Indie-Resource.com

I know I did, and had a few complete years of EGM and GamePro in the early 90's and Nintendo Power in the late 80's.

If you did, too, or even if you didn't, I have stumbled across an awesome site that I know is going to provide me with hundreds of hours of entertainment: RetroMags.com. They have archived just about every issue of every retro game magazine that I can think of (and tons I have never heard of before), and you can download CBR files of all of them! The only downside is that to save on bandwidth they are using a file upload service called FileFactory which does have some limits on the number of files you can download at a time without having a subscription, and the downloads are fairly slow with a free account, but it is still very worth it! I have been downloading one mag a day to check out (some that I recognize from my long lost collection, and others that I know I never had).

Their collection stretches from the dawn of game mags in the early 80's up to 1999 I believe, so probably most everyone has a walk down memory lane somewhere on there.

very nice! I have a ton of old Games Workshop magazines and use to have a bunch of Nintendo Power books. On the plane I play a lot of old SNES RPGs so this will be a big help.

You have to be kidding me....

Check out this Final Fantasy Mystic Quest ad I found! They were basically advertising it along the lines of "You're stupid, and this game says that is OK"...

In an era when advertisement companies had no idea what the product was, let alone any idea how to sell it "Hey, lets neg them into buying it! Few, this meeting is done, let's go snort coke!"

You should see some of the ads from the late 80's magazines. Some of them just show poorly photocopied item sprites from the game with something like "Hey, get all these items!" without any mention of what kind of game it even is or any screen shots. Obviously the benefit of hindsight is staggering, but they are so poorly done it is jaw-dropping. At least in the early 90's they started to get some semblance of an idea how it was done (actually show screen shots, maybe mention what kind of game it is, try to have appealing advertising art, etc.). The early ones are so inept, it is pretty easy to think that this whole industry would have collapsed if not for sales based purely on word-of-mouth.

For example, look at this one from a 1989 EGM. And yes, this is an actual ad for the US release of a major video game console. Does this just hype you up to play the TurboGrafx 16?

What does that even sell? Is it a console? The graphic card wars hadn't started back then. I've heard of people pining for the dreamcast...but not the turbographx?

Anyway, you're just jelous of their graphx! When you're hot, there's no I in team OR graphics! Or a C or an S, either! Bad! Ass!

Haha! Yeah, it isn't very apparent from the ad that it was the first 16-bit* game console released in the US. The pure bumbling of TTI in the North American release pretty much doomed the system Stateside, which was a powerhouse in Japan under the name PC Engine. In the US, it played distant third place behind Nintendo and Sega. Terrible print and TV ads, insufficient resources placed in game localization, and a complete lack of understanding of the US game market killed it before it even got going here. The early 16-bit war between the Sega Genesis and the Turbografx-16 could likely have been won handily by TTI. The Genesis was just launching in Japan as well while the PC Engine had a library of over 100 games from its head-start to the market, meaning the TG16 could have simply out-gamed Sega right from the gate. But they seemed to take a "Wait and see" strategy that backfired as Sega gained a foothold in the market.

* The TG16 actually had an 8-bit processor, but had two 16-bit GPUs, which the company leaned-on heavily to call it a 16-bit machine. In the end, its performance was much better than the NES, although a bit lower than the Genesis in most respects.

You have to understand the times. We all knew what it was because there was not 100 different systems. There was only a few and when a new one came out we all knew about it.

I didn't know what it was at the time, and neither did my friends. Apparently, a ton of people didn't know what it was, which is one of the reasons why it showed up on North American shores, cut a low, moaning fart and then died unceremoniously