Japans "Filthiest Underground Gaming Magazine" enters the Internet Archive

Japan's Game Urara was a magazine about hacking, porn, piracy, mods, and underground gaming culture. It lasted only a few issues in the mid-1990s, but its extraordinary contents distinguished it from all others. A quarter of a century later, it lives on as a set of high-quality scans at the Internet Archive. Senn writes at Gaming Alexandria about the most NSFW game mag of them all.

One could say that this magazine is also a preservation of the shady side of the 90s internet in Japan, and this is reflected by the very informal and laid back articles. From game strategies to cheats, doujin (self-published) games, and even internet guides, its an interesting read on how Japanese gamers used to pull all of this off before a wider-scale version of the internet went on to make it all obsolete. Of course, all of this is the more normal side of Game Urara, and its not exactly hard to stumble upon the weirder stuff it has to offer either.

The magazine quickly transitions from casual discussions of video games and guides, to borderline illegal practices of suspicious drug dealings, piracy, hacking, and whatever of illegal interest found in the communities back then. Its genuinely a bizarre sight as among the innocent video game content lies disturbing articles and ads, such as Mr. Kurosawas (of Hong Kong 97 infamy) shock value section, and advertisements for an extremely bizarre do it at home foreskin removal tool. (Yes, you read that right) This magazine did not attempt to sugar-coat gore, scat, and other bizarre paraphilia, and neither did it try to filter its advertisements.