Memories of Game Players, 1
Remember 1995? I do. I was ten, I lived in Germany, and during the summer of that year my Dad bought me a magazine that would go on to inspire me to go into the magazine industry.
I had been into videogames for a few years, after I got my first Game Players, my love for videogames would quickly become second to my love for videogame magazines.
And I found it! That first one had been sitting in my basement in a box for years and years. And then I scanned it.
All these pictures link to large image files so you can enjoy the scans as much as I can enjoy the mag in real life. Sorry for the size.
Anyway, July, 1995, Issue 73 was a pretty great issue in general, right at the dawn of a new generation of consoles. Unveiling the PlayStation, first look at Nintendo’s Ultra 64, Diddy Kong and Fulgore down there in the corner representing SNES, and who I think is Mondo from Toshinden blasting the PlayStation. And Earthworm Jim 2!
Contents
The crowd-sourced encyclopedia of record, Wikipedia, calls Game Players zany, wacky, and crazy. The magazine’s page layout was a mix of MTV and a strobe light made of knives, the Grunge was palpable, the humor juvenile, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
E3 had just wrapped up when this issue came out, and without blogs there was not much other way to get gaming news until the magazines came out (imagine!). Game Players wouldn’t have a website to call its own for another six months.
Letters
Letters were always my favorite part of Game Players. I didn’t quite understand the STD jokes, but they said damn! And hey, jokes about monkeys and violence! Actually, in the Game Ideas section of this issue (page four below), the guy’s idea for a game called Violence is pretty close to what GTA III turned out to be.
What I never got, even back then, was the Connections section, where kids write in to ask for pen pals. Why would I want to write a letter to someone about Sonic? Plus, printing the names and addresses of eleven-year-olds would not fly nowadays.
And some of these just sound creepy:
I’m 11 years old and love animals. I own a Sega and a SNES. Any age will do.
-Sam
Thanks Sam.
These pages were usually the most enjoyable read of the magazine. Sorry for the missing top part on page two, I must have cut something out for a poster I made at some point.
Hit Lists
Top X lists are always fun snapshots of history. They’d usually drew the first gasp of my reading of Game Players, as some Nintendo game would be at or too close to the top for my taste. They never had the Genesis or PlayStation games I was playing where I wanted them to be. Also, I hated Nintendo (though we’re cool now).
Info Trak
Info Trak I didn’t pay too much attention to, I wanted to get to the reviews! But this is a gem: after E3 ‘05, Game Players reports the delay of Nintendo’s Ultra 64 (later to become the Nintendo 64) and the early release of the Sega Saturn.
The extra development time they refer to in the article turns out to be a good move by Nintendo, as Mario 64 becomes one of the most lauded games ever. Also, Nintendo at this point has a fanbase so rabid and loyal that they’ll easily wait a few more months for the new Nintendo console. Back then things were serious, it was a battle.
Sega, on the other hand, pushes the Saturn out more than three months early, leaving many developers behind. They never really get the game makers back on track, and everyone jumps ship to Nintendo or Sony.
So here, on one page, the disappointment that turns out to be a big boost for Nintendo, and the beginning of the end of Sega as a console maker.
Next time, (in Memories of Game Players, 2), I’ll have the cover story, the unveiling of the PlayStation! Also reviews, previews, and codes. It’s pretty funny in hindsight reading reviews raving about PlayStation graphics. But they were good! They were..
