I no longer keep many of my childhood treasures.
Most of them suffered crippling injuries in the battlefields of imagination, and the few that survived were passed on to new overlords under whom they continued to serve gloriously, partaking on adventures that are now invisible to me as a grown-up, driving on winding roads that look like kitchen tiles or fighting on endless wars that I perceive as silent. It's almost bittersweet, really, because I can see the "wand", but I can no longer feel the magic -- whatever it is that my kids are seeing by grabbing onto the plastic pieces that shaped my life when I was their age, that's something I can no longer process. But there's something equally rewarding about it, knowing that there's a bond still being formed through the use of action figures with missing arms or tiny, metal cars that have begun to rust but whose current shapes can, in no way, take away from their sheer fun factor, even as they will never again look or feel quite like they are supposed to.
There was even a funny "accident" when my oldest kid discovered what used to be the crown jewel of my entire collection: the dusty, bent model cars I had saved ages for -- real metal things made to scale and that I had the "sense" to paint race numbers on with permanent marker as a weelad. They turned those incredibly expensive pieces of misshapen die cast metal into the victims of a demolition derby in just one afternoon, but their laughter filled the air in a way that was way too precious to disturb, particularly when the wind-up engine of my brutalized Volkswagen Beetle suddenly came back to life, causing it to race down their room, crashing into a juice box and making a complete mess of orange-y stickiness which immediately became "lava" through the endless power of wanting to play just a little longer.
I think all my toys would be very happy to know that they are once again on the hands of kids that appreciate them, but there's one key element of my childhood puzzle that has soldiered on mostly undetected, occupying a space on the shelf to which the eyes of children rarely wander: my AZ-Diez magazines.
Hey, look! It's "Iguana Kill Things", one of my oldest surviving toys!
Sitting at the far end of a splintered wooden plank, besieged by Stephen King books and the equally serious-looking mountains of floppy disks I don't have the heart to throw away (because those 1992 taxes are SOOOOO fascinating, you know?) these have stood there for ages, surviving not only the many hours my sister and I flipped through them, but also a couple of moves, a flood, and even attacks with markers and scissors, as we used them to complete boring homework assignments and just to mess around before the age of the internet turned them completely obsolete. The fact that I still have most of them has a ton of merit, and I think it's time to acknowledge them.
First released in 1993, these magazines were a very big deal: they included a Summer edition that was twice their literal size, a monthly newspaper made for (and by) kids, a generous comic book section that licensed everything from Hagar the Horrible to Garfield to Asterix; a science lab section full of do-it-yourself experiments that showed kids from the reader base performing them, and a hilariously misguided section called "El Rincón de Morondanga" (which was the only one on the entire publication written under a pen name) whose sole purpose was to get you in as much trouble as possible. The zine also included an ecology section that was actually really cool, a cookbook for kids, a nature section that taught me a lot about the world I live in, the real life biographies of the most important people in history, the very fake and humorous biographies showing the lives and times of people who never existed, and a ton of other cool things. It also included a maddeningly incomplete videogame and technology section that always seemed to be playing both catch-up and future reading... it was such a mind-blowingly weird experience that I actually tried to e-mail the editor through a Hotmail address listed carelessly on an issue dated February of 1998. My message didn't bounce, but it also didn't get a reply (not that I was expecting one).
Before I tell you all about that wicked videogame section, though, I want to mention something real quick: while the magazine was very complete and proved to be an invaluable homework aid during the "before times" (i.e, the era without home internet), those were also extremely expensive -- like, incredibly so. A few of mine still have their price tags printed on the front, and I was able to figure out that they'd run you around $16 a month if you were to buy all four releases on that time frame, and that's a sum that had to be taken straight from the average salary of an Argentinean worker at the time, which was merely $200. I'm not surprised to hear that barely anyone I ever met had those around, and the only reason my sister and I got to enjoy them was because our grandpa was friends with the editor and this guy was so generous as to always give us multiple copies of the zine as soon as new issues were printed. These proved quite priceless both at the time and way into the future, where they became excellent trading tokens for me to grow my Reader's Digest collection at the cost of repeated (often damaged) ones.
I'm convinced that this section was made specifically for trolling kids. It's amazing how confidently the lead character could spit out awful advice on the daily. No wonder he charged his title every issue XD
I think that what really hurt the videogame and technology section was the fact that the lead writer just wasn't given enough space to develop any of the things he covered -- the "Enter Diez" section was only given four pages to work with and they had to contain both a tutorial on how to use productivity or office software (mostly Microsoft stuff, but there were a few other things in there), previews for upcoming hardware and software releases, some tidbits about the ever-changing technological landscape and, finally, a walkthrough or game review.
The game reviews were usually fine (if a little short), and I'm going to praise the writer here for making a lot of the games he talked about sound utterly awesome through the use of some cleverly-placed screenshots, some vivid descriptions and just a nice write-up all around. I remember trying to hunt down games like Theme Hospital, Little Big Adventure and The Legend Of Kyrandia just because of the way this guy described them. It's almost a shame that the age of YouTube has spoiled us rotten when it came to game reviewing, mostly because having to take someone's word for how a game looked and played through static images and written word you couldn't give or get any feedback on was an art form in-and-on itself.
As for the walkthroughs... Ugh.
Ahhh... All those shiny new things that were coming out at the time. All those secrets and hacks we could learn to improve our Windows experience. What a time capsule!
They actually pose an interesting dilemma for me because I can totally see why the writer (or whoever he was taking orders from) would choose many hard-as-nails graphic adventures to cover -- that way you'd be pretty much forced to buy each subsequent issue featuring the game he was currently helping you beat, but a couple of pages were never going to be enough to cover the puzzles most of those games challenged you with. The end result was a series of guides that were pretty much useless to you as a player because they skipped over a lot of critical steps needed to be taken in order to conquer puzzles, often assuming that you either knew the bits he wasn't mentioning or that you'd figure them out on your own. As a kid growing up without internet and getting games through random discs being exchanged during computer lab or gotten with heavy discounts on shady stores, this was not fun at all. I still remember my first time trying to play Day Of The Tentacle with the magazine by my side... getting stuck almost immediately after the opening sequence ended. It was such a frustrating experience for me that I actually came to believe that I didn't like point-n-click graphic adventures at all -- they were unbeatable even when reading a walkthrough! What the hell! Of course, this notion was quickly defeated as soon as I got my very own, inhumanely slow 56K connection and got access to actual walkthroughs, which led me to slay many of those dragons that had haunted my childhood through the sheer tease of their amazing graphics and funny voice acting that I was never going to experience more than 2% of (if that).
But regardless of how, uh, questionable trying to cram complete walkthroughs into a couple of pages per issue was, the true heart and soul of the videogame section was always going to be the technology side of things.
Having the enormous advantage of reading these decades into the future, it's always funny to see just how things played out, which things they were hyping up and what ended up happening to them. There's a lot to unpack here, and our road is paved on bold claims and grossly overly-enthusiastic assumptions that, I'm sure, came back to bite the writers in the arse later. For example: they just couldn't get enough of the Nintendo 64 and actually named it a "PC-killer" even as its Argentine release kept being pushed back to the point of it arriving to its almost complete obsolescence. They were also married to the idea of computers becoming the centerpieces of any respectable household, always being quick to praise manufacturer Compaq Presario for adding remote controls and "multimedia settings" to their newest machines. But the thing I was the biggest fan of? All those amazingly useless things that really did try to turn our home computers into some sort of altars to the gods.
The thing that caught my attention immediately after reading it was a program that allowed you to make phone calls right from your main desktop by showing you a virtual keypad and connecting through the landline. It sounded incredibly futuristic to me, and I actually wanted to give it a try... which resulted on me severing my own 56K modem by strangling the connection through the incompatible, conflicting orders of getting data and sending out tones and pulses through the same wire. Yeah, it was a mess... but a beautiful one at that (and the fact that I was pretty much a caveman when it came to this stuff only added to the flavor, with me "troubleshooting" the thing through the use of incredibly outrageous means, like flipping wires and endlessly rebooting the rig in case that fixed anything).
This was actually one of their best attempts at a walkthrough (still painful, though). Also featured: My sister playing teacher and grading this thing!
There really isn't much more to say about this whole thing (trust me, we would be here all day if I gave a detailed account of every section I deemed worth talking about), but it'd be wrong to finish this piece without mentioning a funny incident revolving these zines that happened when I was around nine-years-old:
You see... my grandpa was nearing retirement at the time and had decided to go all-out on his many pet projects (being finally free to undertake them) which included reforming his land so he could live out the rest of his days a sort of urban farmer, a dream he largely succeeded at and accomplished. To this effect, he once came home rolling an industrial-size, plastic barrel that he intended to use to store materials and other tools to help him develop his field, but the barrel proved too awkward and too big to be of much use at all, which led it to being quickly abandoned and then reclaimed by us, in the pure way children operate.
It had started out simple: with me diving inside the giant plastic thing during a frantic game of Hide-and-Seek against my sister and many of our friends, hoping to avoid getting caught by entrenching myself in such an unlikely shelter... which actually worked really well and made me realize just how comfortable the interior of that discount industrial waste was. It was cool, dark (but not scarily so) and it allowed for a measure of movement, which led me to claim it as my own and to take my snacks and magazines inside, much to my grandpa's feeble protests and fights with my sister over who would get to use it next. Of course, this only lasted for as long as our bodies were small enough to allow for such an adventure, but I will always remember just how silly and fun it was being there, sitting inside that thing like modern Chavos del Ocho, sipping Coke and munching on cookies whilst flipping through the pages of our favorite magazines.
It's interesting because I have never taken these magazines for granted, yet their role has been largely reduced to "those things we use to pile books and junk against" for decades now. I don't think that's fair, but they are at least getting some more love now that my oldest kids actually need them for school, just like we did when we were their age, copying good info off their pages and even getting lost in the episodic (often incomplete due to missing issues) nature of the delightfully violent misadventures of Asterix and Obelix, all while we enjoy a deep look into the printed, yellowed, discolored, crumpled and utterly precious remains of a world we once ruled and that no longer exists.
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