The writers who shaped how we talk about games
Bill Kunkel co-founded Electronic Games magazine in 1981 — the first newsstand magazine dedicated to video games — earning him the title "The Game Doctor" and recognition as the first professional gaming journalist.
Arnie Katz co-founded Electronic Games magazine with Bill Kunkel in 1981, establishing the editorial standards and coverage philosophy that defined American games journalism for a decade.
Steve Harris founded Electronic Gaming Monthly in 1989 and built it into the most influential American gaming magazine of the 1990s, defining the multi-reviewer format and the ten-point review scale.
Ed Semrad was one of EGM's founding reviewers and served as editor through much of the 1990s, establishing the magazine's authoritative voice on Nintendo and arcade conversions.
Dave Halverson founded GameFan in 1992 and introduced a visually distinctive, unabashedly enthusiast style of games criticism that prioritised import coverage and aesthetic presentation over consumer-guide utility.
Jeff Gerstmann's 2007 dismissal from GameSpot following an alleged advertiser-pressure controversy became the defining moment in games journalism ethics discourse, leading him to co-found Giant Bomb.
Kieron Gillen invented New Games Journalism in a 2004 manifesto that redirected critical writing about games from consumer guidance toward personal, literary, first-person experience — the most influential critical theory the medium has produced.
John Ricciardi served as EGM's Japan correspondent through the late 1990s, providing Western readers with their primary window into the Japanese game market during the PlayStation and N64 era.
Jenn Frank was among the most distinctive personal-essay voices in games criticism of the 2000s, writing about games' emotional and social dimensions for Offworld and The Guardian at a time when those perspectives were marginal in mainstream coverage.
Geoff Keighley transformed from teenage games journalist to the central media figure of the games industry, producing The Game Awards and serving as the primary English-language host for every major platform holder's press event.
Leonard Herman wrote Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames in 1994, the first serious historical account of the video game industry, establishing games history as a scholarly discipline.
Steven L. Kent wrote The Ultimate History of Video Games in 2001, the most comprehensive journalistic account of the games industry's first three decades, built from hundreds of original interviews with industry participants.
A national arcade champion turned games journalist, Rignall brought genuine expertise and infectious enthusiasm to Zzap!64 and Mean Machines, helping transform British games writing from detached reportage into passionate advocacy by people who could actually play.
The most controversial games journalist Britain ever produced — an Amiga Power reviewer famous for savage, uncompromising verdicts, and respected by his peers as one of the sharpest critical minds the medium has had.
A central figure of "New Games Journalism" whose hyper-articulate, deeply personal criticism — culminating in multi-hour video reviews of single games — reinvented what a game review could be.
The critic who took Japanese game history seriously enough to win a Fulbright for it, and who now writes the historical material inside the re-releases themselves.
Started a website about games that were never released, and ended up running the organisation trying to stop released games from disappearing too.
Started at Edge in 1995, became The Guardian's first ever games editor, and then wrote a bestselling novel about a boy who communicates through Minecraft.