Gaming magazines were THE best part of my life growing up. More than the games themselves, more than cartoons, more than family, friends (I had none..the reviewers were my friends :)
We lived in the backwater town of a backwater country, going through a turbulent era. There was nothing to buy there, except local food and produce and clothes. The only foreign stuff available to buy were the absolute basics like soaps and shampoo, and pirated movies and music on cassette tapes (even there people knew and adored Michael Jackson!)
The nearest city with international imports was 10-12 hours away on bus. Sometimes my uncle would go there for work, and the thing I looked forward to the most were the MAGAZINES he would bring back.
At first it was Sinclair User, Your Sinclair, then ZZAP!64. I would pore over them again and again, and fantasize about the games in them… it would be months before my uncle went again. So I made wishlists, drew comics about the stuff in those magazines, and picked up British humor from them, that still colors mine to this day. :)
I learned English and about the rest of the world from them. I learned about the USSR through Raid Over Moscow, the Vietnam War through Rambo and Platoon, the Falklands through some wargames, and other things that I would not be able to make sense of until decades later.
Every magazine and every reviewer, even the imaginary ones like Chuck Vomit the troll who reviewed text adventure games, had an intensely unique personality that affected how people, specially kids like me, perceived the games they were reviewing.
The 1980s and early 1990s magazine subculture is the most sorely missed aspect of gaming and computing that was lost when the internet took over.
Even if you didn't grow up on them, do flip through some random pages of the aforementioned magazines, just to see how some things never changed: There were PC vs Mac wars and console wars even back in 1985! There were people worrying about how increasingly powerful computers would make everyone dumber even back then!
That very blog post describes where they got their materials from, most of it comes from Retromags and out-of-print-archive. You can find downloads over at their sites, and those sites usually also upload to IA.
I don't think you can download directly from VGHF as that is not what it's intended for (it's a research tool)
no idea who Frank is (neither do I care) but these files have been readily available for years (and still are), all they're doing is collecting them at a central place and make them searchable (and vievable at a decent speed, compared to IA).
Preservation through proliferation. Should the archive be forced offline, for whatever reason, it will still persist elsewhere, even if its just rotting on somebody's external hard drive, waiting to be found.
Can't speak for the above, but for me it's a hedge against enshittification and sudden shutdowns. If I had a dollar for every community archive that suddenly went offline, I'd have several dollars.
This is the archive of the Video Game History Foundation. They’re properly setup legally, have overwhelming backing from the industry, and a pristine reputation. They’re basically the Smithsonian, or more accurately the Isabella Stewart Gardner of the video game world.
No. This is by design. I do not like it. It's a tactic often deployed by libraries that want to retain some control over scanned assets. To be fair, normally they are funded by tax payers.
Reminder for French-speaking readers: you have access to over 23,000 scanned computer magazines on Abandonware Magazines, including many about video games.
Gaming magazines were THE best part of my life growing up. More than the games themselves, more than cartoons, more than family, friends (I had none..the reviewers were my friends :)
We lived in the backwater town of a backwater country, going through a turbulent era. There was nothing to buy there, except local food and produce and clothes. The only foreign stuff available to buy were the absolute basics like soaps and shampoo, and pirated movies and music on cassette tapes (even there people knew and adored Michael Jackson!)
The nearest city with international imports was 10-12 hours away on bus. Sometimes my uncle would go there for work, and the thing I looked forward to the most were the MAGAZINES he would bring back.
At first it was Sinclair User, Your Sinclair, then ZZAP!64. I would pore over them again and again, and fantasize about the games in them… it would be months before my uncle went again. So I made wishlists, drew comics about the stuff in those magazines, and picked up British humor from them, that still colors mine to this day. :)
I learned English and about the rest of the world from them. I learned about the USSR through Raid Over Moscow, the Vietnam War through Rambo and Platoon, the Falklands through some wargames, and other things that I would not be able to make sense of until decades later.
Every magazine and every reviewer, even the imaginary ones like Chuck Vomit the troll who reviewed text adventure games, had an intensely unique personality that affected how people, specially kids like me, perceived the games they were reviewing.
The 1980s and early 1990s magazine subculture is the most sorely missed aspect of gaming and computing that was lost when the internet took over.
Even if you didn't grow up on them, do flip through some random pages of the aforementioned magazines, just to see how some things never changed: There were PC vs Mac wars and console wars even back in 1985! There were people worrying about how increasingly powerful computers would make everyone dumber even back then!
https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/9a193e8c-67e0-45ff-98...
Here's a link to the magazine archive
If there is a way to download the archive I did not find it. Most of the scans seem to be sourced from internet archive uploads.
That very blog post describes where they got their materials from, most of it comes from Retromags and out-of-print-archive. You can find downloads over at their sites, and those sites usually also upload to IA.
I don't think you can download directly from VGHF as that is not what it's intended for (it's a research tool)
I couldn't even view any "documents". Always said there's a problem.
works fine here. Maybe try a different browser, or disable Adblocker/NoJS (the reading page looks like it uses lots of JavaScript)
They tout vghf as a museum, but you're really funding Frank's private collection.
no idea who Frank is (neither do I care) but these files have been readily available for years (and still are), all they're doing is collecting them at a central place and make them searchable (and vievable at a decent speed, compared to IA).
So yeah, I'm fine with people funding that
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I'm genuinely asking; why do you want to download the whole archive? What's the purpose?
Preservation through proliferation. Should the archive be forced offline, for whatever reason, it will still persist elsewhere, even if its just rotting on somebody's external hard drive, waiting to be found.
Because it won't be there the next time I go looking for it.
Can't speak for the above, but for me it's a hedge against enshittification and sudden shutdowns. If I had a dollar for every community archive that suddenly went offline, I'd have several dollars.
This is the archive of the Video Game History Foundation. They’re properly setup legally, have overwhelming backing from the industry, and a pristine reputation. They’re basically the Smithsonian, or more accurately the Isabella Stewart Gardner of the video game world.
They’re going nowhere.
AI training?
No. This is by design. I do not like it. It's a tactic often deployed by libraries that want to retain some control over scanned assets. To be fair, normally they are funded by tax payers.
The answer is weaponized scraping.
Reminder for French-speaking readers: you have access to over 23,000 scanned computer magazines on Abandonware Magazines, including many about video games.
https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/
I'd be interested to know their scanning setup and workflow.
Abandonmags?
Doing the Lord's work.
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