Die Hard GameFan News: Help Me Create the Next Countdown Series!
61Hello there, Cyril here with some really exciting news. As you know, I have been collecting classic magazines for a while now, and have a complete library of many of the biggest (and smallest) game mags from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s. It's the reason we're able to post episodes of Electronic Gaming Monthly's Best & Worst, Super Play's Top 6000 and the Nintendo Switch Online Review Crew. However, despite my best efforts to complete the collection, there are a few classic magazines that have evaded me. One of them is Die Hard Game Fan. Or, at least, it was. You see, I'm proud to announce that after years of looking under every rock, I have finally been able to track down all of the issues I was missing and fully archive Game Fan's reviews.
This is a big deal, and I'll tell you why. If you're unfamiliar with the history of Die Hard Game Fan, then what you need to know is that it was created in 1992 as the official magazine of the Die Hard game store, a California-based import shop that advertised heavily in Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro in the early 1990s. Lacking the cash and resources of the big players, Die Hard Game Fan sold themselves as the gamers' magazine. They were basically a half-step up from being a fanzine, complete with rampant typos and articles from inexperienced writers. If EGM was a major TV network like NBC or CBS, then Die Hard Game Fan was the public access channel way up the dial.
And you better believe that the editors played into their reputation. This was a magazine that got into lengthy fights with Electronic Gaming Monthly and got into a lot of trouble because of their edgy jokes. They also published reviews that were almost purposely out-of-step with everybody else. Let's take Cybermorph as just one of the many examples. If you watched our EGM Ranks the Jaguar Games video, then you already know that the review crew gave it an average score of 5 out of 10. Right in the middle of the scale. Game Fan, on the other hand, gave it an average score of 97.75%. More than one editor called it perfect.
Want another example? When Super Play reviewed Super Mario All-Stars, it ended up being their second-best reviewed game of all time with a 96%. Game Fan, on the other hand, gave it a 79.5% and said, and I quote: "I'm sorry, but the old Mario games just haven't stood the test of time. The music and sound FX are great, but the control is too loose and it's all just too cuddly. I believe it's time we retire Mario for a more 90s character." Yeah, imagine being the person who said that in 1993, only three years after Super Mario Bros. 3 came out.
The 88 issues published between 1992 and 2000 are chock full of these baffling reviews, which is why I've been trying to get my hands on the entire collection. And now that I have them all and have archived all 1,285 reviews, I desperately want to do something with it. For as interesting as Super Play and EGM have been, Die Hard Game Fan is so batshit crazy that you can't take your eyes off of it. It would be medical malpractice for me not to go down the lengthy Game Fan arc.
Obviously, I'm going to turn this archive into a bunch of lists. That's what we do here, so don't act too surprised. However, I want to hear your thoughts on how we should go about it. I considered doing it like our Electronic Gaming Monthly Best & Worst series, where we go year by year and I look at the 10 best-reviewed games and 5 worst. That will cover a lot of ground, but my fear is that it will limit how many games we talk about. If we go year-by-year, we'll only hit 135 games, leaving well over 1,100 crazy reviews on the table.
I also considered going the Super Play Top 600 route, where I very quickly countdown 50 games in an episode by using nothing more than Game Fan's review quotes. This would be the most thorough route, since it would mean going through all 1,285 reviews over the course of a couple dozen episodes. This would obviously be much longer and require more work, but it would also be complete. It would be the last word in Game Fan reviews.
So, what do you say? Which type of countdown would you prefer? Or do you have an idea of a hybrid countdown? I'm open to ideas, and I definitely want to hear your thoughts. Ideally, this will be a series that runs at the same time as our other shows, like EGM Ranks and other series I'm working on. Please, let me hear your thoughts in the comments. Together, we can make this the best countdown yet, and it couldn't be for a better magazine.