Word Play: The Evolution of Game Journalism
6/23/2008 5:56 PM | 2 Comments | Page 5 of 10
Steve Kent
Status: I 'used to' a lot of things, Prudence ...
With the videogame crash and the rise of home computers, all of the early videogame magazines died and went away.
Game Journalism, the Next Generation
In 1985, Nintendo of America began test marketing its Nintendo Entertainment System in New York just in time for the holidays. The tests were an immoderate success, and by 1987, the industry had taken root all anew. In many ways, the American home game industry grew out of the ashes of what had gone before.
When Nintendo needed a distribution network, it hired Worlds of Wonder, the company that gave the world a talking teddy bear named Teddy Ruxpin and a consumer version of Laser Tag. Nintendo went to Worlds of Wonder for a very simple reason: The company was founded by Atari expatriates, men with connections in the retail world who understood the games business. After struggling for several years, Nintendo, Namco, SEGA and Konami reestablished themselves.
But the gaming world had changed. Once an American industry, it now was dominated by Japanese companies. Atari still existed, but it was diminished and divided. Activision had moved on to computer games.
Katz, Kunkel and Worley were still around as well. Sensing a comeback, they approached Lee Pappas, publisher of ANALOG, with an idea for a magazine they called Computer Entertainment and Video Games. Pappas bought into their idea and published the magazine in 1988, but he switched the name around and called his magazine Video Games and Computer Entertainment. He did, however, hire the team of Katz, Kunkel and Worley to write a large section of that new magazine.
Conceived by Katz, Kunkel and Worley, Video Games & Computer Entertainment was the first magazine run not by a journalist, but by a gamer -- two-time
Battlezone record-holder Andy Eddy. (Photo credit: Games.net)
Though he did not edit the first issue of VG&CE, a hardcore game enthusiast named Andy Eddy soon took the helm.
Unlike the KKW gang, Eddy was not a journalist by trade. He worked for a television cable company in Connecticut. He knew games, however. A two-time
Battlezone record-holder, Andy Eddy knew the gaming world cold.
Taking a chance that a man with a background in gaming might know what appeals to gamers better than a trained journalist, Larry Flynn Productions hired Eddy as the executive editor of VG&CE.
Other magazines soon appeared on the market. In 1989, a group of entrepreneurial gamers designed a magazine called GamePro which they distributed as a giveaway through Toys"R"Us. They hoped to attract a publisher and they got one. IDG bought them out and published the second issue.
"In a nutshell, GamePro basically started in a garage," says Eddy. "The reason for all of the crazy bylines and cartoony names [that are now signature to the masthead] was was so that the three or four people working on the magazine would not have their picture on every other page."
Dr. David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family
About that time, a magazine called Game Players came out of North Carolina, a publishing hub in the field of high technology. Over in Chicago, Steve Harris, who broke into journalism writing for Roger Sharpe at Video Games started a magazine called Electronic Games Monthly (EGM). His magazine was such a success that, two years later, after meeting Bill Kunkel at a Consumer Electronics Show, Harris decided to back Katz, Kunkel and Worley with the relaunch of Electronic Games.
