Last year, we reported that the video game preservation group Gaming Alexandria had scanned every issue of the influential Japanese video games magazine Weekly Famitsu from 1996, and made them all available to download online, and now, they’ve done the same for every issue of Weekly Famitsu from the following year, 1997.
Key games published in 1997 included Final Fantasy VII, GoldenEye 007, and Grand Theft Auto, so it’ll be interesting to revisit how they were covered by the gaming media of the time (if you can read Japanese, of course!)
The scans of the 1997 issues of Weekly Famitsu are available as PDFs downloadable via a torrent, with the link available via theweb Gaming Alexandria website, where you’ll also find sets of scans of other Japanese gaming magazines from yesteryear, such as Dengeki PC Engine and Family Computer Magazine (Famimaga).
Weekly Famitsu began publication some 40 years ago, back in 1986, and remarkably, the magazine is still being published today, albeit now on a monthly basis, under the shortened title of Famitsu.
While Gaming Alexandria’s scans of Weekly Famitsu are important in the preservation of video games media of the past, it’s worth noting that they have not been approved by Weekly Famitsu‘s publisher, Kadokawa Game Linkage.
