Disk Magazine - 1990s

1990s

In the early 1990s, id Software founders John Carmack and John Romero had some of their earliest works published on disk magazines while working for Softdisk. A short-lived game subscription called Gamer's Edge published side-scrolling and 3D games written by the team that would later create Commander Keen and Doom.

By the mid-1990s, CD-ROMs were taking over from floppy disks as the major data storage and transfer medium. Some of the existing disk magazines switched to this format while others, such as Digital Culture Stream, were founded as CD-based magazines from the start. The higher capacity of this format, along with the faster speed of newer computers, allowed disk magazines to provide more of a multimedia experience, including music and animation. Such things as movie trailers and music samples could now be provided, allowing a disk magazine to target fans of the entertainment industry rather than the computer hobbyists of the earlier times.

Many disk magazines of the 1990s and later are connected with the demoscene, including Grapevine, for the Amiga computer. Demoscene diskmags have been known to cross over into the closely neighboring underground computer art scene and warez scenes as well. Some of the more commonly well known English diskmags include: Hugi, Imphobia, Pain, Scenial, Daskmig (IBM PC), Jurassic Pack, RAW, Upstream, ROM, Seenpoint, Generation (Amiga), Undercover Magascene, Chaos Control Digizine, Maggie, Alive and ST News (Atari ST).

In the late 1990s, the Internet became popular among the general public, which had the effect of killing the market for disk-based publications because people could now access the same sorts of material through the net. As a result, disk-based periodicals became uncommon, as publishers of electronic magazines preferred to use the Web or e-mail as their distribution medium.

Demoscene magazines based on executable program files are still commonly called diskmags, although they are seldom distributed on physical disks any more. Bulletin board systems and the Internet took over as major distribution channels for these magazines already in the 1990s.