Recommend me good gaming magazines from the 80s/90s

[Rincewind]

As the title says; I need some quality reading materials for my "re-live the golden age of gaming in the 80s/90s" project (see my signature).

I want to narrow it down to one or two magazines tops, definitely not more than that (my free time is limited).

Of course, everybody can download all the magazines, then the Hall of Light has links to magazine scans for most listed games, but I find 90% of those to be complete rubbish, to be honest. "There's red guys and green guys and you can shoot them all. Sometimes you'll see yellow guys; if you shoot those, you'll get a bonus! Whoopie! Great game! I like the graphics! 10/10" Yeah, most Amiga mags tended to "review" games like that... One of them even called Galdregon's Domain (Deathbringer in the US) a "Dungeon Master killer" or something. Huh?!

Computer Gaming World seems to be all I need, especially Scorpia's reviews. I really like her style and general attitude. I'm just wondering if her reviews were the best pre-Internet information source on RPGs and adventure games, or if there was something else too. Naturally, this is a question for the oldfags as I'm interested in people's first-hand experience -- I can use Google too.

It would be interesting to pair CGW with a European (well, British) gaming mag that had at least a monthly column with strong adventure / RPG focus, written by a knowledgeable expert who wasn't afraid to state his (or her) opinion. Just to get a different perspective on things.

Speaking of perspectives, I just went through a few CGW issues from 1989, and it's so strange for me to see that half of the magazines consisted of full-page ads for various games. SSI, Interplay, Microprose, Sierra, you name it. I find that super cool, and it gives me a little glimpse into life in the USA as a computer nerd in the 80s/90s. Gaming mags in Hungary had none of that in the first half of the 90s -- understandably, since there was simply no way to buy games legally in the country; everybody was pirating everything. You got maybe 3-5 pages of computer shop ads in a 50 page mag, and that was it. Well, and there were no computer gaming related magazines in existence before about 1987 at all...

 

[Bester]

Scorpia's reviews

I've only read her infamous Baldur's Gate review and it seems so simplistic, like if a 16 year old girl wrote it. No in-depth analysis of anything. I wonder if this was considered high standards back then.

For crying out loud, she even says the random numbers generator cheats.

 

[ropetight]

As the title says; I need some quality reading materials for my "re-live the golden age of gaming in the 80s/90s" project (see my signature).

I want to narrow it down to one or two magazines tops, definitely not more than that (my free time is limited).

Of course, everybody can download all the magazines, then the Hall of Light has links to magazine scans for most listed games, but I find 90% of those to be complete rubbish, to be honest. "There's red guys and green guys and you can shoot them all. Sometimes you'll see yellow guys; if you shoot those, you'll get a bonus! Whoopie! Great game! I like the graphics! 10/10" Yeah, most Amiga mags tended to "review" games like that... One of them even called Galdregon's Domain (Deathbringer in the US) a "Dungeon Master killer" or something. Huh?!

Computer Gaming World seems to be all I need, especially Scorpia's reviews. I really like her style and general attitude. I'm just wondering if her reviews were the best pre-Internet information source on RPGs and adventure games, or if there was something else too. Naturally, this is a question for the oldfags as I'm interested in people's first-hand experience -- I can use Google too.

It would be interesting to pair CGW with a European (well, British) gaming mag that had at least a monthly column with strong adventure / RPG focus, written by a knowledgeable expert who wasn't afraid to state his (or her) opinion. Just to get a different perspective on things.

Speaking of perspectives, I just went through a few CGW issues from 1989, and it's so strange for me to see that half of the magazines consisted of full-page ads for various games. SSI, Interplay, Microprose, Sierra, you name it. I find that super cool, and it gives me a little glimpse into life in the USA as a computer nerd in the 80s/90s. Gaming mags in Hungary had none of that in the first half of the 90s -- understandably, since there was simply no way to buy games legally in the country; everybody was pirating everything. You got maybe 3-5 pages of computer shop ads in a 50 page mag, and that was it. Well, and there were no computer gaming related magazines in existence before about 1987 at all...

As the title says; I need some quality reading materials for my "re-live the golden age of gaming in the 80s/90s" project (see my signature).

I want to narrow it down to one or two magazines tops, definitely not more than that (my free time is limited).

Of course, everybody can download all the magazines, then the Hall of Light has links to magazine scans for most listed games, but I find 90% of those to be complete rubbish, to be honest. "There's red guys and green guys and you can shoot them all. Sometimes you'll see yellow guys; if you shoot those, you'll get a bonus! Whoopie! Great game! I like the graphics! 10/10" Yeah, most Amiga mags tended to "review" games like that... One of them even called Galdregon's Domain (Deathbringer in the US) a "Dungeon Master killer" or something. Huh?!

Computer Gaming World seems to be all I need, especially Scorpia's reviews. I really like her style and general attitude. I'm just wondering if her reviews were the best pre-Internet information source on RPGs and adventure games, or if there was something else too. Naturally, this is a question for the oldfags as I'm interested in people's first-hand experience -- I can use Google too.

It would be interesting to pair CGW with a European (well, British) gaming mag that had at least a monthly column with strong adventure / RPG focus, written by a knowledgeable expert who wasn't afraid to state his (or her) opinion. Just to get a different perspective on things.

Speaking of perspectives, I just went through a few CGW issues from 1989, and it's so strange for me to see that half of the magazines consisted of full-page ads for various games. SSI, Interplay, Microprose, Sierra, you name it. I find that super cool, and it gives me a little glimpse into life in the USA as a computer nerd in the 80s/90s. Gaming mags in Hungary had none of that in the first half of the 90s -- understandably, since there was simply no way to buy games legally in the country; everybody was pirating everything. You got maybe 3-5 pages of computer shop ads in a 50 page mag, and that was it. Well, and there were no computer gaming related magazines in existence before about 1987 at all...

RPG focused European magazine from 80s/90s?
That could be too niche, at least to my knowledge.

Good choice for 90s nostalgia would be Format magazine family - PC Format, Amiga Format, etc.
They were not specialized in gaming, originally British but with lots of franchises.
Their game reviews were known to be edgy and opinionated at the time.

German PowerPlay was nice magazine and they favored RPGs (as I remember, they had multipage review of Spelljammer with high score).
But you have to know German, of course.
https://archive.org/details/powerplaymagazine

For the general 80s British humor and vibe, Your Sinclair is good choice - even though they are not PC or RPG focused.
https://archive.org/details/YourSinclair37Jan89/

 

[Lady Error]

The German Power Play was my favorite until around 1994/95. They had a couple RPG people and it was due to their recommendation that Wizardry 7 was the first RPG that I bought. Still among my favorites.

All the German gaming mags can be found here, by the way: http://www.kultmags.com

 

[Rincewind]

German PowerPlay was nice magazine and they favored RPGs (as I remember, they had multipage review of Spelljammer with high score).
But you have to know German, of course.
https://archive.org/details/powerplaymagazine

For the general 80s British humor and vibe, Your Sinclair is good choice - even though they are not PC or RPG focused.
https://archive.org/details/YourSinclair37Jan89/

Forgot to tell that I'm not only interested in PC games; Speccy and Commodore games are definitely among my interests. I'll need to brush up my German skills a bit, at least now I'll have more motivation to do so. I remember I could get my hands on a few issues of the German 64er mag and I liked it. These are good tips, cheers!

I've only read her infamous Baldur's Gate review and it seems so simplistic, like if a 16 year old girl wrote it. No in-depth analysis of anything. I wonder if this was considered high standards back then.

Dunno, I've only checked out a few late 80s reviews of hers (e.g. Dragon Wars), and they were very knowledgeable and full of useful tips while not spoiling the game. Maybe she hated the Infinity Engine style of games, who knows... In any case, I don't care as I'm looking for reviews in the ~1980-1997 timespan anyway.

 

[Rincewind]

The German Power Play was my favorite until around 1994/95. They had a couple RPG people and it was due to their recommendation that Wizardry 7 was the first RPG that I bought. Still among my favorites.

All the German gaming mags can be found here, by the way: http://www.kultmags.com

Man, that's a great website! Just found this: Best of Sierra -- a whole magazine dedicated to Sierra games, that's something new to me!

They don't use much slang, so I actually understand like 70-80% of it, noice! Bit like being a kid again, mostly just looking at the pictures :D

 

[newtmonkey]

CGW is definitely the #1 magazine to read for PC gaming in the 80s/90s... nothing else comes close imo.

The British mags from back then were absolute garbage, literally written by children who barely even played the games they reviewed. Expect lots of, "I played this for 15 mins and never got out of the first room IT'S PANTS" especially for turn-based RPGs.

 

[Rincewind]

The British mags from back then were absolute garbage, literally written by children who barely even played the games they reviewed. Expect lots of, "I played this for 15 mins and never got out of the first room IT'S PANTS" especially for US RPGs.

That's my experience too; quite off-putting, to be honest.

Nevertheless, I'll check out the British recommendations mentioned earlier. But ultimately I'll focus on the quality stuff, which seems to be CGW and German Power Play.

Plus I have the originals of most Hungarian cult mags here, leather-bound by yearThe ones I like were heavily strategy / adventure / RPG focused and were shitting on most action games quite openly.

These three should give a nice nostalgia trip and a mix of different perspectives, augmented with a few British mags perhaps.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

PCGamer was good in the Netherlands, as was Power Unlimited (dutch magazine). It all went to shit quite some time before dying to the internet though, no gracefull deaths there.

 

[octavius]

Most of the quality magazines (with dedicated columns to RPGs and PBM games) didn't last long (I can't remember their names now), or else they changed into garbage, like Computer&Video Games did. The most successful (long lasting) British magazines were those with most cover disks, biggest screenshots and lamest jokes, at least the Amiga magazines. Ironically enough, the Spectrum magazines were more mature, or maybe they seemed so because I was younger when I read them.

 

[Ladonna]

https://archive.org/details/your-commodore-magazine

Lot's of shit, with the odd decent article.

Zzap 64 had the occasional decent article, along with the usual "played the game for 5 minutes, cannot even explain it properly, and totally fucked up the backstory 1/5" review.

https://archive.org/details/zzap64-magazine

We had the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, fairly dry, lot's of hardware and code, with gaming sections at the back that usually had some decent reviews (full page plus reviews.

https://archive.org/details/australiancommodoreamigareview

I know there were other C64 mags, but the above were the only one's that I ever saw more than one of in the house.

Oh yeah, my brother was big into SSG wargames. He used to have a subscription to their Run5 magazine. (They did the Warlords games as well)

https://roger-keating.squarespace.com/run5-magazine/

Not sure if they fit what you want, but maybe you or some of the others might be interested in them.

Just remembered another one. I think this was American; Run magazine

https://archive.org/details/run-magazine

 

[Viata]

Good thread. I was interested in this too. I know about Brazilian magazines(but they are aimed at consoles and not computers) and Japanese ones(both in this case), but wanted to know what were the good ones in Europe and America.

 

[Rincewind]

We had the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, fairly dry, lot's of hardware and code, with gaming sections at the back that usually had some decent reviews (full page plus reviews.

https://archive.org/details/australiancommodoreamigareview

Actually, that seems quite interesting for the hardware & "productivity" app related info, but yeah, seems a bit dry otherwise.

Looks like CGW is still king.

 

[Dorateen]

Dragon magazine would cover computer role-playing games from time to time, especially as they gain traction with the pnp crowd.

 

[Falksi]

The British mags from back then were absolute garbage, literally written by children who barely even played the games they reviewed. Expect lots of, "I played this for 15 mins and never got out of the first room IT'S PANTS" especially for US RPGs.

That's my experience too; quite off-putting, to be honest.

Nevertheless, I'll check out the British recommendations mentioned earlier. But ultimately I'll focus on the quality stuff, which seems to be CGW and German Power Play.

Plus I have the originals of most Hungarian cult mags here, leather-bound by yearThe ones I like were heavily strategy / adventure / RPG focused and were shitting on most action games quite openly.

These three should give a nice nostalgia trip and a mix of different perspectives, augmented with a few British mags perhaps.

Whoa there son.

Yep, there was a ton of dross on the shelves in Britain in the glory days for sure - Bad Influence, Megatech, NMS, hell even Digitizer - but there were two fucking MINT mags, which contained some great humour and really varied coverage....

The legendary "Mean Machines"...

https://www.forgottenworlds.net/mean-machines-history

https://archive.org/details/mean-machines-magazine

This was a truly awesome mag, which reveled in counter-culture and pulled no punches when it came to reviews. If a game was shit it got duly hammered. A mate of mine used to work for it too with some great stories pouring out of the mag (such as the time when they had to call for an Ambulance because one of the staff writers got so drunk that he could barely speak, and on arrival the only thing which the Ambulance staff could get him to do was repeat Robocop's prime directives )

Next you have C&VG, less legendary because the humour & counter-culture vibe wasn't fully there yet (Mean Machines was comprised of core staff members from C&VG), but it's home computer based and thus contains a lot more depth & variety...

C&VG did start going to shit after around '92, but the 80's period leading up to that was very groovy.

 

[newtmonkey]

Some more PC-only US mags that are worth (briefly) surveying:

PC Gamer
I subscribed to this back in the day, and it was alright, but somewhat childish compared with CGW imo, and it got worse and worse as the years went on. CGW blows it out of the water, but it might be worth flipping through a few.

Computer Game Review and Entertainment
There's a nearly complete run on Internet Archive. This is interesting (to me anyway) because it was put out by Sendai, which also published EGM. It actually has a similar layout, but is definitely for a more mature audience than EGM, with much better writing. There is some surprisingly in-depth coverage of games in here; I remember one issue having several pages on The Universal Military Simulator and Castles, for instance.

There were some decent console/PC hybrid mags:

Video Games & Computer Entertainment
This was about 50/50 console/PC. I found the console content to be mostly worthless; basically just regurgitating information from the instruction booklet with a couple of screenshots. The PC content was quite good, however, with some decent reviews.

Game Player's
I subscribed to this one back in the day. This was probably 60/40 console/PC. This was definitely for a younger audience, with tons of screenshots. The reviews were actually quite decent, especially for the PC games. They covered PC, Amiga, and even C64, so it can be fun to flip through a few issues to get a US perspective on the Amiga.

 

[Viata]

Mean Machines were great:

 

[Falksi]

Mean Machines were great:

Haha, Insult Corner! Ace!

I'll chuck a couple more in...

Mean Yob's letters page too...

Such a mint mag.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Dragon magazine would cover computer role-playing games from time to time, especially as they gain traction with the pnp crowd.

An early series of articles called "The Electric Eye" occasionally covered computer games, and Dragon Magazine launched a regular series of game reviews in 1986 (specifically issue #110, June 1986) with "The Role of Computers" by the Lessers. This lasted through issue #196 (August 1993), after which it was replaced by "The Eye of the Monitor" by Sandy Petersen, who was soon replaced by "Jay & Dee". Of course, these sections were only a few pages in a magazine devoted to RPGs.

 

[octavius]

Mean Machines, along with Crash, was one of the magazines I never saw for sale here in Norway.

 

[Falksi]

You chaps have got me re-reading old issues now

I dare one of IGN's faggot reviewers to start a review like Jaz does here with Dark Castle...

 

[octavius]

One of the relatively short lived quality magazines I mentioned earlier was Games Machine.
I remember it having pen&paper RPG and Play-by-Mail sections by some weirdo named Wayne (he looked like an albino punk IIRC), who also had occasional columns in other magazines.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Despite being Finnish, Pelit was pretty good in the '90s, well, at least their RPG/adventure related reviews. Its worth looking through a computer translation.

Dragon magazine would cover computer role-playing games from time to time, especially as they gain traction with the pnp crowd.

Dragon was an absolute joke though. They basically gave out 5/5s so often that it was a meaningless score. Even they knew that, and eventually gave one game a 6/5 just to show it was actually good. When Sandy Petersen was their reviewer he would constantly cover Apogee/Id games. Oh, and they gave one game a low score because mentioned rape in it. Perhaps they had some brief moment in time when they were good, but it was definitely early in their computer game reviewing sections.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Was it Zzapp or Byte that had a guide to realign your 1542 II disk drive properly? I have the mag in storage somewhere.

It is a wonder there isn't a pdf of ALL Scorpia's reviews in one place in a nice format. Good cover?

Spoiler

The first PC and last NPC look like they're VERY interested. The other ms go from shick to horror to indifference.

 

[Vic]

All the German gaming mags can be found here, by the way: http://www.kultmags.com

wow, I've been hit by a wave of nostalgia seeing some of those covers, I forgot how much I loved to read gaming magazines back then... thanks for the link, doubt I will download any of them tho