Feature: Game Magazines: Then and Now Subscribe to this RSS feed

Play, Nintendo Power and the Official Xbox Magazine, then and now!

Play
First Issue: December 2001

Play is, in a way, the culmination of publisher Dave Halverson's career, a career that spans 15 years and includes stints heading up GameFan and Gamers' Republic -- both magazines famous for what they got right and infamous for everything else. With Play, Dave and his crew aimed for a much more sophisticated look than his previous two titles. The emphasis was on longform interviews and letting official game art tell the story on the internal pages. Play was also one of the first game mags to go "lifestyle," offering coverage of anime, cartoons, DVDs, and other gear in the back.

71 Issues Later:

More has stayed the same than changed over the past six years. Play is arguably the prettiest-looking book on the newsstand, although the editorial often has tonsa typos and Dave's unwavering love of the platform genre has caused most readers to take his action-game reviews with a grain of salt. The only major difference: Non-game coverage takes up much less of the magazine's space now, with most of it going first to spinoff mag Rocket, then to its replacement, Geek Monthly.

Nintendo Power
First Issue: July/August 1988

Like nearly every other decision they made in the late 1980s, Nintendo of America launched Nintendo Power with one goal in mind: the complete dominance of gamers' mindsets, and nothing less. Along those lines, the first few years of Nintendo Power (a continuation of their previous Fun Club News newsletter) are unlike anything seen before or since in the US.

Largely designed (and sometimes written) by a team in Japan's Tokuma Shoten publishing house, the NP of this era looks and reads like a Japanese magazine, with tons of flashy visual design and strategy guides so in-depth and accurate, they often served as the missing instruction manual for whatever games they covered. Undeniably it was the nicest-looking magazine of the NES era, and it's little wonder that it was number-one unti the mid-1990s.

221 Issues Later:

Like GamePro, NP struggled in recent years to shed the "kid-friendly" image that served it so well in the pre-PlayStation era of gaming. The current visual design (launched in 2005) went a long way toward doing that, with a new emphasis on developer interviews and a cleaner, less Japanese-y look and feel. It'll be very interesting to see if the voice of the magazine (still undoubtingly loyal to the big N after all these years) will change at all with the move to Future's San Jose office starting next month.

Official Xbox Magazine
First Issue: November 2001

Launched just as Future (whose US arm was still called Imagine Publishing back then) was closing the legendary Next Generation, OXM reads much like the PSM of the era -- i.e., it was incredibly loyal to its chosen console, often to the point of silliness. (Just look at that "SONY and NINTENDO don't want you to read pg. 36" coverline for ample proof of that.) While retaining some of PSM's natural humor, OXM had a much more mature feel from the beginning, matching the system's pioneering HD and online capabilities and giving the mag the feel of Imagine's Maximum PC and similar mags at the time.

77 Issues Later:

The only major thing that's changed (besides two ex-GamePro writers joining the staff) is the logo on the front of the mag. OXM has never been the largest of mags, with most issues running only 100 pages for most of the year, so there isn't a heck of a lot of room for innovation -- especially when it's the contents of the disc that drives most newsstand sales. The editorial team has countered this with a series of neat features that are more meant to be fun reads than reference sources -- one a few months back on what it takes to get kicked off Xbox Live is still among the best I've read this year.