tcaud

Woo hoo! Thanks for this.

I got a "World of Nintendo" poster with both of my NES systems (which were the Mario/Duckhunt/Zapper combo-pack edition; I had two because my parents had split-custody). I did not get that guide. I don't think Nintendo Power gave the guide away either... the guides they gave away were the four themed Players guides and the Strategy Guides (which didn't appear until 1991). It might have been sold at bookstores and kiosks. The 1980s strat guides are definitely a blank spot in Retromags' portfolio... there were a lot of them.

I did some sleuthing and found this strategy guide at Internet Archive, apparently the first production by Nintendo's magazine dept. https://archive.org/details/The_Official_Nintendo_Players_Guide_1987/mode/2up I believe this to be the guide I remembered, although I could be wrong. (the guide is notably not hosted here)

See here's where I see the strongest argument for independent preservation. So much of the appeal of these mags is nostalgic... the reviews were sparse and insubstantial, often reflecting burnout of the reviewers more than anything else. The other part was the previews (again sorta irrelevant) and the rumors. The ads really were a big part of the experience of these mags... those and the rumors got us pumped up and talking. We'd take these things to school and talk about them with other kids. The strats were also talked about but Gamefaqs has those cornered and these days gamers tend not to even rely on outside sources for information... it's seen as confusing/unclear design. Back when there was a thriving rental market where you paid $2-$3 to play a game for a weekend and you tried to get your money's worth before your save file got wiped by the next renter. Strats helped there (couldn't afford the the games they were too expensive or simply not available. Mags like this helped you beat the game fast and see the ending. Gonna be honest I'm surprised they are even bothering with a digital archive instead of simply relaunching the mag... I think it's a cash grab. (I don't think the mag is gonna thrive either... 4chan will make short work of it)

You may be right here. Somehow I don't think EGM would do that, but other publishers might. Watermarks might be called for then. I'm a believer that if you benefit from another's work you should compensate them the value of the work regardless of whatever legal stipulations may be relevant. Here's one for you: does EGM have ownership of the ads in their magazine?

Something you might want to look out for (assuming it's not already scanned and I don't think it is)... way back in the early 90s I remember seeing a strategy guide which had hand drawn maps for popular Nintendo games. Both Zelda 2 and Kid Icarus were featured.

Let me understand your argument... you say that if a cosplayer is photographed then they receive automatic ownership of the photo?

Publishers have the right to order the destruction of illegitimate copies of their material (they need a judgement for that). They cannot claim ownership of digitizations of that material because those are derivative work. Whether or not EGM has the right to use those scans is dependent on what the licensing terms are. (so ask Eday I guess?)

It's a real question of how they would market their archive. If they are going back into print (good luck with that) then that's one thing... they would have their back catalogue readily available along with their current stuff. But otherwise things get murky. Would they be hosted on Amazon Kindle? Some other digital store platform (Windows Store? Google Play? Itunes?). All that stuff's temporary. I wonder if they are trying to seize on Game Informer's cancellation. It's worth pointing out that EGM itself is in no danger of being lost to history. Although most of the small town library collections have long since been purged, all the bigger libraries (large city libraries and university libraries) still have the copies (they NEVER throw away a magazine). Far easier for limited print games to be lost to time than EGM...

They are doing this to cash in on 90s nostalgia. They'll have them available for a few years and then they'll take them down again. EGM itself will not return... there is no place remaining for it (PC Gamer is only barely alive). Oh look at this. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forgottenworlds4/forgotten-worlds-magazine-4?ref=recommendation-projectpage-footer-1&category_id=Q2F0ZWdvcnktMzI5 People seem to be figuring out they can monetize Retromags.

Sad to see 'em go. When they were still offering them they were most of the reason for having a GameStop membership. They tended be a little on the thin side so not spectacularly engrossing and when GameStopped giving them away (sic) the use of having a pro-membership kinda died with them for me. But good news I guess for this site and related projects... more content always a good thing (they are apparently trying to find a place to archive their stuff).

The closest precedent we have to this is the case of the ROM managers, which mainstreamed emulation and began drawing the attention of game companies to piracy. History shows that when something becomes "mainstream" it begins disrupting existing macro behavioral patterns (particularly economic ones). This is definitely disruptive technology. One additional thing I don't understand: why not just add tags to the images already in the Retromags gallery? I mean it's kind of arrogant to just appropriate other people's work by starting your own independent thing when there's already something going and the leadership isn't being particularly abrasive. You can't play the preservation card because the preservation community is already established and the courts will expect you to obey its norms. That means not turning a profit with these scans. Make sure you ask Marktrade, KitsunieB, and Kiwi before using any of their scans. Kiwi in particular has his own competing effort which he takes very seriously. Those Videogame Preservation Project scans probably also have their own terms attached. The safest thing you can do is simply go to Patreon and ask for money... few will trust you if you use ads because your income won't be verifiable (among other reasons). You will have to work to earn my trust... I expect you to use Retromags' scans and IA folkscanomy to get things going, then when your Alexa ranking is up and people start to pay attention you make a deal with the publishers to get a license and buy out or replace the scans by people who object to your deal making ...this is exactly what I assess your intentions to be. I don't believe for a second your motives are altruistic. Not for a moment.

If you're running on one of the big 10 hosts then you might want to check the TOS. They don't like image galleries on their servers. I think there's a lot of risk in making the data in these mags more accessible. It becomes more valuable which invites copyright claims where before it is aggregated it's seen as more benign and personal, "preservation". (lol like you don't know that, obviously you do). I'm not faulting you for your app, tho I wonder why you didn't just make a Github page for it to demo it. Requests aren't the issue, bandwidth is. I'm not surprised that Retromags has remained mostly obscure, because looking for specific game ads/reviews is something akin to looking thru a needle in a haystack (and most of the ads and reviews for the big games have already been extracted by fans and posted to the relevant CDNs) but yeah I'm not so naive as to think this particular service wouldn't just explode in popularity because the games in question are still being sold or at least available. Whatever, I didn't make the scans so not my problem. It's just my 2 cents. I was planning to introduce an app to ease translation of the Japanese mags, which will probably get less crowd attention on account of this one.

So someone figured out how to monetize this stuff. I guess it was inevitable as the pool of data grew and the sense of it being copy-left-for-dead gained traction. On the internet someone will always find a way to make a fortune from the tidbits and tatters of other people's individual, seemingly worthless efforts. It would take a while to inventory the popular games, but eventually the site would have astronomical bandwidth costs. Hundreds of thousands of dollars at least, image galleries aren't cheap to run and a reviews site as such would be going head-to-head with Metacritic etc. A non-profit like this could never make it in the cloud... would need a privately hosted server with several dedicated lines, else the site would die as soon as Kotaku wrote about it. Better leave NP out of it. Nintendo is very serious about their IP (unless you intend to bribe them). Official Playstation also. There is also the issue that the very copyrighted content of the mags themselves is now newly viable and presumably valuable. Contributors of scans should also be consulted individually, because they offered their work under the expectation that the scans would be packaged as whole mags, and even the belief it wouldn't be heavily monetized. I always expected that GOG would end up owning these scans before the end. This is probably how that outcome develops, because there's no way in hell a Patreon of casual users could keep this online.

I have an idea to increase participation by using a scan quality ratings system. Basically, users would be encouraged to scan mags after which the pages would go in an editorial queue. An editor would rate each page for scan quality using an agreed-upon set of criterion. Users could browse pages that needed work, download them, edit and upload for additional review.