Let's Try This Again: British Game Boy Magazine Covers

Good lord, it's been a while, hasn't it? Months and months, in fact. Well, as a dog returns to his vomit I've decide to take another crack this whole blogging thing, and this time I'm not going to force myself to always come up with a theme for the video game ephemera I make fun of or make sure the articles are a minimum length. Instead, I'll allow myself the luxury of making posts about single, solitary box art, lone arcade flyers, and isolated magazine covers, which will hopefully be a lot easier. I'll still try to write the occasional big entry, but expect mostly short stuff from now on, although hopefully a whole lot more of it.

Still, to celebrate my return, here's a somewhat substantial post about the covers of British Game Boy-centered magazines. Why Game Boy? Because I love the Game Boy in all its myriad forms. Why British? Because my source for these covers, retromags.com, organizes their stuff by country of origin and that's where I ended up. Let's get to it!

 Total Game Boy Issue 02

 

One thing you see a lot of on the cover of Game Boy-centered magazines is art taken from the media packages of games for home consoles that are related to ones on the Game Boy but are definitely distinct. For example, here's my beloved Link's Awakening DX being promoted with art that is very clearly of Link as he appeared in Ocarina of Time. There's also some Super Mario 64 art up in the corner, a few white blobs added with Photoshop (or whatever people used for image editing in 1998) to give the impression Mario is holding that stock image of a Game Boy Color, as well as a dinosaur that surely originates from one of the N64 Turok games and looks less like it's attacking you and more like it's laughing at a really funny joke you told it, or maybe singing a virtuoso tenor aria.

All that means that none of the promotional art on this cover comes from actual Game Boy games. I know it was early days for the Game Boy Color when this issue was published, but I also know for a fact there's some really beautiful official Link's Awakening art they could have used, so it's pretty disappointing. It's not all bad, though: I know "Rainbow Six team interviewed" probably means an interview with the developers of Rainbow Six, but I'm enjoying imagining the reporters interviewing the actual Rainbow Six squad members during a hallucinatory episode and putting the results in their magazine.

 Total Game Boy Issue 08

 

This cover has a few interesting things beyond misrepresentative advertising. Lara Croft, one of the original babes of gaming, takes center stage, aiming her gun at the reader because she knows what they're planning to do with those three posters of her included in this issue. There's also a reference to a game called "Stranded Kids", which I assume is either an early title or a simple misname of the actual Game Boy Color survival game Survival Kids (the first game in the Lost in Blue series), but I want to believe it's actually a completely different game about goats who've been separated from their herd. 

Mario's still up there in the corner, now with a skin tone that suggests jaundice, or possibly that he's trying to camouflage himself like a chameleon with the similarly yellow Game Boy Color he's got there. My favorite part, though, is "I could fight that Pikachu!" being shouted by a belligerent Oddish, as if he's had a few too many drinks at the pub and is about to lunge at Pikachu for looking at his girl only to miss completely and concuss himself on the end of a snooker table. Even Bob the Bubble Dragon is shocked by his loutishness.

 GB Action Issue 01

 

GB Action decided its first issue should lead with a story about an upcoming revision of the Game Boy featuring—gasp—color. The original Game Boy famously didn't have color, something it contemporaries like the Sega Game Gear and Atari Lynx attacked it for regularly in advertising, but it was the right move because unlike its competition Nintendo figured out that given the technology of the day, color wasn't worth having only a 2 hour battery life in what was supposed to be a portable system. If you wanted to play your Game Gear on the train on the way to work, you had to bring enough AA batteries to power Tokyo for three weeks, including all the neon signs.

Back to this magazine cover, the "dream machine!" headline is appropriate, because considering the actual Game Boy Color wouldn't come out for six years it's likely their main source for details on the device was "it came to me in a dream". Okay, that might be a bit unfair—Nintendo did have a long-running attempt to develop the Game Boy's successor under the code name Project Atlantis; it was to feature a color screen and a 32-bit ARM processor (similar to the much later Game Boy Advance) but it never really went anywhere and was shelved in 1997, and so we got the Game Boy Color instead. So not only were they wildly off in the timing of their reporting, to add insult to injury Nintendo would go on to use the "color" spelling for the device worldwide, in a slap in the face of the UK and its love of extraneous Us.

GB Action Issue 17

 

Liu Kang is probably supposed to look tough here, but to me he looks more like he's about to beat up that arcade machine. Speaking of arcade machines, I'm not sure what a "Game Boy arcade machine" is supposed to be. Surely putting a Game Boy in an arcade cabinet would defeat the entire purpose? Maybe they were giving away a Konami Hyperboy, a charmingly impractical peripheral for the Game Boy that combined a screen light, magnifier, and joystick in a massive tabletop package. Anyway, true fact: I don't know Mortal Kombat all that well, so I figured out that this is Liu Kang by doing an internet search for "mortal kombat character with a mullet".

 Well, that will do it for my first post back! Don't want to overdo it, you know. I'll probably return to this subject—there are a bunch of issues of these two magazines I could say something about but haven't, as well as a number of completely different British Game Boy magazines I didn't talk about at all. In fact, the UK seems to have had more Game Boy magazines than any other country, including its native Japan and the much larger US. See you next time!