WHATEVER HAPPENED TO...
GAMES THAT NEVER SAW THE LIGHT OF DAY
Over the past 20 years there have been 257 issues of Retro Gamer. Yet there was one more that was never published. Let’s find out what happened to the load that failed
The first 18 issues of Retro Gamer were published by Live Publishing, a small magazine house that collapsed in August 2005. Yet before its demise, a 19th issue was fully completed, waiting to be published. When the magazine was resurrected at Imagine Publishing later that year, with current editor Darran at the helm, a new 19th issue was published featuring fresh content. So what became of the articles in that original issue 19?
Writers, particularly freelance writers, and especially freelance gaming writers, are a resourceful bunch, so you’ll be unsurprised to hear that many of the articles appeared elsewhere. A number of them were included on Retro Survival, a CD-based project released in November 2005 and put together by the freelancers who lost out financially when Live went under. Chief among these were an in-depth hardware feature about the Vectrex, written by Mat Allen, and Ashley Day’s look at games that were enhanced for the AGA Amigas. A number of regular features also ended up on the CD, including Back To The Eighties (covering August 1985), Strange Games (looking at Ninjasploitation titles) and High Score (featuring Donkey Kong champ Steve Wiebe). An upside of the CD format was that the original, fulllength articles could be featured, with no edits required. For example, the submitted Vectrex article was 10,000+ words and a third had to be chopped to squeeze it into the mag, yet the whole tome was on the CD.
Several other articles would find a home in the relaunched Retro Gamer at Imagine Publishing. These included Paul Drury’s Desert Island Disks with the Pickford brothers, which appeared in the published RG 19, making it the only article intended for the original issue 19 that ended up in the new one. A cut-down version of John Szczepaniak’s article on the Brazilian gaming scene was in RG 20, while the making of Another World with Eric Chahi turned up i
