What Happened to the "Retrogaming Times Monthly"?

[Nz17]

RTM (Retrogaming Times Monthly) used to be at [ http://my.stratos.net/~hewston95/RTM/RTM_Home.htm ], then it was at [ http://www.retrogamingtimes.com/ ], then it was at [ http://www.theretrojunkies.com/videogames/gamemags/ ], but now it is nowhere to be found! Sure, those first two locations have some of the older issues, but what about recent issues? Did this long-running online retro gaming 'zine fold? Did The Retro Junkies somehow kill it? There's no mention of the Retrogaming Times Monthly anymore on The Retro Junkies Web site which I could find.

[CastlevaniaDude]

Good question. I had recently noticed the same thing. I enjoyed reading it, although there was a huge dip in quality for the past year or so. Count me as curious about this as well.

[Tanooki]

Perhaps write the last host (or two) see if they have contact info or know what's up.

[retroman]

I also enjoyed reading it, and have noticed over the last year or more that it was being posted less and less. Over at Atari Age they would post it when a new month came out, and thats how I would keep up with it.

[CastlevaniaDude]

I also enjoyed reading it, and have noticed over the last year or more that it was being posted less and less. Over at Atari Age they would post it when a new month came out, and thats how I would keep up with it.

I read it fairly regularly for the better part of a decade. Reading the back issues is almost as nostalgic as playing the games that they are about in some ways.

[otaku]

I read it and enjoyed it as well, kept up via atariage also. Sad day :(

[InsaneDavid]

Totally missed this thread!

To answer your question - Bryan, the last main editor and jack-of-all-trades for Retrogaming Times Monthly wanted to step down for awhile and work on other parts of the newsletter but no one would permanently take over the editor role. Eventually it was decided that The Retro Junkies would take over as the home of RTM and article submission and issue publication would become automated. After the change and the loss of a driving force at the top, the whole thing kind of sputtered out around February 2014. The automated issue building tool never worked quite right and I was unhappy with the new presentation so I never returned to the newsletter after taking a hiatus from it in December 2013. Over time The Retro Junkies website was redesigned and the remnants of the last moments of Retrogaming Times Monthly were removed with it.

However a few of us still really wanted to get the newsletter going again so in early 2016, with the acknowledgement of nearly all of RTM's outgoing senior staff, I stepped up to lead the return as "The Retrogaming Times" and moved to a bimonthly publishing schedule.

The new URL is http://www.classicplastic.net/trt

Our fourth issue was just released today. The idea was to scale back to the middle years of Retrogaming Times Monthly in terms of presentation and go for an old school clean look. While I have been e-mailing issue announcements to Albert at AtariAge via the e-mail address that RTM used for years, it's up to his discretion whether or not each issue is announced there. We have been light on Atari content until this issue.

Sometime in the future I will also make available the entire archive of Retrogaming Times and Retrogaming Times Monthly back issues as .PDF files, early 2017 is the target for that but I have a lot of it archived and ready to go already.

We're always looking for more contributors!

[gonzo90017]

That's great news. Looking forward to the pdf archive.

[JSoup]

The new URL is http://www.classicplastic.net/trt

I'd like to point out that I found this in two Google jumps without even reading the thread.

[InsaneDavid]

That's great news. Looking forward to the pdf archive.

It was a pretty big undertaking to scrape everything together and fix some directory problems to get the .PDF stuff together as the back issue archive had become somewhat disjoined over the past year. I was able to piece together the missing issues including the infamous RTM #79 "blog issue" that everyone hated. The ability to even have a place to begin to create a solid legacy archive was really thanks to Bryan's dedicated work in getting everything archived and normalized into one place years ago. Even just having an issue list to use as a checklist was useful. The last few issues are still totally missing but I plan on seeing what I can do about that once my time frame for getting all that online draws closer - again, expected to be in early 2017 due to a number of factors. I want to make sure that when it goes live the whole thing will be clean and permanent.


I'd like to point out that I found this in two Google jumps without even reading the thread.

Cool. The challenge has been weaning people away from the old retrogamingtimes.com URL as I have zero control over it. Even though a fair amount of former staff had moved on, and regardless of giving me their consent to revive the newsletter, some of the older assets from the years and years of RTM remained. I believe the old Yahoo Group is still online, or at least it was at the beginning of the year when I first proposed the new newsletter. That's really not necessary anymore as RTM has been shut down now for over two years. The previous newsletter's Facebook page is another example - which again, I have zero control over - regardless of what that page may be titled now, it's not representative of the current newsletter. I breathed a sigh of relief that the old newsletter forums and the subforum on The Retro Junkies was removed awhile back as it was one fewer loose end dangling.

From the start I proposed a clean break and a "this is supposed to be fun, not work" attitude for The Retrogaming Times. That's one of the reasons we moved to a bimonthly release schedule.

What's really cool is that Tom Zjaba, original creator of the original Retrogaming Times, began creating new issues on occasion, as recently as November 2013 - http://www.tomheroes.com/Video%20Games%20FS/Retrotimes/retrogam.htm So if you want some extremely classic style Retrogaming Times, there are probably a few "recent" issues there you may have missed.