The first gaming magazine I ever owned wasn’t even mine. It was my older brother Dave’s copy of Nintendo Power, issue #23 with Super Mario Bros. 3 on the cover, which I “borrowed” and somehow never returned. I was nine years old, and that magazine became my most prized possession, more valuable than any actual game I owned. The pages grew dog-eared from repeated reading, the cover developed that soft, worn quality that well-loved magazines get. I studied every screenshot, memorized maps, and read strategy guides for games I didn’t even own but desperately wanted. That tattered magazine was my first window into a larger gaming world beyond my limited collection of cartridges—a sacred text that promised digital wonders waiting to be discovered.
The monthly anticipation of a new gaming magazine arriving is something today’s instantly-updated gaming websites can’t replicate. I’d check the mailbox daily during the expected delivery window, racing home from school to see if the new issue had arrived. There was something magical about the physicality of it—that moment when you’d tear off the plastic wrapper, catch the first whiff of fresh ink and paper, and see which game had earned the coveted cover spot. The monthly schedule created a delicious cycle of anticipation, consumption, and reflection that perfectly matched a child’s perception of time. Four weeks felt like forever, but that wait made each issue an event.
My allegiance to specific magazines evolved as I got older. Nintendo Power was perfect for a young Nintendo devotee—its semi-official status meant incredible access to upcoming games, detailed maps, and strategy guides that felt authoritative. But as I approached my teenage years and got a Genesis alongside my SNES, I needed more platform-agnostic coverage. That’s when Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) and GamePro entered my life, more mature-feeling publications that covered all systems and, crucially, didn’t feel like they were written with parental supervision.
GamePro’s visual identity was impossible to mistake—those cartoon reviewer personas like “Major Mike” and “Doctor Devon” giving ratings with their signature thumbs-up system. The magazine had an aesthetic energy that appealed to my middle-school sensibilities, with its colorful layouts and slightly rebellious tone. The ProTips—those yellow-bordered nuggets of gaming wisdom scattered throughout reviews and previews—were like little treasures. “In stage 3, use the light weapon against shadow enemies for maximum damage!” These tips felt like secret knowledge being passed from gaming elders to the uninitiated, specialized information that separated the casual players from the dedicated.
Electronic Gaming Monthly, meanwhile, positioned itself as the more serious, journalistic option—the thinking gamer’s magazine. Their review system featuring multiple reviewers giving separate scores felt revolutionary. Instead of a single authoritative voice, you got a panel of perspectives, helping you triangulate whether a game might match your personal taste. If a reviewer whose preferences I’d learned to recognize over months of reading gave a fighting game a 9 but an RPG a 5, I knew to pay more attention to their fighting game recommendations. This created a parasocial relationship with these reviewers—I felt like I knew Sushi-X and Danyon Carpenter personally after years of reading their opinions.
The influence these magazines held over my purchasing decisions cannot be overstated. In the pre-internet era, there were precious few sources of reliable information about games. Television coverage was minimal and often clueless. The clerk at Electronics Boutique was more interested in selling whatever had the highest margin than giving honest recommendations. Friends’ opinions were colored by their own biases and defensive justifications of their purchases. Magazines, with their professional screenshots, detailed features, and numerical ratings, felt like the closest thing to objective truth available. A game scoring in the 90s across multiple publications was as close to a sure bet as existed.
I developed elaborate systems for tracking games I wanted based on magazine coverage. I kept a spiral notebook with game titles listed in order of priority, with magazine scores noted, release dates tracked, and price drops monitored. This wasn’t just some kid being organized—it was financial necessity. On my modest allowance and birthday/Christmas supplement, I could only afford to buy a handful of games per year. A purchasing mistake meant being stuck with a disappointing game for months until I could afford another. The stakes felt incredibly high, and magazines were my risk mitigation strategy.
The physical components of these magazines became important artifacts themselves. EGM’s annual buyer’s guides were kept like reference books, consulted throughout the year when friends debated the relative merits of games or systems. When Nintendo Power sent out those epic fold-out maps for games like Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, they went straight onto my bedroom wall, part decoration and part functional tool for in-game navigation. I even saved the subscription cards that fell out of every issue, not to subscribe (I already had subscriptions) but because they often had tiny screenshots or artwork on them that I couldn’t bear to throw away.
My relationship with game magazines required financial planning that taught me budgeting skills that would have made my math teacher proud. A year’s subscription to EGM ($29.95) versus 12 individual issues at the newsstand ($47.40) meant a savings of $17.45, which was nearly half the cost of a new SNES game. But subscriptions meant waiting for mail delivery rather than getting the issue on release day at the local Waldenbooks. These were the calculations that occupied my young mind, weighing immediate gratification against long-term value—life lessons disguised as hobby management.
The discovery of cheat codes through these magazines felt like being initiated into a secret society. Before the internet made GameFAQs a universally accessible resource, knowing that Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A gave thirty lives in Contra was privileged information shared through magazine pages and playground whisper networks. I kept a dedicated notebook just for codes and secrets, categorized by game and system. Bringing a new issue of GamePro to school after it had published a major code dump made you temporarily popular as friends crowded around to copy down the fatalities for Mortal Kombat or the level select password for Sonic the Hedgehog.
The rumors section in these magazines—EGM’s “Gaming Gossip” and GamePro’s “The Cutting Edge”—were literature’s greatest cliffhangers for my teenage self. Each month brought tantalizing, often outlandish claims about upcoming games or hidden features, offering just enough plausibility to keep hope alive. “Sources at Nintendo hint that Mario and Sonic may appear in the same game!” “A secret code in Street Fighter II unlocks playable bosses!” Many of these rumors proved false, but enough contained kernels of truth to make each new issue’s speculation worth devouring. These sections taught critical thinking in their way—learning to distinguish between credible information and wishful thinking was an important media literacy skill developed through years of rumor validation and disappointment.
The feature articles and special issues became time capsules of gaming history as it was happening. I still have EGM’s 16-bit console comparison guide, with its detailed technical specifications and game library projections. Reading it now is a fascinating glimpse into how these systems were understood at their commercial peak, before history had decided their ultimate legacy. The breathless coverage of technological advancements that seem quaint now—”The Super FX chip allows for revolutionary 3D graphics with up to 76 polygons on screen at once!”—captures the genuine excitement these incremental steps forward generated.
Gaming magazines didn’t just inform; they helped form an entire gaming culture. They established a shared vocabulary, history, and value system among readers. When you met someone who also read EGM, you had immediate common ground—you both understood references to running jokes, ongoing controversies, and notable games that had been covered extensively. The April Fool’s pranks became legendary shared experiences—EGM’s infamous “Sheng Long” hoax for Street Fighter II created a collective wild goose chase that gamers still reference decades later. These publications weren’t just reporting on gaming culture; they were actively creating it.
The arrival of demo discs attached to magazines in the PlayStation era felt like the future had landed in my lap. Suddenly, magazines weren’t just telling you about games—they were letting you play segments of them before release. My PlayStation magazines with attached discs were treated with extra care, stored in protective sleeves after the magazines themselves had been read to tatters. I maintained a separate binder just for these demo discs, carefully labeled with permanent marker noting which games were included. Finding that one demo for a game that never actually got a full release (Tiny Tank, I still remember you fondly) became like owning a rare trading card—physical evidence of gaming history that might otherwise have been forgotten.
The decline of these print publications coincided with my college years—a bittersweet transition. The internet was rendering monthly publishing schedules obsolete, with GameFAQs and early gaming websites offering immediate information rather than making you wait weeks for the next issue. The economics of print media were already struggling, with page counts shrinking and paper quality declining before the eventual shift to digital-only formats or outright closure. I maintained my subscriptions longer than was probably logical, partly from habit and partly from loyalty to formats that had shaped my gaming life so profoundly.
My last physical gaming magazine subscription ended in 2004, but I never deleted the bookmarked folder in my browser labeled “gaming magazines”—a digital homage to the physical publications that guided me through my formative years. Occasionally I’ll visit retro gaming shops that have old issues for sale, and the flood of memories that comes from flipping through a 1994 EGM is more powerful than any actual retro gaming session could provide. The distinctive smell of those aging pages, the familiar layout designs, the screenshots of games I spent hundreds of hours mastering—it’s a direct sensory link to a particular moment in both gaming history and my own childhood.
What these magazines offered that today’s instant digital coverage can’t quite replicate was the curation—the sense that experts had sifted through everything to present what mattered most. Modern gaming sites are comprehensive to a fault, covering every minor release and industry announcement with equal prominence. The physical limitations of print required editorial choices about what deserved precious page space. This created a shared gaming vocabulary—if Nintendo Power dedicated six pages to a new release, you knew it was significant regardless of whether it appealed to your personal taste. There was a cultural center to gaming that these gatekeepers helped establish.
The loss of physical gaming media has been compensated by the incredible breadth and depth of information available online, but something intangible has been lost as well. Those long childhood afternoons spent poring over every screenshot, re-reading reviews of games I already owned just to see if the reviewers had noticed the same things I had, carefully cutting out pages to create collages of my favorite games—these experiences were shaped by the physical format itself. The anticipation of information, the deliberate pace of monthly publishing, created a different relationship with gaming news and criticism than today’s constant firehose of content.
I still have a storage box in my closet containing what my wife generously calls my “magazine archive” and what is more accurately described as “magazines I couldn’t bear to throw away during multiple moves across three states.” The special issues, the buyer’s guides, the anniversary retrospectives—preserved not for reference (everything in them is hopelessly outdated) but because they represent something more than just information. They’re artifacts of how I experienced and understood games during the most formative period of my gaming life. Those glossy pages didn’t just tell me about games; they helped shape who I would become as a player, a critic, and eventually, a parent sharing gaming with my own kids.
When I try to explain to my teenage nephew why these magazines mattered so much—why I still have EGM’s 100th issue sealed in plastic—I struggle to convey the full significance. In an age of instant updates and unlimited information, the idea that monthly gaming news could be precious seems quaint. But those of us who grew up in the heyday of gaming magazines understand. We remember the anticipation, the authority these publications held, and how each issue wasn’t just consumed but studied, treasured, and revisited. They weren’t just guides to games; they were guides to an entire world of gaming—maps for a territory we were all discovering together, one monthly issue at a time.
