This is yet another excellent, and genuinely admirable, form of preserving data and history, one from which plenty of people could learn something.
The Internet Archive offers a huge amount of material tied to the history of PC gaming, and anyone nostalgic for the era of promotional demo discs will be glad to see that the site now hosts hundreds of them. These discs were not always just about previews – they often came packed with special extras or even exclusive bonuses that never appeared in the full retail versions. A perfect example is the Quake-O-Rama disc bundled with the October 1997 issue of PC Gamer. It is not only filled with Quake maps, but also includes the first speedrun demo file for Quake Done Quick. Then there is the March 2008 disc, which contains a full episode of Telltale’s Sam & Max, and is so excited about the Duke Nukem Forever trailer that it opens with a loud “OMG!”.
If that still feels too modern, you can go back far enough to boot up the first episode of Apogee’s shareware platformer Hocus Pocus from a 1994 floppy disk. The further back you go, the more likely you are to run into FMV footage featuring the old Coconut Monkey mascot. The archive’s cover-disc collection contains 758 entries in total, offering a fascinating look into the magazine’s past. PC games may no longer arrive in huge fancy boxes, but there is still nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia.
A large number of old English-language issues of Byte Magazine, widely regarded as one of the foundational personal computer magazines, are also available on the Internet Archive, going all the way back to 1975. The magazine essentially grew alongside the personal computer itself. At the center of it all was Wayne Green, who had previously edited an amateur radio magazine – an interesting parallel, given that tabletop role-playing games were also emerging at almost exactly the same time from an older, far more obsessive wargaming culture. Byte is not only invaluable as a more straightforward record of how personal computing evolved, but also as a reminder that back when computers still felt magical and exciting, and almost like symbols of guaranteed progress, people thought about them very differently.
These days computers are becoming too expensive because we are filling useless warehouses with them, and collectively those warehouses cost more than the highway network. The indexing of Byte on the Internet Archive is mildly frustrating because of missing metadata, and the collection clearly has gaps. Filtering the archive down to English-language entries produces 224 hits for the Byte collection, including duplicates and special issues, while a quick count suggests that the monthly magazine published 276 issues in total, not including specials. The final July 1998 issue of Byte is a particularly glaring omission.
And for anyone more interested in magazines from home, the Internet Archive still has plenty to browse, while the Retroújság site is also worth checking. That said, because of one of Guru‘s founders, a few magazine families are missing there wholesale, for reasons that remain rather baffling.
Source: PC Gamer, PC Gamer, Archive.org – PC Gamer CD-ROMs, Archive.org – Byte Magazine
