YMMV / Game Players Magazine

• Harsher in Hindsight: A less-extreme example, but editor Jeff Lundrigan (who often covered games in the RPG genre) also held the nickname of "Lucky" in the magazine. Although he would work at Next Generation Magazine for some time after leaving Game Players, he would later become unemployed and fade into obscurity unlike Game Players alumni such as Slate (Nintendo Power), Donohue (PSM) and Roger Burchill (editor-in-chief of OPM before it closed down) who are still remembered. Pretty unlucky.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In their January 1998 issue, they did a feature on game predictions for the new year. One of them was that a remake of Pong would debut. While it missed the 1998 deadline, Pong: The Next Level was released in 1999.
  • That thing about Parappa not getting in a drive-by shooting? Yeah, about that...
  • In their review of Road Rash 3D, they referred to Kid Rock as not well-known. That has aged well.
  • In the July 1994 issue, one reader thought they should make a game based on the Izzy Olympics mascot. Sure enough, two years later, such a game was actually made: Izzy's Quest For the Olympic Rings.
• Magazine Decay: Game Players went from the wacky comedy-filled magazine with great info to basically a stodgy, boring book with only a couple snippets of humor. Bill Donohue specifically points out that removing the humor from the book killed it.
  • Something else that didn't help their magazine: their old reviewing system had five simple categories (initially Graphics, Sound, Bells & Whistles, Control and Replay Value but later Graphics, Sound, Gameplay, Innovation & Replay Value). Each category was rated from one to ten; the categories would then be added up and averaged to make the review score. This was replaced by a convoluted 18-point system.
  • Then, of course, there was the transition to Game Buyer. It reverted to the humor-free format of the early Ultra Game Players issues, and while the rating system simplified to a 5-star system, the bar graphs for the five rating categories (graphics, sound, controls, gameplay, depth) were needlessly complex.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • In some respects, PC Accelerator was this for Game Players/UGP, especially since it had a couple former GP staff like Mike Salmon and Dan Egger. It had similar wacky humor but aimed at a more adult reading audience, with Hotter and Sexier being the key difference.
  • PSM could also be considered as such, since Bill Donahue, Chris Slate, and Francesca Reyes were all part of the writing staff, and while it didn't have the same level of humor as GP, some of it did carry over.