Out of Print Archive - Retro Mag Website !

Neil79 · 17 Jun 2012 at 00:03

Why we do what we do :

Too keep it brief, for the love of the content in question.
We want to preserve something which is starting to get swept away in the digital age.

The more that time passes, the harder it becomes to locate these classic magazines. And due to the fragile nature it will only get more difficult as time passes.

So by creating digital duplicates we try to save the content and spirit of the original publication, even though it's very hard to recreate the spirit of the magazines when read on a computer screen. That's why we do our best to portray them in such a way that does the original version as well as the original editors, writers, publishers and everyone who created them proud, by cleaning up the spots, blemishes, discolorations, creases and other imperfections that time has added to them.

Spent so much in those days think it was about £3.50 for a mag?

HangTime · 17 Jun 2012 at 01:11

Nah, if you look at the covers they were cheaper than that.

Neil79 · 17 Jun 2012 at 01:14

wow you're right, so it must've been like £1.00 - 1.50 for a mag and those tapes especially amstrad being £2.99, I do remember 2.99 for tapes being the correct price!

Nearly stole one once but decided not to

chrismscotland · 17 Jun 2012 at 09:00

Theres a really good site if I can find it that had a lot of Spectrum magazine's uploaded - Crash! I think.

I get quite nostalgic looking at some of the old magazine covers

Narj · 17 Jun 2012 at 09:38

Wow...

I wish I hadn't thrown out my amstrad action collection. :-(

Reading these makes me feel old and sad.

mithrandir · 17 Jun 2012 at 09:47

I beleieve I've still got a load of old mags such as Mean machines, Edge, c+ vg, Games-x, raze, sega power and all sort. My mum used to tell me off for buying so many mags and wasting money. I was a console gaming addict in the days

.

HangTime · 17 Jun 2012 at 11:18

Might still have some Amstrad action in my dad's loft. Was a lot better than the rival "CPC User". Got a bit sad towards the end though, with the mag shrinking to a fraction of its former glory, I think it only had about 40 pages. I'd moved on to Megadrive and PC by around 1994.

When you think about it the longevity of these platform-specific magazines is pretty incredible given the rate of technological progress, by the mid-90s the CPC was quite archaic compared to the 16bit consoles or indeed the 486 PC.

I think AA is the only magazine I've ever had a subscription to, got some 'desktop publishing' app as a free gift. Seemed OK at the time and was highly rated but it was very clunky by today's standard (no mouse apart from anything else!).

In the modern age of the internet people probably don't realise what a big deal getting a cover tape/disk was, as that was basically the only way you could get demos (and also saved you from the horror of "Type Ins"). I remember being really jealous when cover cds first came along but I had to get the floppy version of PC Zone, you'd get like 2 floppies (total capacity about 2.8MB) compared to a CD-ROM which held 650-700MB! All that wonderful stuff you missed out on

Slightly OT but I think the CD-ROM is probably one of the most underrated developments on the PC, not only was it a 500x increase in capacity on the previous distribution media but that was even more important because of the constraints that it lifted. I mean lets say some new tech came out that was 500x Bluray capacity, I don't think that would make a lot of difference these days. Whereas going from 1.4MB to 700MB opened a lot of doors. Got overshadowed by the internet in the mid-late 90s, imagine what would have happened had CDROM become mainstream a few years earlier (lets say 1990), how much further ahead would game development be now?

AtreuS · 17 Jun 2012 at 11:54

OMG i actually remember a lot of those covers... brings back memories indeed

Neil79 · 8 Jul 2012 at 13:11

April - June 1992 added