alaskana

PS - the one thing I always remembered of this magazine was that it was 'that Playstation mag with Pac-Man on the cover from late 1999'. As I wrote earlier, it's basically non-existent on the Internet and trying to do an image search will yield nothing. I began to think I was crazy or had false memories from that time seeing as to how there was no record online of it.

Thank you for making me realize I'm not at least 100 percent crazy, lol.

I want to write more about the significance of this particular issue of PS Extreme later, but for now please know that you, E-Day and CIVICMINDED have ended a roughly 6 year search for an obscure issue of PS Extreme that one could not even find a cover image of on Google images or really a reference too anywhere, even on Ebay. I'm serious when I say this particular issue is NOWHERE on the interwebz - and it's weird as most everything is, right? At least on some obscure corner. But not this issue (trust me I've spent years trying to find it).

I get that PS Extreme may not be the most 'significant' gaming mag out there (especially compared to the likes of EGM and Nintendo Power) but for me, this particular issue of this particular publication is the holy grail for me. It hits at a particular time in my life where I was heavily into gaming mags and also was a pretty significant time of change for me (was about to go out of state for College for the first time). I don't know what happened to the copy I bought in late August of 1999 at a Wal-Mart in Anchorage, Alaska (like most other gaming mags I ever had), but I suspect I left it behind when I left for Oregon to college and was eventually tossed in the bin.

Like most of us here on Retromags, I think most of us have 'that' issue that most resonates with our past and makes us fade into (if only at least tempoarily) that irrecoverable past that we sometimes crave .This issue was it for me. Thank you E-day for scanning this, thank you CIVICMINDED for donating this. You are gods to me at this moment.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

Fantastic release, thanks E-Day and Coury. It took me a moment to realize this was the precursor to EGM. One can see a lot of the same elements that would eventually make their way into EGM.

I chuckled when they were talking about playing the Japanese version of SMB 2 and how it would change 'slightly' for its U.S. debut. Talk about understatement of the year lol.

On 9/3/2019 at 4:23 AM, kitsunebi77 said:

Japan wasn't guilt-free of stealing cover art themselves.  Except in this case it was straight-up plagiarism.  Sort of like a D-student thinking they can just change a few words while copying from an encyclopedia and turn it in as their original research paper.

Ravenloft module: 1983  Castlvania II: 1987

"Just have Dracula turn his head and everyone will think this is original art!"

Riiiiiiight....

Dang - good catch. That's pretty much a slam dunk case of plagiarism. I'm guessing whomever was in charge of box art for Konami at that time didn't think Nintendo/Famicom players were also fans of AD&D? Or maybe they just didn't think they would get caught in the same sense that something like that would almost be instantaneously noticed today thanks to the Internet.

That is good cover art, no wonder they stole it.  That art looks ahead of its time for a game cover, especially considering that only a few years prior to that we were subjected to Mega Man 1's hideous box art. Its Japanese counterpart's box art (Rock Man) was damn good though throughout the series.

It's astounding that not only did they manage to cram a huge amount of content into each issue (this one was 150+ pages), but it was bi-weekly(!) as well. Granted, a lot of it is filler such as ads, comics, and other media news, but there's no doubt it was a quality publication that in my opinion EGM (arguably the greatest American game magazine counterpart) and to some extent a few other Western gaming magazines clearly sought to emulate especially with regard to the review scoring system. It would be interesting if there were any interviews of those who produced the magazine. I'd bet the stories that came out of the Famitsu offices would be wild.

Also, I suspect, but cannot prove, that EGM (at least in its earlier years from 88 to 93 or so) got a lot of their 'exclusive' scoops by keeping tabs on Famitsu. I remember at that time seeing Famitsu profiled in one of those early EGM issues and wanting to read that magazine but in the early 90's that would have been next to near impossible, at least where I was living. Perhaps there were some international bookstores that carried Famitsu in some of the larger US metro areas. It would be interesting to hear from anyone at that time who was able to get it in print without going to Japan.

Either way, fantastic job with the scan. I was honestly surprised to see the vast majority of Famitsu's are unscanned at this point (at least publicly). It is definitely one of the last frontiers in what is left to archive digitally outside of those who collect and trade it privately.