Word Play: The Evolution of Game Journalism

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Under Tilden, Nintendo Power was an effective, visually stimulating tool for promoting Nintendo and its products. This was one magazine where layout came first and writing came second -- literally and literarily. Writers were routinely given laid-out pages to fill instead of stories to write. The pages would be covered with text boxes. Instead of assigning writers word counts for their articles, the editors at Nintendo Power told their writers how many letters would fit in each of the text boxes.

Most journalists at the time felt that Nintendo Power was an extended advertorial, but Tilden and her staff worked hard create a high-quality publication. While its competitors struggled to raise their circulations past 300,000 or 400,000 readers, Nintendo Power's subscription base was over 1 million.

But Tilden pressed her advantages in ways that squeezed the competition. She insisted on exclusive first looks at any game coming out from Nintendo and sometimes pressed third-party publishers to give her exclusive access to their biggest games as well. During the days of the NES, when Nintendo held a 90-percent share of the market, getting the Nintendo fan base excited meant everything, and Nintendo Power offered the most direct route to Nintendo fans.

"In some ways Nintendo Power was restricted by being a marketing vehicle," says Eddy. "It had a strict way of covering things because they could not cover things way too early. If we had an opportunity to cover something that was just a germ of an idea, we certainly would."

During the NES period, when Nintendo ruled the industry unchallenged, covering NES and Game Boy worked out just fine. In 1989, however, SEGA released its Genesis game console. By 1992, as Genesis became the top console, Nintendo Power's stranglehold on game publishers became less of an issue.

The other outcast of videogame journalism was Electronic Gaming Monthly. During the early and mid-'90s, EGM's publisher, Steve Harris, and editor-in-chief, Ed Semrad, adopted an antagonistic approach to competing magazines.

"Ed and I never really got along," says Game Informer's McNamara. "I never really talked to the dude much. He said kind of nasty things about us and what we were doing more often than anything. I don't think I ever spoke a word to the guy other than, 'Hello,' maybe the first time I met him."

The team of Semrad and Harris was aggressive, combative and successful. EGM readership grew quickly as the magazine scooped its competitors on story after story, sometimes employing questionable tactics. Semrad and Harris didn't mind. They were businessmen and journalists first, and they found ways to take advantage of any situation.

PR people complained that even after they told Semrad to turn his video camera off, he would lower it and shoot from the hip. On at least on occasion, when a company came to demonstrate a game still under a long-term embargo at EGM, a VCR secretly placed between the game console and the television recorded game footage, which then appeared in the next issue of the magazine.

"There were some contentious times," says Eddy. "EGM with Steve [Harris] and Ed [Semrad] being the heavy drivers behind it... everybody picked up on their M.O. for how they got things done."

A Question of Ethics

In the early '90s, with game sales reaching the $5 billion mark, competition for editorial space became much more fierce. Nintendo of America began opening its doors to the press on a regular basis. SEGA flew reporters to its California offices for editors' days, and other companies flew journalists to their home offices in the United States and Japan.