My mom made me throw out all of my magazines when we moved one time so I can’t go back and look at this with older eyes, but there was this one bit in Playstation Magazine (PSM) that always confused as a child. Tucked into the middle of their preview for the PSX action game Rising Zan, samurai gunman and johnny no more, was a small bit about them hitting the streets and asking random women if they thought Zan was sexy. It featured some small pictures of who they talked to and a sentence or two from each about how they thought Zan was fairly attractive.
Was this real?
As a child I always assumed this was made up. Why would you walk around asking random people if they thought a video game character was sexy? Sure it was the 1990s, when video game magazines could get very horny, but why Rising Zan of all things? It was not by anyone notable at the time and even its preview was fairly small if I remember correctly. Maybe PSM knew so little of the game that they needed to fill up space but who even cared if Zan was sexy? Was that something in the marketing?
Does anyone remember this? I’m kind of curious what this would read like now that I’m older.
i guess official playstation magaine was weird in every country. in the uk one, i remember a “feature” that must have been like 8 pages that was just about the clothes the characters were wearing in the borderline unplayable hoverboard game that no-one bought psybadek
I threw it on testing trade-ins at Gamestop circa '03 and was blown away by that intro, somebody picked the copy up over the next week and I never got to really try it out. Amazing flavor.
September 1999 issue of PlayStation Magazine (distinct from Official PlayStation Magazine). I had a few issues of PSM back in the day but not this one. I always gravitated towards PSM first when browsing the magazine racks because they always got good comic book artists to draw their covers.
PSM remarks in response to a reader who is worried that game developers might charge full retail prices for games and then charge additional money for downloadable updates, “That probably won’t be the case […] The publishers can still make a profit selling downloads online.”
Ha!
Can’t find any scans off the cuff here but archive.org is always a good place to start.
I had always thought Rising Zan looked dumb in the magazines and didn’t care for it until around a decade later when I saw someone at college play the opening and realized it’s actually like what Japanese game devs might think American people might think a Japanese anime about the wild west would be like.