Feature: Game Magazines: Then and Now Subscribe to this RSS feed

Today's top gaming mags have changed quite a bit since their inception. Check out the first and latest issues of the industry's biggest publications!

The modern game magazine, written off as dead at least half a decade ago by many gamers, is undergoing incredible changes. Future Publishing, the largest in the US in terms of titles, is relaunching two titles next month, after buying Nintendo Power off the parent company and obtaining the rights to make an official PlayStation book off Sony. The rest of the scene, including GamePro, EGM and Game Informer, have transformed so extensively in the past few years alone that they'd be unrecognizable if I had just time-traveled here from 2001. While nobody knows if this change will be enough to stave off the assorted problems that face print mags these days, it's incredibly exciting to bear witness to.

Over the next few pages, I'd like to compare the current issue of every game mag out there with their premiere issues -- some of which date back nearly 20 years. It's pretty startling how far some of them have advance, not to mention how little some others have changed. Ready to start, then?

Electronic Gaming Monthly
First Issue: February 1989

EGM, like most magazines that started after the first NES boom, was the result of more than a few false starts. The first was Top Score, a newsletter published by arcade owner and enthusiast Steve Harris starting in 1986. After co-producing a national video game championship the following year, Harris upgraded Top Score to a full-fledged color magazine called Electronic Game Player, which was perhaps just a little ahead of its time -- the NES hadn't hit it really big yet in 1987, and as a result, Harris failed to find any national distributor interested in the mag and was forced to shut it down after four issues. It wasn't until a small-time distributor named Harvey Wasserman floated Harris $70,000 to restart EGP, renaming it Electronic Gaming Monthly in the process.

The undated first issue of EGM is much like the Electronic Game Player that preceded it. While not very professional-looking in looks (Harris and his team had a penchant for ugly-looking title fonts and lots and lots of text), the passion is obviously there -- Harris and his "U.S. National Video Game Team" deal out reviews for all the 8-bit hits of the day, including Life Force, Super Mario Bros. 2, and R-Type for the Sega Master System. The "Review Crew" multi-reviewer rating system didn't get introduced until Issue 2 (June 1989), so instead we have a four-tiered rating system that goes from "Direct Hit!" to "Hit!", then "Near Hit!" and "Miss!" (Dot-com gaming website Daily Radar used a very similar rating system for its short existence.)

221 Issues Later:

No game mag demonstrates how much older the average gamer has become over the years than EGM. While primarily a previews-and-strategy magazine for the first few years, the title shifted dramatically once the last of the old guard (including Harris and Ed Semrad) left and the editorial team moved offices to San Francisco. After taking a stab at the Maxim audience for a couple years, interviewing celebrities and touting features like "Pee to Play" on the cover, EGM's taking a bit more of a hardcore turn these days, focusing on game jobs, industry coverage, and its extensive three-man reviews.

Game Informer
First Issue: Fall 1991

The world's largest-circulation video game magazine wasn't even really a magazine when it started out. The very first issue is more like a club newsletter for Funco, Inc., which back then was a small game-store chain and mail-order house that dealt in used NES and Genesis video games. This 16-page magazine features three game reviews (NHL Hockey and Decapattack for Genesis, Micro Machines for NES), a couple pages of game listings, and that's really about it.

All three reviews include ratings by "Andy the Game Dandy", a.k.a. current editor-in-chief Andy McNamara -- you can spot his face in the company staff photo on the inside front cover, dating back to when Game Informer was distributed to nine Minnesota-area game stores and a few thousand mail-order customers. Ah, nostagia...

175 Issues Later:

GI became a more normal-looking magazine within a year's time, but things didn't really begin to heat up for them until 2001, when Funco (which had expanded to the FuncoLand national chain of game stores by that time) was bought by Barnes & Noble and underwent a period of rapid expansion. Aggressive point-of-sale advertising made GI number one in pure circulation numbers by 2003, and it's never looked back since.

A "world exclusive" GI cover is the feverish dream of game-company marketing departments worldwide, and the mag has even recently become the largest in terms of total pages, as declining ad sales affects the entire industry. To GI's credit, its success isn't just about GameStop throwing the mag down your throat with every purchase -- it's got the best print game-industry coverage in the US, along with feature articles that're great when the game they're talking about is, well, worth talking about.

GamePro
First Issue: May 1989

Like EGM, GamePro was another attempt to serve the massive audience of NES maniacs that sprung up in 1987 and 1988. This one was the brainchild of Patrick Ferrell, who left Tengen to found the magazine and had his brother and sister-in-law handle most of the editorial.

Nearly all of the edit quirks gamers identify with GamePro were well settled in this first issue: the writers taking persona names ("The Eliminator", "X Caliber", "C.A.T. (Champ of All Time)"), the enormous text font and screenshots taking up most of the reviews, the rather obvious ProTips dotting each review. It was plainly a product marketed towards kids, and the marketing didn't end with the mag alone -- Issue 1 includes a page of GamePro-branded merchandise, including a 18"x23" wall poster of the cover art, shirts, beach towels, and some rad cup holders with the GamePro logo printed on them.

230 Issues Later:

For many years, GamePro was mainly known as the magazine that never, ever changed anything. Such a stranglehold they had on the younger gamer audience (or, perhaps, so afraid they were to lose that audience) that the magazine kept all the kid-oriented design points well after the game marketplace matured. It wasn't until very recently that these were dumps -- ProTips in February '07, editor nicknames in November -- as part of a gradual effort to modernize the look of the magazine. Has been successful? I think so, at least; the mag is plainly a lot better to read and nicer to look at than it was even two years ago.