In early 2004, devoting an entire printed magazine to old video games was still something of a gamble. The PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube represented the current generation; publishers were concentrating their attention on increasingly powerful hardware, and the gaming press was generally built around what was coming next. Looking backward at the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari systems, Amiga, arcade machines, and early Nintendo and Sega consoles did not seem like the obvious foundation for a new national magazine.
Retro Gamer proved otherwise.
What began under Live Publishing as an experiment that might have lasted only a few issues developed into one of the most enduring publications devoted to video game history. The magazine survived the bankruptcy of its original publisher, disappeared for several months, returned under Imagine Publishing, changed ownership again when Future acquired Imagine, and continued publishing into an era when many of the gaming magazines that once surrounded it had disappeared.
More importantly, Retro Gamer gradually became something beyond a nostalgia magazine. Through interviews with programmers, artists, designers, composers, producers, and executives, it accumulated an enormous oral history of the video game industry. People who had once created games for machines with tiny amounts of memory were given pages to explain how those games had actually been made. Forgotten studios were reconstructed through the memories of former employees. Hardware failures, cancelled projects, arcade development, home computer culture, and the stories behind individual games became subjects worthy of sustained historical attention.
Retro Gamer did not merely report on old games. Over time, it helped establish the idea that the history of games was worth documenting.
One Issue, Maybe Four
The origins of Retro Gamer were far less certain than its longevity might suggest.
Martyn Carroll, the magazine’s founding editor, later explained in Retro Gamer’s twentieth-anniversary Issue 257 that Live Publishing did not launch the magazine with expectations of creating an institution. The original concept was closer to an experiment. A dedicated retro magazine might work, but nobody could be certain that enough readers existed to sustain it. Retro sections already appeared in broader gaming magazines, including games™, but that was different from asking consumers to purchase an entire publication centered on games and machines from earlier generations.
According to Carroll’s retrospective, the initial thought was essentially to try one issue. Because distributors were reluctant to deal with a single standalone publication, four quarterly issues were contemplated instead. What happened next changed the plan. Reader interest was strong enough that Retro Gamer expanded rapidly, with eleven issues and a “best of” anthology appearing during its first year.
That unexpectedly strong response revealed something important about the gaming audience of the early 2000s. Video game culture was becoming old enough to have a substantial past.
Players who had grown up with arcades, the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, Atari machines, Nintendo systems, Sega hardware, and the Amiga were now adults. Many had disposable income and strong memories of the games they had played years earlier. Emulation was making old software accessible again, online communities were forming around abandoned hardware, and collectors were beginning to treat games as artifacts rather than disposable entertainment.
Retro Gamer arrived at the moment when nostalgia was beginning to turn into historical interest.
The First Retro Gamer
The first issue established much of the magazine’s identity.
Retro Gamer was published in Britain by Live Publishing International and carried material covering a broad range of classic computers, consoles, games, companies, and personalities. Its subject matter deliberately crossed the boundaries that had traditionally separated computer magazines from console magazines. A reader interested in Sinclair computers could encounter Nintendo or Sega material in the same publication, while arcade games and forgotten software companies could sit beside recognizable gaming icons.
The Video Game History Foundation now maintains a nearly complete Retro Gamer collection and identifies the magazine as the longest-running British publication devoted to retrogaming. Its archive places the Live Publishing period from 2004 through July 7, 2005.
The earliest issues were also distinguished by their cover CDs. These were not simply promotional extras. They reflected an era when obtaining old games could involve hunting through fan sites, shareware collections, emulator archives, and physical media.
The Centre for Computing History preserves several of these discs. Its copy of the first issue’s “Retro Gamer Special Collector’s Disc” dates from 2004 and contains more than 200 retro PC games. Other surviving Live Publishing discs included compilations such as Retro Gamer System, Llamarama, The Games Factory, Amiga Forever, retro collections, emulators, and other software.
For readers in 2004, the magazine could therefore provide both historical material about old games and a practical means of experiencing them.
That combination helped distinguish the original Retro Gamer. It was about remembering games, but it was also about playing them again.
From Experiment to Regular Publication
The magazine’s rapid expansion demonstrated that the audience was larger than Live Publishing had initially expected.
Retro Gamer became increasingly regular, and its editorial scope broadened with it. Features could examine individual systems, trace the history of developers and publishers, revisit famous games, interview programmers, or look at titles that had disappeared from mainstream gaming discussion.
This was particularly significant because the people who had created the British computer game industry of the 1980s and early 1990s were still accessible. Many were only a decade or two removed from the work being discussed. Their memories had not yet been separated from the events by half a century, while source code, design documents, photographs, advertisements, and original hardware sometimes still survived in private collections.
Retro Gamer had an opportunity to record those stories before they disappeared.
The magazine also benefited from approaching older games with more space than they had often received when originally released. A game that might have been reviewed in a few columns during the 1980s could now be revisited through interviews with the people who designed, programmed, illustrated, or published it. A company that had disappeared could be reconstructed through the memories of former employees.
That approach gradually transformed nostalgia into documentation.
When Live Publishing Collapsed
The first era of Retro Gamer ended abruptly.
Live Publishing collapsed in 2005 after publishing the first eighteen issues. The Video Game History Foundation records July 7, 2005 as the end of Live’s published run and notes that Retro Gamer then disappeared for approximately five months.
For readers, it appeared that a magazine which had only recently demonstrated a market for dedicated retro coverage might already be finished.
Behind the scenes, however, the situation was even stranger. Retro Gamer’s staff had not simply been preparing another issue when Live failed. They had essentially completed it.
Issue 19 existed.
It just never reached the newsstand.
The Lost Issue 19
The unpublished nineteenth issue became one of the strangest episodes in Retro Gamer’s history.
Martyn Carroll revisited the story for Issue 257. The Live Publishing version of Issue 19 had been completed as a roughly 100-page magazine and was expected for release in August 2005. Live’s collapse prevented it from being published. When Retro Gamer eventually returned later that year, the new publisher produced an entirely different Issue 19.
That means Retro Gamer effectively has two nineteenth issues in its history, one that readers could buy and another that existed but never reached them.
Some of the material intended for the abandoned magazine survived elsewhere. Freelance writers who had lost work and money when Live collapsed found other uses for portions of the material, including the Retro Survival CD project. The twentieth-anniversary retrospective later reconstructed what had happened to the missing edition.
For a magazine dedicated to preserving forgotten gaming history, there is something fitting about Retro Gamer eventually having to investigate one of its own lost artifacts.
The missing Issue 19 also marked the boundary between two versions of the publication. The first belonged to Live Publishing and founding editor Martyn Carroll. The second would belong to a new company and a new editor who would become inseparable from Retro Gamer’s identity.
Imagine Publishing Brings Retro Gamer Back
Imagine Publishing acquired Retro Gamer and brought it back before the end of 2005.
The Video Game History Foundation dates the first published Imagine issue, also numbered Issue 19, to December 8, 2005.
The revival was accomplished under intense time pressure.
Darran Jones, who became editor of the resurrected magazine, later recalled that the team had roughly two weeks to get the new Issue 19 completed before Christmas. Imagine creative director Mark Kendrick redesigned the magazine, while Jones was simultaneously adjusting to running a publication for the first time.
The new Retro Gamer did not simply resume as though nothing had happened. It looked different, reflected its new publisher, and abandoned the regular cover CD that had been such a recognizable part of the Live years. Contemporary reader Blake Patterson recorded the arrival of the new Issue 19 in December 2005, describing the changed layout and noting the disappearance of the disc.
Yet the central purpose survived.
Retro Gamer remained a magazine about gaming’s past.
That continuity mattered more than the change in presentation. A title that had appeared dead only months earlier was suddenly back on sale.
Darran Jones and the Making of a Long-Running Magazine
The Imagine Publishing revival also began one of the longest editorial tenures in British gaming magazines.
Darran Jones took over Retro Gamer in 2005 and remained its editor through Imagine’s ownership, the acquisition by Future, the magazine’s 200th issue, its twentieth anniversary, and into 2026. Future’s GamesRadar profile still identifies Jones as Retro Gamer’s editor and notes that he has led the magazine since its resurrection.
Under Jones and the wider editorial team, Retro Gamer developed a recognizable mixture of historical features, developer interviews, hardware retrospectives, regular departments, reader interaction, collecting material, and articles about the creation of specific games.
The importance of the interviews became clearer with time.
Retro Gamer spoke with major figures from across the industry, but its historical value did not depend only on famous names. Interviews with programmers, artists, designers, producers, and other employees from smaller companies often preserved information that might otherwise never have been recorded in detail.
That gave the publication an unusual role. It remained commercial entertainment journalism, but portions of its archive function much like oral history.
A researcher studying the development of an older game can often find something in Retro Gamer that does not appear in the original reviews. The people who made the game can explain what hardware limitations caused a feature to change, why a level was removed, how a licensing agreement happened, what an abandoned sequel might have looked like, or why a company suddenly disappeared.
The stories behind games became as important as the games themselves.
A Magazine About People, Not Just Machines
Retro gaming can easily become a catalog of hardware specifications and release dates. Retro Gamer’s strongest historical work frequently moved in another direction.
The publication showed that video game history is fundamentally a history of people.
Machines did not design themselves. Games remembered as classics were created by programmers working against memory limits and deadlines, artists squeezing recognizable characters into tiny numbers of pixels, composers finding ways to produce music from limited sound hardware, and businesspeople trying to sell software in markets that could change within months.
Retro Gamer’s retrospective format allowed those people to return to their work years later and explain what had happened.
This approach also widened the history of gaming beyond the most commercially successful systems. British home computers remained particularly important to the magazine, but arcade games, Japanese consoles, handhelds, European developers, obscure hardware, failed systems, unreleased games, and independent software all found space.
The result was not a single history of gaming but thousands of smaller histories.
That breadth is one reason the magazine eventually became useful not only to nostalgic players but also to collectors, researchers, preservationists, and writers trying to reconstruct the development of the medium.
From Niche Magazine to Award Winner
By the beginning of the 2010s, Retro Gamer was no longer an uncertain experiment.
Darran Jones recalled in the twentieth-anniversary retrospective that sales and subscriptions remained healthy during the 2010 to 2014 period even as conditions across magazine publishing became more difficult.
The magazine received particularly significant industry recognition in 2010 when it won Best Magazine at the Games Media Awards.
The competition included Edge, games™, PC Gamer, PC Zone, Official PlayStation Magazine, Official Nintendo Magazine, and other established titles. Contemporary trade coverage recorded Retro Gamer’s victory and Jones’s acknowledgment of the editorial staff, freelancers, and readers behind it.
For a publication whose entire existence had initially been treated as a market experiment, the award represented a remarkable change in status.
Retro gaming was no longer merely a novelty section hidden inside magazines primarily concerned with new releases.
A magazine about gaming history had become one of the industry’s recognized publications.
Issue 100
The arrival of Issue 100 in 2012 gave Retro Gamer an opportunity to acknowledge how unlikely its survival had once seemed.
The staff decided to commemorate the milestone in part by reprinting the original first issue, connecting the mature Imagine-era magazine directly with the experimental Live Publishing publication that had begun the story.
By then, one hundred issues had created something that had not existed when Retro Gamer began: a substantial serialized archive of video game history.
Every new issue added interviews and recollections. Every anniversary increased the distance between the contemporary industry and the periods being documented. Games from the 1980s and 1990s were no longer simply recent memories. They were becoming historical subjects.
The definition of “retro” was changing as well.
When Retro Gamer started, machines such as the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 were obvious candidates for retrospective coverage. As the magazine continued, the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, and later platforms gradually entered the historical frame.
Retro gaming was not a fixed era. Time kept adding new systems to it.
That gave the magazine a potentially renewable subject forever.
Future Acquires Imagine Publishing
Another major change arrived in 2016.
Future plc agreed to acquire Imagine Publishing’s parent company, Miura Holdings, in a transaction valued at approximately £14.2 million. Contemporary publishing trade coverage specifically listed Retro Gamer among the Imagine brands entering Future’s portfolio.
The acquisition attracted scrutiny from Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority because Future and Imagine both owned specialist publications covering overlapping subjects. The CMA’s concerns centered especially on science fiction magazines, rather than Retro Gamer itself, and Future ultimately agreed to sell SciFiNow as part of the remedy. The CMA records that Future completed its acquisition of Miura on October 21, 2016.
For Retro Gamer, the transaction meant another publisher without another death.
The Video Game History Foundation records Imagine Publishing as Retro Gamer’s publisher through November 3, 2016, followed by Future beginning November 30.
Nick Thorpe later remembered the uncertainty of the period in Retro Gamer’s twentieth-anniversary issue, including staff learning that Imagine was being purchased by Future. The magazine nevertheless continued.
The publication that had already survived the collapse of one publisher had now passed successfully through another corporate transition.
Issue 200 and the History of Games
Retro Gamer reached Issue 200 in October 2019.
The milestone issue approached gaming history on an appropriately large scale, examining different periods and developments across the medium. It also included a double-sided poster and a music CD containing Turrican arrangements by composer Chris Huelsbeck.
Two hundred issues carried significance beyond a large number printed on a cover.
By 2019, Retro Gamer had itself existed long enough to become part of the history it documented.
A publication created partly to remember games of the 1980s had now been running for fifteen years. Readers who discovered gaming through machines that were contemporary when Retro Gamer launched could now see those systems receiving retrospective treatment in its pages.
The magazine had crossed an unusual threshold. It was no longer merely observing gaming history from outside. Its own early years belonged to that history.
Retro Gamer Goes Home
Only months after Issue 200, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted ordinary magazine production.
Retro Gamer’s twentieth-anniversary account describes the team initially leaving the office with the expectation that the disruption might be temporary. Instead, production shifted to homes, video calls became essential to keeping the staff connected, and issues continued to be assembled remotely.
The circumstances demonstrated how much magazine publishing had changed since Retro Gamer’s first issue.
In 2004, the magazine had appeared with a physical CD filled with software for readers to install on their computers. By 2020, the staff itself could produce the publication while dispersed outside a traditional magazine office.
Yet the underlying editorial process continued to depend on many of the same things: research, interviews, images, design, writing, editing, and an audience interested enough in old games to keep buying new issues about them.
Retro Gamer survived another disruption.
Twenty Years of Retro Gamer
The magazine celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2024 with Issue 257 and an unusually extensive examination of its own history.
That retrospective is especially valuable because the publication turned its normal historical method upon itself. Founding editor Martyn Carroll reconstructed the Live Publishing years. Darran Jones looked back at the revival and Imagine period. Nick Thorpe covered later changes and the move into the Future era. Other staff members and contributors reflected on production, covers, interviews, editorial decisions, and the people who had shaped the magazine. The anniversary material also returned to the unpublished Live Publishing Issue 19.
In doing so, Retro Gamer demonstrated one of the principles that had always made its best articles valuable.
History is not only a sequence of dates.
It consists of decisions, accidents, memories, personalities, failures, arguments, deadlines, lost material, and people trying to remember why something happened the way it did.
The same method the magazine had used to investigate old development studios could now explain Retro Gamer itself.
Loss and a Full Circle Return
The publication experienced a major personal loss at the end of 2025 when features editor Nick Thorpe died at the age of 38.
Thorpe had become an important part of Retro Gamer’s editorial identity and was especially associated with his knowledge of Sega and his interviews with figures including Yu Suzuki and Takashi Iizuka. The magazine commemorated him in 2026, with Darran Jones writing a personal tribute to his colleague and friend.
In March 2026, Retro Gamer’s story took another turn when founding editor Martyn Carroll returned to the magazine as features editor.
Carroll had remained connected to Retro Gamer through freelance contributions after leaving the editor’s chair more than two decades earlier. His return placed the man who had guided the first eighteen issues back on the staff of the publication he had helped launch, now working under Future alongside Darran Jones and the modern editorial team.
Few developments could better illustrate Retro Gamer’s continuity.
The magazine had changed publishers twice. Its design had evolved. Its definition of retro gaming had expanded. Print publishing itself had been transformed.
Yet someone who helped create Retro Gamer in 2004 could return to it as a full-time staff member in 2026.
An Archive Hidden Inside a Magazine
The historical importance of Retro Gamer becomes clearer when its entire run is considered together.
One issue might contain an interview about the development of a single arcade game. Another could reconstruct the history of a software publisher. Another might explore a cancelled project. Another might document an obscure computer system or speak to a programmer whose career had received little attention elsewhere.
Individually, these are magazine features.
Collectively, they form an archive.
That archive is particularly valuable because video game history has often suffered from weak preservation. Companies closed. Source code disappeared. Development disks were discarded. Artwork was thrown away. Corporate records were lost during bankruptcies and acquisitions. Early game creators sometimes left the industry entirely.
Even the physical magazines and documentation surrounding games were frequently treated as disposable.
Retro Gamer entered this environment early enough to interview many people while memories were still relatively fresh. In some cases, those interviews may now preserve testimony from people who can no longer be interviewed.
The Video Game History Foundation’s decision to maintain a nearly complete Retro Gamer collection reflects that archival value. Its holdings encompass hundreds of issues and special publications across the Live, Imagine, and Future eras.
The magazine has become part of the source base from which future histories of video games can be written.
Why Retro Gamer Matters
Retro Gamer survived because nostalgia was powerful, but nostalgia alone does not fully explain more than two decades of publication.
The magazine gave readers something deeper than an invitation to remember childhood favorites. It treated games as objects with histories.
Who created them?
How were they programmed?
Why did one version differ from another?
What happened inside the studio?
Why was a sequel cancelled?
How did a small company become successful?
Why did another disappear?
What did the developers think when they saw the finished game?
Where are they now?
Those questions helped move discussion of older games beyond lists of classics and personal memories. They placed games within technological, creative, commercial, and cultural history.
That role became more important as the industry aged.
The people who built the first commercial video games are now part of a history stretching back more than half a century. The arcade boom, the British home computer revolution, the rise of Nintendo and Sega, the transition to three-dimensional games, and the arrival of the PlayStation are no longer simply earlier chapters of a current industry. They are subjects of historical research and preservation.
Retro Gamer has spent much of its existence interviewing the witnesses.
Its own story is almost as unlikely as some of the companies it has documented. A magazine conceived as an experiment became successful enough to outgrow the plan almost immediately. Its first publisher collapsed. A completed issue disappeared before publication. A young replacement company resurrected the title under a new editor. The magazine reached one hundred issues, won an industry award, passed to Future, reached two hundred issues, survived pandemic-era production, celebrated twenty years, and continued into 2026.
The first editors could not have known how long it would last. According to Martyn Carroll’s own account, they were initially trying to determine whether there was enough interest for a retro magazine to exist at all.
More than two decades later, the answer is difficult to miss.
Retro Gamer did not simply find an audience for the history of video games.
It helped create one.
Sources & Further Reading
Carroll, Martyn. “The Live Publishing Era 2004–2005.” Retro Gamer, no. 257, 2024. Pocketmags. https://pocketmags.com/eu/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-257/articles/the-live-publishing-era-2004-2005
Jones, Darran. “The Imagine Publishing Era 2005–2009.” Retro Gamer, no. 257, 2024. Pocketmags. https://pocketmags.com/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-257/articles/the-imagine-publishing-era-2005-2009
Jones, Darran. “The Imagine Publishing Era 2010–2014.” Retro Gamer, no. 257, 2024. Pocketmags. https://pocketmags.com/eu/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-257/articles/the-imagine-publishing-era
Thorpe, Nick. “Into the Future 2015–2019.” Retro Gamer, no. 257, 2024. Pocketmags. https://pocketmags.com/eu/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-257/articles/into-the-future-2015-2019
“Going Remote 2020–2024.” Retro Gamer, no. 257, 2024. Pocketmags. https://pocketmags.com/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-257/articles/going-remote-2020-2024
Carroll, Martyn. “Retro Gamer’s Missing Issue.” Retro Gamer, no. 257, 2024. Pocketmags. https://pocketmags.com/de/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-257/articles/retro-gamer-s-missing-issue
Retro Gamer. “The Complete History of Retro Gamer.” Retro Gamer, no. 257, 2024. Pocketmags. https://pocketmags.com/us/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-257/articles/the-complete-history-of-retro-gamer
Retro Gamer. “Issue 100.” Retro Gamer, no. 257, 2024. Pocketmags. https://pocketmags.com/us/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-257/articles/issue-100
Pocketmags. “Retro Gamer Back Issues.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://pocketmags.com/us/retro-gamer-magazine/issues
Pocketmags. “Retro Gamer, Issue 200.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://pocketmags.com/publishers/future-publishing/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-200
Zinio. “Retro Gamer.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.zinio.com/ca-en/publications/retro-gamer/4664
Video Game History Foundation. “Retro Gamer.” Game History Library. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/9
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Video Game History Foundation. “Retro Gamer, Issue 100.” Game History Library. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/7007
ISSN International Centre. “Retro Gamer, ISSN 1742-3155.” ISSN Portal. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1742-3155
United Kingdom, Companies House. “Imagine Publishing Limited, Company No. 05374037: Filing History.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/05374037/filing-history
United Kingdom, Companies House. “Future Publishing Limited, Company No. 02008885.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02008885
United Kingdom, Competition and Markets Authority. “Specialist Magazines Merger Could Face In-Depth Investigation.” October 7, 2016. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/specialist-magazines-merger-could-face-in-depth-investigation
InPublishing. “Future Acquires Imagine Publishing.” June 24, 2016. https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/future-acquires-imagine-publishing-4173
InPublishing. “Retro Gamer Wins Best Games Magazine Award.” October 19, 2010. https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/retro-gamer-wins-best-games-magazine-award-12561
Centre for Computing History. “Retro Gamer Special Collector’s Disc.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/69517/Retro-Gamer-Special-Collector-s-Disc/
Centre for Computing History. “Retro Gamer System.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/69513/Retro%20Gamer%20System/
Centre for Computing History. “Live Publishing International Games Collection.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/cgi/archive.pl?author=&order=Publisher&platform=&publisher=L%21ve+Publishing+International&type=Games
McFerran, Damien. “‘I Spent the First Year Worrying I’d Get Replaced’: Retro Gamer Magazine Turns 20.” Time Extension, March 15, 2024. https://www.timeextension.com/features/i-spent-the-first-year-worrying-id-get-replaced-retro-gamer-magazine-turns-20
McFerran, Damien. “‘This Is a Full Circle Moment for Me’: Retro Gamer Veteran Returns to the Mag Full Time, More Than 20 Years After Launching It.” Time Extension, March 20, 2026. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/03/this-is-a-full-circle-moment-for-me-retro-gamer-veteran-returns-to-the-mag-full-time-more-than-20-years-after-launching-it
Patterson, Blake. “Retro Gamer Issue 19 Arrives!” Byte Cellar, December 12, 2005. https://bytecellar.com/2005/12/12/retro_gamer_iss/
Retro Reversing. “Retro Gamer Magazine: List of Interviews and Notable Issues.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.retroreversing.com/retro-gamer