“You can’t keep old copies of Dragonmagazine forever,” my wife has told me any number of times, referring collectively to my two-decades-worth of that publication, along with vintage copies of Wargamer’s Digest, White Dwarf, and any number of similar journals dating back to the early 1970s.

On the face of it, her statement could not be more true and has a certain sublime elegance to it. Even if I were to achieve some form of physical immortality, my old gaming publications most assuredly would not last forever. Eventually, maybe after decades — or centuries if they were exceptionally well-taken-care-of — the pages of these magazines would become brittle, break apart, eventually disintegrate, their atoms becoming dispersed. Even if they were preserved in some electronic format, perhaps for millennia, all things eventually come to an end, and they could not be expected to survive the inevitable destruction of our world, the death-throes of our sun, the collapse of our universe. (Although sometimes I suspect my wife is not being nearly the physicist or philosopher I give her credit for and is really just saying that she doesn’t want me to keep this stuff around any longer.) No, you certainly can’t keep old copies of Dragon magazine forever … But why is it that so many of us want to keep our favorite gaming magazines as long as we can? I think it is because of the positive feelings we got when we opened up those classic magazines, often during our young and formative years as gamers.

When I opened new issues of some of the classic magazines I used to read back in the 1980s, I used to find useful articles that supported the games that I played; fun articles that tied in with games I didn’t play but that inspired me to try them or to adapt the articles to the ones I did; self-standing games of various sorts; and universal resources that could be enjoyed on their own or applied to many sorts of games. Those publications had many voices, many games, and many companies represented, and that is what made them fun an useful. When they disappeared and became or were replaced by one-company, one-game magazines, many of us simply stopped buying such publications.

Creating something that evoked similar positive feelings in the gamers of today, something that would be as broadly useful and enjoyable to them, has been the primary goal behind the development of d-Infinity(and, if you immediately “get” the title, then you can be sure that this publication was created for you!).