TheRedEye

Hello, this is from a CES Show Daily that I bought on eBay, that's my photo. This was never run in consumer magazines, this was a "trade" ad.

I've been attempting to catalog all of the EGM editorial supplement booklets up until around March 1995, when they switched to single page fighting game move inserts (and immediately after, mini strategy guides). I felt that these supplements, especially the CES previews, were actually extensions of the issues they were bundled with, so to me it feels like the scans are missing content without them. These are editorial supplements, I did not attempt to include supplements that were pure advertising or otherwise provided by external sources. I also did not include posters. These are the supplements that are magazine-sized, say "editorial supplement" on the cover, and were produced by EGM staff. There are 18 total if you count the Cinescape preview issue, I've uploaded uncorrected 600dpi JPGs here, in folders marked with which issues they go with. If anyone would like to edit these and put them on Retromags, feel free: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/5qgaxjc89sms465ek7f9a/AHoHueRMYILZviFr7-4XnGw?rlkey=kk3plt15m17kn1ch0w071t1dm&dl=0 I determined this through a combination of sealed issues that we own, live auctions on eBay, and archived auctions on WorthPoint. At this point I am confident that this is all of them. The only one I cannot substantiate its mate for is "EGM's Video Game Accessory Guide," it's somewhere around issue 40 but I have not found any evidence of where it belongs. I also included a stack of subscriber-only pages, though I have not tracked whether this is the complete set, nor did I attempt to figure out which issues they go with...a project for another day, maybe? There are also seven editorial inserts for EGM2, and several for Electronic Games and Computer Game Review, which maybe we can collectively track, but they're much rarer than EGM's...

Hey! Sorry but I'm going to have to correct you here, what you're describing didn't start until the original Xbox. First of all, EPROM PCBs work fine in retail systems, and there's just no such thing as a special review system for cartridge-based games (other than the capture units for portable systems that you described). CD-based systems (post-Sega CD) had copy protection, and so there were special debug units to play burned discs, but nothing about them did any video capture. As you mentioned, portable systems had special units for capture, but until the DS these special units just spit out standard television video. How editors captured screens depends on the publication, year, and environment. Nintendo Power took photos of a CRT in a dark room until about issue 20, when they switched to a video printer, before finally settling into using a video capture card on a computer (I'm not sure when this switch occurred, since video printer stuff looks so similar to digital capture). They almost always captured in pure RGB, and had modified NES units to do this. EGM also took photos at first, and is famous for its photos at trade shows, but for in-office capture they switched to capture cards on Macintosh somewhere around issue 9 (and like Nintendo, they modified their systems for RGB video to get the best quality). They also would sometimes record gameplay onto video tape and capture the frames they wanted afterward. If you want to go back further than Nintendo Power, most of the early 80s stuff was using publisher-provided screenshots, most of which were actually hand-drawn and not actually capture of a game. Computer magazines took photos, either directly or with a really neat device called a "film recorder," which was basically a tiny CRT inside of a box with a 35mm camera attached. I don't think video game magazines used these, but I think some PR/marketing/back-of-the-box shots did. The switch to digital capture came at around the same time that magazines switched from paste-up layout to digital. Pretty much every video game magazine was using video capture cards and doing all-digital layouts in QuarkExpress by 1993 or 1994, give or take, and did so until the systems did their own internal capture. At least some (and maybe most/all) of them usually had a foot pedal so they could easily capture screens while playing, instead of having to reach over and hit something on the keyboard. The first system to have any kind of frame buffer capture, as I mentioned, was the original Xbox debug kits. You had to network it in to a computer and hit a capture key there. It became standard in the 360/ps3 era, just as it became standard for users.

You too, huh? We're just down to that and the following issue, I wonder if that's coincidence or if it's just a time of particularly low circulation.

I just wanted to chime in and say that there's no guarantee these appear on the internet archive, because Future consistently pulls its content down from there.

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