Xuelder

Indie Game/Narrative Designer

Tech Warlock

Weird dude who makes weird things.

Part of the Swamp, Part of the Krewe


Itch 🕹️
xuelder.itch.io/

shadsy
@shadsy

The Video Game History Foundation is raising money for our annual fundraiser this month by sharing cool things from our collection. Today, we're sharing an article from an ultra-obscure magazine in our collection, Digital Diner!

Digital Diner was, in the words of one of the editors who donated his copies to us, trying to be Rolling Stone for internet culture. There were only two issues, but they're surprisingly good. The article we want to highlight today was in issue #2, and it's about the retrogaming scene... circa 1997.

I think it's easy to assume retrogaming is a more recent phenomenon, or even as old as the early 2000s, but this article dives into the growing retro community that existed as far back as the PS1 era! There's some familiar names in this article, including Jamie Fenton and legendary FPGA designer Kevtris! (For @sebmal specifically, there's some Mr. Do.) Truly, everyone was yearning for the Good Old Days before they were even that old.

But here's the really cool part: we have this scan because we have already scanned 1200 video game magazines.

You heard me!

The words "1200 game magazines" in the style of Big Bill Hell's

A pile of hundreds of game magazines

VGHF is building a library of video game magazines, and we want to make sure as many of them are scanned as possible. When we receive a duplicate copy of a magazine, we check if it’s already available online. If not, we send it off to a local vendor to scan. This is an actual photo of our first order with them! And with the exception of magazines where publishers specifically forbid it, all of them are browsable online, right now, on the Internet Archive, including this issue of Digital Diner.

We want these scans to be widely accessible, so we’ve donated digital copies of these magazines to community scanning groups like Retromags and Gaming Alexandria to help build their own collections. If you’re the kind of person who reads game magazines online, there’s a chance you’ve already read some of our scans!

So far, we’ve scanned enough magazines that you could read one issue every day for the next three years and not get to the bottom of the pile. And there's another 300–400 unscanned magazines in my office that we're waiting to send off.

None of this would be possible without the support of our community! If you appreciate the work we're doing, please donate to our winter fundraiser! And if you sign up for our Patreon, you can see tomorrow's surprise a day early. For Nintendo fans, it's a REAL good one.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

This bangs immensely

i owe my entire yt career and a lot of entertainment and a lot of otherwise-unanswerable questions to the archives of mostly just a couple magazines which google books scanned over ten years ago before being told that their project was doomed due to copyright horseshit that even google couldn't fight and giving up.

it is incredibly interesting to look at how quickly the game industry began reflecting on itself. this is not the earliest reference i've seen to retrogaming as a specific thing you could do, and as tim rogers' so eloquently spent ten minutes illustrating in his review of pac-man, there were hundreds if not thousands of observations, even by the late 80s, that Namco's game represented a long-distant signpost in the rearview mirror. that carries with it the implication that by playing that game, you were revisiting roads long already traveled.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Yeah I remember playing NO$GMB and SNES9x back around the time this magazine was out and they worked mostly okay. The retro scene was definitely well-established by then!