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Comment by dusted | Hacker News Reader

"Unfortunately, the model as a whole couldn’t compete with the internet."

I never think they were meant to. As young nerd, without a connection to The Internet, at a time where one would have you spend literally days online to download the amount of data a CD holds, these magazines were absolutely fantastic!

Every month, when they came out, I was off to the store to get my two or three magazines, for about half the price of a computer game, I'd get three CDs full of weird, strange, wonderful stuff to peruse. In a way, those CDs were even more like the Internet that was slowly developing, than the Internet today.

Not only were the articles in the magazines interesting and inspirational to young me, but there was simply no other way I could get access to all that wonderful random stuff that were on the CDs.

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In Poland, we had[0] a CD-ROM videogame magazine called CD-Action. For kids like me, it was a great deal - it sold for 1/5 to 1/10 the price of a new, boxed videogame, and it always had one or two full game releases in it, as well as a dozen or more demo versions, plus some zines and random stuff you mention. Sure, the games we got were a while past their release date, but in those times it didn't matter - with Internet barely becoming a thing, gamers weren't in sync with the global release schedules. In fact, we were all in sync with CD-Action release schedules! So e.g., maybe we got Jagged Alliance 2 in 2001, two years after its 1999 release, but before 2001 nobody would hear of this game over here, while in 2001 every other kid with a computer would have played it, and we could enjoy talking about it together. And because the CDs were also full of demos of other games, we never had a shortage of things to play.

(And if some demo piqued your interest, there were places you could go where you could get CDs with games and other software à la carte, for cheap. :).)

[0] - Technically still have, but it's been over a decade since I last paid attention to them.

If you're wanting to revisit some of those memories, The Internet Archive has ISOs of some of those from CD-Action[0], and for anyone one else who cares to look through CD and DVD magazine cover disks[1]. Going through PC Gamer and Boot magazine cover disks was a trip.

[0] - https://archive.org/search.php?query=cd-action

[1] - https://archive.org/details/coverdiscs

I remember in the magazine section of Tower Records there was a section of paper magazines that came with a CD-ROM. You were mostly paying for the CD-ROM, but the paper magazine helped give you an idea of what was inside before you bought it.

I remember trying to play the content on the CD-ROMs was quite challenging. Different videos needed different video players to be installed. Or the latest version of a particular video player. Some of them needed more memory than my PC had. You had to have a relatively high end PC to play all the content, and I always had a low end PC.

But there was no other way to get that kind of content onto my PC. Download speeds were horrible. Connections were unreliable. Some of the download methods used required me to start over at the beginning when the download failed in the middle after 15 minutes. It was challenging.

Did I mention I had to walk to Tower Records in the snow, uphill both ways?

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