Interest in videogames reached an all-time high during 1994. In January, GamePro became the rst videogame magazine to sell 500,000 copies of a single issue. EGM broke a di erent type of record when its December issue contained 404 pages. So much news concerning videogames was coming out that EGM’s publisher, Sendai Publications, decided that one monthly magazine a month wasn’t enough to contain all of this information. For a while, the publisher thought about releasing the magazine on a biweekly schedule, but that was problematic, since each issue would therefore only have a shelf life of two weeks. Instead, the company introduced an all-new monthly magazine called EGM2, which was published two weeks after its sister publication, EGM. Now Sendai had two magazines sharing shelf space every month.
Most videogame magazines were geared towards teenagers and pre-teens. Following the success of the adult-oriented Electronic Games, new magazines were published that a empted to go after an older audience. The rst of these was Electronic Entertainment (E2), which debuted in January by Infotainment World, the same company that published GamePro. E2 immediately gained respectability in the gaming world by providing a monthly column by Nolan Bushnell.
During the year, Chris Anderson, the owner of British-based Future, sold the company to Pierson. He still retained the American GP Publications that he had purchased in 1993. Following the sale, Anderson moved himself, and the entire North Carolina-based publishing company, to California, where he renamed it Imagine Publishing. By the end of the year, Imagine premiered a new magazine called Next Generation, which offered a format that was amazingly similar to the British Edge. Next Generation quickly established a niche with adult gamers.
Check out more of the rich history of the industry in Leonard Herman’s book Phoenix IV available at Rolenta Press www.RolentaPress.com and make sure to sign up to get Old School Gamer Magazine for free by clicking here!
Leonard Herman, The Game Scholar, is regarded as one of the earliest and most respected videogame historians. The first edition of his book Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Home Videogames, which was published in 1994, is considered to be the first serious and comprehensive book about the history of videogames. He has written articles for Videogaming & Computer Illustrated, Games Magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly, the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, Pocket Games, Classic Gamer Magazine, Edge, Game Informer, Classic Gamer Magazine, Manci Games, Gamespot.com and Video Game Trader, which he also edited. He has also contributed articles to several videogame-related books, including Supercade, The Video Game Explosion and The Encyclopedia of Video Games. Mr. Herman has also written the book ABC To the VCS (A Directory of Software for the Atari 2600), a compendium of game summaries. He has also written and designed user's manuals for the following Atari VCS games: Cracked, Save the Whales, Pick-Up, Rush Hour, Looping, The Entity and Lasercade, as well as the user's guide to Ralph Baer's Pinball! for the Odyssey2. In 1994, he founded Rolenta Press, a publisher of videogame books, whose catalogue included Videogames: In the Beginning, by Ralph H. Baer, the inventor of the videogame console, and Confessions of the Game Doctor by Bill Kunkel, the world's first videogame journalist. Two Rolenta Press books were included in a list of the top ten videogame books of all time by Game Informer magazine in 2008. Mr. Herman has served as an advisor for Videotopia, Classic Gaming Expo and the National Videogame Museum. He has appeared in several episodes of G4's Icons and in the documentary, The King of Arcades. In 2003, Mr. Herman received a Classic Gaming Expo Achievement Award in recognition for his accomplishments in documenting game history
