Editor’s note August 6, 2021: We removed this article and all other “IGN Babes” content after determining that it doesn’t reflect our editorial standards.
They were packed full of content, too. Reviews, interviews, strategy guides, cheats and mods. Even the ads were cool. I kept a lot of my old game magazines, and they’re still pretty fun to read through. Obviously, you have to grit and bear all the edgy “humor” and hornyness.
The 80s and 90s were a golden age for hobby magazines. I think by the late 00s, all the young writers (who have always made up the bulk of writers for magazines) started making tool-assisted content for content mills and blogspam, and that style of writing is what now dominates hobby magazines. Modern magazine content must be first and foremost slop for the web version of the magazine, and it’s only later cobbled together into the physical version.
Remember when booth babes were a thing in the games industry?
I remember going to Gamescom 2011 and being at this big and crowded World of Tanks booth to check out the game, when suddenly a bunch of booth babes who were hired to do promotion for the game went onstage and began gyrating to music. Every nerd there then attentively watched these women doing the most generic and boring ass moves on stage for like 10 minutes, because
Gaming outlets like IGN also used to do articles in which they’d rate these booth babes after a convention.
I don’t know about cosplay babes, but booth babes became more controversial in the early 2010s, and then PAX and Eurogamer Expo banned booth babes because they wanted their conventions to be more family friendly and welcoming to everyone. Since then, they fell out of favor at gaming conventions in the West.
It still feels like cosplay babes are a sort of loophole around that because some of the costumes they wear are more revealing than what booth babes wore.
At the very least, cosplay babes fit into the overall scene. Booth babes were just a weird thing to have and none of them looked like they wanted to be there.
Yeah, that is a good point. I haven’t been to these conventions in over a decade, but it does sound like cosplay babes essentially serve the same purpose as booth babes did in terms of promotion and titillation, but in such a way that they can get away with it.
Most cosplayers who make money doing it are influencers working for themselves, so it’s at least a bit less exploitative than the old way when companies would hire for the role. Plus the ones who go all in on having a sexy costume are a subset of the community, not the whole thing.
IGN had a video series called “babeology” which was literally just photoshoots with models. It wasn’t even like a cosplay thing, it was pure TV-14 titillation.
The magazine cover that is burned into my retinas from when I walked into a Blockbuster and saw it staring my in the face was the February 2001 NextGen cover where Duke Nukem is fondling Lara Croft from behind (censored on the cover). Very telling that this the representation of “games growing up”. Gamers™ really are stuck in the early 2000s.
I only have the vaguest memories of the IGN Babes section; seems like it started up around 2008, and the only time I was actually actively reading gaming magazines and stuff was from the early 2000s to around 2006 or 2007.
Part of me is nostalgic for that era (I honestly wasn’t reading those sorts of publications–stuck to Nintendo Power, EGM, and GameSpot, none of which were particularly horny), but I think it’s less about the magazines themselves and more that I’m nostalgic for being so excited about video games that I would get a new issue in the mail and read it cover to cover. I’d kill to be that excited about literally anything at this point.
Remember Incite magazine? http://www.videogameobsession.com/videogame/mags/Incite/Incite-Issue01December1999-400px.png
Remember when IGN had a Babes section?
https://www.ign.com/articles/2007/04/18/ign-insiders-desktop-babes
lmao
Playstation Magazine used to have a swimsuit issue with horny drawings of all the hotties (sometimes even the male characters!) in their dunkaroos.
Yeah having the guys in speedos was the “joke” portion because silly women you can’t lust over video game characters that’s for MEN ONLY
God, I remember being a kid and watching everyone perv out over 7 of 9
Weird times
God, $1.99 for a magazine. Those were the days.
They were packed full of content, too. Reviews, interviews, strategy guides, cheats and mods. Even the ads were cool. I kept a lot of my old game magazines, and they’re still pretty fun to read through. Obviously, you have to grit and bear all the edgy “humor” and hornyness.
The 80s and 90s were a golden age for hobby magazines. I think by the late 00s, all the young writers (who have always made up the bulk of writers for magazines) started making tool-assisted content for content mills and blogspam, and that style of writing is what now dominates hobby magazines. Modern magazine content must be first and foremost slop for the web version of the magazine, and it’s only later cobbled together into the physical version.
There were some good ones into the late 00s/early 10s. I kept buying PC Gamer until they stopped including demo disks
Remember when booth babes were a thing in the games industry?
I remember going to Gamescom 2011 and being at this big and crowded World of Tanks booth to check out the game, when suddenly a bunch of booth babes who were hired to do promotion for the game went onstage and began gyrating to music. Every nerd there then attentively watched these women doing the most generic and boring ass moves on stage for like 10 minutes, because
Gaming outlets like IGN also used to do articles in which they’d rate these booth babes after a convention.
I thought they kind of still were a thing? Just cosplay babes now filling the spot they used to.
I don’t know about cosplay babes, but booth babes became more controversial in the early 2010s, and then PAX and Eurogamer Expo banned booth babes because they wanted their conventions to be more family friendly and welcoming to everyone. Since then, they fell out of favor at gaming conventions in the West.
It still feels like cosplay babes are a sort of loophole around that because some of the costumes they wear are more revealing than what booth babes wore.
At the very least, cosplay babes fit into the overall scene. Booth babes were just a weird thing to have and none of them looked like they wanted to be there.
Yeah, that is a good point. I haven’t been to these conventions in over a decade, but it does sound like cosplay babes essentially serve the same purpose as booth babes did in terms of promotion and titillation, but in such a way that they can get away with it.
Most cosplayers who make money doing it are influencers working for themselves, so it’s at least a bit less exploitative than the old way when companies would hire for the role. Plus the ones who go all in on having a sexy costume are a subset of the community, not the whole thing.
IGN had a video series called “babeology” which was literally just photoshoots with models. It wasn’t even like a cosplay thing, it was pure TV-14 titillation.
Alternative link (also damn, that magazine didn’t even make it a year)
The magazine cover that is burned into my retinas from when I walked into a Blockbuster and saw it staring my in the face was the February 2001 NextGen cover where Duke Nukem is fondling Lara Croft from behind (censored on the cover). Very telling that this the representation of “games growing up”. Gamers™ really are stuck in the early 2000s.
I only have the vaguest memories of the IGN Babes section; seems like it started up around 2008, and the only time I was actually actively reading gaming magazines and stuff was from the early 2000s to around 2006 or 2007.
Part of me is nostalgic for that era (I honestly wasn’t reading those sorts of publications–stuck to Nintendo Power, EGM, and GameSpot, none of which were particularly horny), but I think it’s less about the magazines themselves and more that I’m nostalgic for being so excited about video games that I would get a new issue in the mail and read it cover to cover. I’d kill to be that excited about literally anything at this point.
bruh
IGN Babes had already been around since the early 2000s at least, I remember seeing it for the first time around 2000.
Added to the list of already mentioned: postal babes