GameFan magazine missing issues help

[segagamer]

Last night, I went thru and organized my 1999 and 2000 US video game magazines and I noticed that I seem to have two missing issues of GameFan Magazine: February and April of 1999. I used to subscribe to the magazine while it was in print and was surprised that I did not receive these two issues in the mail. Can someone who has GameFan Magazine confirm whether these two missing issues were ever printed and should have been mailed to me during my subscription run? Thanks for the help in advance.

Also, I have noticed that video game magazines used to be big and heavy (with lots of pages) especially around the year-end holiday. Nowadays, the magazines are thin no matter what time of year. How things have changed...

[fennec fox]

February 1999 doesn't exist, but April does. The full list is at
http://www.magweasel.com/wiki/GameFan (self-plug)

Part of the reason for thinning magazines is that pretty much every mag uses much thinner paper stock than they used to -- so even if a mag put out a 300-page issue today, it'd still be thinner than a 300-page issue from 1994.

[segagamer]

Can someone please scan the front cover of the April 1999 issue for my reference?

Also, it is not just the thinner paper, but the overall number of pages has been drastically reduced these days when compared with the same magazines from 5+ years ago (eg, EGM, GamePro, etc).

[Anthony1]

Can someone please scan the front cover of the April 1999 issue for my reference?

Also, it is not just the thinner paper, but the overall number of pages has been drastically reduced these days when compared with the same magazines from 5+ years ago (eg, EGM, GamePro, etc).


http://www.millartime.com/videogames/images/gamefan/apr99vol7issue4.jpg


As to why mags are thinner nowadays, the paper stock is part of it, and it's something that really irritates me. Alot of mags use this crappy recycled paper that doesn't show screenshots very well, and it's just overall quite depressing how crappy the paper stock is nowadays. Just check out an issue of GamePro or EGM, they both use a real cheap stock of paper. If you want to see some high quality paper stock, check out the old issues of Game Fan or Next-Generation. Besides the paper stock issue, it's just the fact that advertisers now look at magazines as a dying medium. Their advertising dollars are going elsewhere, and the less ads, mean lower page counts. It's probably especially bad for the gaming magazines, cause their target demographic gets more and more of their info via websites and podcasts and videocasts and things like that.

[nebrazca78]

I used to subscribe to Gamefan. While they did make a great magazine, I don't know how good they were at the business side of it. I used to have to call them regularly because they would forget to send the mag some months. I used to "wait by the mailbox" so I don't think I ended up missing any issues in my subscription but maybe they forgot to send a couple of your issues.

[Anthony1]

I used to subscribe to Gamefan. While they did make a great magazine, I don't know how good they were at the business side of it. I used to have to call them regularly because they would forget to send the mag some months. I used to "wait by the mailbox" so I don't think I ended up missing any issues in my subscription but maybe they forgot to send a couple of your issues.



Yeah, they were notorious for getting issues to subscribers very late. I loved GameFan so much back in the days (the early GameFan), that even though I was a subscriber, if I saw an issue at a Electronics Boutique before I got my issue in the mail, I would usually buy it right then, just cause I wanted it right away.

[segagamer]

Thanks Anthony1 for the pic scan. I agree with you that I also loved the magazine very much and bought several issues at EB, since GF had a bad habit of getting them to my mailbox late.