As you probably already know, Famitsu is a seminal Japanese video gaming magazine.

The mag launched in 1986 under the name Famicom Tsūshin, when, as the name suggests, it was dedicated to covering Nintendo’s 8-bit Famicom. The magazine later expanded its coverage, becoming a multiformat title, and establishing itself as arguably the world’s most influential video games publication. The magazine is still being published today on a monthly basis, and now, the gaming preservation website Gaming Alexandria have scanned every issue of Famitsu from the year 1996, at which time it was a weekly publication, generally referred to as ‘Weekly Famitsu’ in English.

While this project does not appear to have been approved by Famitsu, it nonetheless offers an intriguing chance to discover how the Japanese gaming press covered gaming in 1996, which was a vibrant and exciting time for our hobby, with hardware releases including the Nintendo 64, and Game Boy Pocket, and games released in 1996 included Super Mario 64, Nights into Dreams, Resident Evil, Super Mario RPG, and Soul Edge. Clearly 1996 was quite a year for video games! You can currently  find the link to download the 1996 Weekly Famitsu scans via Gaming Alexandria’s X posts.