gaming magazines Archives - I'm Not Doctor Who

I am, as these things tend to go, back from my day at the office, following a horrible long drive home in the cold and wet, featuring a stop for a Burger King at Fleet Services that I honestly kind of regret now. I got back too late to pick up my prescription from Tesco, too, so that was annoying. If I hadn't stopped for the Burger King I might have made it. But oh well.

As a result of all this, I am extremely tired and my brain feels like it is firing on roughly 30% capacity. As such, I have started writing this without any particular topic in mind, so I'm just going to babble my way through it until I've done enough words to satisfy myself, and then, honestly, probably just go to bed.

Ooh, here's something I can talk about. Last night I got around to finally watching Pixels to Pages: The Story of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a well-regarded documentary put together as a collaborative affair between the My Life in Gaming and Game Sack channels. I have slightly mixed views on it, because while I cannot deny that it was a well-crafted, well-produced and beautifully edited documentary, it purports to be "the story of Electronic Gaming Monthly" while it is, in fact, "the story of Electronic Gaming Monthly's early years".

Since, as a Brit, I came to EGM rather late, primarily due to my brother taking up the Editor-in-Chief's reins in 1998, I only really knew it from when it was well into the Ziff-Davis era, and the documentary was disappointingly scant on anything from that age of the magazine. My brother got a passing mention as "they got some new guy in, I think he was from England?" and that was it; the vast majority of the documentary focused on the people who helped start it at Sendai Publications, with a few contributions from Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation and Dan "Shoe" Hsu, who joined EGM in 1996 and remained with it until 2008.

For context, EGM ran between 1988 and 2009, and the Ziff era started in 1996. To be fair, the story of EGM's early days is fascinating, and its history is populated by real characters, but it just seemed a bit odd for the documentary to position itself as telling the story of a publication and then just… not really acknowledge anything that happened after 1996 beyond a brief, cursory mention. I'm not just saying this because I'm biased and want to see a family member's contributions to the publication's legacy acknowledged — though that is, of course, part of it — it just felt a little odd to rush through a good 12 years of the magazine's existence as if they didn't matter.

Still, like I say, the documentary is a worthwhile watch, and even with its specific focus it's quite a lengthy affair. It's entirely possible that they just decided to focus on the early days because they thought that was the most interesting story to tell — and I reiterate, it is an interesting story! — or perhaps there was some reason people from the Ziff era were unable or unwilling to contribute their voices to the whole thing. The net result was that it left me with somewhat mixed feelings about the project as a whole, but happy to recommend it to anyone interested in the subject matter.

Among other things, this documentary, along with the continuing excellent work of the Fun Factor podcast, has rekindled a desire to do more Magazine Stuff on my YouTube channel. So I'm going to do exactly that this weekend. There's a lot of different things I would like to cover, so you'll have to wait and see what I decide to do!

Anyway, that's enough of that. Time for bed.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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I've written about this before, but I write a lot of shit on this blog, so you may not have seen it, particularly since I last wrote about it in March of this year, when you may not have even been reading this blog. (The viewing figures would seem to suggest that quite a few more people are reading this blog now than there were in March. Although the other day I had approximately 900 bot visits from China, so I may take those figures with a pinch of salt or ten.)

Anyway, what I would like to talk about is the Fun Factor podcast, hosted by the experienced writers and video game enthusiasts, Ty Schalter and Aidan Moher. "Oh great," you might say. "Another video games podcast. Like we need any more of those!"

To that, dear reader, I say fie and pfaugh and other such expectorations! Fun Factor is different. Fun Factor isn't just a bunch of dudes sitting around talking about what they'd played that week, maybe coupled with the gaming news headlines they'd picked off their favourite website. Fun Factor is, as you might have determined from the name, about something which is very close to my heart and soul: magazines.

Each episode of Fun Factor takes a close look at an individual video game magazine. The present "season" is focusing specifically on the "Generation Gap", which covers the years between 1995 and 1997. This was a time when gaming underwent a quantum shift as we moved from 16-bit pixel mastery into the brave new frontier of (texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded) polygonal 3D thanks to platforms like the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

It was an exciting time, and the press of the period reflected that — for many, this was a real golden age for games magazines, as the Internet was early enough in its mainstream adoption (i.e. a lot of us were still on dial-up, particularly outside the US) that it hadn't yet taken the place of traditional publishing.

Rather than attempting to summarise the entire magazine, an episode of Fun Factor instead primarily focuses on a single piece in that magazine: a "review of a review", as it were. Along the way, Aidan and Ty both take a bit of time to flip through the magazine as a whole and contextualise what they're about to do a deep-dive into, including commentary on what was going on in games at that time, what they were both up to in their own personal lives (and experience with gaming) — and even a look at some of the weird and wonderful adverts that cropped up in print.

What I particularly enjoy about Fun Factor is that it has a breezy, friendly tone that one iTunes reviewer quite correctly described as "being like reading old magazines with friends". It's unmistakably modern, as Ty and Aidan are not above pointing out how these magazines often demonstrate how social attitudes and conventions have changed over the years, but, crucially, this never becomes in any way overbearing or preachy. There is plenty to criticise and lessons to be learned in these old mags — but also plenty to celebrate, too, and the show always finds an excellent balance between reflecting on how we've grown (or not, in some cases!) and what a wonderful time it was to be interested in video games.

Both Aidan and Ty cite classic games magazines as being formative in their own decisions to get into professional writing, so it's all done out of love for the medium. I've seen all too many online discussions of '90s magazines and ads in particular descend into nothing but laughing at the terrible taste and attitudes we all had, but Fun Factor has never, to date, across 13 episodes at the time of writing, found anything completely irredeemable in the publications they've looked at.

Even in instances where both Ty and Aidan have disliked the review that was published — such as Edge's truly strange Final Fantasy VI review — there have been positives to pull out. And some of the best examples of reviews from that period have, so far, ended up coming from the most unexpected places — like, say, sports games.

I adore old magazines and have a small collection of them that I treasure — mostly from well before the era that Aidan and Ty are presently covering on Fun Factor — but I don't have many people that I feel I can talk and enthuse about them with, or who understand why they hold such meaning for me. One of the reasons I value Fun Factor so much is that it helps me feel like there are other people out there who get it, who understand why magazines, at one time, held such importance for us as video game enthusiasts — and why many of us miss those days greatly.

If you're after something new to listen to and the above sounds like fun, you can find more information about the Fun Factor podcast on their official website, funfactorpod.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast's channel on YouTube, and I'd encourage you to check out the video versions of the podcast, since each episode displays scans of the pages that Ty and Aidan are talking about, allowing you to "read along" with them to a certain extent.

Thanks for the entertainment, fellas, and I look forward to hearing more from you. Plus if you ever need to hear stories about old Atari magazines, Year 10 work experience on PC Zone or freelancing for the Official Nintendo Magazine here in the UK, you know where I am!

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Tag: gaming magazines

#oneaday Day 621: Tired

#oneaday Day 489: You've got Fun Factor