Video: Here's A Nostalgic Look At Official Xbox Magazine Demo Discs

I have a lot of nostalgia for demo discs. I still have them with my OG Xbox & PS2 collection.

@Solidchief I'd love to collect a bunch! Sadly, I only have a few lying around

I had a stack of these a mile high until I moved from my mom's and she threw them, along with all my OXMs, away.

@Kezelpaso You can get them on Ebay for a cheap price if you really wanted to.

I've got tons of demo discs and mags for various consoles. I got loads of those little cheat books as well!

Man, figuring out the button pattern, to play the demo of metal wolf chaos, was a moment I remember fondly.

I still have every copy of the Official Xbox Magazine from issue 1 through to about 175 (I think the magazine had stopped in about 2018 here in the UK), and I also have every one of the demo discs that came with them too. Just couldn't bring myself to throw them away...

Some memories there yes indeed! I still have the beta kit the headset NFL Fever and Moto GP disc's. Still have all the demo discs and their sleeves packed up. But my OG X Box is still working and hooked up to the tv. I had to take it apart and replace the disc drive but it still works! But yeah Demos are still a thing I like. I check the demos tab on the store frequently it just isn't what it used to be as a feature.

Wow that’s brought back memories buying that magazine each month, showing me age 😂

Definitely miss the magazines. There was just something special about flicking through the carefully curated pages of a games mag every month, especially when you know the valiant efforts the writers and editors went to in getting it printed on time. And, not to say there aren't good people doing good stuff out there today, the writers and content were so much better than the dross you often find on the internet these days.

RIP Xbox World, PSM, N-Gamer, GamesMaster and all of the official mags.

Voted for the magazine but I wanted to also vote for Game Manuals.
I caught this video yesterday and I was so bummed they didn't also play the Hunter The Reckoning video that was on the disc.

I think of the whole magazine era as the golden age for gaming. It was basically in it's peak from the PS1 through PS2 era for me. It just seems like the journalism was so much better when everyone spent a month coming up with all the latest stories and reviews and packing them into a single magazine, made for a good read.

I also loved the demo discs of course, I remember subscribing to numerous magazines or asking my parents to buy a magazine at the supermarket or something just so I could play the demo discs included, I think the PS and Xbox magazines are the ones I did that for. Back in the PS1 era it was one of the really cool things about thing a Playstation gamer, all the N64 guys had no access to demos due to the nature of how big, expensive, and limited cartridges were. Discs were always relatively cheap to make and barely took up any space with a cheap disc cover or just loosely placing it in the plastic wrap or something. I remember sometimes some kids would just steal them out of the plastic, so I would have to find one that didn't have the disc stolen.

Back in an era when there was no way to download games and the only games I could play were the ones I saved up for with my allowance, it was incredible to play a wide variety of games in the form of these demo discs. Heck I would even love to have sorta demo disc downloads today, but it seems like GamePass has largely eliminated the need for such a thing.

I have quite a few of those demo disks. Loved those disks and I loved the magazines. I’d look to see what was up and coming and get really excited. Then there would be the few that would get cancelled but the magazines never mentioned it. One in particular I can remember was a game called “The Unseen.” Kind of a fitting name for a game that completely vanished.

The rush of going out to my mailbox anticipating a new issue and actually seeing it was everything!
The news of finding out what amazing new demos were going to be playable, the smell of a new magazine in your hands was an experience I wish that never left us. For fans like me who grew up before the digital age, this new age where practically anything can be done online is a hard thing to accept.

I still have the demo discs from and most of the mags from when I subscribed to OXM. Miss that stuff as well as getting proper manuals with games.

I was a PlayStation owner up to the 360. Then i jumped into that. I used to subscribe to Power magazine for PlayStation, then 360 gamer magazine for Xbox. Used to love mags. Miss manuals too. Nothing like buying a new game then riding home in bus, reading the book to get hyped for it. Good times

With so many great indie print mags out there - Ninth Fresh, Sega Mania, Sega Powered, Fusion etc - I am surprised no one has got an Xbox mag on the go. There is still a print PlayStation magazine on shelves and I would love a new Xbox magazine bug no one seems to do one. A real shame that. Sites like her are great bug they are no replacement for the days of print media which was always best and remains best IMO. No offence intended.

Funny enough, there are a fair few people that comment on these forums (not this article, at present) that are on my friends list on the the Xbox that I met through reading the Official Xbox Magazine and their online forums. Seems so long ago now...

I turn a few pages every now and then, decide not to throw those old magazines away, but it’s a time that passed… and I’m fine with it. They were sooo expensive though. Buying UK mags just for some discs… I live in Sweden.

My best psychical disc memory though has to be standing in line for StarCraft 2, back when games launched in brick-n-mortar stores at midnight, people camped out in the street and the queue went around a few blocks and had some key devs signing copies and cosplay competitions etc… riding the late bus I VNC back to my computer at home, punch in the CD-key and pre-load it before I got home. Back when Twitter was fresh I used to text SMS message-tweets, heh. Been a few wonky setups full geek mode Would never sleep in the street for entertainment media, but hype was real back in the day hurr-hurr… Xbox related; buying the minor unknown title Crackdown just for beta access to Halo 3 and then finding it so fun I missed a few classes

OH you're breaking my heart. So many fond memories. I had a continuous subscription since '02 or '03 time frame until it transitioned to digital and then died. Even on my mil deployments, my wife would ship me my OXM with letters and cookies. Yet I always traveled with my slimline PS2 because that was so much smaller and easier to transport.

@NahImgood Xbox don’t have exclusive content? Sony are making loads for the PlayStation. I don’t get your point and there appears to be a realm of fantasy in your comments. Plenty of Xbox gamers so why shouldn’t there be an Xbox magazine? It would be chocked full of games. The PlayStation mag is pretty thin on gaming content.