Monday, November 21, 2022

The V.I.P. of Gaming

Issue #99 of Dragon (July 1985) contains the advertisement below. It's for a gaming magazine that is completely unknown to me. Looking into it, I discovered it had only five issues, published between October 1985 and September 1986 and was published by a company called Diverse Talents, Inc. The same company was also responsible for publishing Space Gamer for a short time in the late 1980s. Since I know nothing of The V.I.P. of Gaming Magazine – what a mouthful! – I'd be curious to hear from anyone who knows anything more, especially if you actually read it when it was released.

8 comments:

  1. I have a complete set easy to find. What would you like to know?

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    1. I'm most interested in the games covered by the magazine and the contributors.

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  2. I never had the magazine under that title, but during their brief stretch publishing TSG there was a section in most or all of those issues called VIP of Gaming in kind of the same way Dragon had an Ares section for a long stretch. Beyond that my memory fails me. Much as I liked TSG over the years that part of its ever-shifting identity was a real low point, albeit still more recognizable than the later incarnation that started with Better Games' takeover and resetting teh numbering. That was a better stretch than the VIP issues but was TSG in name only, the entire tone and style was utterly different from anything that came before. Not bad at all, but it wasn't doing anything to maintain the magazine's legacy, just trading on its name and reputation.

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  3. For this periodical, RPGGeek actually has a good overview of the contents. They basically had articles all over the place.
    https://rpggeek.com/rpgperiodical/2102/vip-gaming

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  4. I bought (and still have) one issue. I didn't realize only five issues were ever published. I believe I bought a second one as well, but that seems to've disappeared. I bought the one issue I still have because it had a Villains & Vigilantes adventure in it, authored by one of V&V's creators.

    My overall impressions were then (and remain) three: (1) the name was terrible, (2) what was best about the magazine was, as referenced above, it published articles about less popular RPGs in less popular genres (i.e. beyond fantasy) - many of which were personal favorites of mine, and (3) the magazine's "look and feel" kind of blurred the boundary between fanzine and a (smaller) professional magazine about RPGs, such as Different Worlds or Space Gamer.

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  5. My first issue of V.I.P. was #2, purchased when it was new. That issue has a lot of Car Wars variant rules (including rules for bicycles!). Each issue had content for a lot of various games and some included cardstock insert expansions for board games like Junta and Dune. It was like a return to the early days of The Dragon and White Dwarf, before those periodicals became company organs that only published for TSR and Games Workshop products, respectively.

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  6. You should have received a mail notification sent by me.

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