I mean back in the day, when there was still some variety--the 80s and (early?) 90s. I used to read, in descending order of regularity:

White Dwarf (before it became a Warhammer zine)
JTAS
Dragon
Imagine
Different Worlds
--insert big hiatus between circa 1988 and 2002--
Dedalus (edited by what's his face, author of Dust Devils)

... and one more I can't remember.

I'm sure some us are hardcore enough to own a full run of A&E?

What was that thing called that Andrew Rilstone ran in the 90s? That sounded really good.

Arcane was Rilstone's mag, and very good it was too.

I also bought:

White Dwarf - Pre-GW mouthpiece issues only.

Imagine - Superb TSR UK publication that primarily dealt with D&D.

Valkyrie - Decent UK magazine that fell on its arse a few years ago.

Dragon - Up until the release of AD&D 2e I loved it.

Only one I ever really read was the Rifter.  

By the time I came around, there really weren't any gaming magazines left except the entirely D&D-centric Dungeon/Dragon (which my game store didn't carry anyway), and White Dwarf, which was just an extended advertisment for Warhammer.  It was fun as a kid for the pretty pictures of minis, but basically worthless.  

The Rifter came out when I was still actually playing Rifts/Palladium, so it was at least half interesting because of that.

I used to read InQuest religiously.  I pored over its Magic card encyclopedia until I memorized every card printed before Mirage.

The writing was juvenile, insulting and calculated to sell to boys my age and younger.  It was the RPG magazine equivalent of a Pepsi commercial, except with all the editorial coherency of Steve Justa's High Plains Heavy Metal Iron Master Newsletter.  Early column writer Rick Swan spent three months bringing up his college roommate and young daughter before settling in for a long winter's night of jokes about older sisters.  A Letter from the Editor both excerpted The Notebooks of Lazarus Long and used the term "mundanes" without a hint of irony, winding up one "waffer theen meent" quote away from the Geek Hat Trick that would have awakened Twilight, the Worldcutting Sword.  One article, ostensibly about the history of the succubus, railed against the establishment of a sex offender database.

The lone high point I can look back on was the open feud the editorial staff had with Raven CS McCracken.  You had distilled batshit insanity on one side and writers who held to the geek equivalent of Seventeen's editorial guidelines on the other.  It was like watching lobotomy patients play legless dogs in rugby.  You can decide who was who.

InQuest and the thirteen-year-old-fucktard gaming culture it sold like so many packs of Spellfire were the reasons I walked away from RPGs to go play high school football.  In 1999 I used my collection of issues as tinder for a bonfire.

Nowadays I mostly use IQ as fodder for threads like these.

I've got almost every issue of Arcane, that was a good one.

I used to get Dragon every month, until Arcane came along, or possibly the newsagent just stopped stocking it. It wasn't terribly good, but as the only game in town for me at the time, it was worth getting even though I never owned D&D in any version.

I started with Dragon in '81; got that for a couple of years. I had a few issues of White Dwarf too. But they both shot themselves in the foot, because it was them that sold me RQ. So then I started getting Different Worlds and Wyrm's Footnotes, until I stopped buying gaming mags altogether in about '86.

I also had (still have) an almost complete run of Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society.

The best of them all:

Challenge Magazine.

Twilight:2000
MegaTraveller
Dark Conspiracy
Space:1888
Cyberpunk
Battletech
Star Wars

all in one Mag

I forgot to include Warpstone in my earlier post. As single-system mags go it's nigh unbeatable.

White dwarf during the late 80's when I started to really get into GW.
Games Master and then Games Master International when I realised there was a bigger world out there and it didn't only involve Warhammer.
Then Role player Independent followed by Valkyrie.

I tried Arcane but by the time it got good it had folded.

I miss that there isn't a decent rpg mag i can buy; i guess the internet has killed any such prospect, i'd much rather read a mag.

The only gaming magazine I ever got much out of was the double-digit issue numbers of Dragon. I've bought spot issues of other gaming rags up to the present day, but only for the actual content - not because the mag itself inspired me.

White Dwarf and Dragon in the early 80's.  I got a lot of good gaming ideas from W.D.

I read a lot of Shadis, up until the mag started falling apart both on the page and in my hands.  

I'm very fond of 1980s Dragon, and would like to have the full run of arcane, as I found it very good stuff.

For those of you (both of you) who were, like me, fans of "It Was A Time of Darkness", which ran in the back of arcane until they inexplicably decided to replace it with a scene-for-scene recreation of Die Hard but with gnomes (no, seriously), you may be pleased to know that IWATOD in its entirety and original form is available on the author's website at http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/comments/JN/darkness1.html

The first episode's not much cop, but it gets better.

Dragon and Dungeon, Polyhedron, Roleplayer. I use to start pining for Dragon when it's receipt would get near, then disappear until I'd read it cover to cover, adds and all.

I have issue 100 of Dragon around here somewhere.

There still is Polymancer and Rifter.