We’ve learned every PC Engine Fan magazine has been scanned by a group of fans looking to preserve an iconic bit of gaming history.

In a post on their website, the group announced that monthly magazine PC Engine Fan (ピーシーエンジンファン), which was in publication from the late eighties to mid nineties, has been scanned and uploaded in its entirety.

Gaming Alexandria is a site that describes themselves as, “a group of game preservationists that post scans, articles, interviews, and even dumps of prototypes to be shared with the world before they are potentially lost.”

The magazine often included extras such as strategy guides and soundtracks from various PC Engine games. The covers for the magazine were particularly special. Each edition featured a hand drawn image by anime industry artist Akemi Takada, whose resume includes character designs for highly revered shows such as Urusei Yatsura and Patlabor The Mobile Police (we highly recommend it).

Here is what Gaming Alexandria had to say on PC Engine Fan (ピーシーエンジンファン)

PC Engine Fan

PC Engine Fan debuted in December 1988 with its first issue and was released monthly until October of 1996. There were two special “deluxe” issues that were released in 1997 as well but those were months apart. The publisher was Tokuma Shoten Intermedia who also created other system specific magazines for video game consoles at the time. Many people note the beautiful artwork on the covers and they were done by the artist Akemi Takada. The magazine mainly covers the NEC’s PC Engine and its various iterations and add-ons as one would expect from the name. It also covered the short lived SuperGrafx, and the PC-FX which comprises most of the coverage of the later issues.

Included with many of the issues were various bonuses, such as appendices/strategy guides for various games, vinyl records of game soundtracks, and even discs that could be played with the CD-ROM² addon and PC-FX. The PC-FX discs are especially interesting as they included software in which readers could create their own programs for the PC-FX. While we have scans of a lot of the extras we do not have them all. Hopefully with time we will be able to acquire the rest of the missing extras and get them scanned in. But for the most part these are just strategy guides for games, and not generally useful for research purposes which is our main intent in digitizing magazines.

Contained within the magazines are all sorts of neat things. There is naturally coverage of the games being released at the time, including many games that were never actually released such as PC Cocoron, Splendid Saga, Meikyuu Jima (Kickle Cubicle), and many others. Coverage of upcoming hardware in the PC Engine line is in here as well, along with information of the various electronic shows of the day including CES in America! There are developer interviews and articles, such as in the very first issue there is lots of coverage on the various companies producing software for the PC Engine. Manga for the games Cosmic Fantasy, Puyo Puyo, and Dragon Slayer – The Legend of Heroes were also printed in the magazine. Readers Land was a popular section of the magazine in which readers could submit artwork, and write letters etc. to the staff of PC Engine Fan. There is much more to uncover in these magazines as well so be sure to dig in and see what interesting things you can find! We hope you enjoy digging through them as much as we have.

All scans of PC Engine Fan (ピーシーエンジンファン) can be found either at Gaming Alexandria’s site here or on Internet Archive.

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