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We have every issue of PCGames... we think.
🕑 Added 2025-11-20 22:00:01 +0000 UTCIn the vein of a post we made a few months ago about Imagine Town Magazine, we wanted to share another story of how difficult it can be to nail down information about poorly documented game magazines.
We've finally finished a complete digitized run of PCGames, a computer game magazine that went from the late 80s to mid-90s. The magazine got rebooted in a couple different forms (as Electronic Entertainment*, then as PC Entertainment, and then, hilariously, back to being called PC Games). But we've been focusing on that first run of PCGames, because up until a few weeks ago, we didn't even know how many issues were published.
After the first four issues of PCGames, they stopped putting numbers on them. Normally, this would be fine. They still listed a publishing month (like "December 1989"), and it's easy to track magazines that way instead!
Except that PCGames didn't come close to keeping a regular publishing schedule. We thought maybe it was a monthly, or maybe seasonal, but nope. They just kinda put out issues whenever they could or whenever they felt like it.
Here's the publishing dates for every issue we have from 1991:
January/February 1991
March/April 1991
October 1991
November 1991
December 1991
Respectfully, what the hell was going on over there.
It is extremely difficult to confirm that something doesn't exist. Were any issues released between April and October? Is there a reason they switched to a monthly format after apparently taking half the year off? aaauuugh (this is Phil editorializing)
We often look for clues from the editorial inside each magazine, which we did for Imagine Town Magazine. Frequently, the editors will apologize for an interruption in their schedule, sometimes due to a change in ownership or some other outstanding factor. But the schedule for PCGames is too erratic to track this way.
Sometimes, other people have already cataloged these magazines. We do use Retromags as a reference (especially since a lot of their cataloging was based on the collection of Kevin Gifford, a long-time magazine collector), but they're sometimes incomplete too. Again... how do you verify that something doesn't exist?!
In cases like this, we have to make educated guesses. One of the best sources for that is eBay listings. In particular, if a former subscriber puts up all their old issues, we can get a much clearer idea of what was actually mailed out.
In the case of PCGames, we finally did locate a couple subscriber lots of PCGames that covered the time periods we were uncertain about. We have never seen any additional issues that we weren't previously aware of.
So now, we're comfortable taking a leap and saying that we are not missing any additional issues, and our catalog and Retromags are accurate.
Between our scans and Retromags, we now have every issue of PCGames readable and text-searchable! There's a lot of goodies in these, including some previously unscanned interviews with developers (I'm a personal fan of the interview with Will Wright in the Spring/Summer 1992 issue, where he says galaxy brain stuff about like "The game will be you, and you'll be the game.")
*Fun fact that will make you question everything you knew: Electronic Entertainment (E2) was run by IDG Communications, which partnered with the Interactive Digital Software Association to run a convention called... the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Yes, the event was named after a magazine that was gone before the second E3 even happened.
