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Hello! You might not know me, but if you’re a regular reader of this site, you may very well have seen the Time Extension editor Damien mention my magazines from back in the day.
During the '80s and '90s. I launched and ran a succession of very popular, often best-selling publications including Zzap!64, Computer and Video Games, Mean Machines, the Official Sega and Nintendo magazines, and more.
Then I disappeared off to the States and launched IGN.com, amongst other things. However, for decades, I’ve wanted to go back to my roots and produce a proper video game magazine. However, I wasn’t sure whether there would be interest in it, so instead I thought I’d write a book, Games of a Lifetime, and see how that fared.
As it turned out, and much to my delight, it was very well received, and shortly thereafter I thought perhaps now is the time to return to magazinedom, so I started to figure out what exactly this publication should be.
And that was more difficult than I thought.
After press-ganging Paul Glancey, my former right-hand man at Zzap! 64 and CVG, we began cooking up a concept.
The thing is, a lot of my old magazines carry what I’d call huge baggage of expectations. Zzap! 64 and Mean Machines especially have a special place in many people’s hearts because they were part of their childhood… and while I’d love to magically bring them back as they were, they just wouldn’t quite work these days. They just wouldn’t match the impact that they had back then and would inevitably disappoint.
I also wanted to avoid making a “proper” magazine, as we just don’t have the staff to do that, plus I don’t want to compete against other mags that already exist and do a great job of delivering retro gaming, and indeed modern retro games content every month.
So instead, I had the bright – perhaps – idea of taking the original editorial philosophies of my old publications and applying them to a new publication that talks about the olden days.
I’ve always loved writing in a conversational style and have a particular way with words that has always been a cornerstone of the magazines I’ve worked on. So, Paul and I are continuing that tradition with a new publication that will feature fascinating, informative, entertaining, off-the-wall, and unexpected stories, anecdotes, and observations about last-century gaming across consoles, computers, and coin-ops.
That mag is called Golden Age.
To help give everyone an idea of what we want to do, we decided to make an issue 0 – a “dummy” magazine in old-school traditional style. This 38-page PDF is basically us putting our money where our mouth is and showing you exactly what we want to create. And Damien has been kind enough to feature it on this fine site.
You can also download the complete PDF here.
While issue 0’s layout is not quite where we want it yet (the pages we’re making for issue 1 look significantly better), it does give you a very good idea of the kind of things we’ll be writing about and indeed how we’ll write about them.
A wee bit of Mean Machines here, a sprinkling of Zzap!64 there, plus some modern-day hilarity because while you’ll certainly see plenty of in-jokes, callbacks, and references to our old stuff, we also have plenty of new material to amuse you with.
I mean, none of you are 12 years old anymore, so we can now go places we never dared tread back in the day for fear of enormous parental backlash. Oh, while also not using some of the words that were acceptable many decades ago, one utterance of which would have the PC police smashing our door down with one of those huge battering rams.
Ultimately, we want Golden Age to be a time machine that uses authentic '80s/'90s-style prose to transport you back to the olden days and make you laugh.
Have a read of issue 0 and see what you think – but do remember: its features are essentially our warm-up; articles written to help us shake off decades of cobwebs and dust as we gird our loins and get ready for the actual performance. And what I can tell you is that the stuff we’ve been writing for these last six-or-so months is even tighter and more buttoned-down – and funnier – than these early test pieces.
Essentially, we’re really beginning to feel it, to use a modern-day term. Which is hugely, hugely important to me – and indeed why we’ve been working on this thing for over a year without showing anyone anything. I don’t like producing shabby shite, and we weren’t going to do anything without it feeling right. And after a lot of work, it’s really feeling right to me.
So anyway, thanks for reading this. Thanks also to Damien for hosting these pages, and if this thing is of interest to you, head over to Kickstarter and maybe consider helping make this magazine a reality!