When I was young I loved paging through my uncle’s collection of mid-90s video game magazines, and when I was old enough to buy my own I’d grab three or four of my favorite PC and console magazines each month. Then, almost overnight, the internet practically killed the gaming magazine, and we’ve lost much…
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Longform Reviews From Career Writers and Exclusive Content
There’s a lot of variety in a magazine, and that’s its main strong point, but for me, the meat and potatoes of gaming magazines were always the big feature articles rather than game reviews. These would be interviews, or behind-the-scenes coverage of upcoming games, or something really. What made these articles so great is that the writer spent a huge amount of time getting the material to write them. They’d hang out with developers for a week or two, or travel to Japan to get exclusive information on the Japanese gaming industry.
They could do this because the magazines paid them a salary, or a freelancer fee large enough to make this sort of writing feasible. These days it’s all about quantity over quality, which is just the nature of online publishing. Writers on gaming blog sites do a fine job, but the days of having the time and money for these deep-dive pieces based on first-person experience are sadly over.
Oddly enough, it’s mainly YouTube essayists like NoClip that come the closest, but I still loved curling up with a magazine and imbibing three to five pages of deep scoops.
Yes, ironically, someone will probably point out in our own comments below that, well, we have comments below! However, as much as I like reading your comments and the comments of people all over the internet, there’s something to be said for reading a publication and letting it stew a little before hearing someone else’s opinion about it.
In fact, back in the day I’d have to wait until the next school day to talk with my friends, or by the time I was in high school, hop on some forums to talk to the same general groups of people I always did.
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A Curated Letters Section
As an addendum to my previous point, your honor, I’d like to point out that we did get to read comments from regular folks in the letters section of the magazine. The difference here is that some poor intern had to read through the slush pile before picking out the most interesting and coherent scribbles that came in the mail each month. This would then be published along with a reply by someone who presumably wanted to keep their job and would stay civil.
Reader letters are always fun, and going back to old magazines now, it’s a great time capsule of what people were thinking then. Actually, there’s no reason we couldn’t do a proper letters segment in a modern blog, but again comment sections make this less necessary.
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Strong Editorial Vision and Visual Design
A magazine is a discrete publication that has to be planned, executed, and completed by a specific deadline. This is very different to a modern blog which is an endless, living thing. So, while the editors of a blog (myself included) have a clear idea of the direction and style we want, it’s more like surfing a wave, or perhaps riding a bucking bronco.
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It’s like the difference between a music album and an endless streaming playlist. A magazine is designed to take you on a journey from the first to last page. Individual issues might be themed, or put together around a certain big event at that time. And don’t get me started on the wonders of proper desktop page layouts. One of the biggest downgrades going from magazines to websites is that websites don’t have good fixed layouts, and have to adapt to any screen. Whereas a magazine can communicate visually in a way websites just can’t.
You Can Read Old Gaming Mags Right Now
While modern gaming magazines aren’t really a thing anymore, one awesome thing about the modern web is that it allows for preservation of old media. For example, there’s the excellent Video Game History Foundation digital archive, where you can read numerous magazines for free right now on your web browser. Likewise, the Internet Archive has a massive collection of video game magazines as well as great retro computing magazines.
I don’t just enjoy reading these old magazines today, but it’s a great source of information for my research on computers, gaming, and all the other geeky stuff we like to write about here. So you have no excuse not to pick up a digital copy of an old gaming magazine you might have loved, but has since disintegrated.
