Around the time I first got involved in the general Game Maker community in 2007–2008, downloadable PDF magazines were for some reason the new hot thing that everyone and his grandmother were doing. The quality varied, many of them died after one issue and all of them are long gone nowadays (with the potential exception of my incomplete archive).

One such magazine was Russell’s Quarterly, and it was different from the rest. The pages were not glossy or full of pretty pictures – rather, each issue consisted of close to a hundred pages of detailed, vigorously thought-out articles about game design, pontificating on everything from religion in games to the mechanics of boss battles, all written by a guy called Tom Russell. Later issues featured a few articles from one or two contributors, but Russell still wrote the bulk.

Sadly, he had to stop working on the magazine due to real-life commitments, and so only five issues were ever published, spanning a little over a year. In time, even the links to the PDFs expired, and eventually you couldn’t download Russell’s Quarterly anywhere.

I still had them on my hard drive, though. I’ve read every issue cover-to-cover countless times, and I want them to be available somewhere so others can read and learn from them. So I’ve put them up on my personal Google Drive. Here are the links:

I’ve also uploaded all of these issues to the Internet Archive here.

I should mention that two of my old games are reviewed in issues 3 and 5 – that probably plays a small role in my fondness for the magazine.

# Addendum (2019-03-04)

I recently received an email from Tom Russell.

I just wanted to drop you a note to thank you for saving these, and to give you my enthusiastic “yes!” to continuing to make them available.

He’s not involved in GameMaker anymore, but he and his wife run a company called Hollandspiele, which develops and publishes niche board games about a variety of serious and historical topics.