Time is not kind to paper publications, especially when humidity and mold start to take hold (I've experienced this firsthand). But the efforts to digitize and preserve their content are enormous, and the Retromags portal focuses on video game magazines that were sold worldwide in recent decades. Its backups also extend to strategy guides, galleries, and other magazines unrelated to gaming.
The general recommendation hasn't changed: if you're looking for a driver for old hardware, a disappeared website, a specific manual, or digitized copies of old magazines, your first stop is the Internet Archive. The amount of information available there is impressive, and many preservation-minded users use it as the definitive repository for their work. However, the Internet Archive isn't perfect, and it's not alone. There are several projects focused on digitizing and backing up publications (among which the Survivor Library stands out), but today we came across Retromags, a site dedicated to preserving classic video game magazines and trick guides.
Retromags: Thousands of Retro Gaming Magazines in One Place
Retromags' main section is its magazine database, divided into categories by country of origin. The most complete section belongs to the United Kingdom, exceeding 10,000 publications (the number of projects in that region has been remarkable), followed by Japan (more than 8,000) and the United States (7,040). We also found Latin American magazines (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico are represented), though I'm surprised not to see anything from Spain here. Retromags says it responds almost immediately to any takedown request, but I imagine outdated news and old catalogs shouldn't cause a major copyright crisis... or should they?
Another section definitely worth your time is the strategy guides section. Today, any walkthrough is just a search away on Google or YouTube, but many companies offered help texts with tricks or solutions in the past (and sometimes sold better than the game itself). Now, not all guides listed here are available (their downloads have been replaced with links to eBay and Amazon), but there's a huge amount of material to explore.
And the best part? Retromags is free, and you don't need to create an account to download the magazines. The only recommendation is to use something like SumatraPDF to read CBZ files, or you can extract their contents with 7-Zip (they're just alternative zips).
Official site: Click here
