'The best video game magazines of my life: from Crash to Edge'

Fusion Retro Books (Fusion Retro Books)

A Reader’s Feature reminisces over the golden age of British video game magazines, from the 80s all the way up to the present day.

Classic UK video game magazines such as Crash, C&VG, Mean Machines, and Super Play are honoured by a reader that misses the early days of British games media.

Progress, technology, changing habits; these are all reasons we mostly now get our gaming news, reviews, features, etc. from dedicated sites and YouTube.

But rewind a few years and the landscape, or the shelves of WH Smith to be more precise, was wall to wall with dedicated gaming mags and, if memory serves, the UK had more mags per person than any country in the world.

So for no reason other than wilfully reminiscing, I thought I’d take you through my personal history of UK-based gaming mags and how they dovetailed with my own gaming life. I’ve picked seven magazines that I enjoyed and have done a pen pic of each chronologically below.

Crash (1984-1992)

Our family had a ZX Spectrum, so this was the jumping on point for me when it came to dedicated gaming journalism. Of course, the fantastic Oliver Frey covers drew you in, back in the day when you truly had to use your imagination to translate the rather basic graphics of the era into the high octane action in your head. But the writing set a trend (along with the next entry) for what British gaming mags would become over the next few decades.

Computer and Video Games/CVG (1981-2004)

Although this launched before Crash, I don’t remember starting to pick this up until after that publication. I get the impression that although the number of gaming mags was relatively large, the number of people working in the industry was quite tight and that many people flitted from one mag to another, hence why the writing style (particularly in the seven I’ve chosen) was similar between publications of the time.

Initially, this concentrated on the ‘computer’ games part of the title, e.g. Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad, Atari ST, and Amiga, but as the 16-bit era rolled in, with the new decade of the 90s, they started to feature the new consoles and their games. Demand must’ve so high that soon enough they then launched a separate mag to satisfy it…

Mean Machines (1990-1992)

And MM was born. Looking at the publication dates of my favourite mags it looks like the early to mid-90s was the peak time for the industry, which was no coincidence as this is where the Mega Drive and SNES battled it out and Mean Machines was equally bombastic in its approach. Colourful, loud and personality driven in terms of highlighting its writers (something previous mags did but this took it to new heights). It only ran for a couple of years before splitting into Sega and Nintendo dedicated magazines, but it was as sweet as it was short.

ACE (1987-1992)

An acronym for Advanced Computer Entertainment, I remember this being slightly more cerebral than its peers, a trend that would continue in the late 90s. It also used a novel/odd scoring system that, if I remember correctly, tried to predict your enjoyment of a game over time, using a graph (I’m going purely on memory here, so happy to be corrected). It certainly offered something different and was welcome for it.

Super Play magazine — Super Play was heave for fans of Japanese gaming (Retromags)

Super Play (1992-1996)

The only single platform mag I remember getting regularly, as I had a SNES (and Mega Drive) at the time. This title leaned into the import scene more than other mags, particularly games from Japan, and the art style mirrored that. The writing was a little more toned down when compared to the likes of Mean Machines and, dare I say, a little more grown up as the audience grew up (of sorts) with the industry. Which leads us nicely to…

Edge (1993-Present)

The only magazine I subscribed to, and for a few years too. Mature, wide-ranging, sometimes offbeat, and very well written. Gaming journalism had come of age and Edge was a big part of that, recognising that gamers were not just teenagers in their rooms, but also adults with jobs, hopes, and dreams. Personally, I think latterly they went a bit too far from the joy of gaming, became a little self-serving and in love with their own reflection, and that was the dropping off point for me. But they deserve huge credit for carrying the torch when others fell by the wayside, so what do I know?

GamesTM (2002-2018)

For me GamesTM was the perfect blend of Edge style writing with Super Play type content, where the games were king. Covering both new games and the retro scene, this took gaming journalism to its zenith, maybe not in overall success but definitely in quality, and the fact it was published for nearly two decades is testament to that.

I believe all these titles have been archived online in one way or another, in case you fancy tickling your nostalgia bone. I certainly won’t begrudge the current way of consuming gaming info, as I’ve partly contributed to it by stopping buying mags a while ago. But I do look back at those decades fondly, where I’d take great pleasure hiding myself away for a few hours, pouring over the pages of gaming goodness.

By reader TheTruthSoul (PSN ID)