u/Retroaffaire

From the Tokyo Olympics to the Lost Decade. Garo watched all of it. Founded in 1964 by Katsuichi Nagai, built on a single principle: complete artistic freedom, no compromise.

The artists who published here are legendary. Among them: Yoshiharu Tsuge, Sanpei Shirato, Shigeru Mizuki, Suehiro Maruo, Nobuyoshi Araki, Toshio Saeki).

This is an introduction to a magazine that never chased readership, never followed trends, and never pretended Japan was fine when it wasn't. The issues shown here span 1981 to 1997. The end of the Showa era. The big economic bubble and its collapse. The Kobe earthquake. The sarin attacks.

Garo closed in 2002. It should be talked about more.

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If you collect retro games, figures, manga or anything vintage (or new) Japanese, this is how I do it. Real prices, not tourist mark-up. Shop as many items as you want, once JPFans receives it in their warehouse, you can consolidate all the items together, and pay only one shipment fee! You also get 3 free inspection photos before anything ships.

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Tell me in the comments, what's the first thing you're hunting for? 👇

The Most Unsettling Games on PC-98, Sega, Nintendo, PC Engine and More, a personal selection of favourite horror games!

Do you know all of them?

A flip through the February 1992 issue of BEEP! MegaDrive, the Japanese magazine that covered Sega's 16-bit world with some of the most unhinged, beautiful cover art in gaming history. Published by SoftBank, BEEP! MegaDrive stood apart from Famitsu and the rest: commissioned abstract artwork instead of promotional screenshots, a weird editorial tone, and deep-cut coverage you couldn't get in the West. This issue landed just two months after the Mega-CD launched in Japan, so expect a lot of Mega-CD hype, plus spreads on Valis SD, Lunar, JuJu Densetsu (Toki), Shadow of the Beast and more.

SEGA made a home computer in 1983, launched on the same day as the Famicom. The SC-3000H is one of the most interesting footnotes in gaming history.

Just put out a video on the SC-3000H, SEGA's attempt to be both a games console and a home computer simultaneously, built around the same Z80 chip as the Spectrum and MSX, sharing a cartridge library across both form factors.

The software catalogue is fascinating: SEGA produced educational titles covering the Japanese school curriculum, a BASIC interpreter with JIS encoding, and a games library that brought their arcade hits home, Zaxxon, Flicky, Ninja Princess, Bank Panic. Girl's Garden is in there too, one of Yuji Naka's earliest works.

The SC-3000H is a genuinely interesting object, a record of SEGA deciding, in 1983, that they could be more than an arcade company.

Did you have one?

Vinyl records and cassette tape soundtracks from the golden era of anime, my collection.
A journey through the anime soundtracks that shaped a generation: pressed in Japan, played and remembered in Italy and elsewhere (with some niche anime to discover along the way).