I probably don’t have the same history with video game magazines as you do. I spent my childhood in Singapore, see. It’s a little island, out in Asia, you probably know that. What you might not know is that Singapore doesn’t have any videogame magazines.* None. All of the ones that were available were imported from the US, or the UK, and as a result they were expensive. Crazy expensive, actually—since the Singapore I grew up in dealt almost entirely in pirated software, a copy of EGM could cost up to four times the average street price of a hot new game.
But right now this isn’t about piracy, this is about relative value, and as a child the relative value of any gaming magazine was sky-high to me. I was only allowed to get them to keep me occupied on long plane trips, which might have been once or twice a year. And so every one I received became a world-weary treasure, covers gone and pages white with wear at the edges. I read each one countless times, getting excited right along with the editors.
Growing up that way gave me certain tics—for example, there’s a part of me that will always well up with excitement when anyone mentions Gaiares—though I don’t even like the game—because I read some British guy’s breathless 1989 prose about it enough times to set down permanent neural paths. It also made me value immensely the writing that’s done about games. That, probably more than anything else, is why I write about games now, can’t stop writing about them, and read about them as much as I play them.
I wish I could tell you how much EGM specifically contributed to this mindset, but that would be impossible—I remember so many vertical columns of nice big review numbers, but I never had many magazines so they’re probably the same single magazine’s worth of reviews, over and over. What’s important is that it’s in there, embossed deep into my brain.
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