Pick up any magazine, and by its nature, it’ll have a cover story. It could be anything from a review of a groundbreaking new product to a profile of a famous individual to coverage of a recent event.
Juiced.GS publishes all these kinds of stories and more, but there’s one story that’s uncommon in our pages: the feature. The subjects of feature stories can be as diverse as any cover story, but what distinguishes them are original research, many interviews, and the tying together of several disparate threads into a long story that’s in-depth yet of broad interest.
That’s not something that Juiced.GS has done much of, which is why the cover story of our March issue is so exciting. It takes a topic familiar to all retrocomputing enthusiasts users — text adventures — and examines its evolution not only on the Apple II but on other classic and modern hardware, looking at the triumphs and challenges the genre has faced both thirty years ago and today. Everyone from Eamon Adventurer’s Guild founder Tom Zuchowski to current-day interactive fiction spokesperson Andrew Plotkin spoke to Juiced.GS on this subject, resulting in a comprehensive review of the IF scene.
Juiced.GS has a taxonomy by which stories are filed, such as MusinGS (interviews), Cover ][ Cover (book reviews), and My Home Page (editorial). I scrolled through the Juiced.GS index, trying to find an existing category for this cover story. The closest matches I could find were the unimaginative “Cover story” or, in one instance, the similarly uninspired “Feature”.
As we hope to publish more feature stories, the staff decided to create a new genre of Juiced.GS article: “Apple Core”. These stories are meaty, in-depth pieces that go to the heart of what it means to be an Apple II user with elements to which all Juiced.GS readers can relate. As Apple Cores may require more research than, say, a subjective review or a one-on-one interview, we’ll be limited to publishing one or two Apple Cores a year.
As always, we welcome your feedback on this direction as well as your suggestions for additional topics to pursue under this banner. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the first Apple Core.
… but this story won’t be the first thing you notice about the new issue.
It’s nearly the end of the calendar year’s first quarter, which can mean only one thing: another issue of Juiced.GS has shipped to all domestic and international subscribers!