Discovering an amazing new resource to dig into for video game or anime history is always an exciting prospect for me. I spend at least an hour a day trawling through the internet, casting a fishing net of curiosity out into the digital oceans and hoping for a juicy catch. It’s honestly a bit of a high when I strike gold, so perhaps (in part) I’m chasing that thrill too.

A couple of months ago, I reeled in a whopper of a catch: Dokan Magazine.

A Slice of Spanish-language Fandom

I can only find scant information on Dokan. Published by Ares Informática SL, which also published Minami magazine, the magazine ran from 1998 to 2004. This in itself is a pretty exciting window of anime fandom covering most of the 2000s Anime Bubble. It also serves as a wonderful resource for getting a perspective on Spanish and Latin American anime and manga fandom during that time.

I have a single issue of Dokan, picked up late last year in a bundle of magazines. At first, I concentrated on the magazine itself, digging into scans of other issues on the Internet Archive. But then one day, I looked more closely at a particular page.

I think I initially mistook it to be an ad for something you could buy. But then it clicked with me that they were showcasing the contents of a CD that had once been taped to its cover, which then sent me looking for uploads of that particular issue’s disc. And I was overjoyed to find that it and a great many other Dokan CDs had been uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Digital Delves in Windows 98

I always enjoy using contemporary hardware or software when digging into something like this. So, I turned to one of the Windows 98 setups I have on DOSBox and PC-Em.

My fluency in Spanish is spotty, but I knew Ejectuar means ‘Execute’, so that felt like the first natural step after the CD auto-run kicked in. Then you’re presented with one of my favourite things in the whole wide world: tactile in-universe interfaces.

Hit the power button, and the lights of this control room will turn on, the screen will light up, and Dokan’s mascot will greet you with a cheery smile – and a colourful menu.

This already had me grinning like a silly fool as I hadn’t anticipated anything this flashy and characterful. From here we have six choices: Juke Box, Otaku Webs, Video, E-Manga, Art Gallery, and Made in Japan.

Let’s work our way down the list, though I will be saving ‘Otaku Webs’ for last.

Juke Box

Here we have nested audio files in MP3 and MP2 (remember that? No?) format. To play them, you click one and then hit the red plunger lever below the slowly flashing red lamp. It’ll then open them up in your default Media Player. Winamp for me, in this case. Being the massive Escaflowne fan I am, I immediately fired up the opening. Which turned out to be the ending theme, but hey, nobody’s perfect.

The MP2 audio file is 32kb 44000 mono, so it had quite the AM radio hiss and crunch to it. The MP3s are generally much clearer and sport a higher bit rate.

It brought back memories of my early hunts for anime music on the internet, though generally I stuck to MIDI files due to their much smaller size, plus the fact that I don’t think my first Windows PC could play MP3 files.

Out of curiosity, I fired up the very last Dokan CD from 2004, number 76(!), to see what kind of music I’d find in its jukebox. By this time, the presentation of the CDs has been simplified, and there are only four categories. I was pleased to find Beyond the Bounds from Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner in its ‘Musica’ section, though!

Video

Returning to Dokan 4 and 1998, I dove eagerly into its video section. Getting video clips of anything back then was exciting!

It’s a hearty selection of what you might expect from the time: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Patlabor, Sailor Moon. But there’s also Saint Seiya/Knights of the Zodiac, which was particularly popular in parts of continental Europe and Latin America.

e-Manga

What a delightfully of-the-time title! e-Manga takes several slightly different forms across the Dokan discs, but at their core, they’re Shockwave-based, offline web-page manga readers and scanlations.

Some of the ‘e-manga’ are more like motion comics with dynamic transitions, while most are simple flip-through-the-pages affairs – familiar to anyone who has read manga on scanlation sites way back when. I couldn’t get the ones included in Dokan 4 to work properly, so the snaps above are taken from disc 8.

Be aware that some of the manga may be of an erotic and/or horror-based nature if you go digging, and that no warnings are given as to their nature.

Gallery

Now, here’s something that I would have loved back then: hundreds of pieces of scanned/digital artwork! Here in Dokan 4, we’ve got oodles of Magic Knight Rayearth and The Vision of Escaflowne – one of my favourites!

The images can be accessed directly on the disc, or you can view them in a slideshow via a viewer opened by the red plunger.

Dokan 4’s gallery is a random grab-bag of anime cels, scans, screencaps, and scans of calendar artwork from a sizeable selection of shows from Slayers and Sailor Moon to Blue Seed and Escaflowne.

Note: erotic/nude images may also appear without warning in these galleries, reflecting the casual acceptance of nudity in media in parts of continental Europe.

Made in Japan

When I first read this title, I anticipated that perhaps we’d get snaps and overviews of fan creations or official merchandise, but nope, at least for Dokan 4, this section is full of screensavers, desktop themes, and MP3 software. Also included on this disc is Wkiss, a ‘dress up doll’ program which seems focused more on stripping the anime girls of their clothes.

For anyone running a retro PC or virtual machine and who would like some old desktop themes without hunting around for them, these discs are an excellent resource.

Otaku Webs

I’ve saved the best for last (or at least what I consider the best!) with the Otaku Webs section. These are, without a doubt, the core features that make Dokan an immensely important resource for web history archaeologists and enthusiasts like myself: fully preserved fan sites.

Anyone who has spent any length of time trawling scrapes of websites on Wayback Machine, like I have, understands the pain of coming across cool websites with malfunctioning and missing elements. To find a fully intact scrape is always something of a red-letter day. Here in Dokan, every web element, banner, GIF, and internal link is present and functions. Use a retro PC or VM with the appropriate resolution Windows 95/98 desktop (800×600, 1024×768 recommended), and you’re once again browsing the late 90s web 100% as it appeared to people then.

I let out a yelp of joy the first time I clicked one of the links and a fully preserved website loaded up. For web historians with a focus on anime/manga fandom, this is a motherlode.

With the Internet Archive sporadically under threat, it’s things like these that could represent our best archives of the web as it was and anime/manga fandom in a particular window of time.

In Conclusion

I’m still so happy I’ve become aware of Dokan’s CDs. All thanks to the random inclusion of an issue in a magazine bundle! They’re absolute treats and timepieces. Continental European and Latin American anime and manga fandom is something that should also be explored and appreciated more, too, and I hope to discover regional equivalents of Dokan elsewhere.

Dokan discs can be found in abundance on the Internet Archive, and long may they be preserved there. But I urge you to make your own local copies, just in case, and to dig into them yourself!