Here's a good article about it.

I don't know if any of you remember this, but Zillions was a kids' magazine published by the same group as Consumer Reports, which you might have heard of. I still have a stack of issues from the heyday of Zillions (1993-1999), and they were actually pretty cool. Yesterday I spent a few minutes going through old issues. While some of these topics are hilariously dated (like the reviews of primitive text-messaging devices), a lot of the content has held up quite nicely. It's probably been about 15 years since I'd browsed through these issue, and the nuggets of 90s pop culture were fun to look at. There were some extremely talented artists contributing for the magazine, something that I only partially appreciated when I first read them.

Unlike other kids' magazines of that era, Zillions dispensed practical and useful financial advice to young people - advice that has influenced me to this day! It was also a rarity among publications aimed at the 8-14 age range in that actually assumed that its audience was capable of critical, rational thought, instead of overly dumbing down material to the lowest common denominator. In recent years there's been a lot of talk about the need to teach basic financial skills to youth, and Zillions did this better than anything else I've ever seen.

Like so many other print publications, the Internet was the downfall of Zillions. The kids' letters to the editor lagged behind by several months (sometimes even years!), which was one of the biggest weaknesses inherent to the industry when the Internet facilitated instant access to information. Publication stopped in summer 2000, which was shortly after I last read a new issue. I understand why the magazine folded, but the world would be a better place if we had a similar magazine - whether in print or digital format - today.

Does anyone else remember this magazine? There doesn't seem to be much written about this magazine online, but it was a fairly popular - and useful - publication in its time.

i don't think i ever read this, but i thought money was a boring topic as a kid. (hell, talking about finance is a sure way to get my eyes to roll back in my head at 25.) this does look like something i would have been able to obtain through the school library, though. if they did tech like texting devices, did they do gaming at all? kids like that, i think.

i subscribed to boys life as a kid and nintendo power up until a couple years before it finished running. this is neither here nor there, but i remember this guy i knew comparing nintendo power to fox news, as if the systematic brainwashing put out by fox news was in any way comparable to a bias towards nintendo. (okay, i'm kidding about the "systematic brainwashing" thing.)
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Edited by: fireball3k, May 20th, 2015 @ 1:43 pm

Zillions had a fair amount of gaming stuff. They'd review a lot of the most popular games (besides music, movies, TV, and books), and they'd review every new console that came out. They were usually pretty good about reviewing new consoles early in their lifespan, despite being a bimonthly magazine.

Most Zillions readers probably read the magazine in school libraries, although subscribers could get it delivered in the mail (and it was remarkably inexpensive for a magazine with no advertising).

I got quite a few magazines during my younger days. I haven't taken the time to flip through the old magazines that I still have, but I have a feeling that Zillions held up better than any of the non-gaming publications.

for what it's worth, boys' life was a total yawnfest. it was tied in with the boy scouts, which meant it was about the great outdoors and nothing else, basically. probably not that interesting now to me even given that i like my camp in corydon, but definitely not interesting to a kid whose ambition in life was to fool with computers

one of my favorite not-gaming magazines was disney adventures, which was this handbook-sized magazine that (obviously) disney published. it was mostly about disney movies and pop music, but it also had comic strips and such in it. yeah, i know, some people are going to call this soulless corporate brainwashing given that this is disney we're talking about, but for the rest of us, it was a lot of fun to read. it didn't hurt that a lot of the talent featured in the magazine was hot women like amanda bynes, britney spears, christina aguilera, and others i'm probably forgetting.