“The problem was I couldn’t decide on a single game that encapsulated that blue skies ethos. So eventually I decided that a series of postcards featuring different Sega games would be a fun way to let people choose and create their own front cover design,” says Mikolai. And that’s where Will ‘Devil’s Blush’ Stevenson comes in. “I’d been a fan of this work since I first came across it a few years back. He takes these amazing, scanline heavy images of classic video games. His images really capture the crunchy details of older games and often recontextualise them,” says Mikolai. Featuring these art works, Forgotten Worlds has four double sided postcards with a die-cut front cover design that lets you switch them out with a variety of Sega blue skies.
Mikolai argues that magazines are, at least in part, a response to the “increasingly horrible, online experience we all have to deal with” – AI slop, pop-up banner ads, SEO rubbish and the dead internet theory. “We’ve almost broken this amazing thing we invented,” says Mikolai. “As the world moves faster and gets more chaotic, there’s something nostalgic and comforting about sitting down with a coffee and a physical magazine you can read. The name Forgotten Worlds was chosen because it implies a world that we have left behind.” Hoping to recreate the optimism that the wider culture once had for the future – as seen in 80s movies (with their flying cars and utopian cityscapes and whatnot) – Forgotten Worlds brings back fond memories and allows us to take a step back from the noise of the online and return to a pixellated, but clear-eyed, vision of happiness.