The first 18 issues of Retro Gamer were published by Live Publishing, a small magazine house that collapsed in August 2005. Yet before its demise, a 19th issue was fully completed, waiting to be published. When the magazine was resurrected at Imagine Publishing later that year, with current editor Darran at the helm, a new 19th issue was published featuring fresh content. So what became of the articles in that original issue 19?
Writers, particularly freelance writers, freelance gaming writers, are a resourceful bunch, so you’ll be unsurprised to hear that many of the articles appeared elsewhere. A number of them were included on , a CD-based project released in November 2005 and put together by the freelancers who lost out financially when Live went under. Chief among these were an in-depth hardware feature about the Vectrex, written by Mat Allen, and Ashley Day’s look at games that were enhanced for the AGA Amigas. A number of regular features also ended up on the CD, including Back To The Eighties (covering August 1985), Strange Games (looking at Ninjasploitation titles) and High Score (featuring champ Steve Wiebe). An upside of the CD format was that the original, full-length articles could be featured, with no edits required. For example, the submitted Vectrex article was 10,000+ words and a third had to be chopped to squeeze it into the mag, yet the whole tome was on the CD.
