worry about art and information dying or being lost to history. Everything old would be digitized and preserved and we'd all read about it on our personal electronic devices on this day reflecting on the past and how far we've come. A lot of that came true but earlier this year I was sad to see that the part about preservation was not coming true, especially for game and tech magazines—things that were originally made on computers. The weight of time past was growing larger and I thought, if I don't get work on some of these magazines, maybe no one will. Anyway, long story short, I think the best way to show my appreciation for this site and the mission it stands for is to provide good scans and that's all I want to do. I don't know how successful the Thank You page has been in bringing people here, but I've been visiting on and off for many years, and well, I knew I had to stop waiting for others to do what I wanted. Magazine collections are big, heavy, and costly to move. I've had to throw so many of them away as I moved to different places. It's 2015 and people should not have to lose things like that forever. The technology is here to have every magazine I've ever owned in my pocket and accessible anywhere. It's time to get it done! You know? I hope I can do that without worrying who gets the credit or adding logos to things. In the long run scanning sites are those kind strangers on the street who pick up that thing you dropped and give it back to you, and you say thanks and maybe have a conversation. For some people it's a lot of dropped things and we're their guardian angel. If I aspire to be that, it means making more good scans, and that's all there is to it.

I added a standard Retromags Thank You page to today's release just to see what it felt like. No big deal. But I'm uploading a version without it to ADO and Kiwi will have a version without it on OGM. I'm not sure what kind of effect that will have.

Retromags Presents! GMR Issue 06 July 2003 Database Entry! Download Directly!

All great points. Any search of "old game magazines" or similar has Retromags as the number one spot followed by OGM and ADO. As bandwidth has grown the times have changed and we rely much less on circulation for distribution. I can't imagine where people are now that they're reading scans and they haven't heard of Retromags. I very much like the spirit of letting people know there is a community here who cares about preserving game magazines, but since I already have the impression that this community is easy to find, the thank you page seems a bit antiquated.

I've been meaning to talk about that, because I upload my scans to several places and I'm not sure how I feel personally about taking credit. If I added a credit page, I'd probably want to design it myself and be inclusive of all the places where I originally uploaded it, including OGM and ADO, and have it explain something of my personal philosophy or intentions. But I find all of that a bit much and at the end of the day I should focus more on getting the work done than on worrying who gets the credit. Then again, maybe the purpose of such a page is not actually to let a person know where the scan originally came from, but to let them know there is an active community of people interested in preserving game magazines, to thank them for their interest, and welcome them to join, possibly even help. In that sense maybe I should point them to Retromags because ADO's forum is borderline unusable and OGM is limited to comment sections. The mags are originally hosted in several places but this is a forum where we gather. Would you accept a custom page or is it important to have a standard?

I rescanned all the pages for issue 04 yesterday so most or all of the dirt lines were removed from the unedited copy. Issue 05 uploaded today has the alternate cover! Still on track to upload one issue a day.

Retromags Presents! GMR Issue 05 June 2003 Database Entry! Download Directly!

Looks great! If you're interested in collecting cover discs, you should keep an eye on my ADO page. I have a few you're missing and will be uploading a lot more eventually. https://archive.org/details/@marktrade?∧[]=mediatype%3A%22software%22

Retromags Presents! GMR Issue 04 May 2003 Database Entry! Download Directly!