That’s a Wrap
I have run out of PC Gaming ads to post. There will be no more updates to this Tumblr.
The Museum of PC Gaming Ads began when I was staring at a hip-deep pile of (American) PC Gamer magazines that I’d collected from March 1996 through December 2001 as a teenager. I wanted to throw them out, but I couldn’t bring myself to just toss away so many memories. I was tempted to scan them all: old PC Gamer magazines are strangely hard to find on the Internet. But that would have taken far too long, especially with the crappy scanner I had at the time.
Flipping through my magazines, I noticed that while the articles had aged poorly — so many gushing previews for crap games — the ads were still interesting and funny. Back when I read PC Gamer religiously, I was annoyed by all the ads. Now they were far more fun to read than the rest of the magazine. Often the worst games had produced great ads. While you could find some of them at the CGW Museum, the scan quality was fairly poor. I thought I could present a comprehensive and higher-quality collection of PC gaming ads. Following in the footsteps of the many other console video game ad Tumblrs, I went ahead and started this Tumblr.
At one point, I was thinking of trying to get other PC gaming magazines to expand this Tumblr into an actual “museum” collection so I wouldn’t run out of ads. Turns out scanning, cropping, and (occasionally) photo editing is extremely time consuming. I’m pretty busy these days, too busy to even play any games — I still haven’t played the 2016 Doom yet! I definitely have no time to be making this Tumblr any more ambitious than it already has been.
I hope everyone who has been following this Tumblr has enjoyed it in its 2.5 year run. If you’ve just found it, keep scrolling. There are a lot of old ads here.