One thing I miss reading is magazines. I know they still exist, but not in the quantity (or quality) they once did. Growing up I spent a lot of my free time with a pile of gaming, comic book, toy, computer, and card game magazines to keep me company while I was young and bored and broke. In these magazines I would longingly look at all the games or comics I wanted to read but just did not have the money for, and I would say to myself “someday I will” as if it were a noble life goal. None of my favorite magazine titles are still being published (and if they are they are just a broken empty shell of their original form that was stepped on and ground up beyond recognition), but I kept all of my old ones and still look at them when I am old and bored and broke, which is very often.

With that in mind, I thought that one thing I could do is scan a few pages of interesting articles from entertainment magazines of times past (mainly comic and gaming magazines). There are still certain bits of information from older magazines that are not archived for historical purposes on the internet, and I think sharing some of these would be interesting – particularly because most of my favorite magazines are extremely hard to find these days (some being quite collectible, I guess because magazines are generally seen as disposable and not that many exist in readable condition, especially if they were niche magazines). For my first entry involving gaming magazines I thought I would post something that is not really that old compared to my favorite years in magazines (which would be the ’90s), but it was always an article I found fun because it is about the memories people have of old consoles and how they were important to them as they grew up with gaming. Later on I will put up some more informative pages with obscure stuff you can’t find on the internet easily, but for now here is the small videogame console retrospective from Gamers’ Republic Volume 2 Issue 8 (January 2000) titled “Millennium Special”. Keep in mind that the write-ups in this article for systems like the Neo Geo Pocket Color, Dreamcast, and PS1 were written while those consoles were still alive (though nearing their end).

I scanned this stuff fairly large so I will just post the direct links instead of embedding them. The writers of each console retrospective are mentioned at the start of each write-up.

Atari

Atari continued

Colecovision

Intellivision

NES

Master System

Genesis

Turbografx

Neo Geo

SNES

Sega CD

3DO

Jaguar

Sega 32X

Saturn

Virtual Boy

PS1

N64

Dreamcast

Handhelds