Video game journalism

Print-based[edit]

The first magazine to cover the arcade game industry was the subscription-only trade periodical, Play Meter magazine, which began publication in 1974 and covered the entire coin-operated entertainment industry (including the video game industry).^[1] Consumer-oriented video game journalism began during the golden age of arcade video games, soon after the success of 1978 hit Space Invaders, leading to hundreds of favourable articles and stories about the emerging video game medium being aired on television and printed in newspapers and magazines.^[2] In North America, the first regular consumer-oriented column about video games, "Arcade Alley" in Video magazine, began in 1979 and was penned by Bill Kunkel along with Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley.^[3] The late 1970s also marked the first coverage of video games in Japan, with columns appearing in personal computer and manga magazines.^[4] The earliest journals exclusively covering video games emerged in late 1981, but early column-based coverage continued to flourish in North America and Japan with prominent examples like video game designer Yuji Horii's early 1980s column in Weekly Shōnen Jump^[5] and Rawson Stovall's nationally syndicated column, "The Vid Kid" running weekly ran from 1982 to 1992.


The first consumer-oriented print magazine dedicated solely to video gaming was Computer and Video Games, which premiered in the U.K. in November 1981. This was two weeks ahead of the U.S. launch of the next oldest video gaming publication, Electronic Games magazine, founded by "Arcade Alley" writers Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz.^[3] As of 2015, the oldest video game publications still in circulation are Famitsu, founded in 1986, and The Games Machine (Italy), founded in 1988.


The video game crash of 1983 badly hurt the market for video game magazines in North America. Computer Gaming World (CGW) reported in a 1987 article that there were eighteen color magazines covering computer games before the crash but by 1984 CGW was the only surviving magazine in the region.^[6] Expanding on this in a discussion about the launch of the NES in North America, Nintendo of America's PR runner Gail Tilden noted that "I don't know that we got any coverage at that time that we didn't pay for".^[7] Video game journalism in Japan experienced less disruption as the first magazines entirely dedicated to video games began appearing in 1982, beginning with ASCII's LOGiN, followed by several SoftBank publications and Kadokawa Shoten's Comptiq. The first magazine dedicated to console games, or a specific video game console, was Tokuma Shoten's Family Computer Magazine (also known as Famimaga), which began in 1985 and was focused on Nintendo's 8-bit Family Computer. This magazine later spawned famous imitators such as Famitsū (originally named Famicom Tsūshin) in 1986 and Nintendo Power in 1988.^[4] Famimaga had a circulation of 600,000 copies per issue by December 1985,^[8] increasing to 1 million in 1986.^[9]


By 1992, British video game magazines had a circulation of 1 million copies per month in the United Kingdom.^[10] During the early 1990s, the practice of video game journalism began to spread east from Europe and west of Japan alongside the emergence of video game markets in countries like China and Russia. Russia's first consumer-oriented gaming magazine, Velikij Drakon, was launched in 1993,^[11] and China's first consumer-oriented gaming magazines, Diànzǐ Yóuxì Ruǎnjiàn and Play, launched in mid-1994.^[12]