I just finished writing a feature about the Video Game History Foundation in Oakland, California, and how it is preparing to share its digital archive of games magazines. From 30 January, you'll be able to visit the institute's website and explore a collection of about 1,500 publications from throughout the history of games, all scanned in high detail, all searchable for keywords. It's a magnificent resource for researchers and those who just want to find the first-ever review of Tetris or Pokémon. I can't wait to visit. While researching the article, I spoke to John O'Shea and Ann Wain from the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, which is also collecting games mags and other printed ephemera.

Before the internet, if you were an avid gamer then you were very likely to be an avid reader of games magazines. From the early 1980s, the likes of Crash, Mega, PC Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazine were your connection with the industry, providing news, reviews and interviews as well as lively letters pages that fostered a sense of community. Very rarely, however, did anyone keep hold of their magazine collections. Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping.

In the 21st century, video game news is available in endless streams, 24 hours a day. But if you grew up in the 1980s and 90s, you went to magazines for your gaming news, reviews and gossip. For 30 years, the UK games mag industry was a thriving sector, providing players, not only with information about games on every format, but also a sense of community. They were part newspapers, part fanzines and their writers were the YouTube streamers of their day. I've been lucky enough to write for dozens of them, but before that I was an avid reader, spending all my money on these glossy celebrations of game culture.

If you were into video games in the 1980s or 90s, then along with your computer, your QuickShot joystick and your tape player, there was one other vital component of your set-up: a games magazine. For me it was Zzap! 64, a glossy mag dedicated to the Commodore 64 with brilliant, opinionated writers, excellent features, and an exhaustive tips section. I would rush to the newsagent on publication day, bring it home with almost religious reverence, then read it from cover to cover. And then I would go back and read it again. This was how I discovered new games such as Sentinel, Elite and Leaderboard, but also, through the letters page and competitions, joined a community of players, years before the world wide web allowed us all to get in contact. In the 80s, video game magazines were the internet.