What's the deal with Imagine Town Magazine? We figured it out

Library director Phil Salvador here, with an unusual new addition to our digital library.

We've added what we believe is the complete run of Imagine Town Magazine, a promotional magazine for Ubisoft's line of casual games for girls. I wanted to highlight this magazine because 1) it's Friday, and 2) the story here is the kind of work that VGHF is uniquely suited for, and the sort of work you're making possible with your support.

Last year, when Ubisoft moved their publishing office in San Francisco, they let us come by the office and gather up anything interesting before it all went in the dumpster. This is where Ubisoft's marketing staff worked out of, so they mostly had promotional items.

Among all the Rabbits promotional stuff, Frank also found a stack of girl game magazines, which we had never heard of before. He brought them back, and they sat in my to-process pile for about a year.

Earlier this week, we recorded an episode of the Video Game History Hour with Dr. Stephanie Harkin, who is researching how video games are depicted in girl's lifestyle magazines. Our conversation reminded me that I should dig into those magazines and figure out what the story was.

In total, we had three issues from two different magazine series, Imagine Town and Game Candy, plus a few duplicate copies. Both series were published by Ubisoft as promotional items.

The first thing you do in a situation like this is, of course, to search for it to see if anyone else has talked about it. We found... close to nothing. There was a single post on the Digital Press message boards 13 years ago about Game Candy and Imagine Town, which says these were given away for free at stores. One issue of Imagine Town has been uploaded to the Internet Archive by a user who's mainly been uploading girl's magazines from the 2000s. And that's it, that's about all the context we found online.

Most of the copies we had from Ubisoft were actually still sealed in their original polybags, so we opened them up and got some more answers. The magazines were bagged together with other girl magazines from the period, like Discovery Girls and Six7*8th (a magazine for middle school kids. Get it? 6th grade? 7th grade? 8th grade?). In addition to maybe being distributed for free at stores, Ubisoft magazines were also used as supplements for other mags, similar to some of the promotional inserts you would get back in the day with something like Electronic Gaming Monthly. The reason there was so little information about these is that girl magazines are generally treated as disposable, and these promotional inserts are even more disposable than that. Plus, there's not much overlap between video game magazine collectors and teenage girls in the late 2000s.

The other piece of the puzzle to figure out was how many issues of these magazines were published. That seemed like a lost cause... until we looked at each magazine closely.

• Our first issue is Game Candy. It's undated, but our copies were distributed with a December/January 2009 copy of Discovery Girls. Inside the magazine, it says that this is the first issue of Game Candy. Solved!

• The next magazine chronologically is the Summer 2009 issue of Imagine Town. But even though it's called Imagine Town... all the subscription cards and contact information inside the magazine say Game Candy! And the cover even says "brought to you by Game Candy." These are all the same magazine series!

• The last one is the Fall 2009 issue of Imagine Town, which presumably came out after the Summer 2009 issue. Easy.

We established that these are all the same series, and they all came out around 2009. Which brought us to the last question: Were we missing any?

Our best clue was in the Summer 2009 issue. The back cover has a calendar for May, June, and July, with promotional plugs for Ubisoft products released in may. This suggests it was meant to be first published no later than May 2009, possibly even as early as April 2009. Could Ubisoft have published another issue of Game Candy between January and April? It's possible, but unlikely. The first issue is undated and was probably meant to be an evergreen promo item that they could continue to use without locking it into a specific year or season. Besides that, the Summer 2009 issue covers all the Imagine games that came out in early 2009, like Imagine: Family Doctor, so there wouldn't have been a need to double up on that with yet another issue.

Given that these issues all came from the same pile from the office of the magazine's publisher, and given that we don't seem to be missing any issues in this sequential run, my professional opinion is that this is the complete run of the magazine.

With the facts established, I went ahead and scanned the magazines. Since these are staple-bound, we were able to rebind them after scanning, and we also have sealed duplicates in case we ever need a backup copy for some reason.

On the one hand, I wanted to share this because these are fun unusual magazines. To my knowledge, this is the first and only mention of Keke Palmer in our digital library. It's also the first place I've ever seen a mention of the game Petz: Monkeyz House, which is a top 10 video game title if I've ever heard one.

But the more I thought about it, this is the kind of work that VGHF is in a unique place to be able to do. Not only were we able to show up to Ubisoft's office at the last minute and grab these magazines, but we were also able to take the time to figure out how and when these were distributed, then scan them and make them available for research. We benefit from the unique set of skills we have here at VGHF, but also from the flexibility to work on projects like this that's granted to us by our independence. Specifically, we appreciate that the folks on this Patreon trust us to work on whatever we think is necessary to get our jobs done.

Sometimes, that means digging up lost video games and prototypes. But other times, we just need to sit down for an hour or two to document an obscure magazine so that no one ever has to ask questions about it again.

The complete run of Imagine Town Magazine is now available in our digital library!