Legendary Games Journalist Julian Rignall Launches Golden Age Retro Magazine Kickstarter

Former Zzap!64 and Mean Machines editor Julian 'Jaz' Rignall launches a Kickstarter campaign for Golden Age, a retrospective magazine exploring 80s and 90s gaming.

The world of retro-gaming publishing is getting a particularly interesting new project from somebody who helped define the original golden age of videogame magazines. Julian Rignall, better known to generations of British readers as Jaz, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Golden Age, a new publication dedicated to the culture and history of videogames during the 1980s and 1990s. Rignall previously helped establish and edit influential publications including Zzap!64, Computer and Video Games and Mean Machines before becoming involved in the early development of IGN. For the new magazine, he is working alongside former colleague Paul Glancey, another familiar name from Britain's classic gaming press. Their ambition is not simply to reproduce an old magazine with contemporary printing technology. Instead, Golden Age will apply the conversational writing style, distinctive humour and enthusiastic editorial attitude of those historical publications to retrospective stories about games, developers, computers, consoles and arcade machines. To demonstrate the concept, the team has released a thirty-eight-page issue zero as a downloadable PDF. The sample provides potential supporters with an opportunity to examine the proposed editorial direction before backing the campaign. Rignall explains that the magazine will focus on entertaining historical observations and unusual stories rather than attempting to compete directly with existing publications delivering regular reviews and current gaming coverage. The crowdfunding campaign launched on November 5, with its eventual funding and publication schedule still dependent on the campaign's outcome. For readers who remember waiting impatiently for the latest issue of Mean Machines, Golden Age promises something particularly appealing: an opportunity to revisit gaming's formative years without having to explain to their parents why a videogame magazine was an essential educational purchase.