Electronic Games | Code Like It's 198x

Electronic Games was the first American magazine devoted to video games, and it knew it. “At last there’s a high-quality newsstand publication that we arcaders can really call our own,” its first issue announced in the winter of 1981. It came from New York, out of a column that had been running in Video magazine, and it was written by three people who played everything: Arnie Katz, Bill Kunkel and Joyce Worley. For three years it covered arcade machines, cartridges for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision, home computers and hand-held games in the same pages, and every year it handed out its own game-of-the-year statuettes, the Arcade Awards.

Fast facts

Publisher: Reese Publishing Company (Reese Communications), New York; Jay Rosenfield, publisher.
First issue: Volume 1, Number 1, cover-dated Winter 1981, $2.95.
Founders: Arnie Katz, Bill Kunkel and Joyce Worley.
Editors: “Frank Laney Jr.” (issue 1); Arnie Katz (from March 1982); Doug Garr as editorial director (from March 1985).
Frequency: bi-monthly in the spring of 1982; monthly by 1983.
Awards: the Arcade Awards, or “Arkies”.
Last issue under the name: April 1985. From May 1985 it was Computer Entertainment.
Revival: Electronic Games again from October 1992 to July 1995, then Fusion and Intelligent Gamer until January 1997.

From Arcade Alley to a magazine

Katz and Kunkel had been writing about games in Video, Reese’s home-video magazine, in a column called Arcade Alley. Katz later dated the column to 1978. Its readers’ support, said Video’s editor Bruce Apar in the first issue of Electronic Games, had “gained a whole new magazine”. The column’s authors had already “originated the Video magazine ‘Arcade Awards’ (Arkies) to honor excellence in electronic gaming”.

The first masthead named the editor as “Frank Laney Jr.”, with Bill Kunkel as executive editor, Joyce Worley as senior editor and Arnie Katz among the contributing editors. The Laney name was a pen name: Katz later explained that he was then working on a trade magazine, Chain Store Age, and “wanted to keep my writing in the trade magazines separate from writing in the gaming world”. From the second issue, in March 1982, he was named as editor himself, and by May as co-publisher.

The first editorial set out the rule the magazine would be known for: “this publication is written by actual gamers for actual gamers. You’ll never see so-called ‘reviews’ written directly from manufacturers’ press releases by know-nothing writers in these pages. That’s a promise.” It also promised that the page would be “the most sober-sided piece you’ll ever read in this magazine. We try to take electronic gaming seriously, but not, we hope, solemnly.”

Every kind of game

The cover of the first issue listed its territory: “Videogames · Computer Games · Stand-Alone Games · Arcades”. The first issue told the story behind David Crane’s Freeway, reviewed Tandy’s Color Computer and carried a buyer’s guide to programmable consoles. Later issues tracked the arcade charts (Pac-Man was number one in May 1982), reported on new machines such as GCE’s Vectrex in October 1982, and answered readers’ technical questions. In November 1982 it explained to a reader how Missile Command and Asteroids fitted 8K into the 2600, “using a special bank switch that flip-flops two 4K programs”. The technique is bank switching.

The staff grew with the boom. By mid-1983 the masthead had a strategy editor (Frank Tetro Jr.), a Midwest editor (Rick Teverbaugh), a technical editor and a long list of contributors, and Reese also produced annual Software Encyclopedia specials. The reviews stayed signed: a verdict ended with “(Bill Kunkel)” or “(Arnie Katz)”, so readers knew whose taste they were trusting.

The Arcade Awards

Each January the magazine announced the Arcade Awards, which Katz, as “chairman of the judging committee”, said were decided “only after long debate fortified by on-the-spot test-gaming”. The January 1983 issue marked “the four-year history of the Arkies” and added Certificates of Merit for the first time. That year’s statuettes went to Activision’s Pitfall! as best adventure videogame, Imagic’s Demon Attack as videogame of the year and Broderbund’s David’s Midnight Magic, a pinball game for the Apple II, as computer game of the year. The winners were presented in December 1982 at “the gala Fourth Annual Arcade Awards Presentation” in New York, where the pinball game’s award drew “tremendous roars of approval” from the ballroom.

For the 1984 awards the magazine let its readers nominate. A ballot in the September 1983 issue covered games published between 30 September 1982 and 14 October 1983; the top vote-getters went to a judging committee of games journalists as finalists. The 1984 computer game of the year was Broderbund’s Lode Runner. Software houses quoted the awards in their advertisements.

A new team and a new name

The magazine changed hands editorially in 1985. The March 1985 masthead named Doug Garr, the editor of Video and author of a biography of Steve Wozniak, as editorial director; Katz and Worley were gone from it, and by April so was Kunkel. Garr promised “an honest, critical, information-packed issue every month” and a redesign with more features, and he brought in Roe R. Adams III from the recently closed Softalk as national editor.

Katz gave his own account of the change in a 2009 interview with Gamasutra. Asked how the original magazine ended, he said: “It folded because Jay fired all of us and brought in another crew”. Jay was Jay Rosenfield, the publisher. Katz said he “had told Jay, as far back as mid-1984, that with our name Electronic Games, we should be shifting our focus to computer games because of the problems in the industry”, and that “When he finally decided to re-target, he for some reason decided to do it with people other than Bill, Joyce, or I.”

The April 1985 issue told readers that from the May issue, on sale on 11 April, the magazine would be called Computer Entertainment. The reason, it said, was that “more and more of us will entertain ourselves with our computers”. It described Electronic Games as “the first magazine to cover the field”. Public accounts date the last issue of Computer Entertainment to August 1985.

The revival

Katz, Kunkel and Worley kept working together as consultants, reviewers and game designers. In October 1992 they brought Electronic Games back under the imprint of Decker Publications. Katz later gave Kunkel the credit for arranging it with Steve Harris, the publisher of Electronic Gaming Monthly: the three supplied the words, and Harris’s company in Lombard, Illinois, designed the magazine. The revival leaned towards the new CD machines, the 3DO and multimedia PCs, with long previews, industry interviews and a monthly column of Kunkel’s commentary. Public accounts say the arrangement ended in 1995, when the magazine was renamed Fusion from August and produced in-house, with Katz and Worley staying on as contributing editors. It became Intelligent Gamer’s Fusion in March 1996 and Intelligent Gamer from June 1996, and closed with the January 1997 issue.

Bill Kunkel died on 4 September 2011; the Society of Professional Journalists later named its video game journalism awards after him. Joyce Worley died on 30 July 2016. Game Informer’s obituary called Electronic Games “the first dedicated video game magazine” and credited the three founders with building “a structure specifically for reporting and reviewing games”.

Sources

Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 1, Winter 1981: cover (“Winter $2.95”; the four kinds of game), masthead (Frank Laney Jr., Bill Kunkel, Joyce Worley, Arnie Katz), “Switch On!” editorial (“written by actual gamers for actual gamers”), Bruce Apar’s welcome (“Arcade Alley”, the Arkies, Reese Publishing Co.), p. 12: Freeway; order form (235 Park Avenue South).
Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 2, March 1982: masthead (Arnie Katz, editor). Vol. 1 no. 3, May 1982: masthead (Jay Rosenfield, publisher; Arnie Katz, co-publisher), statement of publication (“published bi-monthly by Reese Publishing Company”); the arcade chart with Pac-Man at number one.
Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 8, October 1982: the Vectrex. Vol. 1 no. 9, November 1982, p. 102: the bank-switching answer.
Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 11, January 1983: Katz’s editorial (“the four-year history of the Arkies”, “chairman of the judging committee”) and the 1983 Arcade Awards (Pitfall!, David’s Midnight Magic, the Certificates of Merit). Vol. 1 no. 12, February 1983: statement of publication (“published monthly”).
Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 15, May 1983, and no. 16, June 1983: Demon Attack as the 1983 videogame of the year. Vol. 1 no. 17, July 1983: the Fourth Annual Arcade Awards Presentation in New York in December.
Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 7, September 1983: Katz’s editorial and the 1984 nomination ballot. Vol. 2 no. 13, July 1984, and vol. 3 no. 3, March 1985: Lode Runner as the 1984 computer game of the year.
Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 17, July 1983, and vol. 2 no. 10, December 1983: mastheads (strategy, Midwest and technical editors; Reese Communications).
Electronic Games vol. 3 no. 3, March 1985: masthead (Doug Garr, editorial director) and Garr’s editorial (Roe Adams, “an honest, critical, information-packed issue every month”). Vol. 3 no. 4, April 1985: masthead, and the letter announcing Computer Entertainment from the May issue.
Steve Fulton, “Electronic Games: The Arnie Katz Interview”, Gamasutra, 28 December 2009 (web, secondary): Arcade Alley from 1978, the Frank Laney pen name, the revival; Katz’s own account of the founders’ departure in 1985, quoted as his words. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/electronic-games-the-arnie-katz-interview
Wikipedia, “Electronic Games” (web, secondary): Computer Entertainment to August 1985; the revival from October 1992 and the later titles Fusion, Intelligent Gamer’s Fusion and Intelligent Gamer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Games
Internet Archive, Electronic Games, October 1992 (web, secondary): the revival’s publisher, Decker Publications. https://archive.org/details/Electronic-Games-1992-10
Retromags, “Electronic Games (1992)” (web, secondary): the editorial and design arrangement with Sendai in Lombard, Illinois; the coverage of the 3DO and multimedia PCs; the renaming as Fusion in 1995 with Katz and Worley as contributing editors. https://www.retromags.com/publications/united-states/electronic-games-1992/
Wikipedia, “Bill Kunkel (journalist)” (web, secondary): dates of birth and death; the Kunkel Awards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Kunkel_(journalist)
Game Informer, “Game Journalism Pioneer Joyce Worley Passes Away”, 31 July 2016 (web, secondary). https://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2016/07/31/joyce-worley-katz-obituary.aspx