Who Here Remembers Play Magazine?
Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2012 2:16 am
While cleaning and (trying to) organizing after going through about 7 years of magazines...(yeah I'm a packrat)
mens magazines, gaming magzines, tech magazines.
I came across my old Play issues. About three years of them.
Time did not treat them well. The dust and hot summer days made them fall apart.
Damn cheap ass glue! Only about a third of them survived. I have older mags that still hold together better!
And on a transition on holding together better, which play magazine did not. Their fall from grace and eventual bankruptcy left many people (including me
) with a bad taste in their mouths.
I recently resubscribed and my new issue never came. NADA. Only till I went online did I find out about their demise. No letter of apology. No offer to switch to a different mag. nothing. I even subsribed to their other magazine GEEK and that went down the drain too. It really pissed me off
For me out of all the magazines I got each month: Gameinformer is corporate fed mag, everyone gets one. EGM/Gamepro was what everyone read; ie nostalgia. Play had a speical place: games that were under your radar.
I really liked Play mag too. Their articles were different enough to get my attention. They showed stuff the other magzines only had as a stub. Candid reviews for other stuff not game related. I liked their balzyness (SPELL CHECK
) with their no # rating reviews. Thier covers were amazing as well.
But alas, these guys are now a stub themselves in gaming history. Had they still survived, I would have been a loyal subscriber.
I dont even have their magazines to gawk at anymore.
damn cheap glue.
mens magazines, gaming magzines, tech magazines.
I came across my old Play issues. About three years of them.
Time did not treat them well. The dust and hot summer days made them fall apart.
Damn cheap ass glue! Only about a third of them survived. I have older mags that still hold together better!
And on a transition on holding together better, which play magazine did not. Their fall from grace and eventual bankruptcy left many people (including me
) with a bad taste in their mouths.I recently resubscribed and my new issue never came. NADA. Only till I went online did I find out about their demise. No letter of apology. No offer to switch to a different mag. nothing. I even subsribed to their other magazine GEEK and that went down the drain too. It really pissed me off
For me out of all the magazines I got each month: Gameinformer is corporate fed mag, everyone gets one. EGM/Gamepro was what everyone read; ie nostalgia. Play had a speical place: games that were under your radar.
I really liked Play mag too. Their articles were different enough to get my attention. They showed stuff the other magzines only had as a stub. Candid reviews for other stuff not game related. I liked their balzyness (SPELL CHECK
) with their no # rating reviews. Thier covers were amazing as well.But alas, these guys are now a stub themselves in gaming history. Had they still survived, I would have been a loyal subscriber.
I dont even have their magazines to gawk at anymore.
damn cheap glue.
I have been looking around online for an archive of Play, or even torrents of it, but haven't found much beyond individual issues. It's a shame; it was really the only game magazine I ever bothered to read besides Nintendo Power. It is very rare to see magazines with such a palpable passion for games, and Play did it better than anyone else. I wish we would see a revival of the magazine, a la EGM, but I really can't see that happening. Given that Gamepro has gone under, too, I have a bad feeling about the direction of print-based game journalism.
