I enjoy a good magazine. I also sometimes enjoy a bad magazine. I remember buying magazines off racks in corner stores, grocery stores and bookstores. I remember looking forward to some magazines a lot, a genuine highlight of the week or month.
I don’t remember the last time I bought a magazine this way (I’m all-digital now). It may have been a copy of Runner’s World a few years ago. I don’t miss paper magazines, exactly, because reading on a decent tablet has no real downside, unless the battery charge runs out. You can even zoom in to see extra detail you might miss in a paper magazine, handy for people not-as-young anymore.
What I do miss is the choices I had and the depth in some of those choices. The culprit, not surprisingly, is the Internet (or World Wide Web if you want to be more precise). This vast, always-available and (kind of) free source of information has directly replaced the way I buy magazines and more importantly has just plain supplanted many of them, especially when it comes to gaming.
Here’s a list of magazines I current buy regularly via digital means:
- Runner’s World
- Writer’s Digest
- National Geographic
I occasionally pick up issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and a one-off of others when a particular story interests me or a good deal is to be had (Rolling Stone, The Economist, Scientific American, etc.)
As you can see, it’s a pretty short list. All three magazines are available on newsstands but the digital versions are cheaper, I never have to wonder where I left a copy and they take up zero space. The zero space part is particularly nice, given the boxes of Writer’s Digests I used to carry around between moves. I’ve been reading it for over twenty years and buying it regularly. Storing twenty years of magazines is like trying to store an entire tree in the closet. It’s not convenient.
Here’s the list of the magazines I used to buy regularly. I’ve separated out the gaming and computer magazines because there’s so many of them:
Gaming:
- Computer Gaming World (later Games for Windows magazine)
- PC Gamer
- Computer Games
- Electronic Games (later Computer Entertainment)
- Electronic Fun
- Videogaming Illustrated
Computers:
- Compute!
- Home Computing
- Creative Computing
- Ahoy (Commodore 64)
- Compute’s Gazette (Commodore 64)
- PC Magazine
- PC World
- PC/Computing
- ExtremeTech
- boot (now Maximum PC)
- Mac User (note: I never owned an actual Mac until after Mac User magazine was defunct)
- Macworld
- BYTE
Others:
- Omni
- Discover
- Dragon magazine (more occasionally)
- Epic Illustrated
- Heavy Metal
- Twilight Zone magazine
- Weird Tales (one of its runs back in the late 80s/early 90s)
- Fangoria (semi-regularly)
- Cinefantastique (mostly for special issues, like the ones they had for Star Trek TV series)
- Starlog
- Mad magazine
- Cracked
- Entertainment Weekly
This is not an exhaustive list, as I would also sometimes buy news magazines (Time, Newsweek and Maclean’s), the occasional People or Us and not forgetting the magazines I’m forgetting. Some magazines don’t overlap much or at all–several ended their runs in the early 80s, some I grew out of, like Mad and Cracked, while others I just lost interest in. The cruelest were the ones that died before their time. I wanted to keep reading them, but market forces dictated otherwise. Some of my favorites were among them, too.
Here are my favorites:
- Twilight Zone This only lasted eight years, and it was a terrific mix of short fiction (mainly horror) along with articles on TV and movies that had a TZ feel to them. It was intelligent and especially well-written for a genre magazine, no doubt guided by the hand of its founding editor T.E.D. Klein (an excellent if not exactly prolific horror writer)
- Epic Illustrated This lasted a mere six years and ended its run due to a combination of high cost (glossy color throughout) and low sales. It was basically Heavy Metal without the giant boobs. A great selection of serialized and one-shot stories. I found it superior to Heavy Metal in that it seemed less oriented toward horny young men. On the other hand, Heavy Metal is still being published, so maybe Epic should have had giant boobs.
- Omni A science magazine that had it all, including an admittedly obnoxious silver paper middle section that tended to leave your fingers silvery, too. A mix of fiction, features and regular columns, Omni made science seem accessible and fun. It even treated the subject of UFOs seriously, something virtually unheard of in any U.S. magazine not focused specifically on the subject. This actually lasted about 27 years in print form though in its later days it was hard to find locally and had become the proverbial shell of its former self.
- Computer Gaming World One of the first PC gaming magazines and one that treated the hobby with respect. In its heyday in the early 90s (ie. just before the rise of the Internet) its holiday issues would come in around 500 pages. Most of that was ads, of course, but it was still a sign that the hobby was vibrant. It introduced the world to Jeff Green via a monthly column, a smart writer who always made me laugh. Sadly, he oversaw the demise of the magazine after it was rechristened Games for Windows. It had an impressive 27-year run (the last two as GFW).