Threw away all my old game mags today.

So I just got done throwing 9 or 10 years worth of video game magazines into the recycling bin

Honestly, it was a bit depressing. Magazines were a big part of my life at one point. I remember as I kid getting super excited whenever a new issue of PSM and EGM came in. And back then the only real way for a kid to get news about the latest games was magazines. Until we got high speed Internet, I relied pretty much solely on magazines.

It's like I threw away a part of my old self and past. But it had a strange cleansing feeling. They had no real world value anymore, they were a potential firehazard, and they simply took up too much space. And really, what was I gonna do with these things?

I'm also trying to go digital for a lot of my media and I'm Dec lettering my life.

I'd did keep my first two issues of PSM and my first issue of EGM and there last issue before the original team disbanded and the magazine shut down back in 06 I believe.

So, thanks for all to those editors and contributors that helped make my childhood awesome.

Did you guys ever do the same thing? How was it?

I had to do that with a lot of back issues of the New York Review of Books at one point, which was annoying since there was a lot of good info in there and the sub was like $70/year. But once you do it you feel better about it pretty much immediately. There's always so much new stuff to read that it's tough to justify keeping old periodical issues around. Except perhaps for comic books.

I threw out the last of them about 6 months ago, buying magazines was an expensive habit (relative to what I pay now for this site) and I'm glad to be done with it.

Awwh, why did you do that?

I have not. I still have all the gaming mags I bought in all my years (granted it's not that big of collection. Maybe 50, 60-ish)

nnooooo you fucked up! I did that a lot earlier in my life and I regret it now. I found an old '97 christmas edition of EGM. I ended up reading through it and really wished I had all those other magazine again. It puts a fun perspective on gaming as a hobby and it's an awesome nostalgic ride. For instance in that magazine the letters to the mag talked about violence in games. Exactly how people talk about it now. They bitched about calling any fps a doom clone and that how they should be called Wolfenstein clones. Hints and rumors about the Dreamcast. Some of it spot on and some way off. Also people talking about how the Saturn is going to fail, Lara Croft's boobs etc. All such cool retrospective.

I kept the ones that were important to me. But there was no real reason for me to have them anymore. I feel pretty good about it.

I should toss mine as well. I have stacks of them I had gotten from various publishers since 1998, until maybe 2003 when I cancelled them all. Had Car and Driver coming as well, cancelled them after they pit a 911 vs. GT-R, and guess what? The BMW M3 won. What a fucking joke.

I kept all my old Nintendo Power magazines when I recycled all my other stuff. I subscribed to it like 10 years ago and it was so good back then. I stopped subscribing shortly before it changed hands. I don't have the heart to get rid of them. I still like looking through them every once in a while. They remind me of games I should go back and play (like F-Zero GX. I need to buy that again. My copy was stolen).

Other than those though, I purged myself of all the rest of my magazines because I never was going to look at them again and they were taking up way too much space.

It would've been nice to make scans of them first at least to be able to have them to go back to but at the same time not take up space.

I tossed mine out as I was moving out of my parent's place about 5 or 6 years ago. It took forever, as I glanced through almost every one. I had many, many Gamepro mags, from the 1st issue, and quite a few Official Playstation Magazines as well. It's too bad my kid will never know the anticipation and joy of receiving one of those puppies in the mail every month.

You fucked up. You should've sold them to me.

God I wonder how much all the Gamepros from the 90s would cost.

Lot of 72 "GamePro" Magazines - 1989 - 2005 & Adult Owned - Smoke Free Home.

starts at $72.

I had every issue of OXM up until a year ago when I threw them all out. I had just as many issues of EGM and PC Gamer because I was getting all three simultaneously. Let me tell you, it does not dawn on you how many magazines you have until you try to lift the bin you are storing them in. That thing was heavy. I actually had to drag it out to my trash can.

It felt good though. Magazines just don't have the relevance they once used to.

My grandfather has every National Geographic Magazine from the past 50 or so years. It is pretty awesome to look read articles from the 70's.

If I have room I love keeping all the nostalgia, unfortunately I just don't have the room to keep that kind of stuff.

Now that I think about it, I have access to several high-speed color scanners at my place of employment.

If only I had the will to actually sit and scan all of these...

Listen to a podcast and just scan away :) It'd be worth it in the long run, I mean just to have all of that information, especially if it's not available elsewhere. Maybe it is, but then again who knows.

Hrgggg.... only problem is shipping is 77 dollars to Canada.

Probably gonna do the same with mine real soon, no point of keeping them now a days. Only thing that's keeping me so far is the part where you have to go through each of them and rip out your mailing address and name from all that shit.

Ouch! Magazines aren't light though...LOL. Maybe you can drive out and pick them up?

I haven't thrown away any of my game magazines but I did so with my steep collection of Goosebumps books as well as kids magazines like Disney Adventures. I don't miss any of them now but at the time it's a bit depressing.

I have a copy of OXM with Vanquish on the cover I use to bash spiders with, and I keep two old mags under my coffee table with Left 4 Dead and L4D2 covers for nostalgic value. Aside from that, they get tossed pretty quick.

I really should do this as well. I have a bunch of old Nintendo Power, OXM, and EGM magazines and all they do is take up space.

I use a copy of OXM to kill spiders too :O

I remember there was a point that I had every single GameInformer magazine from like June 2000 to somewhere in 2011. It seemed like an awesome idea at the time (cleared up a lot of space), but now I regret throwing out the older ones because of how much sentimental value they had. The covers weren't nearly as "artsy" as they are now, but I have fond memories of getting the latest issue, reading every single article and buggin' my Mother to ask Gamestop about weirdJapanesegames that had either come out years ago, or weren't coming out for quite some time.

Man, I miss the weird PSX/PS2 era.

I did the same some time ago and good riddance; these days I find any kind of print media more than a hassle than anything else. Really, anything on paper is a hassle you have to store, at least temporarily, and then dispose of.

Look at it from the right side: in recycling your collection, you just saved a tree or two. Yay!

Going digital is the way to go. I now handle just about every bill through E-banking, I just declared my taxes online, the school has finally started uploading lecture material so printing is optional - I just keep it on the tablet - and I'm going to get the tablet a keyboard so I can take lecture notes on it too so I don't have to buy any more paper notepads. The only thing I get in the mail are ads I don't want and a weekly magazine I get free from the Swedish Medical Association which I haven't figured out how to discontinue my subscription on.

only games mags i kept were my EDGE collection. i have them all going back to issue 1.

I almost have the entire run of the shortly lived GMR magazine. I have been contemplating cleansing myself of all my old magazines as well but I just can't pull the trigger.

I cut the cord on old gaming magazines a while ago. It was fun to thumb through them, but it's just not something I really care about. Games are another story, since you can actually experience them for the first time many years after they were created.

I was forced to throw out everything I had at a point by my parents because they were tired of them taking up space. I do have every one I've bought since then, but this collection pales in comparison to the original.

Having moved several times since then, I will say how nice it is to have done so. Magazines get extremely heavy when they pile up.

i threw away a lot of them a long time ago. it's sometimes funny to look at some old stuff though. i have a few issues of stuff back in the day.

I do have plenty Swedish game mags. Haven't thrown any out as of yet, maybe will if I ever take the time to scan them all. Unlike the US gaming magazines, very few of the Swedish ones are readily available scanned on the Internet. I can pretty much only find the Amiga era stuff online (thanks to the Amiga scene who had the foresight to see that their era was about to end back in the mid 90's, and started archiving everything Amiga related ever), and I got plenty of one-off 90's PC gaming things. Once I've got them all digitalized and backed up, I'm not sure I'd keep the originals around though, I'm not so much as collector as I hate things getting lost to history.

Years ago I got rid of my collection of German gaming magazines which lead way back to the mid 80s (probably several hundred kilos in weight), moving them first from my flat into the cellar and later from the cellar to the waste-paper container was a nightmare. Still getting dorsal pain by just thinking of it...

So no regret (besides the occasional nostalgic melancholy feeling), as there are by now some good archivepages with scans of most of those.

The only magazine I am currently still collecting is "Scroll" by Ray Barnholt, but there are only 9 issues so far...

I looked like a deer in headlights when I saw that thread title. I still regret not keeping my old magazines, gaming and otherwise.

Magazines in the 90's were nuts because unlike the insane onslaught of trailers, screenshots etc back in the day all you had to decide what game you were going to spend your birthday money on was a handful of screenshots in a magazine and the back of the box. Man that seems like from such another age but its only really been about 12 or so years since the internet started to take over print.

I lost all my old gaming magazines when my old house burnt down last year. It's weird, I'd have probably never read them again, and if in the future my mother moved out I'd probably have just told her to throw them away without giving it much thought, but I feel like I've lost part of my gaming history with those, along with the old games that were lost too.

That thread title made me cringe. Seriously.

You might not regret it now, but you will regret it in ten or twenty years. I lost my gaming magazines long ago, and you have no idea what kind of rush it was to find some of those mags in the Internet Archive collection: http://archive.org/details/computermagazines

I had forgot most things about my childhood, but reading those mags brought back so many memories, of times long gone and old friends. Some of whom have since passed away. It's probably one of those things that you only start to understand when you grow older: you should keep mementos.

For the rest of you who are considering throwing away magazines: do yourself a favor and scan them first, if they're not already available online.