JHD

I have found video game magazines at various thrift shops in three or four different Canadian cities. Presumably other people are searching for these too, so they sell quickly. I do not recall any PC-related magazines, but I am also not interested in that genre. I have also found multiple history-related magazines (my main collecting interest), including some British titles with no newsstand circulation here. Based on what I have seen, there is no weeding of donated magazines by the thrift shops; indeed some of the titles that I have seen on the shelf are of rather niche interest (e.g. model trains, Legion magazine).

Thank-you for sharing this obscure preview issue. Several sites host an otherwise full run of Total Control, but not this specific issue. e.g. https://www.outofprintarchive.com/catalogue/TotalControl.html The advertisement for a subscription -- Pay for 10 issues, get 12 -- is rather less of a deal in retrospect when the magazine ceased publication with issue #11.

Was this the very last issue of EGM ever published? I have never seen anything dated later than this, but given the irregular publishing frequency it is possible another issue may have receive a limited release. Wikipedia incorrectly reports that the last issue was #264 (Summer 2014).

Without seeing the original contracts I cannot provide a definitive answer, but it would be my expectation that the advertising content belongs to the company placing the ad. The magazine publisher would normally own the editorial content only. Advertising copy is usually provided in a fully completed form, and the publisher just has to drop it on the page. Things quickly get complicated with freelance (vs. staff) writers, photographs provided by third parties, etc. Given the passage of time, the presumed loss of original contracts, and the fading memories of the people involved, there will always be some ambiguity. As with most copyright disputes, the stakes are so very low that nobody is ever going to litigate the matter because the costs far exceed any possible recovery. Breen was a rare exception, and he was apparently financed by third-parties with an ideological basis.

I am neither a lawyer nor an American, but this is what I know. Here in Canada, one of the few copyright related lawsuits that resulted in a final judgement is called Breen v. Hancock House Publishing. In a nutshell, Hancock House published Professor Breen's PhD thesis without his permission and sold it as a book. It was a commercial failure and the publisher ultimately went out of business. As part of the judgement, Professor Breen received the remaining unsold inventory of the book (since he owned the copyright). He could have, if he so chose, sold those books himself (though I understand that he did not do so). Arguably, then EGM (or whomever the rights holder is) has the legal right to sell (or do whatever else they wish) with material in which they own the copyright -- even if the scan was created by a third party. It would be the same situation if another publisher decided to reprint back issues of the magazine and sell them. EGM could seize and then resell those reprinted issues themselves.

This is a good reminder for everyone to keep local copies of whatever they find interesting. There is nothing permanent about something hosted on a third-party website.

It is not a video game magazine, but I randomly received a copy of the British publication Dragon User magazine in 1983 or 1984 that came in a poly bag. Around the same time, I subscribed to some science and technology magazine that also came in a polybag. I do not recall seeing anything on the newsstand so packaged, but there were no video game magazines in the early-to-mid 1980s.

I like Adobe and it is already installed on my computer. I have no desire to add yet more software to address different file formats. Also, a PDF file can be smaller than a CBR file (with an admitted loss of resolution). I already have three external hard drives; storage space is a consideration. Note that articles published in academic journals (which constitutes the majority of my digital collection) are invariably in PDF format. These files are normally just text, with the occasional map or diagram; black and while photographs are sometimes included, but only rarely. Most scanned books (other than Project Gutenberg) are released in PDF format. Again, the text is far more important than the illustrations.

Personally, I like my files in PDF format. Everything that I download (from here and other sites) in a range of file formats (CBR, EPUB, etc.) gets converted to PDF for my own personal use. This extra step takes only a few minutes.

That is very clever! Do you know how many roster updates were released? Are these mini-cartridges very common?

I utterly love this stuff! Thank-you for sharing. I am fairly certain that my Parents had this cookbook (though they were teenagers when it was published, so presumably it came from my Grandparents). There is a 7-Up game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Spot

Personally, I most enjoy the magazine content that is not directly about games. For example, articles about how to get into the industry (job opportunities/requirements, discussions of various training programs), company profiles, interviews with major figures, etc. I also like the detailed strategy guides, but only for those games that I have, so just a small subset of the total

Thank-you for posting this! Strategy guides are difficult to find (at least around here) and even more so for games that I have/want to play.

As a former professional librarian, I love technical discussions like this! I have struggled many times this problem, especially when the library holds only a few scattered issues of a periodical or (as very often happens), the publisher itself makes a numbering error. Normally a volume consists of all of the issues published in a year, with the issues numbered sequentially therein; a volume can have from just 1 to 360+ issues (some daily newspapers used this numbering scheme). With irregular frequency publications, volumes may not be annual, but they are always sequential (e.g. Volume 1 is from 2015, volume 2 is from 2018 with nothing having been published in between). I have only ever seen whole numbers (numbered consecutively from Issue 1 to end of publication) with video game magazines. My only contribution concerns the dating of issues. Can we learn anything from the release dates of the games covered in the magazine? I once encountered a British game magazine with no dates listed anywhere (cover, masthead, copyright). Almost all of the games reviewed had been released within a few months of each other, however. Thus I was able to make a best guess as to when that issue was published.

I recently unearthed my collection of ~150 physical cartridges from my storage unit where they have been languishing since 1998. I have an original 2600 (several different models, in fact), but nothing that I can easily connect to a modern TV. As soon as the 2600+ became available on amazon.ca, I placed my pre-order. With tax, it came to Cdn$172.49. There is no delivery charge.