PSM Issue 001 (September 1997)

I believe it was advertised in other Imagine Games Network magazines, like NextGen.

Yeah, who know which mag I must have seen it in (probably Game Players), but since a one-year subscription was $12 and a single issue was $6, I guess subscribing was a pretty low-risk no-brainer. Even if the mag ended up being terrible, you were only out the cost of 2 issues.

thank you so much guys for putting your logo and "donate to us" page, on page 1 of your magazine scans. I cant explain how amazing it is to, instead of having the magazines cover art on my e-reader's library page, now I have a wall full of your website's ad pages to look at. Now, I get to enjoy editing hundreds of CBZs to edit out your cover pages! thank you!

  On 5/11/2025 at 7:24 AM, richarddukard said:

thank you so much guys for putting your logo and "donate to us" page, on page 1 of your magazine scans. I cant explain how amazing it is to, instead of having the magazines cover art on my e-reader's library page, now I have a wall full of your website's ad pages to look at. Now, I get to enjoy editing hundreds of CBZs to edit out your cover pages! thank you!

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WTF are you on about friend?  First of all, that page you posted?  NOT IN THIS SCAN.  You posted in the wrong place.  (Also, that page hasn't been used in scans here in around 15 years, so you must have pulled it from a VERY old scan.)

Second of all, the credits page that is there (which says NOTHING about donating) is located on the very LAST page of the file.  If your e-reader is showing the last page first, try using an e-reader that works properly.

Can @MigJmz maybe delete this guy's post from this thread?  Move it and this reply into its own post in the forums if you like, but since he isn't talking about this scan, it shouldn't be here.  Thanks.

Moving on, here's some comics cover art by this issue's cover artist, Art Adams:

scan is very good, thank you as always @kitsunebi! @richarddukard by chance is that section of your ebook reader set to Manga mode, so it's showing all the last pages as the cover?

  On 5/12/2025 at 2:58 PM, newyokohama said:

scan is very good, thank you as always @kitsunebi! @richarddukard by chance is that section of your ebook reader set to Manga mode, so it's showing all the last pages as the cover?

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No need to reply to that guy - he'll never be back to see it.  I'd bet anything he didn't even download those mags from here.  More likely they came from some other place that changed the format, like when someone uploads our stuff to the Internet Archive and turns them into PDFs, which erases the naming format of the original jpgs. 

I just wanted to point out that "manga mode" would never show the back cover first, as it doesn't put the pages in reverse order.  It simply swaps the left and right facing pages.  It's a mistake to think that manga is read from back to front.  It isn't.  It's read from right to left.  The front cover is still the first page, it's just that the binding is on the right side as opposed to the left.  So reading manga NOT set to manga/Japanese mode will display pages like so:

1, 3, 2, 5, 4, 7, 6...etc.

But the front cover is still first, and the back cover is still last.

that’s a good thing to know, didn’t know that, thanks!

  On 5/12/2025 at 10:01 PM, newyokohama said:

that’s a good thing to know, didn’t know that, thanks!

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Actually, I probably should explain better.  Not that this has ANYTHING to do with this issue LOL.

If viewing in single page mode, digital manga will still display all pages in correct order: 1,2,3,4,etc.  The text is printed in vertical columns read from top to bottom, starting at the right side of the page and working left.

In two-page mode (or an actual Japanese-style mag or book, when opened and showing two facing pages, page 2 is on the right, and page 3 is on the left.  This is still in 1-2-3 order, but since you read from right to left, we Westerners may think of the pages as swapped (so it's only from a Westerner's perspective viewing in two-page mode that the pages would be in the 1,3,2,5,4 order I mentioned previously.)  So if the mag is NOT set to manga mode, when opened to facing pages, page 2 will be on the left and page 3 on the right, as they are in Western mags, except that this is the reverse of how they're meant to be oriented.  This causes problems whenever facing pages are meant to be viewed as a single image, like on any two page spread, as the right half will be on the left and the left half on the right.

So manga mode is necessary when viewing any facing pages that have elements spread across both pages.  If there are no spreads at all (such as in a text novel), you could leave your viewer in regular reading mode and it wouldn't matter (though there are few to no mags to which this would apply.)

TLDR (or just too hard to understand/be explained in words): Manga mode could not possibly be responsible for this guy's problems.

I want to say PSM had subscription cards inside the boxes of games and maybe even the PS1 consoles themselves in the lead up to its debut. Which would be ironic considering how much they tout that they're unofficial and independent. It'd also be interesting because P.S.X. became OFFICIAL the next month after PSM started.

But I may be remembering this wrong because I also seem to recall Next Generation had cards inside the PS1 console box for three free issues. And perhaps Imagine knew from those registrations who to sell the PSM subscriptions to. So that may be the actual source for those of us who got in the ground floor of PSM.

I think the NextGen offers were in the box around the end of 1996 and that supply would have trickled over into 1997. So if you got a PS1 around this period you might have gotten the same offers.

There was a lot of free stuff you could get from filling out the registration cards back in those days, you could get lots of unsolicited company demo discs from registering games. I think the original PlayStation Underground stuff was sent to people who registered the consoles. This was before Sony started selling those demo disc Jampacks.