It has been a long road, but we are thrilled to announce that another major piece of gaming history has been preserved. The complete run of Marukatsu PC Engine (マル勝PCエンジン) — Kadokawa Shoten’s dedicated monthly magazine for NEC’s beloved PC Engine console — is now fully scanned and available for everyone to read and enjoy! This is our fourth complete PC Engine focused magazine set fully preserved. We believe this is the last of the PC Engine-focused magazines that were published in Japan. A huge thank you to David Shadoff for providing several of these issues again and our Patreon Patron’s for helping fund the rest. This is an amazing accomplishment and we couldn’t have done it without you all!
We have preserved all 65 issues and two appendices in high-quality 600 DPI. There are unfortunately many appendices from these magazines unscanned still due to their rarity/cost but at least we have the main issues with the bulk of information available. You’ll also notice the volume numbers jump around randomly starting with the February 1993 issue. Unsure why this is but we guess it’s due to appendices being counted as volumes — only sometimes.
Kadokawa Shoten’s Marukatsu PC Engine made its debut in January 1989. It came out after its sister publication Marukatsu Famicom in order to focus on the PC Engine’s growing popularity. Before going more into the history of the magazine, we should start off by mentioning that a great split with the magazine staff happened in late 1992. The staff that left ended up starting Dengeki PC Engine which we also fully scanned and wrote an article about here. You can definitely see that the soul of the magazine left with them, as Marukatsu changed almost completely and much of the original charm was gone. After this rift, Marukatsu PC Engine lasted only last a little over a year more before ending its run in March 1994 while Dengeki PC Engine would go on for a several more years.
While other magazines often focused heavily on basic game coverage and guides, Marukatsu also leaned into the “fandom” aspect of the era with its reader participation games: The Evil Emperor of Farzias and Megami Stadium. It was known for its vibrant layouts and heavy focus on character art as well. In the August 1990 issue, illustrator Akira Sasaki (TONG KING SHOW) began doing cover illustrations of the magazine’s humanoid rabbit mascot who was named Rabi. Eventually he left with the staff to Dengeki PC Engine and created a similar looking sheep — then rabbit humanoid mascot — gracing the covers. Dengeki PC Engine also began its own reader participation game called Megami Paradise which obviously was a continuation of Megami Stadium. It really does seem like Marukatsu itself ended when the split occurred, and it was just a shell of what made the magazine special until its actual demise.
A quick note on the scans, these are OCR’d with Azure Document Intelligence which does a great job on Japanese — in our experience. However, the issues that were uploaded to the Internet Archive do not have this OCR as this was done recently. I will hopefully get time to fix that at some point and replace the Archive uploads with the better OCR. But if you want the most accurate OCR right now download the torrent. I also created a furigana removal script I ran against the PDFs; while imperfect we feel like it does a pretty solid job. If you’ve ever tried to search or copy and paste from Japanese OCR’d magazines with furigana in the past, you know what a hassle it can be to get accurate translations when furigana gets mixed in with sentences. This will hopefully help researchers — if you find it helpful please let us know in the comments or via Discord. We may improve it further if people find it useful.
Marukatsu PC Engine – Complete V1.0 [Gaming Alexandria] Torrent Magnet Link
To view the magazines click here (List on Gaming Alexandria) or here (Internet Archive listing).
Please spread the word on these and share what you find, either via comments below, on Twitter, Bluesky, forums, etc. We want the world to be able to enjoy and research these beautiful magazines!
Thanks again to all of our supporters.
