Gaming Magazines (GamePro, Game Players)
The glossy gaming magazines you subscribed to with the little bind-in postcard — GamePro, Game Players, and their newsstand rivals. Multi-platform reviews, screenshot-packed previews, and pages of cheat codes you copied out by hand before a big weekend.
Before the internet spoiled every secret, the gaming magazine was how you kept up. GamePro launched in April 1989 from publisher IDG and ran until 2011, filling its pages with multi-platform reviews (its 'ProReviews'), tips ('ProTips'), and a beloved cheat-code section, S.W.A.T.Pro. Game Players started the same year, 1989, out of Greensboro, North Carolina, cycling through publishers before being renamed Ultra Game Players and finally folding in 1998. Together with rivals like EGM, they defined the newsstand-gaming era.
The rituals were universal. You tore out the bind-in subscription postcard and mailed it off, then waited weeks for each fat issue to arrive. You pored over blurry screenshots of games you'd never afford, and you carefully copied out cheat codes and passwords onto scraps of paper to try later — because there was no other way to get them.
The web killed the model. Instant reviews, free codes, and forums made the monthly wait obsolete, and one by one the print magazines shut down. But for a generation, the arrival of a new issue in the mailbox — and the smell of those glossy pages — was a genuine event.
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Nintendo Power
Nintendo's official magazine and the pre-internet bible for stuck kids everywhere. Nintendo Power came packed with glossy fold-out maps, pull-out strategy guides, previews of games you couldn't afford yet, and the exact secret you needed to get past that one impossible level.
Game Genie
Slot your game into the Game Genie, slot the Game Genie into the console, thumb in a code from the booklet, and play with unlimited lives. Nintendo went to court to kill it, lost, and was ordered to pay Galoob the entire $15 million bond it had posted — a landmark copyright fight waged over a plastic cheat cart. It was never a Nintendo product, and it wasn't Nintendo-only: Sega gave the Genesis version its official approval while Nintendo was still in court.
GameShark
The cheat device of the PlayStation and N64 years: impossibly long hexadecimal codes, thumbed in one character at a time with the d-pad, in exchange for infinite everything. Codes came from magazines, a members-only newsletter, and a 1-900 number that charged you $1.29 a minute.
Gex
The wisecracking, TV-obsessed gecko who cracked one-liners while wall-crawling through the 'Media Dimension.' In the era of mascot wars — Mario, Sonic, Crash — Gex was the snarky one, voiced by an actual stand-up comedian. It's tail time.