Game Player's Vol. 2 No. 11 (November 1990)

Oh my god, I've been looking for this for a long, LONG time. I remember buying this magazine at a Walgreens when I was 12 years old back in my hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin. I'm sure I bought it because of the cover story of the TMNT arcade game, which I loved greatly and was hotly anticipating being able to play at home. But that quickly became secondary to the story on The Secret of Monkey Island. I didn't have a computer at that time and only knew one person who did, a friend with an Apple IIe. Being used to Atari and NES games - as good as some of them were - I was amazed at how much more complex and visually impressive computer games seemed to be. They were like some advanced form of entertainment from a distant world, and this Monkey Island thing was the most noteworthy example I'd seen yet. It seemed so unique, so rich and compelling and unbelievably interesting. I was aching to play the game but knew that I couldn't. It felt like some faraway dream for only the richest of video gamers. I vividly remember sitting on my bunkbed, munching some Act II brand popcorn (back when it was new and tasty) and being mesmerized by the thought of this game.

Then, three years later, I was doing odd jobs for the manager of a local mom and pop video rental store when one day he decided that he'd capitalize on the constant presence of local youths who hung out in his store by setting up various game systems and charging them a dollar to play games on it for half an hour. One of those machines was the Sega CD, not a system I'd paid much attention to but one that was sort of a bridge between affordable consoles and still prohibitively priced computers. I thought I'd look into it and was stunned to see that Monkey Island was available on the system. I begged the owner to let me try it for just a short while and was almost shaking with excitement. I didn't know how to advance very far into it though, and wanted to get to the parts of the game shown in the old Game Players article. Remembering it, I went home and found my copy. And, in a move that I would always later regret, I cut out the Monkey Island article and folder it up, packed it into my pocket, and went back to the store. I don't even know what I thought the article would achieve (it was just that - an article, not a walkthrough) and I lost the pages shortly thereafter, never to see them again.

This issue of Game Players is one of the things I've searched for on a pretty much yearly basis ever since discovering this site in 2009 or so. It was so frustrating that this particular issue seemed so evasive for so long. While the first two dozen issues of Nintendo Power will always be my gaming magazine nostalgia hotspot, Game Players Nov. 1990 is pretty close because of the laser-focused memories of what it was like to imagine some far-off day in which I could use these amazing, untouchable rich people computers to play these advanced, fantastical, almost mythical "grownup" video games. Those memories - as well as the general memories of what life was like at that point in my childhood - are ones that I always wanted to revisit. Now I'll finally get to read that damn Monkey Island article again for the first time in over thirty years. Thank you SO much for uploading what is, to most people, just some forgettable entry in some B-tier gaming rag but which to me is a special little nugget of my gaming life.