RETRO GAMER’S MISSING ISSUE
Over the past 20 years there have been 257 issues of Retro Gamer. Yet there was one more that was never published. Let’s find out what happened to the load that failed
Words by Martyn Carroll
The first 18 issues of Retro Gamer were published by Live Publishing, a small magazine house that collapsed in August 2005. Yet before its demise, a 19th issue was fully completed, waiting to be published. When the magazine was resurrected at Imagine Publishing later that year, with current editor Darran at the helm, a new 19th issue was published featuring fresh content. So what became of the articles in that original issue 19?
Writers, particularly freelance writers, and especially freelance gaming writers, are a resourceful bunch, so you’ll be unsurprised to hear that many of the articles appeared elsewhere. A number of them were included on Retro Survival, a Cd-based project released in November 2005 and put together by the freelancers who lost out financially when Live went under. Chief among these were an in-depth hardware feature about the Vectrex, written by Mat Allen, and Ashley Day’s look at games that were enhanced for the AGA Amigas. A number of regular features also ended up on the CD, including Back To The Eighties (covering August 1985), Strange Games (looking at Ninjasploitation titles) and High Score (featuring Donkey Kong champ Steve Wiebe). An upside of the CD format was that the original, fulllength articles could be featured, with no edits required. For example, the submitted Vectrex article was 10,000+ words and a third had to be chopped to squeeze it into the mag, yet the whole tome was on the CD.
Several other articles would find a home in the relaunched Retro Gamer at Imagine Publishing. These included Paul Drury’s Desert Island Disks with the Pickford brothers, which appeared in the published RG 19, making it the only article intended for the original issue 19 that ended up in the new one. A cut-down version of John Szczepaniak’s article on the Brazilian gaming scene was in RG 20, while the making of Another World with Eric Chahi turned up in RG 24, albeit in a
heavily revised form. A short piece on the unreleased Vectrex game Mail Plane, originally included as part of Frank Gasking’s Games That Weren’t column, eventually appeared as an expanded standalone article in RG 41.
A couple of articles wound up in other places. Dan Whitehead’s feature about kids’ TV show Knightmare was published in the November 2005 issue of UK genre mag Cult Times. For reasons he forgets, your correspondent’s article on games linked to rock bands (Crüe Ball, Revolution X and so on) randomly popped up on Eurogamer.net in January 2008, under its original title Rock Star Games. And that was pretty much that. A few bits were never published anywhere, but this was mostly monthly stuff like the news, reviews, reader letters, the coverdisc (remember those?) and the next month page (teasing an in-progress article about the Oric range of computers, which would ultimately appear in RG 29).
That said, there were a couple of interesting articles that sadly didn’t get published. The first was a special letters spread that stemmed from the Gilsoft article in RG 16. We asked readers who had used utilities like The Quill to create their own games back in the day to send in their tales of trying to get them professionally published – and we received quite a few responses. Some of these included scans of the letters they received back from publishers and it was fascinating to read them (note to Ed: this would make a great feature one day). [Agreed – Ed]
The second was a brief history of the Ninja Gaiden series. No great loss, you might think, yet this was written by Sam Lockett, one of two lads who happened to be at Live on work experience at the time, precisely as the company was going to the wall (the other, Ant Cooke, contributed some reviews). These two teens gained an eye-opening insight into the exciting and unpredictable world of magazine publishing – and no doubt revised their career aspirations soon after. It’s a shame their work was never published, but they did leave with a good story to tell. Obviously the main story here is that Retro Gamer thankfully survived this blip, and all the main features in the unpublished issue 19 appeared elsewhere. The original pages were all backed up safely at the time and are now just a footnote in the magazine’s 20-year history.
“Several articles would find a home in the relaunched RG at Imagine Publishing”