Australian Gaming Database and magazine cover scans at RGA

hyper001

[Source: Australian Gaming Database]

Just wanted to give props to Retro Gaming Australia’s latest additions – they’ve just release an excellent wiki-based database relating to the gaming sector in Australia (including some excellent coverage of Hyper, Sega Megazone and The Zone, three of my favourite slices of Australian gaming media), as well as an archive covering magazine cover scans.

These both join their excellent/extensive Google docs-based Australian game magazine score review archive, TV ad archives and video game magazine ads.

In a perfect world of course, we would be able to grab all the back issues of Hyper and Sega Megazone in a PDF-like format to capture the history of gaming magazines in this country perfectly, but that’s unlikely to happen unfortunately. I for one would love to see some conversions of the old print masters into PDF to peruse on my PC or iOS device, but the return on the investment would probably not be sufficient given the time needed to do this.

Now if only I hadn’t sold off all my video game magazines when I got to Uni! I had piles of delightful magazines in there – C+VG’s from 1992-1993 and several issues of MEGA, Megatech, Sega Zone, Sega Force, Mean Machines Sega and the Official Sega Saturn Magazine from the UK (I owned Sega consoles if you couldn’t tell ;)), [Sega] Megazone 20-55 (the final issue), smatterings of Hyper from 1993 and 1994, then every issue from December 1995 to mid/late-1998… would make for some great reading going back and checking all of those out now 😀