I love how Thrasher is offering for free the ability to download back issues of Thrasher in JPEG form. 1987 was probably the second year of me skateboarding I recognize a couple of the Thrasher covers that I purchased back then, funny how they stick in your mind…I had the “Firepick” issue and the last one of the year with Eddie Reategui on the cover. I must have looked at those mags over and over again as if they were the Bible of skateboarding. Funny because I don’t do that now as an adult, I’ll look through a skatemag 2 or 3 times and then I’m ready for another issue….I guess the reality is there is soooo much free media on skateboarding that you can get online now and that is primarily what I look at. 
Back in the 80s…I had an Apple IIe computer, but I didn’t have a skateboard game that I remember. I had a local tiny bmx/skate shop in Bellevue, Nebraska run out of this sketchy warehouse behind some oil stacks and the owner “Earl” would rent the skate videos he recieved and I remember all the time and effort it took to hook two VCR’s together so I could make my own copies of Powell Peralta’s “Future Primitive” and “Search For Animal Chin” or H-Street’s Shackle Me Not, Santa Cruz’s videos “Wheels of Fire, Streets of Fire and Speed Freaks” and probably the last one I copied was Blind’s “Video Days” from 1991 I think….That was pretty much my last year of skateboarding and I already wasn’t skating as much I used too. I know I didn’t get to copy all those vids as some of them had copy protection on them so all I ended up with was a bunch of squigly lines.
So, really all you had back then as far as skateboarding media was the few videos there were and the skateboard magazines you could afford to buy as a kid. I’m sure if those Thrasher Magazines are still on my bookshelf at my parents house, they are probably missing so many pages that I taped onto my bedroom wall.
