About

GameSphere Magazine is a magazine about the games and machines of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s — DOS, Windows 9x, the arcade boards preserved through MAME, and the consoles of the same era.

Long-form reviews, written properly: what the game actually was, how it played at the time, whether it holds up now, and a score out of ten that means something. Alongside the reviews, guides to running old games on modern hardware and to buying and keeping the original machines alive.

What you will find here

In-depth reviews. PC, arcade and console games, famous and forgotten. Plenty of them have been remembered by nobody except the people who loved them.

How to play it today. DOSBox-X, dgVoodoo2, MAME, compatibility fixes, CRT versus modern displays, and where a game can still be bought legitimately.

Hardware. Consoles, handhelds, what breaks on them, and what to look for when buying second-hand.

Comparisons, guides and ranked lists across platforms, genres and studios.

Browse by platform: Windows · MAME · DOS · Consoles · Tutorials

What you will not find here

No news about new releases, no AAA coverage, no esports, no previews. Almost everything covered here is at least twenty years old, and that is the point.

How the magazine works

Nothing here is paid for. GameSphere sells no advertising space, no sponsored articles, no reviews and no links. Nobody pays to appear here, in any form, and nobody pays us to write anything.

The banners. You may see a banner for a shop, a developer, a preservation project, an event, or an individual making something worth knowing about. Those placements are free: we put them there because we think they are useful to readers, we are paid nothing for them, and we take nothing in exchange. A banner is not a review and not a recommendation — we have not tested what it advertises — and we earn no commission if you buy anything. Banner links carry rel=”sponsored nofollow”, and no advertiser has any say in what we publish or in what a game scores.

Contributors. Some articles are written by guests with their own byline — people who know a corner of this hobby better than we do: collectors, repairers, shopkeepers, developers, preservationists. Nobody pays to be published and nobody is paid to write. Where a contributor has a commercial interest in what they are writing about — because they sell it, made it, or run a project around it — a disclosure box at the top of the article says so plainly. Their opinions are their own.

Screenshots are there to show what is being discussed, not to decorate the page. Where an image comes from someone else, the source is credited.

Everything written here is reusable. Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence — copy them, translate them, build on them, as long as you credit the author. See the Content License page.

Who writes it

GameSphere Magazine is written, edited and published by Demosthenes Koptsis.

Headshot of a man with glasses and a beard, wearing an orange striped shirt, set against a neutral gray background.


Corrections, suggestions, requests from rightsholders, pitches from would-be contributors, or a note about a game worth covering: dimoskoptsis@gmail.com

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Support

The magazine is free. If you would like to help keep it going, there is a Ko-fi page: https://ko-fi.com/dimk_publishing

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Entirely optional, and it changes nothing about what gets covered or what a game scores.

Legal

Game titles, screenshots, artwork and trademarks are the property of their respective developers and publishers, and appear here for the purposes of review and criticism. GameSphere Magazine is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any game publisher or retailer.