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[triverse]

Out-of-Print Archive is proud to announce the donation of over 350 UK magazines (there are a couple of US issues but not many) from a friend of our project that wishes to only be known as Richard.  OoPA is in awe of the generosity shown here and are proud to release these shots of just some of the magazines received by us















The highlights in this collection are:

Lots of CVGs 1994-2002
Mean machines Sega 1994-1996
Dreamcast magazine (possibly the full set)
Official Sega Saturn magazine in wonderful condition (possibly the full set)
Official Nintendo magazine (several years worth at least)
A dozen or so Sega power issues
A bunch of official Sega magazine issues.

And the crowning piece here is the final 3 issues of Mean Machines Sega!  Out-of-Print Archive is now the ONLY place that you will be able to read the ENTIRE run of Mean Machines Sega when they are released!

We will have a features page up soon for this (it is a rather large collection to go through and verify completeness of the issues and well, we just need to catch our breath here folks).

Just one more example of how far Out-of-Print will go to bring the absolute best to the fans of the magazines that we are able to offer here.

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articles/features/out-of-print/Mega_Donation.html

[STGuy1040]

This is absolutely incredible! Please extend my gratitude and thanks to Richard for his donation!

[meppi]

It sure is. Great guy all around, in person as well as online.

Once again, Richard, thank you so much.
I'll make sure to keep my promise and make it possible for these magazines to be enjoyed by as many people as possible.

[triverse]

I would like to personally thank Richard also for his great and amazing sacrifice in donating these magazines to Out-of-Print.  Thank you Richard.  There are not many people willing to do what you have done and we are eternally grateful to you for your help.

[nickerous]

Wow, that's a haul and a half!  Can't wait to see them uploaded!

[meppi]

Wow, that's a haul and a half!  Can't wait to see them uploaded!

Already started work on the first issue, which is CVG 168 - november 1995 (UK).



Chose this particular issue as it's the issue where Paul Davies took over as editor of CVG, which in turn changed the magazine into one of the best gaming magazines I've ever seen.
The new crew only started to arrive with issue 169 though when Ed Lomas, Tom Guise and Jaime Smith joined as well, but I wanted to start with the beginning. Some truly amazing stuff that's going to be going up in the coming months. I put the quality of CVG under Paul Davies easily on the same level as OSSM, which is very dear to me as you already know.
I'm so glad that I can do these now as I was missing the complete first year if these.

I would have had the whole magazine scanned today, but I noticed just over halfway through I saved the files under the wrong size and ended up with PSD files of 520 wide instead of 2552 or so.
So I had to start all over from scratch.
Also been playing around with how to edit these as the pages are heavily yellowed, but still possible to clean them up like I do with my other releases, so that's great news.
Will take a bit longer to make these ones shine, but it'll be worth it in the end, I promise.

[Nreive]

Wow!  This is great news.  If anyone has read my recent post, Retro Regrets, then you will see that I regrettably let a lot of magazines slip through my possession, including CVGs, Official Sega Magazines, Sega Powers, etc., so it will be great to see these great mags again.  Richard, you have helped ease the pain that I've had to carry since those tragic losses.  Thank you so much.

meppi - glad to see you're working on these already.  I recall that issue of CVG, as Paul Davies and the crew had to work with the old design, which they thought was rubbish - nice distinctive cover though.  They got the mag re-designed soon after with an all new look issue, which I have for some reason - one of the very few mags to survive the great loss of '99.

[meppi]

Hehe, indeed.
Here's what Ed Lomas said a couple years back when I first found out about the crew posting on the meanmachinemag board:

If my memory is still working properly, issue 173 was our first 'relaunch' issue, where we invented the whole thing from scratch (new layout, logo, sections, rating system, writing style, Freeplay, etc). We had got the team onto CVG about 5 issues before that though, but had to carry on using the bloody awful old design while we were coming up with the new stuff. There were a few issues that looked like the old CVG (the one that was selling so few copies it was almost shut down) but which had us writing in our obsessive way and trying to make things look exciting, even though the existing mag framework was so cripplingly shit that it was almost impossible to do. We had some great subject matter though – Sega Rally, Virtua Cop, Street Fighter Alpha, X-Men, that sort of thing. I particularly remember Paul and Tom almost having a fist-fight over whether Sega Rally should get 95% or 96% on one issue. We hated reviewing things with percentages.

Thinking about it, my first issue was probably 167 (along with Tom G, Tom C and Jaime). It was rubbish. The issue before that is a funny one though (Wipeout cover, I think). Paul took over the mag part-way through the issue, but had to lead the old team for a few weeks before they were shoved out of the way. They finished the magazine and Paul, wanting to be nice to the team, sent everybody home early, only to find out later that one of the files for the news pages had corrupted. He ended up redesigning it from scratch himself, with almost no understanding of Quark Xpress, and the result is hilariously crap. 

[Nreive]

meppi, do you have a list of issue no's for these yet. I know it's a huge task to list this, but I don't want to hunt down any particular issue that might be in this batch.  Plus if there are any missing issues from the huge batch, we can hunt down the missing ones.

[meppi]

I have a partial list, but thanks to Richard's donation and a bunch of magazines I picked up in the past year, it's far from complete.

I'll try and put together a new one, but won't be posting it online due to certain people eyeing things like this, and then trying to snipe the ones from under our nose when we try to grab them.

Thus, I'll send the list to you personally when it's done.

[Addicted to Chaos]

I would like to thank Richard very much too, this is great news indeed and I'm happy that Richard donated it to this site too. I'm very happy that he gave them to this site because I think this site has the best hands for them. The future for this site and it's fans looks very bright indeed. Also, after spending and observing how things work/look here for past 11 days, Richard definately made the right choice. Once again, thank you.