You know what I miss most about being a kid gamer in the 90s? It wasn’t the games themselves – hell, I can still play most of those on my original hardware. It was that monthly ritual of getting my gaming magazines in the mail and feeling like I was holding the keys to the kingdom. These weren’t just magazines to me, they were scripture.
My introduction to gaming journalism started with theft, if I’m being honest. My buddy Jake had this older brother who subscribed to Nintendo Power, and one day Jake “borrowed” issue #34 with Metroid on the cover. We spent an entire weekend poring over those pages like archaeologists studying ancient texts, memorizing every screenshot and map detail. I’d never seen anything like it – here was this whole world of gaming knowledge and insider information that felt impossibly sophisticated compared to just playing games blindly.
That experience got me hooked on the idea that there was more to gaming than just the cartridges themselves. There was this whole ecosystem of information, strategy, and community that existed in print. So I begged my parents for magazine subscriptions, which probably seemed like a reasonable request compared to constantly asking for new games. Magazines were cheaper than cartridges, educational-ish, and kept me occupied for hours. My mom probably thought she was encouraging reading habits. She wasn’t wrong, technically.
Electronic Gaming Monthly became my primary source of truth once I graduated beyond Nintendo Power. EGM felt more grown-up, more legitimate somehow. They covered all the consoles, not just Nintendo stuff, which mattered once I convinced my parents to get me a Genesis alongside my SNES. But what really sold me on EGM was their multi-reviewer system. Instead of getting one person’s opinion, you’d get three or four different perspectives on each game, complete with separate scores.
I developed this weird parasocial relationship with those reviewers. After reading EGM for a couple years, I knew that if Sushi-X gave a fighting game a 9, it was probably worth my attention, but if he scored an RPG highly, I should be skeptical because our tastes diverged there. Ed Semrad seemed to appreciate the same platformers I did. Steve Harris was the guy to trust for sports games, which I mostly ignored anyway. These weren’t just bylines to me – they were distinct personalities whose preferences I’d learned to calibrate against my own.
GamePro had a completely different vibe that appealed to my middle school sensibilities. Those cartoon reviewer personas – Major Mike, Air Hendrix, Doctor Devon – felt more like gaming buddies than authority figures. The whole visual design was more aggressive, more colorful, more… I don’t know, radical? That sounds stupid now, but in 1992 it felt cutting-edge. Plus GamePro had those ProTips scattered throughout every issue, little yellow boxes with specific gameplay advice that felt like cheat codes for life.
The physical anticipation was half the experience. I’d calculated exactly when each magazine should arrive based on previous months, and I’d start checking the mailbox obsessively during the expected window. Finding that familiar spine among the bills and catalogs was better than Christmas morning. I’d literally run to my room, shut the door, and spend the next two hours absorbing every page, advertisement included.
Those ads were important, too. This was pre-internet, remember – magazine ads were often the first place you’d see screenshots of upcoming games. I’d study those tiny preview images like they contained state secrets. “Coming Spring 1994” meant marking my calendar and starting a savings plan. A full-page spread for a new RPG meant clipping it out and adding it to my bedroom wall collage of games I desperately wanted.
My purchasing strategy revolved entirely around magazine coverage. I kept this notebook – God, I was such a nerd – where I’d track games by score, release date, and price. Getting multiple 9+ scores across different magazines was basically a guarantee I’d eventually buy something. A game scoring in the 6-7 range might be worth a rental. Anything below 6 was dead to me unless it was dirt cheap and I was really bored.
The financial math was crucial because I could maybe afford three or four games per year with my allowance and birthday money. A bad purchase meant being stuck with something disappointing for months. These magazines weren’t just entertainment – they were consumer protection, helping me avoid wasting twenty-five bucks on some terrible licensed movie tie-in.
I still remember specific issues that blew my mind. EGM’s first coverage of Doom, with those tiny screenshots that somehow conveyed how revolutionary it was going to be. GamePro’s massive Street Fighter II character guide with all the special moves listed. Nintendo Power’s fold-out map for A Link to the Past that went straight onto my wall and stayed there for years. These weren’t just magazines – they were artifacts, reference materials, decoration.
The cheat code sections were pure gold. Before GameFAQs existed, finding out that holding A+B+C+Start on the Genesis gave you a level select in Sonic was insider information passed through magazine pages. I had a separate notebook just for codes, organized by system and game. Bringing a fresh issue to school after they’d published a new batch of Mortal Kombat fatalities made you temporarily popular as everyone crowded around to copy them down.
The rumors sections were simultaneously the best and worst parts of these magazines. “Gaming Gossip” in EGM, “Cutting Edge” in GamePro – these pages were pure speculation disguised as journalism, and I ate up every word. Some rumors turned out to be true, which validated the whole enterprise. Most were complete nonsense, but hope springs eternal when you’re thirteen and desperate for news about the next Sonic game.
I learned media literacy through these rumor sections, actually. After getting burned by enough “Secret character unlocked in Street Fighter!” claims that turned out to be hoaxes, I developed a healthy skepticism about sources and evidence. Not a bad skill to develop, even if the stakes were just video games.
The technical coverage fascinated me in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time. Articles about blast processing, Mode 7 graphics, CD-ROM loading times – I absorbed this information without really grasping the underlying technology. But it gave me this framework for understanding why games looked and played differently across systems. The 16-bit console wars weren’t just about brand loyalty – there were actual technical differences being explained in these pages.
Demo discs changed everything once the PlayStation era hit. Suddenly magazines weren’t just telling you about games – they were letting you play pieces of them. Those demo discs were treated like precious artifacts in my house. I’d read the magazine until it fell apart, but the disc got carefully stored in a protective case. I still have a binder full of those things, including demos for games that never actually got released.
The community aspect was huge, too. Meeting another kid who read the same magazines meant instant common ground. You both understood the inside jokes, the ongoing feuds between reviewers, the significance of certain scores or features. When EGM published their infamous April Fool’s joke about Sheng Long in Street Fighter II, it created this shared experience among readers – we’d all been had together, and somehow that made it funnier rather than annoying.
My magazine subscriptions started declining in college as the internet became more reliable for gaming news. Why wait a month for information when you could get it immediately online? The economics made sense, but something was lost in the transition. The curation, maybe – having editors decide what deserved page space created a shared vocabulary about what games mattered. Everything online gets equal treatment, which is democratic but less focused.
I kept my subscriptions going longer than I should have, partly from habit and partly from loyalty. These magazines had shaped my entire relationship with gaming during my formative years. Canceling felt like betrayal, even as the page counts shrank and the content became more generic.
The last physical gaming magazine I bought was probably around 2005, but I’ve never stopped missing them. Occasionally I’ll find old issues at retro game shops, and flipping through a 1993 EGM hits harder than actually playing games from that era. It’s not just nostalgia – it’s remembering a completely different relationship with information and anticipation.
My kids don’t understand any of this, obviously. They’ve grown up with instant access to every piece of gaming information ever created. The idea that we used to wait a month for news, that we treasured individual magazine issues, that we’d re-read reviews of games we already owned just to see if we’d missed anything – it all sounds absurd to them.
But I still have a box of my favorite issues stored away. The special retrospectives, the buyer’s guides, the anniversary issues – they’re not reference material anymore, everything in them is hopelessly outdated. They’re more like photo albums from a specific period of my life, when gaming felt smaller and more manageable, when expert opinion carried real weight, and when information was scarce enough to be genuinely precious.
Trying to explain this to modern gamers is like describing what it was like before cell phones – technically possible, but the context is so foreign that the significance gets lost. These magazines weren’t just about games – they were about becoming part of a community, developing taste, learning to think critically about media. They were my introduction to journalism, consumer advocacy, and tribal identity all wrapped up in colorful pages full of screenshots and score boxes.
I miss that monthly rhythm, the anticipation and delayed gratification that made each issue feel important. Everything moves faster now, which has obvious advantages, but something valuable was lost when we stopped having to wait for our gaming news to arrive in the mailbox. Those magazines taught patience, curation, and the value of expert opinion – lessons that feel increasingly relevant in our current age of information overload.
The internet democratized gaming journalism, which was probably inevitable and mostly good. But those of us who grew up reading EGM and GamePro remember when gaming media felt more like a conversation between friends than a constant stream of content. We remember when getting the latest issue felt like an event, and when the opinions inside actually shaped what games we played and how we thought about them.
Maybe I’m just old and nostalgic, but I think we lost something important when gaming magazines died. Not just the information – that’s better now than it’s ever been. We lost the sense of community, the shared experience of discovering the same games at the same time, the authority that came from careful curation rather than comprehensive coverage. Those magazines weren’t just guides to games – they were guides to becoming a gamer, and I’m not sure we’ve found anything to replace them.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
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