Word Play: The Evolution of Game Journalism

6/23/2008 5:56 PM | 2 Comments | Page 4 of 10

"A little bit later, when Activision came into the field long with IMAGIC and a few others, it became clear that this was going to become a major new hobby."

In the summer of 1981, Katz and company approached a magazine publisher named Jay Rosenthal with the idea of starting a magazine dedicated to videogames. The result was Electronic Games.

"We tried a one-up called Electronic Games Magazine. It did so well when it came out that they bumped it up to quarterly. By the third issue, it was bi-monthly. By the fourth issue, it was monthly," says Katz.

"I was associate editor and editor-in-chief, Bill was executive editor, and Joyce was the managing editor."

Other magazines such as Joystick and Video Games soon moved in to compete.

The first editor of Video Games was Steve Bloom, who, like Katz, Kunkel and Worley, was a New York native.

Bloom, who went on to write one of the first books on the history of videogames -- "Video Invaders," appears to have been attracted to videogames as an extension of pop culture. The man who replaced Bloom was Roger Sharpe, the columnist who brought videogames to GQ.

A former freelancer for Katz at Electronic Games, Sharpe continued contributing to Electronic Games. Even after he took the reins at Video Games, Sharpe still penned an occasional article for Electronic Games using the pseudonym Jay Carter.

"I did not feel any rivalry. I think we all believed that the world could sustain all of us because we approached the industry differently," says Sharpe. "The only time there was a rivalry was when we began publishing 'Player's Choice Awards' to compete with the 'Editors' Choice' awards offered by Electronic Games. We ran a poll and published reader awards whereas Electronic Games had their staff making the decisions. I was idiotic enough to question how many people would send in."

These were formative times in gaming, and the journalists of the day helped. When you hear familiar gaming terms such as "side-scroller," "Easter egg" and "maze chase," these were terms coined by the journalists of the day and adopted throughout the industry.

Sharpe calls those early days the "salad days," but by 1984 the salad days ended. In 1982, Atari spent over $20 million securing the rights to the movie "E.T." The game was a disaster. At the end of 1982, Atari reported that it had not reached its earnings projections causing a crisis on the stock market.

Over the next two years, Mattel would drop out of the game industry, Coleco would give up on games and concentrate on its Cabbage Patch Doll business, and the home game business would all but disappear. Electronic Games, Joystick and Video Games all closed as well. Roger Sharpe left magazines, but not the game industry. He was hired by Bally Midway and continues to work in the industry to this day.

"I had anticipated the collapse of the industry," says Katz who recognized the rise of companies like Commodore and tried to adjust. "Unfortunately our publishing company did not want to embrace computer games software as a focal point of the magazine."