While I was researching games to put on my list for my #1995InVideoGames series on Mastodon, I hunted down scans of old German PC games magazines from the period to look over their lists of recent and upcoming released, and quickly noticed many games that got showered with praise though I had no memory of ever even having heard about them, or annoucements that later turned out to be completely off the mark. This gave me the idea to reread these magazines 30 years after their original publication and write down and share my thoughts on revisiting these snapshots of the German PC games culture from that time.
I had occasionally flipped through magazines of my friends on school trips, but I believe the first one that I bought for myself was PC Action 11/98. I did switch to reading GameStar instead about a year later, because in 1999 and early 2000, the then layout editor of PC Action was really into the idea of using booth babe photos on the cover and throughout the title story of every issue, which even as a 15-year old boy struck me as rather disturbing and repelling. But they didn't do that in their early years and apparently dropped it again later, but it was the first magazine I regularly read, and it just happens that the very first issue came out in January 1996. Which just makes it the perfect magazine to cover alongside my #1996InVideoGames series. But I am also covering PC Games issues from the same months, which I believe was much more widely read and both started much earlier and continued for much longer than PC Action.
My favorite magazine that I read for the longest time was GameStar. Which only started in late 1997, so that's still some time off in the future for a 30-year revisit.
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