Retro Gamer: Videogame Hardware Handbook, Volume 1
Retro Gamer was the first really successful commercial retrogaming magazine. It has now been around long enough that the first issues could themselves be considered retro. The first issue was published as a quarterly magazine in January 2004 but for most of its life it has been published monthly.
In addition to the regular monthly magazine, they occasionally publish compendiums dedicated to a particular machine or subject. Typically these have reprints of some stuff they have previously published in addition to some new material. This magazine is published in the U.K. and living in the U.S., it doesn’t come cheap. It’s about $10 at my local Barnes and Noble with some of the special issues being around $20. You can subscribe and save a bit of money though. If you are looking for a physical magazine that covers retrogaming there is currently no better choice that I am aware of.
This is one of the special issues titled Videogames Hardware Handbook and covers machines from 1977 to 1999. It’s really more of a book at over 250 pages. A new edition of this was released in 2017 that covers machines until 2001. This issue includes:
1977-1979
- Atari 2600
1980-1989
- Intellivision
- Game & Watch
- BBC Micro
- ZX Spectrum
- Dragon 32
- Commodore 64
- Vectrex
- MSX
- Famicom
- Amstrad CPC 464
- Commodore Amiga
- Atari ST
- Nintendo Entertainment System
- Sega Master System
- PC Engine
- Sega Mega Drive
- Konix Multi System
- Nintendo Game Boy
- Atari Lynx
1990-1999
- Sega Game Gear
- Super NES
- Philips CD-i
- Sega Mega-CD
- 3D0
- Atari Jaguar
- Sega Saturn
- NEC PC-FX
- Nintendo 64
- Nintendo Virtual Boy
- Game Boy Color
- Sega Dreamcast
- Neo Geo Pocket Color
- Bandai WonderSwan
In addition to giving hardware details and history of each of these systems, it also lists their top ten games for most of them. I notice there is no ColecoVision or Atari 8-bit computers (but the Atari ST is there). This is a UK centric magazine though and I’m not sure how popular the Atari 8-bit and ColecoVision were there or if they were even widely available. See anything else they missed?
