Tag: media

Game Informer Is Back

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

There’s lots of things that have disappeared from the world in the 35 years the internet’s been around, and very few of them ever come back. Anyone remember Happy Puppy? Midway Games? GameSetWatch?

One of those dead properties was Game Informer, a long-time video game publication that got its start as an official organ of the used game chain FuncoLand, whose ads used to be ever-present in other game mags. When they merged with Babbages to form GameStop, Game Informer went with them. In recent years you could get issues of Game Informer for free from GameStop stores.

Then, I assume as a cost-cutting measure, GameStop shut it down last year. Despite its status as a store giveaway, the publication was pretty slick, and wasn’t without its fans. And lo, it seems they are back! Not just their website but a print magazine too! The new incarnation of Game Informer is unconnected to GameStop, it having been sold to an outside group. According to the company, its entire staff returned to work on the new publication. It seems too much to ask that it be free again, but maybe it won’t be too expensive.

I will admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of GI while they were owned by GameStop. Its focus was solidly on the AAA market that we mostly steer clear of. But it’s good when people working in media get their jobs back, and we wish the staff of the resurrected company well. They’ve even kept up with their reviews, on their first day back they posted 29 reviews of games released during their absence. (It includes Echoes of Wisdom, but no sign of Balatro.) It may be worth following their Youtube channel, which continues on from their GameStop days.

Here is the announcement from the channel (3 ½ minutes):

Surviving Forums in 2024

Chris Person on Aftermath (a site that, to warn you, sometimes blocks articles behind paywalls) gives us a big list of web forums that still exist, and are even popular, today. There’s many categories there, but indeed gaming is one of them. We have a vested interest in the survival of as many non-social-media sites as possible, so here is the whole list of gaming boards from the article:

That’s a lot! There’s a lo more links there too, including a big list of technology and compute forums. By all means, click through, to the article, for more!

Digitiser

I’m a bit fuzzy on all this and open to correction, but….

In the UK, as far back is 1978, there was an electronic text service called Oracle, of no relation to the current-day owner of Java, OpenOffice, and VirtualBox. It was launched as a competitor to the even-older BBC service Ceefax that launched in 1974. In 1993 Oracle turned into Teletext, Inc. Teletext lasted for a good long while, up until 2009.

There is much more to that story, but we’re getting into the weeds. Our subject is the early teletype video game magazine Digitizer, a service provided on Teletext. Digitizer lasted from 1993 to 2003, a solid ten years full of typically cheeky 90’s British video game news content, delivered through the medium of ASCII text and artwork.

It’s a whole world of gaming enthusiasm from a lost era, and in it one can see the birth of a whole subculture. Some of these people are still writing today over on the site digitizer2000, although sporadically it seems. The site Super Page 58 has worked hard to archive as much of their content as they can, including a voluminous, yet still incomplete, listing of reviews.

And they liked the SNES port of Atari’s Rampart almost as much as I did!

The History of Digitizer, and Digitizer today.

Commodore 64 Ads Retrospective

This is not a real ad, it’s a reimagining, but it’s pitch-perfect.

Bryan Lunduke has a collection of old ads for what is still the best-selling model of personal computer of all time, the Commodore 64. No doubt it retains that title today on the basis of a number of technicalities, like PCs are atomized among many different makes that still all run the same OS, and people not considering an iPhone to be a computer somehow.

I’d like to draw your attention in particular to the ad for GEOS on that page, the early C64 windowed operating system that breathed new life into the system. In the end it was probably doomed due to a number of factors: Apple’s head start and much better marketing, the fact GEOS had to be booted from disk while Mac OS was partly ROM-resident, and a bit of clunkiness. But you can do rather a lot with GEOS all by itself, and it comes with a capable word processor in GeoWrite. GEOS, and its weird legacy, probably deserves a post of its own eventually.

The image above is for a fake ad, but it’s based off of an iconic, and slightly disturbing, television ad from Austrailia, Keeping Up With The Commodore: