I thought this might be an interesting occasional feature to have on here. I love old gaming magazines, and I still love reading them today. The temptation to try and start collecting them is enormous, but 1) I don't really have anywhere to put them and 2) it's a surprisingly pricey hobby. So I'll stick with PDFs for now!
Today we're taking a look at the January 1988 issue of Advanced Computer Entertainment, or ACE for short. As per magazine publishing conventions of the time, this issue was most likely released in December (it even says Christmas on the cover) but for the purposes of this feature, I'm just going to take the cover date as "this month".
The cover promises a bunch of goodies, with a particular focus on Christmas stocking-fillers such as compilation disks and cassettes, and the "big releases" of the Christmas period, including Incentive's Driller, EA's Skate or Die and MicroProse's F-19 Stealth Fighter.
The "Editorial" column in magazines is a bit of a lost art these days, replaced by never-ending Opinion pieces. The Editorial section, meanwhile, felt like the staff of the magazine — usually the editor — welcoming you to the latest issue, drawing attention to the things they found particularly noteworthy and interesting, and what they were most proud of.
In the case of this issue, ACE introduced something that would become a fixture in the magazine for many years to come: The Pink Pages. This was an honest attempt to provide a full-on "consumer guide" to home computers, providing an overview of information on 12 different home computers, a selection of consoles and 50 games the team particularly recommended, complete with bite-size mini-reviews. The pages also played host to a free readers' classified ads section, which became quite popular over time for everything from people seeking penpals to those hoping to buy, sell and trade hardware and software.
This was quite an interesting time for computer and gaming hardware — as the cover notes, the magazine was multi-format, and covered both the 8- and 16-bit systems of the time, as well as a few console titles. Being a British magazine, the majority of the emphasis was given to the computer systems, since consoles didn't "catch on" quite as much over here until probably the PS1 era — but there were also often some interesting pieces looking at unconventional, lesser-known hardware from overseas such as the FM Towns, Sam Coupe and NEC's PC-XX range.
Here's an interesting nugget from the news pages: the arrival of Digital Audio Tape, positioned as a contender for CD-ROM's throne in terms of data storage. ACE tells us that a DAT can hold up to 1.2 gigabytes, which they rather charmingly describe as "the equivalent in memory terms of just under 75 million ZX81s (with the RAM pack)". Nice.
ACE considered DAT to be a particularly attractive prospect due to the difficulty of finding read-write CD-ROM drives at the time. Ultimately CD-ROM and its writeable/rewriteable versions would win the format war due to it being accepted as the "standard" for both computer software and audio, but DAT was an exciting prospect for many. One of many dead formats that failed to make a sufficient impact, though.
This is an interesting clipping on a subject that is still a hot topic today — a little too much so, some might say. In 1988, there was still something of a belief that women and girls "needed" their own specific games rather than them being able to enjoy the same stuff the boys lusted over. There were still a number of women in the industry at the time despite its perception as a boys' club, and the case study ACE cites here is Magnetic Scrolls head honcho Anita Sinclair, who was 25 at the time.
Sinclair believed about 25% of the audience for Magnetic Scrolls' games — which were primarily text adventures supported by beautiful graphics — were women. She believed that "women make better adventurers than men" and, contrary to what a lot of people would like to have you believe these days, did not believe that her sex had hampered her career in any way. She also did not have positive things to say about "games for girls" from the era, referring to Infocom's romantic interactive fiction title Plundered Hearts as "one of the worst games ever written".
Speculative features can be quite fun. This one looks forward from 1988 to 1992 (easy now, farseer) and ponders what the "games of the future" — and the systems of the future — might look like.
Writer Andy Wilton postulated that the 16-bit systems such as the ST and Amiga would really come into their own, citing the 68000 processor's ability to produce "unbelievable solid 3D graphics at high speed". Looking beyond the filled 3D polygons of 1988 and beyond, Wilton believed that the next steps were ray tracing — something which graphics cards now are only just starting to get into — and the use of fractals to produce realistic textures. In the long-term, it would be the latter that was experimented with first — particularly for the modelling of landscapes — but neither of these technologies really caught on to a significant degree.
Wilton also showed how far we'd already come by this point, demonstrating a variety of different ZX Spectrum games that went from a static, single-screen affair to a full, filled 3D polygonal title. Back then, the sky seemed like the limit — and the sort of stuff we take for granted today was the stuff of dreams.
The Supertest, as some magazines called it, was a staple part of late '80s/early '90s video game magazines in the UK — and in magazines such as ACE, which were kind of about computerised, nerdy lifestyle as much as they were about games themselves, you'd find features on stuff like keyboards. Several of the popular computers at the time — most notably the Atari ST — were equipped with MIDI interfaces, or at least had accessories available that would allow them to play host to MIDI controllers, and as such some sort of keyboard was quite a popular computer accessory, since we didn't have access to built-in MIDI synthesis like the PCs of today do.
An interesting trend of the era was the fact that a significant number of magazines played host to substantial columns devoted to the adventure game/interactive fiction genre. These writers, who typically wrote under a pseudonym such as Pilgrim (seen here), Brillig (Page 6) and Rouloc (Atari User), would focus on a single game or two at a time and provide in-depth coverage, perhaps in the form of a review, or perhaps in the form of some help with a particularly challenging game's most tricky puzzles.
It's a great example of something we've lost in the modern games press: true genre specialists. These adventure game columns may have only been a page or two in each issue, but they — and the people behind them — became a beloved part of magazine culture.
And here's how ACE's reviews worked. Unfolding over the course of anywhere between a quarter of a page and a double-page spread, they typically focused on a "lead" platform for the review, and, in the case of the larger, longer reviews, provided a bit of commentary on what the other platforms had to offer, too.
ACE's unique aspects to their reviews were their completely unnecessary 1,000 point rating scale, and perhaps more notably, their "Predicted Interest Curve", which aimed to quantify what the reviewer thought the longevity of the game might be — and whether it was something with a bit of a learning curve, or something that was immediately striking and enjoyable. In the case of Bubble Ghost here, we can see that reviewer Pete Connor believed the game started quite strong, but that people would come to enjoy it more over the course of their first hour with it. After that, interest would probably decline after the first day due to its relatively short length, but it remained reasonably fun to return to.
A flawed system, for sure, but an interesting twist on the usual Sound/Graphics/Playability scores other magazines tended to make use of.
And here's that cover feature on compilation packs, explicitly positioned as a "buyer's guide" — consumer advice, rather than artistic criticism. This was pretty much the default way that reviews and other coverage were handled in magazines of the time — the reviewers would make their judgements on things, and that, in turn, would help people to decide whether or not the games were worth buying.
Of course, you had to trust the reviewer's opinion for these "guides" to be truly useful, but even if you didn't, they could still be a helpful means of simply learning what was available at the time — we didn't have the Internet then, remember, so finding out what had come out recently was either a case of looking at magazines or paying your local software shop a visit.
At least you could be sure the reviewers of the era wouldn't be ramming criticisms of toxic masculinity and the like down your throat at every opportunity.
Ah, now here's a lost art form: the POKE. Only really a thing on the 8-bit machines, which all tended to come with a built-in BASIC interpreter, "POKEs" were short BASIC programs that you'd type in before starting a game in order to cheat. They worked by storing particular values in specific memory locations — memory locations that the game happened to call upon in order to, say, figure out how many lives you start with, how much damage you take and all that sort of thing.
The equivalent today would be downloading a piece of "trainer" software or perhaps using a hex editor on a save file. It's not quite the same, though… not to mention it's rather frowned upon, particularly if you're playing online!
And finally, we close off with the back page — which, again, was something of a tradition for most games magazines of the time, though the exact implementation varied from publication to publication. It often incorporated gossip that wouldn't really fit in the news section, or perhaps something comedic — many magazines actually created their own special characters purely to "host" the back page. You'd typically also find an advertisers' index, allowing you to quickly find an advert you wanted to see — not as unthinkable as that might sound today, since "adverts" in a magazine like this also included mail order companies that were good places to get affordable software and hardware — and a brief summary of what we could expect from the next issue, since by the time this one hit newsstands, the team would already be well into working on it.
This was a whistle-stop tour of a particular edition of ACE; there's plenty more besides what we looked at here. If you'd like to read the full issue, Atarimania has an excellent archive of PDF magazines (primarily focusing on Atari, but incorporating some multiplatform magazines like ACE) right here.
