Did any of you out there subscribe to any of the old gaming magazines back in the day? If so which ones?

Alright people,

I know this topic won’t really “cater” to the younger crowd (y’know, the one that grew up on tablets, youtube, streaming services, and commercials before movies.) but I thought “Hey, what the hell.”

Did any of you out there subscribe to any of the old gaming magazines back in the day? If so which ones?

Going back into the Ol’ memory banks (who says that?) I vividly remember having an actual subscription to Electronic Gaming Monthly (or as they were commonly called EGM.) that I would receive right in my mailbox every month.

That’s right younger gamers, an actual physical book comprised of various articles of a thing called “paper” in an actual physical mailbox outside your house… not your email inbox (Wait'a patronize younger gamers, Ninja. You dolt!).

I actually looked forward to it every month as back then it was my only window into what was on the horizon in the video-gaming world. Bear in mind this was before the internet/during its infancy so the printed published magazines were your most up to date source for info.

I’m pretty sure EGM was the only mag I had an actual subscription for but I know I bought almost every other gaming mag my eyes came in contact with at the grocery store or other various “book-type” stores as well.

Off the top of my head I can recall getting almost every issue of…

PSM

Official Playstation magazine (C’mon, everyone bought the “officials” so that they could get the free demo discs. That’s right young gamers, that was our “demos.” You had to pay to get a magazine that had around 5 to 10 demos on a disc.)

Official Dreamcast magazine

Official Xbox magazine

Tips and Tricks (Had to get those cheat codes lol.)

Nintendo Power

GameFan (I lloooovveeedd gamefan.)

Gamers Republique (Incredible mag as well.)

Next Generation (a few of them here and there.)

Gamepro (Although I was starting to lose favor with them near the end.)

I’m sure there were some others but those were the ones I vividly remember the most.

So gamers, do any of you like me still have piles and piles of old gaming magazines stashed away somewhere in your houses?

-PILES OF PAPER NINJA APPROVED-

I subscribed to EGM and Next Generation, but I bought a lot more magazines at stores.

I have subscribed to GamePro, Game Informer and EGM at some point in my life

I remember being subscribed to Nintendo Power, but I didn't keep any of them. Strangely don't have any strong memories of it other than the weird face icons they paired with review scores.

Growing up I only really ever had Nintendo systems, so I was hooked on Nintendo Power for years. I still kinda miss those mini-strategy guides they'd have in em.

I was subscribed to Game Informer for a while, but then it changed over to a digital subscription at some point and over time I realized I had completely stopped paying attention to it so I cancelled.

EGM, Nintendo Power, and Ultra Gameplayers were my favorites. I always thought the latter was hilarious. Kinda scared to go back and look at them now...

I also did GamePro, PC Gamer, and OPM off and on. Game Informer as well, but that's definitely a more recent thing for me. I subscribe to it every once in a while just to have a game magazine to look at, even though it's largely pointless nowadays.

Tips and Tricks was always the one I begged for at the grocery store.

I think I answered a similiar question some months ago...

I subscribed to a few, (poorly) translated magazines, mainly because of the included demo discs and being able to look at some pretty pictures, since like said, the internet wasn't a thing for me back then. PC Gamer is the only name I can remember from the top of my head.

Never bought or subscribed to any console magazines since I was a pc-gamer, 'till two magazines merged together. The other one was a local finnish magazine, that had only focused on pc stuff before. I was subscribed to that and still am, actually. Celebrates it's 25th anniversary in this month.

I subscribed to PC Zone and that was about it. We don't get Game Informer in the UK I believe.

Yep! My family had a Nintendo Power subscription from like 1996-2008.

I also had a short 6 month subscription to Game Pro right around when the first Smash Bros came out on N64. As well as like 3 years of PC Gamer around when Tribes and the first The Sims game were just coming out. I remember getting lots of awesome looking PC Demo Disks with games that our crappy family PC could rarely play.

I read PC Gamer an awful lot at my local library. I always liked the pieces by Logan Decker.

Also this isn't from PC Gamer but I always enjoy sharing it.

I had an EGM subscription for over a decade. I definitely bought other magazines at the bookstore, especially late in the XBOX/PS2 era. Very fond memories of summer days reading and absorbing the E3 issues.

I started with Video Games and Computer Entertainment (but moved on to Gamepro and EGM eventually.)

So rad!!

Michael Jackson still black!

Ridiculously-brawny Blanka gives ghetto-Dhalsim a knuckle sandwich! Or the Hulk is beating up a homeless witch doctor. It almost looks like Rob Liefeld drew this cover, but the feet are too well drawn.

Next Generation was the fucking bomb. I still have the cover of the first issued burned into my memory.

Pretty sure the only subscription I had was EGM; but I definitely bought copies of PC Gamer and some others from time to time at the store.

Mainly PC Gamer and Official Playstation Magazine. I was really into PC Gamer. My dad also subscribed to a Swedish PC magazine called PC För Alla which had a section dedicated to games and a monthly CD with shareware & demos.

There was also a shortlived gaming magazine called Incite. The articles weren't very good but it had some really solid Demo CDs, at times including a full game.

I had just about everyone major one you could imagine growing up in the 80's.

The major ones I always had were

EGM and CGW but I also had Nintendo Power, GamePro, PC Gamer, Playstation, Game Informer, and a variety of others.

EGM, gamepro, and gameinformer. Probably in that order.

Nintendo Power and OXM.

Honestly as a kid my proudest moment was probably getting a letter published in Nintendo Power (remember letters, those things the mailman would carry). They got my name wrong, probably because I had (still have) terrible handwriting - its Tim not Jim - but still a great feeling. It's the one under Power Outage.

I subscribed to the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter, which was free, and as a result they sent me Nintendo Power's first issue for free when they started making it. I suspect that many people who got the first issue got it that way. I was in 5th or 6th grade and my mom asked me if I'd like to subscribe to it, which I did. I still regret lending out the infamous second issue (featuring Simon Belmont holding Dracula's severed head) to someone at school, because I never got it back.

Later, I'd subscribe to EGM and Gamepro. I have fond memories of poring over all these magazines, especially during family road trips up and down the country in the summer. I'd study every damn detail, even the advertisements. I also remember buying a few issues of Video Games and Computer Entertainment, but never subscribed to that one.

By the mid-90s, I'd stopped subscribing, though. The late 1990s saw me temporarily lose interest in video games, albeit not completely. And in the mid-2000s I got rid of almost all the magazines I had collected by donating them to the public library I had been working at. I still have a handful I kept for nostalgia purposes.

I had a subscription to PC Gamer for a while. Even when I didn't have a sub to it, I'd usually pick it up at the store. I'd frequently pick up EGM and another one. Computer Gaming World? I remember it folded back in 2006 or 2007? Was that it?

Man, I loved the demo discs. PC Gamer in the early-mid 2000s was great. I liked a lot of the people who wrote for it. And it was the first podcast I got into. I'll still usually pick it up. The current issue has a great story on the development of the Family Matters quest (the one with the Bloody Baron) in The Witcher 3.

I've had subscriptions to Game Informer off and on over the years. Even if I don't read the reviews most of the time, the cover stories tend to be great, in-depth looks at games. Yes, I know that's just MARKETING, but they can be fun to read. I currently have a sub to it.

The funny thing is, I find that I like the IDEA of physical magazines more than actually reading them these days.

@sinusoidal: That description of the second cover. Hahaha. Please post more!

@adequatelyprepared: That's incredible. I wish more games critics had the stones to take companies to task like that. A quick google search of the author tells me he was blacklisted (unsurprisingly) by EA after that.

In 1995 I started working for EB Games at that time all sales people could take "a single copy" of every magazines except OPM which had a disc in it. So from 1995 until September 1997 I did not subscribe to anything. In 1997, after I left EB, I started to subscribe to most of the game magazines. At around $12-$14 per year is was cheap entertainment.

These are the magazines I remember getting somehow...in the PlayStation era there were a few zines that seemed to last only a few issues

• EGM
• Dreamcast
• GamePro
• Next Generation (then Next Gen)
• Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (there were two versions of this by different companies, Sony switch horses at some point.)
• PLAY
• PSM
• PSX
• PSNext (lasted only a few issues)
• PSNow(something like that name...)
• Edge

I have to admit working at EB and getting piles of magazines for free was nice. I remember between 1995 and 1998 there WERE so many gaming magazines it was ridiculous. Not only were there all the US magazines, but that was the era where UK and European magazines were sold at bookstores too.

I subscribed to Nintendo Power for something like 4 years in the mid-2000s, and I still have a lot of those issues in a closet at my parents' house. Even as a dumb kid, I knew that stuff was the equivalent of state-controlled media. I'd actually like to go through them some day, to see how many grasping attempts there were to fill a magazine with content during the especially dry spells that accompanied the end of the Gamecube and the beginning of the Wii.

@monkeyking1969: Do you still have any of those? I bet they'd be a trip to look through now, and it'd be quite the collection (especially the ones that didn't last, that's just fascinating to me).

I loved GameFan and Next Generation. I occasionally read EGM but I preferred the GF and NG.

I subscribed to Computer Gaming World and TurboPlay. Our family also subscribed to COMPUTE! Gazette which wasn't strictly a gaming magazine but had a lot of Commodore 64 game reviews and type-in games.

I had enough PC Gamer mags that it spelled the name "PC Gamer" along the spines of the magazines.

Kind of like this, but pretty much complete:

I'd post my own collection, but it's at my mom and dad's place!

Otherwise, I had PSM, OPM, MaximumPC, Nintedo Power, and EGM at various points in my life. I think I even have a Playstation Underground disc binder somewhere.

I had Nintendo Power during the late 90s and Game Informer during the early 00s

@sticky_pennies: oh man i remember that pc gamer thing. had subscriptions to nintendo power and later game informer. i think i had one for pc gamer too but im pretty sure i just bought them individually when i could afford it, man the demo discs were so rad. has GB ever done a pc gamer demo derby?

reading this thread *almost* has me tempted to subscribe to pc gamer or game informer again, just for nostalgia's sake. but i know it's not the same.

Nintendo Power. Still have the collections that made Link, Mario and Donkey Kong on the spines, though all of them are in pretty bad shape. I also loved Official Playstation Magazine for a long time, and I believe I had an EGM subscription through some rebate offer for a few months but not very long because I didn't own a PC so the two official magazines kept me pretty satiated.

I subscribed to EGM2 (surprised no one mentioned that yet).

Also had a sub for PC Accelerator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Accelerator)

Never did like Nintendo Power even though I had a sub for a year.

I think I only really had a sub for Gamefan. It was the only mag that was multi-console and also didnt rag nonstop on everything Sega.

I had a subscription to Nintendo Power in sixth grade, when I got a Gamecube and had a Game Boy Advance. That lasted a year.

I think I had a subscription to Electronic Gaming Monthly later on in middle school.

I kept up a subscription to Game Informer for quite a few years in high school and college. I was buying a whole lot of used games from Gamestop back then, so I figured I might as well sign up for their membership thing that nets you a few dollars off of each used game and a year-long subscription to Game Informer. I moved to a different house last year - up until that move, a dozen or so of the more interesting GI issues stayed in the bathroom, on a shelf in front of the toilet.

Honestly, having a new issue of Game Informer every month was fun, even if I didn't thoroughly read every one of them and it didn't influence most of my gaming purchases. Here's this super-convenient packing of everything that's been going on in the games industry, what's coming out, what just came out, etc. Internet sites don't have to pare-down their content, they don't have to give any thought to what's important enough to write about, they can just post literally anything that will get them a few views. A magazine has to separate the bullshit from what's worth publishing (or magazines have to give some thought as to what bullshit is worth publishing). That's not to say that I prefer print, but there's definitely an art to it that we lose by just visiting a website to get our news every day or every other day.

Yeah, I had a subscription to the Official U.S. Playstation Magazine. If any of you still have the perforated insert that held the first PS2 demo disc they released, you will find on it an embarrassing quote from seven- or eighth-grade me. I wrote in to them after the PS2 had been out for a while and they had a run of rehashed PS1 demo discs. I wouldn't stand for it!

(I'd actually be curious to see it; I long since lost it or threw it out).

I was an EGM loyalist. Have every issue from 71 onward until they folded on 236. No coincidence, when they folded, that was pretty much when I started hanging out on Giant Bomb too.

Those strategy guides in Nintendo Power were essential, especially considering there was no internet at the time.

For games like say a Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest having something like that was almost a necessity.

-NIN-SENTIAL NINJA APPROVED-

EDGE magazine and GamesTM

Internet was very poor where I lived for a lot longer than it should have been.

i was a gamepro person, also won a sega genesis from one of their mail in contests, fond memories RIP gamepro :(

Truth to tell, when I moved to Massachusetts to go to Graduate school in 1998, my parents were moving too. I had to pack or toss everything because my parents did want ANY of my shit in their packing-up. All those magazines went to a dumpster It was a HARD choice, and I did spend a sleepless night thinking about it, but in teh end I had to toss them. There was a dumpster where I was living where I toss them all into with my futon, posters, a student desk, etc. The magazines I saved very carefully were Next Generation, PSM, and OPM....but they are all lost now. I thought I had saved the Next Generation magazine. I had all EXCEPT issue no 1, but in the three moves since Boston they have gone missing.

If you ask, "Oh, why you get rid of them?!" Well, when I was getting ready to move they took up more than a dozen legal size file boxes. Stacked three high and in four or five rows. They weighed a ton - literally! When Jeff talks about cleaning his house, I can only imagine my burden x10,000. The sad thing is I have been subscribed to Edge since 2007, I paid over $100 a year for it, but I toss THOSE issues away as soon as I read them. Collecting stuff is hard when you have to move that stuff from apt to apt.

We can only hope somewhere or someone has they all so that they can be scanned in high-res.

Nintendo Power - I remember having them as a kid in the mid-late 90's. My mind exploded when I saw screen shots of GBA games thinking how incredible it was I could take that anywhere.

To offer at least one non-English (language) perspective on this topic:

I have nearly all the issues from the Finnish gaming magazine Pelit (translation: Games) from 1992 all the way up to the end of 2008. I paused my subscription for almost a year in 2007 since I was at the time spending more time reading reviews and watching games coverage in video format on a website called Gamespot - additionally starting to read/watch Let's Plays on Something Awful. In the end, 2008 was the last hurrah for the magazine on my part.

Early on in its life Pelit focused on PC, Amiga and C64 games. And with the rise of Windows (95) - or collapse of the latter two systems - only PC games were covered from the mid 90s onward; this is up until the early 2000s with the advent of PS2, Xbox and GameCube, and the merging of the publisher's Playstation-focused console magazine Peliasema (translation being literally: Playstation) into Pelit. The Pelit-magazine still seems to be published monthly even though they have had a strong competitor in the form of a magazine called Pelaaja (translation: Gamer) for 15 years now, it seems. Considering how the internet is the internet, in the realm of video games print media still seems to keep its head(s) above the water, at least in Finland in 2017.

My personal and maybe even historical magazines are lying at my parents' house in two large boxes below the stairs waiting to be skimmed through, read and/or researched. Then again they more or less simply take space and as such may become recycled in the not-too-distant future despite their nostalgic and time-capsulific informational value.

PSM was amazing in the late 90's. I probably had most every issue. The writing and attitude were solid, the cover art was always amazing, and fucking LID STICKERS. Alright, the stickers were totally a gimmick and eventually trailed off (because I'm sure they were too expensive at a time when print was becoming over saturated). But whenever I think back to my OG playstation I still think of my gold eyepatch smiley face lid sticker.

GamesTM. It was so damn thick and full of info.

GamePro in the early to mid 90's and PC gamer in the late 00's.

GamePro

Nintendo Power

Game Informer (still)

PSM

EGM

Gamestop man.... Gamepro

@monkeyking1969: Ah yeah, I get having to get rid of stuff when you move. That's unfortunate, but it's the way of life!

@adequatelyprepared said:

I read PC Gamer an awful lot at my local library. I always liked the pieces by Logan Decker.

Also this isn't from PC Gamer but I always enjoy sharing it.

Wow. Just wow.

Don't see that very often, lol.

-FIRED NINJA APPROVED-