Showing posts with label About. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About. Show all posts

Saturday, March 28, 2015

What is the purpose of Retro Gaming Art?



As most of the readers of this blog, I grew up playing video games through the 80s and most of the 90s. This meant, for the most part, there was no internet to gather information about my favorite games. Magazines, as the ones you see above, were my only source of reputable data around my cherished--and expensive--hobby.

Down here at Mexico we received a good amount of video game mags. Most of them were American, like EGM and GamePro, but sometimes SuperPlay and other European publications could be found if you really looked around certain establishments.

These were high-quality magazines, with knowledgeable journalists and great editorial layout. They were very attractive then for a young 10 year old boy. Now, as an adult, I find them quaint and certainly not without fault, but I keep going back to them as period artefacts.

I could analyse them from lots of different angles: color selection, editorial style, information value, commercial success, etc. But for this blog, I chose to analyse the printed ads contained in them because they represent the way society viewed itself through the games it played, as well as through the way video game companies tried to sell these products to the masses. Old video game magazines are a treasure-trove for this objective.

Now I only have some basic rules regarding the material I post in this blog. I'll list them below:


  1. Only original material will be posted from original documents that must have been printed at least 10 years ago.
  2. To obtain the print ads you see here, the original documents will not be mutilated or transformed in any way.
  3. Unlike many other sites of this nature, I will try to ad some historical information about the advertised game and my personal thoughts if I have played it.

That's it! I hope you find my posts interesting. You can be assured there will always be new material coming. As I write this, there are already 100 different ads! Thanks for reading. Time for a brief Easter break. I'll see you soon.