Recently, I stumbled across a 1997 cover-scan of a magazine that was never available in the UK, and yet it still felt very nostalgic because it was completely dripping with the 1990s games-magazine zeitgeist. I ended up going down a little bit of an old magazines rabbit-hole afterwards, and felt compelled to write a little bit about it all here.

!Next Generation, Bomberman cover
"Online Gaming Explodes!"
"Bomberman returns! The world's best multiplayer game is set to ignite online gaming on the PC"
"In NG 21's "Top 100 Games of All Time" Super Bomberman 2 for the Super NES ranked #2. We said "Four players won't have more fun doing anything else," and we meant it. Interplay now plans to bring the magic of Bomberman to the online PC world. The full, exclusive story begins in page 48"

Can you imagine seeing something like that nowadays? Today, you'd never know just how big of a deal Bomberman really was back then, and sometimes I don't think that people believe me when I say it. But there it is plain as day, from a time when Atomic Bomberman was genuinely expected to be THE killer-app that would draw the mass-market to play video games over the internet.

The scans of the full article are viewable here if you want to read the whole thing; It's interesting to see that the magazine felt that Bomberman matches had more staying-power than the likes of multiplayer Doom, Command & Conquer, and Warcraft II! This was not unique to this publication, and was a very widespread view at the time.

!Ultimate PC
After that, I ended up discovering this excellent overview of an issue of Ultimate PC - a short-lived magazine that I somehow never heard about at the time. I guess that it didn't get widespread distribution? It looks like the sort of magazine I would've enjoyed, though - and at £3.95 for a magazine with a cover-disc, it was clearly great value even for the time!

!N64 Magazine
And then I found this read-through of an issue of N64 Magazine (an unofficial UK publication I often bought) that I actually owned back in the day - I distinctly remember the letters page mentioning a PR stunt by Nintendo that some sports team tried to steal the credit for!

You just don't see stuff like this anymore - I hope it makes you guys as happy as it makes me. If anyone's got any nostalgia for old gaming publications to share here, please do so!

Last edited by Pengling on 3 Jun 2024 at 1:13 pm UTC