It was a heavy loss in games journalism when Game Informer got kicked to the curb last fall, but it got over its own death pretty quickly when game dev and blockchain company Gunzilla financed its resurrection in March. A few projects were announced back then, including a return to print—but if you want to reminisce about the days when Game Informer was hot off the presses, its archive just got updated with its entire backlog of physical issues.
It’s free to view if you sign up for an account on the site, and goes all the way back to 1991. A blog post announcing the additions from editor-in-chief Matt Miller said: “In the coming months, we plan to surface specific legacy articles we believe are worth exploring. In the meantime, enjoy this new level of free access to the rich history of gaming we’ve covered over the last 34 years.”
The post notes it took some help from the Video Game History Foundation, Retromags, and one dedicated fan in particular: bogusfrank, “whose efforts to track down issues and preserve gaming magazine history now help us access our own company’s history and share it with all of you.” I doubt fans would have let these issues truly go lost, but having them on display in this free and accessible format is the best case scenario.
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After digging around in the archive a bit, I must say it’s a great bird’s eye view of changing aesthetics for videogames and print journalism in general. Recent issues’ sleek, simple graphics are kind of a hilarious contrast to the garish color schemes and explosive cover arts of the ’90s and early aughts.
I especially love those old ads and box arts so proud of their primitive 3D character model renders that they’d throw them up front and center, seemingly certain it wouldn’t look like someone dropped their GI Joe in a bonfire a few years later.
I even stumbled on the classic ad for Akklaim’s Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition, which implies the game is some sort of Clockwork Orange nightmare scenario. “Can’t stop. Must pop. Must bust,” it reads. Am I supposed to want to be the guy saying that?
They really knew how to do videogame ads in the ’90s. (Image credit: Akklaim (via Game Informer))
There’s also lots of valuable history and a rare sense of exhaustive preservation in the archive, so that’s fun too I guess. Check it out here and feast your eyes.