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Something I have to do pretty often is scour long, boring lists of ebay auctions looking for things we need for the @GameHistoryOrg library, usually video game magazines. So I thought I'd start a thread with some observations because idk. Thread:
The world of video game magazine collecting is kind of strange and exciting because there are so few of us, and there isn't much of a checklist. This specimen, the premiere issue of "Cyber Sports," is INCREDIBLY rare, but demand is basically nonexistent. ebay.us/8wgCyf 
This was EGM's very short-lived spin-off that was exclusively about sports games. How short-lived? According to Retromags there *might* have been six issues, but who knows if that's accurate. I think we have two. retromags.com/magazines/usa/…
Here is an issue of Consumer Electronics from 1984. It's hard to find good business coverage of games prior to the mid-90s, as most of it was locked away in vaguely-related trade mags like this. The toy trades also covered video games for a long time. ebay.us/sdCiFz
This magazine is frustratingly difficult to find. I found one small run in a local library, and it had some really neat advertising from companies like Nintendo and Sega that was only ever seen by industry-types. This is maybe the third issue I've seen on eBay, ever.
As a matter of fact I do look for these, and even paid way-too-much for about a three-year run from the early 90s...that turned out to have almost zero video game content. But these aren't in any library, so there's no way to know!
I do know this one, it's actually just called "PC Games" (NOT PC Gamer!). This was done by IDG, the GamePro publisher, and ran throughout the 90s, with a brief change to "Electronic Entertainment" around 1994 when they thought "multimedia" was the future.
Electronic Entertainment, aka "E2." Around the time this issue went to print, E2 debuted its expo, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, aka...E3.
This "magazine" is interesting: it was the official publication of Trysoft, which ran the official Nintendo stores in the Redmond area. A lot of NOA launch parties were at this place. Don't tell the collectors but I consider this a semi-official Nintendo publication...
This is another one where there's no rulebook, we don't know how many issues were made. I have the first issue and a sequential run of maybe five, but judging by the publication months we're missing at least one issue, assuming it exists. Nobody knows!
I once tracked down the person who ran Trysoft and was the publisher of Future Play to the hot dog cart he ran in Seattle (Hot Dog Japon). I'm HARDCORE. He had no idea why I knew who he was or why I was asking him about Nintendo. He didn't keep his issues...
There's really not much to these so don't go out of your way to track them down, it's literally just a magazine full of ads. I don't think there's any editorial content at all, just full-page ads for NES games, though some of them are unique!
Games Business was good, but is also extremely hard to find. We lucked into a near-complete run from someone who worked on it. It was tabloid-sized, so I think people threw it away since it was so huge. But yeah, Next-Gen is what I was referring to.
I'm not sure why but late 90s Game Informer (maybe late '95 through 2000ish) is really hard to find and expensive. Early 90s? Super common. 2001-2004? Doable. GameStop acquisition onward? Noooo problem.
