FISCHER: Old news through new views

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

Late last year I came across a Kickstarter project that caught my eye.

“The EGM Compendium” is a book detailing the behind the scenes history of Electronic Gaming Monthly, which was my favorite of the video game-themed magazines I subscribed to back in the mid-90s and early 2000s.

The magazine, along with its contemporaries like GamePro, Tips and Tricks, and the iconic Nintendo Power, served as my window to the wide world of the video game industry back in the days before the internet.

It’s kind of wild to remember that even before the internet ushered in the information age, a little kid in Nowhere, Iowa, could still have all the latest news, rumors, and previews of video games being made on the other side of the planet delivered directly to his mailbox once a month.

Today, all that same content is delivered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A never ending drip-feed of news delivered one article at a time.

As far as speed goes, obviously the internet cannot be beat. After all, how else could you possibly watch the casting announcement for the next Avengers movie in real-time?

However, I do miss the monthly ritual of opening up a new magazine and reading it cover to cover, even knowing that by the time it reached my hands said information may have been several weeks old.

Thus, ever susceptible to the sirens call of nostalgia, I chipped in on the Kickstarter. And while I’m still awaiting the physical compendium itself, this week I received the long awaited e-mail granting me access to a digital archive containing online versions of hundreds of issues of EGM spanning from 1989 to 2014.

It’s been quite the trip to the past, reading through the earliest issues to see what was big back then and what would be big in the future.

The second issue, for example, features the review of “Mega Man 2,” a game that today has a reputation as a standout of the franchise that has spawned dozens of sequels and spin-offs.

One page over, however, is the review of “Ironsword,” a game that rated comparably high by the same reviewers of the time, but is a title I’d never heard of until this week.

I’m looking forward to this trip through the industry to see what people were saying about iconic games before they became big and to see what games never became iconic at all.

As a bonus though, the archive offers an additional avenue of insight. As somebody that professionally puts printed words on pages every week, I can’t help but look at the page layouts and design work done on the magazine and marvel at what people used to accomplish in the days before Adobe InDesign.

Sure, give me a folder full of JPEGs and Word documents and I could replicate any given page of the magazine in a matter of minutes. But I can hardly fathom the process it must have taken for these magazines to be put together back then.

Did they use Adobe PageMaker? Were they still typing things out on a typewriter and physically laminating them to the page? Was it a little of both? Maybe I’ll find out when my book finally arrives.

In the meantime, I’m getting more out of 30+ year-old magazines than I ever thought I would.

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and can’t wait to hear more about this upcoming new “Super Nintendo” that they’re talking about.