US · 1981–1985
The first magazine in the United States devoted entirely to video games, founded in 1981 by Bill Kunkel, Arnie Katz, and Joyce Worley — the publication that invented the vocabulary and editorial template every games magazine since has followed.
Electronic Games holds a foundational place in games journalism as the first American publication devoted solely to video games. Its first issue appeared in October 1981, but its roots ran back to 1979, when Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz began writing "Arcade Alley," a column about video games, for Video magazine — a monthly otherwise concerned with televisions and home-video electronics. The popularity of that column convinced Kunkel, Katz, and their colleague Joyce Worley that games could sustain a magazine of their own, and in 1981 the three friends founded Electronic Games to prove it. Before Electronic Games, no publication had treated video games as a subject worthy of dedicated, serious coverage — as an art form with its own creators, craft, and culture. The magazine changed that, and in doing so it had to invent much of the language the medium would use to describe itself. As editor, Bill Kunkel coined or popularised foundational terms including "playfield," "screenshot," and the use of "scrolling" to describe moving backgrounds — vocabulary so basic to games writing today that its deliberate creation is easy to overlook. Kunkel was posthumously and repeatedly honoured as a pioneer of the field, and his coinages remain in universal use. Just as influential as its vocabulary was its structure. The basic editorial architecture of Electronic Games — a mix of news, letters, previews, reviews, and strategy features — became the template that essentially every major video game magazine that followed would copy. Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, and the rest of the newsstand press that dominated the 1980s and 1990s all inherited a format that Electronic Games had established first. The magazine also ran the Arcade Awards, among the earliest formal recognitions of excellence in the medium. Electronic Games rode the crest of the early-1980s video game boom, but that timing also made it vulnerable. The North American video game crash of 1983 devastated the industry the magazine covered, and Electronic Games ceased its original print run in 1985 as the market it depended on collapsed. The title and its founders resurfaced in various forms over subsequent years, but the original 1981–1985 run stands as the origin point of American games journalism — the publication that first argued, in print, that video games deserved to be written about seriously, and built the entire framework for how that would be done.