NAG Magazine AKA New Age Gaming Turns 12 This Month

NAG magazine is one of South Africa’s best gaming magazines. Those of you who bought the last issue, the April 2010 issue released last month, would have realised that NAG is now twelve years old. The magazine was started in April 1998.

And hey, it’s the 12th of April too. April 12th, twelve years… just fits, doesn’t it?

         

                 My first issue of NAG I bought, with the Cover CD.

To celebrate this, I guess I could write about my experiences with NAG magazine and when I first bought a copy. It was the January& February issue of 1999 [contained content for both months for a few years, nowadays they’re separate issues], Volume 1, issue 8, and it had my first NAG Cover CD, which I still have to this day, over eleven years later.

Unfortunately I did throw the magazine away. But there are archived editions of volume 1 and 2 in PDF format which I have. You can find these PDFs on the April 2008 issue Cover DVD, by looking under “10 Anniversary Bonus” Yes, that was to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the magazine, two years ago. So I can say that I’ve read every single issue of the magazine, ever.

On it was the demo of Thief: The Dark Project, a game which ranks as one of my favourites of all time nowadays, succeeded only by its sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age.

The magazine also had a review of Thief: The Dark Project to go along with the demo. There was also a review of the now legendary Half-Life, and Tomb Raider III – probably the last great TR title by Core Design, which went on to become Rebellion Derby, but is now closed as of this year. A street in Derby was named Lara Croft Way in the games’ [and possibly the studio’s] honour.

Since I’ve bought magazine every month without fail for a dozen years. I’ve watched it grow from a sixty-odd page magazine to over a hundred pages, only to drop back down again due to the recession, slowly climbing its way back up. I’ve seen the format change constantly too. The price has gone from R11.95 to R18.95 [first issue I bought], to R24.95, and so on until today; the price currently sits at R42,00.

I’ve seen the Cover DVD change as well, the format of it, the contents, the size. It was once a Cover CD, then it went on to two Cover CDs, then a 4.7 GB DVD, now a 9 GB DVD. NAG is now possibly planning to go up in price again this year with the addition of another Cover DVD. That’s 18 GBs worth of stuff. Eventually it’ll be Blu-Ray or something.

And I’ve also seen the magazine go from print only, to having a website called NAG Online, which recently moved to its very own domain, with forums and the whole lot, with online exclusive reviews and news.

Ah, memories. Here’s to another twelve years.

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Happy Birthday! :D

NAG Magazine AKA New Age Gaming Turns 12 This Month