Word Play: The Evolution of Game Journalism

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

And the field kept growing.

It was at about this time that video- and computer game coverage got their first voice on television. Though news shows had been running the occasional game story for over a decade, a few pioneers began making regular features around this time.

Steve Baxter, a cameraman working for KIRO, a Seattle-area CBS affiliate, contacted a cable program called PCTV about covering games and wound up becoming a regular part of the show.

"My PCTV work lasted about two years and then they changed their format. Entertainment software reviews no longer fit into what they were doing so they told me that they no longer had any need for my services," says Baxter, who had never left his full-time job with KIRO.

Shortly after things fell apart with PCTV, Baxter landed in an even better situation when he began reviewing games for "CNN Futurewatch" on the side.

"They already had a correspondent in Southeast Asia who would do an occasional videogame bit. I think he was stationed in Thailand.

"I would do on average two to four reviews per month. It wasn't always weekly, but it was pretty close to that."

On the magazine side, a California retailer specializing in import games started a magazine called Diehard Game Fan. Minnesota-based Funco, a company with both phone order and retail stores, began publishing a magazine called Game Informer. The first editor-in-chief of Game Informer was Elizabeth Olson, who still works in the videogames industry. When she left, she was replaced by Andy McNamara, who still edits the magazine to this day.

Later, in 1994, English-based Edge Magazine exported its style and content to the United States in form a Rolling Stone-like publication called Next Generation. Led by a hard-driven Brit named Neil West, this ground-breaking magazine pushed designers and game company executives for direct answers during interviews, often challenging the company line. Next Generation exposed its readers the hardcore inner world of gaming. In short, Next Generation covered videogames in an "edgy" new way.

For the most part, the people writing for all of the new gaming publications got along because they all shared the same obsession for videogames. There were however, two exceptions.

Breakaway Stars

If asked which publication made their lives the most miserable, most second-generation game journalists would agree that the problem child in the pack was Nintendo Power.

"Nintendo never published their circulation numbers, but I think everyone assumed that Nintendo Power was the biggest magazine out there," says Andy McNamara, editor-in-chief of Game Informer.

"It wasn't a magazine, it was a catalog," complains one early journalist who preferred to speak off the record.

"There was no competing against it because it was an in-house magazine," says Eddy.

Nintendo Power was the work of Gail Tilden, an early employee of Nintendo of America. Tilden was on the Nintendo team that launched the NES in New York in 1985, a group that included many of the company's top brass. The New York merchandizing team landed at Newark Airport during a hurricane, approached to store owners cold, set up store displays all through the night, and earned their way into the highest echelons of the Nintendo elite. As a member of that team, Tilden had the ear and loyalty of Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln, the top men in Nintendo's American operation.