Set Side B

The Video Game History Foundation has a breezy 3½ minute video about one of the less-remembered magazines of the NES-through-Playstation era, Game Player’s, with the apostrophe-S at the end. But it wasn’t just one magazine. Over ten years they put out magazines under thirteen different titles, and surprisingly, one still survives today as PC Gamer, a fact of its history that even their own website seems not to know.

They say that they have now managed to obtain the complete run of all the issues of the Game Player’s series, and all but one of them can now be browsed online, including Game Player’s Sports For Kids, which wasn’t about video games at all.

I remember Game Player’s as being the least of the game periodicals of the time, without the insider’s angle of Nintendo Power, the gonzo enthusiasm of Electronic Gaming Monthly or the slightly highbrow air of Video Games & Computer Entertainment. Yet it seems to have done quite well for itself.

The main fact I remember about Game Player’s was idly reading through the colophon one day (I was a weird kid) and seeing a familiar name: Richard Mansfield! I don’t remember what his capacity there was, but I do remember his days at Compute! and Compute’s Gazette, and that he wrote a couple of books on machine language for the Commodore 64. I always felt that Game Player’s must have felt like a step down for him. I hope he’s still around, out there somewhere, enjoying the current revival of interest in 8-bit computing.

rodneylives

This is quite a collection to look through! While it was originally posted in 2021, it was updated with some new reviews just this past Sunday. They’re sorted alphabetically by game. They go at least as far back as NES Dragon Warrior, but some of them are really recent, especially with the addition of games reviewed by WalMart’s free pass-out magazine GameCenter. Their definition of JRPG kind of goes far afield, with some metroidvania-style Castlevanias, two Advance Wars games and a good number of half-related things.

Here are a small selection of included magazine scans….

GamePro’s review of the TurboGrafx port of Cadash, which unlike the Genesis/MegaDrive’s version has all four characters from the arcade game. The review’s written by “The Pizza Boys,” and has slangy writing and goofy little cartoon faces over the review scores, because it’s in a magazine written for teenage boys from 1991. Notice, the whole review is seven paragraphs, with four section headings, and four “PROTIP” inserts that don’t offer useful advice:

The review of Dragon Warrior from Game Player’s. I love it when magazines from this era publish the address of Nintendo of America. This review doesn’t really tell you much about the game though:

I had forgotten about this phase in Nintendo Power’s history. Check out their dissing the inventory of Earthbound, Nintendo’s own product! (I disagree, BTW, Earthbound is designed around its inventory limits, and they’re an essential part of the game!)

VideoGames & Computer Entertainment has always had a place in my heart, and Clayton Walnum is one of my favorite reviewers. In its heyday it had a no-nonsense approach to their reviews that appealed to me. It was the exact opposite of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a magazine that, honestly, I never much liked because of their loud editorial style and tendency to bloat their magazine up with advertisements: