Banging on the old drum of ‘you already know this’ Games magazines have always been my number 1 love of absolutely everything to do with the industry, I realize this sounds completely insane but when you are younger your cash availability is at it’s lowest in general terms and games have always been quite expensive when you factor era, storage media and machine cost into things. An example of this would be that The Amiga 500 was a purchase of mine in 1990 and it set me back £499.99, I earned less than £20.00 a week doing a paper round and a Saturday job, I was 16. I had to work an entire summer holiday then borrow money from my mum just to get my foot through the door. A games mag was less than £2.00 and had sometimes over a hundred pages of wall to wall visual splendour, it wasn’t like getting a new game but it was certainly a close and massively satisfying alternative!

From the time of the Spectrum mags like ‘Crash’, ‘Your Sinclair’ and ‘Sinclair User’ to the glory days of when CVG embraced consoles like the NES and Master System I lived, loved and obsessed over everything they presented. Each month most of my cash would go just on the dozens of different publications I would eventually have collections of. Here’s something to note. In those days games magazines usually came out after a machine had been around in order to give them plenty to talk about or multi format magazines which were absolutely the bigger selling publications would occasionally feature a new machine but it would take ages for real coverage of the games to appear. I remember with real clarity that ‘ACE’ magazine which was very much the EDGE of it’s time was the go to mag for the hot gossip on new emerging formats.

So here’s the thing…

In 1993 and 1994 when consoles like the Amiga CD-32 were around many existing Amiga mags simply added it into their pages, yes it spawned 2 separate mags dedicated to it however much of the hype and fanfare felt like it was done via absorption rather than moments like the Official PS1 mag which hit before the machine ever came out in the UK. Now considering how Sega magazines were everywhere the Mega-CD coverage was also done this way, with only 1 dedicated magazine for that again everything felt very tagged on rather than shouted about. Atari stuff was always in their own magazines like ST Format or the multi format mags like Ace and CVG etc and because the Jaguar was so utterly crap it never even generated it’s own real publication even post launch, a proposed magazine that I have a preview issue of was scrapped after it bombed.

Games shops still very much had their flags behind the Megadrive and Super Nintendo even the Amiga which completely dominated much of the UK scene was being pushed further and further back and with hardware shortages for the CD-32 itself even a massively selling new console that hit the ground running simply died for no other reason that a warehouse of stock was sealed when Commodore couldn’t pay it’s bills. The 3DO was so expensive and so completely mis-understood by retail it sometimes appeared in major retail outlets in the wrong section, same for CD-I.