Electronic Games · Issue 1 (Winter 1981) · N/A — the medium itself
Before Electronic Games there was no such thing as a video game magazine. Its editors had to invent the vocabulary as they went — "playfield", "scrolling", "screenshot".
Electronic Games launched on 15 October 1981 as the first magazine in the United States devoted entirely to video games, co-founded by Bill Kunkel, Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley. It grew out of Arcade Alley, a column Kunkel and Katz had been writing since 1979 for Video, a monthly published by Reese Publishing about televisions and home video electronics. In the early days they struggled to fill the column — there simply was not enough happening. Then Activision was founded, the home game market began to look like a national phenomenon, and Kunkel persuaded Reese's management to produce a one-off magazine devoted entirely to video games. The one-off became an institution that ran, under various titles, until 1997. Its significance is difficult to overstate: there was no established way to write about video games in 1981, no house style, no review format, no agreed terminology. Electronic Games invented them, and as editor Kunkel expanded the medium's vocabulary directly, coining or popularising words that are now so standard they feel like they were always there — "playfield", "scrolling", "screenshot". Its basic structure became the prototype for essentially every American games magazine that followed it.
Inventing games journalism, and much of the language games journalism uses
The problem Electronic Games faced in 1981 was not a shortage of opinions but a shortage of nouns. How do you describe the area a game takes place in? How do you describe the way the screen moves sideways as the character advances? How do you refer to a still image captured from a game? These are not rhetorical questions — they were practical editorial obstacles, and the magazine's answers to them are the words the industry still uses.
That is a rarer achievement than it sounds. Most publications inherit a vocabulary from the field they cover. Electronic Games had to build one, in public, issue by issue, while simultaneously persuading a publisher that a magazine about video games was a viable commercial product at all. The fact that terms like "screenshot" now feel inevitable is the measure of how well they chose.
The origin story contains a detail that is easy to skip past: Kunkel and Katz initially had trouble filling Arcade Alley. In 1979 there were not enough games being released to sustain a regular column in a magazine about televisions. Two years later, the same men were launching a standalone monthly.
That compression is the entire early history of the industry in miniature. The founding of Activision — the first third-party publisher, and therefore the first proof that anyone other than a console manufacturer could make games — is the hinge, and Kunkel saw it immediately for what it was: not merely a new company, but the moment the medium acquired enough independent output to be worth covering as a field rather than as a curiosity.