Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2011

Back when the Twin Towers still featured on the Big Apple’s skyline, Windows XP was the latest rage in operating systems and Roppongi Hills was just a model in Hiroo Mori’s office, a significant event occurred to rock Tokyo’s publication world. Tokyo Classified, launched in 1994 by Mark and Mary Devlin, changed its name to Metropolis and took the city by storm. Now, in a new section, we take a trip back to the future as our editors select some highlights (and possibly lowlights) from past issues.

To kick off our Retro Metro feature, we went searching for Metropolis Issue #1 and found that in the short span of a decade, our office had changed just as significantly as this city. We were backing up issues on 230MB, 3.5″ MO disks rather than our own servers, and making calls on our J-Phone keitai. In our first Metropolis issue, writer Stuart Braun presented readers with a look at Tokyo’s designs on being the city of the future—complete with an artist’s view of Roppongi Hills.

Eminem was headlining the Fuji Rock Festival, Richie Hawtin was playing Liquid Room, Maniac Love was in its prime, Don Morton was attacking Pearl Harbor and Dr. Doolittle 2 and the “Personals” still contained four pages of the funniest reading in the magazine.

So go ahead and click on our downloadable “mini mag” to find out what Mori was thinking as he redrew Roppongi’s map, and gawp at some tech breakthroughs that really show how long a decade is these days. Let us know what you think in the comments; maybe there is a year or issue in Tokyo Classifieds or Metropolis that particularly interests you. We’ll see what we can dig out of the archives for Retro Metro.