United Kingdom · 2004–present
The first commercial magazine devoted entirely to retro games, launched in 2004. It survived its publisher's bankruptcy within two years and is still published monthly.
Retro Gamer launched in January 2004 as a quarterly from Live Publishing, and was the first commercial magazine devoted entirely to retro video games. Its timing was good — emulation, collecting and nostalgia for the 8- and 16-bit eras were all growing — and it soon moved to monthly publication under its first editor, Martyn Carroll. The magazine nearly ended early. Live Publishing went bankrupt on 27 September 2005, but Imagine Publishing acquired the title and relaunched it on 8 December 2005, with Darran Jones as editor. Jones has led it since. Future plc took over the magazine on 21 October 2016 when it acquired Imagine. Retro Gamer's content mixes histories of classic games, hardware and companies with interviews with the developers who made them, many of whom had never been asked about their work before. In that sense it became an important oral-history archive of the industry's early decades. It won Best Magazine at the Games Media Awards in 2010.