Ever since the world’s first two videogame magazines, Great Britain’s Computer and Video Games and the United States’ Electronic Games, debuted two weeks apart in November 1981, printed videogame magazines have basically come in four flavors.
General: The majority of gaming magazines fell under this category and covered all aspects of gaming, including handhelds, and in many cases, computer games. Some of the most popular magazines, including Electronic Games, Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), and the aforementioned Game Informer, fall into this category.
Company-specific: This is a magazine that is basically propagan- da for the hardware manufacturer and focuses primarily on the games and systems that the company has to offer. Nintendo Power, which was for the most part published by Nintendo, is probably the most well-known example of a company-specific magazine.
Console-specific: This type of magazine was usually printed by an independent publisher but was supported in part by the console’s manufacturer. As the name implies, it usually focused on news and reviews for games and peripherals for the specific console that it covered. Some console-specific magazines were even packaged with discs that contained playable samples of upcoming games. The most popular of the console-specific magazines was the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine.
Retro Gaming: This is basically a subset of the general format except that it only covers consoles and games that are usually more than 25 years old. Some general magazines, including Game Informer and GamesTM offered monthly retro sections. The new kid on theblock, Old School Gamer Magazine, falls into this category. The number of retro gaming magazines that have appeared can be counted on one hand.
The first magazine that was devoted strictly to retro gaming wasn’t even a professional magazine at all. Classic Gamer Magazine, which debuted in the Fall of 1999, was the self-pub- lished brainchild of Chris Cavanaugh, a long-time fan of the original Electronic Games magazine and its editors, Bill Kunkel, Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley.
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
