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Reader mode // feature
Games magazines were never just review delivery systems. They were weather reports from the front line: what was coming, what looked impossible, what disappointed everyone after three months of hype, and which screenshots had clearly been provided by someone with a very relaxed relationship with reality.
That matters because games history has a habit of smoothing itself out. The rough edges vanish. The delays, the rumours, the shop-floor gossip, the demo-disc miracles and the pre-release nonsense all get compressed into a tidy paragraph.
The magazines keep the mess in. They remind you what a machine meant before it had a Wikipedia page, what a studio looked like before it was acquired, and what readers were being told before the final truth arrived in a cardboard box.
For anyone writing about games now, that is not nostalgia. It is evidence.