Hardcore Gamer Magazine
[ Years Active: 2005 - 2008 ]
Like Electronic Gaming Monthly, Hardcore Gamer Magazine's final issue featured Street Fighter IV!
Born out of the ashes of Die Hard Game Fan, Hardcore Gamer Magazine reunited Tim Lindquist, Terry Wolfinger and Greg Off. These three editors created a somewhat similar magazine that focused on the admittedly geekier side of the games industry. Such topics would include hard to find arcades around the world, local game tournaments and more than a few pages devoted to obscure anime releases. They also featured standard news and reviews, but the real draw was the freeform approach to what was always meant to be a hardcore gamers' rag.
How It Ended:
You could see the death of Hardcore Gamer Magazine a mile away. For starters, the magazine switched from shipping monthly to a quarterly. It also started to get smaller and smaller, often only reviewing one or two games. The focus was places squarely on the online side, where the editors would post reviews and blog entries. With almost no fanfare, HGM decided to abandon the magazine and focus
Don't worry kids, the Monitaur will never die!
exclusively on strategy guides, including one for
Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?
Brand New Series Finale:
Happy with their Street Fighter IV-themed issue, the entire Hardcore Gamer Magazine staff gets a keg, orders pizza and drinks the night away. It was the wildest party you've ever seen, with loony animated characters hanging from the ceiling and this guy who managed to get a TV stuck on his head. By 3 AM everybody had passed out. There was a silence in the office as everybody slept through the night drunk as can be. In the very next scene editor Greg Off wakes up to discover that he's not in the same office. He wonders where everybody went. Where is the alcohol? Where is the Monitaur? And that's when E. Storm, Nick Rox and The Enquirer walk in. It's at that very moment that Greg realizes that he's not in the Hardcore Gamer Magazine offices; he's still working on Die Hard Game Fan. It's the 1990s and those 34 issues of HGM were nothing but a bad dream. Of course Nintendo isn't going to call their motion-based console the Wii, that's just stupid. That should have been a tip-off right there. And Sony would never launch a console at $600; that just defies all logic. It was all a dream. Greg can get back to working on his true love, Die Hard Game Fan.
Incite Video Gaming
[ Years Active: 1999 - 2000 ]
This is the typical Incite cover - when it's not a hot chick on the cover, it's a WWE wrestler!
Do you like video game magazines but hate all of the pesky video game coverage? Do you want to hear about celebrities and their video game habits? Would you rather see women in bikinis than screenshots of video games? Then Incite is the perfect magazine for you. Back in the early 2000s, Incite was the only video game magazine whose second focus was video games. This was a magazine about celebrities, plain and simple. There were articles about game systems celebrities owned, features where celebrities competed against each other in video games and interviews with celebrities that had some loose connection to something game related. And then there were the interviews with celebrities that didn't play games, weren't in video games and had nothing to do with video games. In other words, it was the soft core version of Maxim (which is already the soft core version of Playboy).
Without Incite Video Gaming, who will Fred Durst play Chu Chu Rocket against?
When Incite Video Gaming folded it left a lot of eager D-list celebrities unsure of what to do. What would all of those no-name wrestlers do now? And if Fuel and Limp Bizkit went head to head at Power Stone 2, would anybody care? Without Incite there to report on it we'll never know. And so it ended - not with a band, but with a whimper.
Brand New Series Finale:
It's a celebrity filled episode of Incite Video Gaming. In this star-studded finale, the editors are visited by a steady flow of WWE wrestlers and D-list starlets. Later the Foo Fighters show up to rock the office, and then Hugh Hefner comes out with a fresh batch of nude (albeit skin-painted) Playmates. And then they all sit down and play Halo. Around the half way mark, Jar Jar Binks (of Star Wars fame) jumps through the window and makes a real scene. Moments later he's thrown back out the window by David Hasselhoff, Fred Durst and that guy that plays Mini Me in all of those Austin Powers movies. The editorial staff continues to celebrate, then sobers up and realizes that they can go on without Incite Video Games. In a final stirring speech editor Greg Rau wonders if their magazine changed anybody's life. It didn't, Greg. It really didn't.
Official Dreamcast Magazine
[ Years Active: 1999 - 2001 ]
It's always best to lead off your Sega magazine with a picture of Sonic, unless you're a Saturn magazine that is!
Like Mega Play, The Super NES Buyers Guide and Turbo Play before it, the Official Dreamcast Magazine was a system-specific magazine. This time around they were focused on the Dreamcast, Sega's ill-fated final stab at the hardware market. Like many magazines of its day, the Official Dreamcast Magazine featured demos and videos burned to a GD-ROM. For twelve short months, the Official Dreamcast Magazine was the thing to read if you couldn't get enough information about your beloved Chu Chu Rocket-playing machine.
How It Ended:
Unfortunately the publishers of the Official Dreamcast Magazine didn't have much of a choice in how they ended their twelve issue run. You don't argue with Sega when they decide to call it a day and get out of the hardware business. And so the magazine was canceled, along with dozens of high quality Dreamcast games. I hate to lump the Official Dreamcast Magazine in with the likes of Incite and
If you were the "ultimate," then why didn't you make it out of the 1990s?
NEXT Generation, but when you hook your wagon up to somebody else's star, you have to suffer the consequences if things go wrong.
Brand New Series Finale:
With third party support abandoning ship and two more consoles (GameCube and Xbox) ready to jump into the battle at any time, it looked like everything was doomed. But not if the Official Dreamcast Magazine has anything to say about it. Battered and bruised, the staff gets a sudden burst of energy and starts calling all of their contacts. After several hours of negotiations, the Official Dreamcast Magazine was ready to confirm that Sega and Electronic Arts were teaming up for an exclusive line of football games. This would be the one thing that would save the Sega Dreamcast and keep the Official Dreamcast Magazine's hopes alive. Unfortunately this news came a little too late and Sega was still forced to bow out of the system war. Because of their heroic acts in the final hours, the staff of Official Dreamcast Magazine were able to find allegiance with other system-specific magazines, like OXM and the Official PlayStation Magazine. In the final moments, we see the Dreamcast's light power-up and hear that all familiar sound of the console turning on. The Dreamcast is alive ... and then it all cuts to black.
