Areala

I can't speak for other magazines, but EGM's editor in chief, Ed Semrad, was a photography enthusiast as well as a video game nut, and he was obsessive in his need to document every game he laid eyes on. He custom-built a camera setup which was jokingly called "The Cone of Silence" that he could place over an arcade monitor or television screen to block out external light and take beautiful snapshots of gameplay because the camera was always at the perfect distance and angle. I imagine @TheRedEye could shine of additional light on this as well! *huggles* Areala

Happy to be corrected! I was thinking about an article I read (I believe in EGM) which talked about the process for them getting screenshots, but I didn't go hunt down the article in question and so (like a moron) I was relying on my memory. That's dangerous to do after forty, so learn from my mistake, kiddos. *huggles* Areala

I got this! The major magazine publishers were often working with prototype or pre-release copies sent over by the game developers. In the cartridge days, there wouldn't be any plastic shell housing the games, they would be the printed circuit boards with the appropriate ROM chips soldered in place. You generally couldn't play these versions on a standard consumer console, so the magazines would have special versions of the hardware (like the dev kits of today) that would allow them to play these versions of the games. These were intended to be hooked up to a computer monitor rather than a television, so it was easy for the magazines to use a monitor attached to a computer running screen capture software, and grab whatever images they needed, then clean them up using Photoshop. The dev kits for portable systems did not include screens, so they too would be hooked up to a monitor just like the standard consoles, which is how they got such clean screen grabs of the games without any of the screen blur or other graphical issues seen, for example, on the GameBoy. *huggles* Areala