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.

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.