My 1990′s, Pt. 1: PC Gaming Mags
My favorite PC gaming magazine, GameStar decided not to print cheats, tricks and hints for games anymore:
The internet has established itself as source for cheats and hints; you will find more up to date and more accurate walk-throughs at www.gamestar.de and on many other sites than possible in the magazine. 1
That is another way of telling that printed media are sooner or later becoming extinct. That’s why I decided to take a look back into the wild and crazy 1990s and my personal experiences with PC-Gaming magazines.
PC Spiel mit CD-ROM
This mag also featured the very funny Space Rat comics series (above) as well as some funnies about the editorial staff (below)
Funny, because 2000 MHz seemed impossible back in the good old days of 33 or even 66 Mhz. Cooling fans usually did not exist for those CPUs back then as far as I remember.
I remember the fond days of when I had collected and saved enough money to go to the tobacconist 2 in the district of Straßgang in my childhood and buy another fresh issue of my favorite gaming mag back then PC Spiel mit CD-ROM which means nothing more that “PC game with CD-ROM” — talk about creative magazine names in the days of i-D. Recently I found out that it was known from 1986 as ASM, short for Aktueller Software & Videospiele Markt, “Current Software & Videogames Bazar”, until they changed the name after issue 05/1995. And I think shortly after I picked it up because I was sooo proud of my IBM Aptiva 80486/66 Mhz (see box) with 12 MB RAM, 512 MB HDD, 8 bit sound card and a double speed CD-ROM drive because I wanted some more games than included in the package 3.
PC Games
To the left there is the original article of Amored Fist in PC Games
There are some screenshots from some ancient rendering application and mumbo-jumbo about its making the authors didn’t understand theirselves. Funny. See this footnote 4 for a translation.
My IBM Aptiva around 1995. The game would’ve even run on it smoothly, according to the hardware recommendations.
I also bought some PC Games magazines (in fact my oldest remaining gaming mags are 15 years old PC Games issues — without the cover disk though) back then. One of the oldest ones I remember avidly featured some tank game (Armored Fist) with prerendered ingame footage. It looked so realistic! I was completely out of my mind and read every column about its making (with some very early DOS-based rendering application, perhaps 3D Studio 1.0?). Little I knew that this would become my future here at the FH Salzburg. When thinking back… I really loved *any* rendered stills, though. I was a strange kid.
Another PC Games I remember was the one featuring an extensive article about Commandos, which I couldn’t wait for in 1998. I bought it in Linz where I had been with my computer class from school for one day: We visited the Ars Electronica Center and I needed something to read for the train ride back to Graz. What I also didn’t know back then was that I would win in the Prix Ars Electronica an honorary mention in 2001 for my experimental digital music piece http://:
Come to think: I should read more often a PC Games issue to look into the future…
GameStar
According to the C64 wiki PC Spiel [...] blurred its original character completely and didn’t separate itself from its competitors [...] and disappeared in 1997 when I found out about GameStar’s second issue that totally replaced the empty spot in my heart that PC Spiel had caused. And they were funny. I think that I even remember the first editorial staff: The old cowboy Charles Glimm (or “Grimm”?) who launched the magazine with Jörg Langer and Mick Schnelle, who I even met! The first issue I got was all about NHL 98 that I really loved playing against my school colleague and best friend at the time, Martin Mayer. I haven’t heard from him in years though…
Retro
That’s the very first issue of Retro, my version still has the old GO64! logo on it, although the page footer says “Retro”.
At last, he came back: My beloved Space Rat Comics survived the death of PC Spiel and return in Retro. Yay!
Another magazine I got my hands on since issue #1 is called Retro and is a mixture of the old GO64! magazine, that survived 114 issues and the Retro Magazin which existed for 4 years then. Thanks to Hannes Drexl aka. robotriot who brought issue #1 to one Game Design course last year. I just had to subscribe to it because it sounded so lovely. And it still is. With every single page you notice that it is a very small magazine run by a few Retro aficionados that produce about 1 typo or misspelling per page and the Adobe InDesign bug, that re-starts long articles completely from the beginning after turning pages. At first I thought I got a little funny in the head but it definitely happened now three times. I keep these magazines very safe. Because one day they’ll be worth a fortune because of the very rare printing errors… hopefully.
- Original: Das Internet hat sich als Quelle für Cheats und Tipps etabliert, auf www.gamestar.de und vielen anderen Seiten finden Sie aktuellere und ausführlichere Lösungen, als sie in einem Heft möglich sind. ↩
- that’s where you also buy newspapers here in wicked Austria ↩
- That were the marvelous game Critical Path I have to blog about sooner or later, The Journeyman Project and the Lotus Organizer predecessor PlanIt by Adrenaline, I have to blog about too… maybe in some weeks ↩
- “The tank is being plotted vectorally and translated into an XYZ-coordinate space. Employing the Hue-Backgrounding method the wireframe becomes a solid object. The contours are being filled and the used colors are getting defined. Spatial lighting and XYZ proofing take care of light and shadows.” wtf?! ↩
Comments
Gerry (Nov 02, 2011)
Hi,
aktuelle Cartoons zu Space Rat, kleine Gruftschlampe & Co. findest Du übrigens unter http://www.toonsup.com/tikwa.
Viele Grüße
Gerry