i was reminiscing about old pc gaming magazines recently and it dawned on me that most of the magazines i loved were by the same publisher (imagine/future). i used to get them from the grocery store and i can recall getting the first issue of cdrom today. cdrom today came with a disc full of demos. the magazine wasn’t dedicated to games, but nonetheless a lot of coverage was about games. this was during the era of the early 90’s when a cdrom drive in a PC was still a cutting-edge type of thing. it was an excellent magazine and i played the heck out of the demos.

not long after that i came across the first issue of pc gamer. the first couple of issues came with floppy disks that contained a single game demo. later on they adopted the cdrom today demo cd idea. pc gamer was a really high quality magazine in my opinion. again i would play the game demos over and over (usually the demo only contained one level of a particular game). i had a subscription to pc gamer for a year or two i believe. my only complaint about the magazine was that during the mid 90’s you’d get these really big deluxe issues (i feel like they were 2x or 3x the size of a normal issue). anyways, a huge issue sounds like something really awesome, but it wasn’t because they were full of advertisements…some were like 5 pages dedicated to a single game ad. i generally like game ads, but they were a bit out of control during that time period.

i did have a few issues of other gaming magazines at the time such as computer gaming world and gamepro (and maybe some others), but in my opinion they were generally of much lesser quality than pc gamer. i’ve already stated my adoration for nintendo power of the late 80’s and early-mid 90’s previously. it’s interesting that future publishing actually became the maintainer of the later nintendo power issues. i have never seen any of the future published nintendo power issues, but i can’t think of a worthier maintainer.

in the early 2000’s i subscribed to maximum pc…another excellent future publication. i have no complaints about the quality of maximum pc really. the content was heavily based on pc-modding…and that was a subject i became less and less interested as time went on. so i eventually did not renew the subscription based on my changing interests.

and finally in the mid-2000’s i was subscribed to the official xbox magazine (also a future pub). also a good magazine and i imagine it was hard to write for because there weren’t that many great xbox games. this magazine also shipped with a demo disc for the xbox which i played extensively (somewhat of a flashback to my pc gamer days).

that’s all the future publications that i grew up with and every one of them were top notch. i wish i could find an archive of some of the older issues.

some non-future mags that i also really loved were wizard (for comics) and inquest/inquest gamer (for rpgs and ccgs). the retro gamer magazines from the UK were pretty nice as well.

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