I’ll level with you immediately. I am a self-confessed video game magazine geek. Physically holding a magazine and even smelling its pages are more of a thrill to me than just digesting web pages and half reading video games related emails and press releases.Owning a video game magazine collection for me allows me to fulfil that fantasy of having my own library of video games related literature. In the last 5 years or so I have begun to fall for the various video games coffee table style books such as Bitmap Books’ Visual Compendium series or their beautiful one-off books like The Art Of Point and Click Adventures. These are the kind of books you can flick through and soak up the nostalgia as you turn each page and transport you back to another time and place where the video games magazine ruled the world.
My favourite video games magazines have to be the Mean Machines run of magazines that were headed up by Jaz Rignall. The original run of magazines only lasted 24 issues before it split into a SEGA and Nintendo variant but those first 24 are ingrained into my psyche and greatly influenced the way I think about games critique and how to have fun with video game writing.
More recently I’ve also had the pleasure to look at a cool magazine called Ninty Fresh which went through Kickstarter very successfully and is now into a run of issues each being funded by Kickstarter backers.
With all this in mind, it feels like there is something of a renaissance of the written word in physical form within the video games world which for me is a great thing and leads me onto the journal which has been absorbing my time lately.
The lovely people from Lost In Cult have just released their first gaming journal entitled Lock On and I was approached to take a look at this beautiful video gaming tome just before I went on my hols to the Isle Of Wight.
Perfect holiday reading was my first thought.
