Journalist, Author & Game Historian · Wired (Game|Life), Kotaku, Digital Eclipse · 2000s · American
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.
Chris Kohler graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 2002 with a degree in Japanese language and culture, and immediately received a Fulbright scholarship to write his first book — Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. That is an unusual sentence to be able to write about a games journalist, and it defines his career: Kohler approached video games as a subject worthy of academic-grade research and cultural argument at a moment when most of the field was still writing preview copy. In 2005 he founded Game|Life, the first gaming vertical at Wired, and edited it until January 2017; from 2017 to 2020 he was Features Editor at Kotaku, where he created and hosted the video series Complete In Box. He was a fixture of the long-running Retronauts podcast from its inception in 2006. Then, in 2020, after twenty-four years in journalism, he did something almost no critic does: he crossed over into the work itself, creating the role of Editorial Director at the game studio Digital Eclipse, where he writes and researches the historical documentary sections of the studio's classic-game collections. The criticism became the product.