Old Gaming Magazines That Shaped Generations

Before YouTube breakdowns, Reddit threads, Discord leaks, and day-one patch discourse, old gaming magazines were basically the pipeline. Magazines taught kids and adults how to look at games. They shaped taste, built hype, ranked what was “cool,” and subtly defined what being a gamer even meant in the first place. That memory still shows up in retro communities today, where people talk about waiting on the next issue, obsessing over tiny preview images, and treating demo discs, cheat sections, and rumor pages like sacred text.

That’s why the history of gaming journalism is bigger than a stack of old Nintendo Power or EGM issues sitting in somebody’s attic. It’s also the story of how gaming culture standardized itself across all possible environments.

Source: https://gamehistory.org/every-english-language-video-game-magazine/

Long before feeds became algorithmic, magazines were already doing the cultural filtering by hand: deciding what deserved the cover and what counted as the future. Retro players point to that era as one where magazines covered everything from imports to arcade scenes, and where a single preview page could fuel weeks of talks and impossible expectations.

Gaming publications were the closest thing the medium had to a global nervous system before the web. They were where people got launch news, preview coverage, cheat codes, walkthrough fragments, hardware rumors, and the kind of reviews that felt official when you were twelve and had no other frame of reference. Like flipping straight to Nintendo Power’s “Classified Information” pages for codes and tips, or learning entire fighting-game move sets through GamePro guides because there was nowhere else to look.

What made them even more precious was the rhythm. You did not scroll past an issue in ten seconds. You waited for it, bought it, reread it, argued with it, and squeezed every last bit of value out of six screenshots and one preview column. That anticipation gave each journal a weird kind of staying power. In modern terms, that kind of ritual was its own form of player retention; not in the live-service sense, but in the way it kept players emotionally plugged into games between releases.

They also opened the door for kids who did not even own the hardware yet. That part gets overlooked now, and unfairly. A lot of people first learned the shape of the gaming industry through publications long before they had a reliable way to actually play most of what they were reading about. You could still know the names, the studios, the mascots, the genres, the upcoming releases, the import oddities. You could follow the scene from a distance and feel like you belonged to it.

Source: https://www.nettosgameroom.com/2024/09/the-death-of-gaming-magazines-and-few.html

That’s why they were so big and valuable. They were access. They connected local players to a wider culture and made gaming feel larger than a bedroom.

If there is one video game magazine that feels like a bridge between the scrappier 8-bit press and the more polished games media that came later, it is ACE. It is short for Advanced Computer Entertainment and launched in the UK in October 1987 and ran until April 1992, first under Future Publishing and later under EMAP. In retrospect, you can understand why so many consider it a sort of prototype for the more polished Future style, which would in turn appear on Edge.

Its platform concentration was broad by late-1980s standards. Early coverage was dominated by systems such as the Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, then expanded when newer hardware arrived.

Source: https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/ace/

It also ran material on graphics and computer music, which gave it a slightly more tech-literate feel than a straight review monthly. It also shipped with cover cassettes and later floppy disks carrying demos, which made each issue feel more like a package than just a read.

Editorially, ACE had strong roots in the UK microcomputer press. The launch team was built largely from ex-Amstrad Action and Personal Computer Games staff. Peter Connor and Steve Cooke served as co-editors, with Andy Wilton as Reviews Editor, Dave Packer and Andy Smith as staff writers, and Trevor Gilham as Art Editor. When the project changed hands in 1989, Future moved much of the original team onto Amiga Format and ST Format, which says a lot about how important that staff DNA was.

The part people even now bring up when talking about ACE is the review section, Screen Test. It broke games down into categories like visual effects, audio, IQ Factor, and Fun Factor, then gave an overall score out of 1000. That alone made it feel slightly obsessive in the best possible way, but ACE also added the “Predicted Interest Curve,” a graph meant to estimate how long a title would actually stay interesting over time.

Computer Games Magazine was one of those magazines from the 2000s that had one foot in old-fashioned print culture and the other in the louder, more frenetic version of gaming culture that was beginning to emerge online. By the time it closed in April 2007, though, it had built a long, weirdly layered story: it was founded in the UK in October 1988 as Games International, relaunched in October 1990 as Strategy Plus, then reworked into Computer Games Strategy Plus before it finally became Computer Games Magazine, after theGlobe.com acquired it.

Source: https://www.retromags.com/gallery/image/32666-computer-games-magazine-issue-113-april-2000/

It was the print monthly magazine that covered both computer and console titles, but its primary focus was more on the PC part of the market. Computer Games Magazine had a slightly more systems-oriented, strategy-influenced feel.

It was also not just a print publisher. The official site, cdmag.com was said to be drawing around a million unique visitors per month by early 2000, which can make Computer Games Magazine a prime example of a publication that’s found itself squarely on the line between print dominance and digital expansion. It was still a print-first brand, but it was already learning to step inside both spaces.

Computer Gaming World had a different kind of weight amid 90s gaming magazines. Founded in 1981 by Russell Sipe, it was one of the first publications dedicated solely to computer IPs, and lasted longer than any other uninterrupted PC games publication until an update in 2006, when it became Games for Windows: The Official Magazine.

Early CGW was minimalistic in terms of page count, small circulation, and even small numbers. A defining characteristic of that identity was strongly influenced by its contributors. CGW created an editorial bench of editors that included Charles Ardai, M. Evan Brooks, Johnny Wilson and Scorpia, all of whom featured as the magazine’s leading opinionated voice on RPGs and adventure genres for nearly sixteen years. That lineup mattered, though, because CGW wasn’t simply reviewing games. It gave serious space to genres that often got flattened or ignored elsewhere, especially hardcore RPGs, wargames, and flight sims.

Source: https://www.retromags.com/gallery/image/7829-computer-gaming-world-issue-132-july-1995/

Style-wise, CGW came across as a more deliberate, text-rich when compared to many of its rivals. Even when other magazines were leaning harder into flashier, faster judgments or hype-y layouts, CGW preserved a reputation for serious reviews and editorial substance.

If some periodicals seemed archival or niche, PC Gamer seemed like the journal that evolved alongside the mainstream side of PC play and kept an eye on gaming culture. It was established in the UK in 1993, the US edition in 1994, and became one of the iconic magazines from the 2000s.

Its tone always had a more spirited and expansive touch. The UK and US editions both built up reputations on extensive reviews. Regular sections mixed previews, letters, hardware coverage, modding features, reader contributions, and longer editorial pieces. Part of the identity was born from the format and reach. The British and American editions were published monthly, and the UK version would often release 13 issues a year.

For many years the journal had floppy disks, then demo CDs, then DVDs. The demo-disc presentation became a signature part of the brand’s mythos, complete with quirky FMV bits and the Coconut Monkey mascot that older readers still point to with the same kind of half-ironic affection only print-era PC fans can muster.

Source: https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/pc-gamer/

From an editorial standpoint, PC Gamer had actual continuity. The UK version has been led by Phil Savage, and the US edition has been developed in a long line of prominent editors, including Gary Whitta and Evan Lahti. In time, that established the magazine as a voice that could change with the market without fully losing itself. It was serious about criticism but never quite so formal that it felt detached from the people who were actually building PCs, modding games, arguing on forums or obsessing over patch notes. It was this balance which greatly kept it relevant as print declined and the digital world took full advantage of it.

Yet PC Gamer was really successful because it managed to move quickly enough online without giving up the tradition of being a print mag. Its blog, forums, podcast, and later the broader combined UK/US site gave it an air of ease when entering online life rather than despair.

If you care about video game magazine covers, GameFan is one of the easiest magazines to recognize from across a room. Launched in September 1992 as Diehard GameFan, it built its identity around huge, colorful screenshots, glossy paper, loud layouts, and an imported-games obsession that made a lot of other US media outlets look conservative by comparison. It covered both domestic and Japanese releases, but the style especially clicked with readers chasing Saturn, PlayStation, arcade imports, fighters, and Nintendo games that felt bigger and stranger in print than they did anywhere else.

Tim Lindquist, Greg Off, George Weising and Dave Halverson founded the magazine, and Halverson later became the critical editor in chief most people identify with its tone and legacy. That voice was messy and fervent, at times unruly, the antithesis of the cleaner magazine-house tone of something as simple as EGM. GameFan may be rough around the edges, but that roughness was part of what it enjoyed. It sounded more like a publication written by people who were too excited about games to clean up their mess to fit in to mainstream respectability.

Published monthly in an original run, it continued to circulate until December 2000, with circulation reaching over 100,000 by that time. It also gained fame for, on the road, things beyond merely reviews and previews. It took on anime stories earlier than many of its competitors, published features like The Adventures of Monitaur, and helped set out an exaggerated character-driven form of gaming media that later appeared in gaming mags like Gamers’ Republic and Play, both associated with GameFan workers.

Source: https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/diehard-gamefan/

With that said, GameFan had baggage as well. It also has a checkered history, including a notorious 1995 story with racist filler text that was printed and an apology in the subsequent issue. So, for all of the magazine’s energy and visual identity, it’s also one of those stories where anything-goes editorial culture, obviously, really had a darker side.

That said, if you’re about magazines that felt like they came alive on the page, GameFan ought to be in the conversation right now. It was noisy, it was imported-looking, visually overcrowded, and utterly indifferent in the willingness to turn game hype into spectacle.

What we like about old gaming magazines is that they do not just feel retro. They feel like a time machine built out of paper, bad fonts, exaggerated review scores, weird cover lines, and somebody’s very specific 1996 opinion about where games were headed.

That is probably why collectors hunt them down. It is not only nostalgia, though, yeah, that is part of it. It is also preservation. These mags captured the mood of an era while it was happening. The ads, the layouts, the screenshots they chose, the games they pushed, the ones they ignored, the language they used around “the future”—all of that tells you what gaming looked like when it was figuring itself out.

And honestly, developers have reasons to care. A lot of old magazine design rules. The big typography, chaotic page composition, overcommitted cover art, weird confidence, all of it has a kind of energy modern marketing sometimes lacks. You still see devs and indie teams borrowing that look now.

For researchers, they are even more valuable. They are basically archives of how the medium explained itself before YouTube essays and social media feeds took over. Editors, reviewers, preview writers, and feature columns helped shape public opinion in a much more direct way back then. So if you want to understand how players learned to value certain genres, studios, mechanics, or whole ideas of what games should be, the magazines are right there. They did not just document gaming history. In a lot of ways, they helped write it.

And now we write the history. And yours can be part of it. If you want to build a game people will remember, talk about, and go looking up years later, teaming up with a game art studio like Argentics gives you a much better shot at making something that actually sticks.

Be on the next cover everywhere. Talk to us about your future project!