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World's First Dedicated Gaming Magazine Is Facing Closure
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes "BBC Reports: 'Computer and Video Games, which in 1981 was the world's first magazine dedicated to gaming, is facing closure. The title, which has been online-only since 2004, may stop publishing at the end of a 45-day consultation period that began on 14 May, sources said. However, its publishers, Future, are also believed to be looking into selling off the brand. The magazine is behind the gaming industry's Golden Joystick Awards, a yearly event held since 1983. Early issues of the magazine were seen as being instrumental in helping small-time games developers to get their titles out there, said Mr Henderson — a trend that he thought was beginning to re-emerge as apps and mobile gaming have taken off.'"
If this strikes a chord with you I would recommend listening to the first episode of A Life Well Wasted, chronicling the (initial) death of Electronic Gaming Monthly. http://alifewellwasted.com/200...
And why do we care what he thought?
Going the way of Kilobaud Microcomputing and Byte or (sadly) Computer Language Magazine.
I didn't realize it was still going. I still have some old issues from the Sinclair Spectrum era lying around somewhere.
News at 5:15, 5:45, 6:10, 6:40, 7:15, 7:45, 8:30, 9:10, 9:45, 10:20, 11:30 (I watch too much CNN)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It is re-emerging. it's just doing it via a medium that isn't measured in dead trees per lunar orbit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
for not using the bizarre American term "shutter". Facing shuttering just sounds stupid, especially since we already have a word that means closed: closed.
I'm not sure what a gamer would need a magazine for
How young are you?
...the world's first magazine dedicated to gaming...
Okay, I'm being pedantic here, but this is one of my pet peeves. "Computer Gaming" is not Gaming. It is a lesser thing--a subset of the greater whole.
This was not the first gaming magazine-- Games magazine came out in 1977 and The Dragon was in 1976. Both of these magazines were dedicated to gaming (with Games being the more general use of that term).
Don't even get me started on calling computer games RPGs.
High user ID. Google+ user. Completely clueless about history (we didn't always have the interwebs).
You sir, are probably too fucking young to know what you're talking about.
Move along, the adults are reminiscing about the good old days there, sport.
Young enough to call himself a gamer and assume that the sole competition for a magazine always was online sites.
What are these "magazines" you speak of?
The Genral goes back to 1964. Though that was limited to games published by The Avalon Hill Game Company.
I'm 36 and the first computer game I remember playing at home was Ultima IV. I barely remember this magazine, had no idea it was still around, and think his question is completely valid these days and the days since the late 90s.
47
That's just adorable :D
People don't want to pay for information like they used to. The Internet killed that desire. This applies to magazine subscriptions, even internet-only subs.
When people have a question they want answered, they expect they can just google it, find free answers from trustworthy sources within the top few links on the list, and then move on. People want this sporadically, so they don't want to subscribe to something (apart from their existing internet subscription) for it. They feel like most of their subscription money will be wasted on content they don't want. They also don't want to pay a per-incident micro transaction fee because its too much fuss and they don't know whether or not they will like the information until after they have got it (and in their opinions, it should be free anyway).
Good, bad, or indifferent, that's the market reality, so the old subscribe-to-a-magazine model is dying.
Some of this could have been salvaged had the ISPs structured their billing differently. Inasmuch as content draws people to the Internet, and hence creates demand for ISPs, the ISPs should track page hits and share a portion of their subscription income with the providers of services that were hit the most. Though there is plenty more to say about that model, that ship has sailed so it isn't really worth repining now.
So, on the Internet, there really is no way to get opinions that are objective and thorough. Those who come to be seen as such will immediately face financial incentives to slant or distort. Once the distortions are too obvious they will lose respect and the cycle will start over for someone else. That is how things will work for the foreseeable future.
I don't know if you're trolling or not, but 1983 was the year of the Video Game Crash, when video games as an industry nearly died because of insanely high game prices ($80+ in 1980s dollars, a price that stayed until the middle of the N64/PSX era) and the proliferation of shovelware by companies looking to make a quick buck. Game reviewers were almost nonexistent - most of the time, they were side-panels in general computer magazines.
The fact that a magazine dedicated to reviews came out was huge, because it helped put a lid on shovelware companies and keep the quality of games high. Remember, game review sites didn't come out until the late 90s/early 00s, so up until C&VG, there was no centralized source for reviews. A sub-$10 magazine purchase that could tell you which games were worth buying was good insurance against buying an $80 game and finding out that it was unplayable garbage.
Now, granted, review websites have gone downhill and there are still plenty of shovelware vectors that are practically unwatched by reviewers (Steam Greenlight) but for the most part the games industry is better off thanks to the existence of C&VG and magazines like it.
Why are you so derisive of youth? It isn't their fault that they grew up in a more technologically advanced world than you did. How is it reasonable to expect that they would have an intuitive grasp of a history that they did not live and that is largely irrelevant to their day-to-day lives?
I don't understand why people on slashdot have to be so acrimonious.
What is this "magazine" of which you speak?
A frustrating but inescapable fact about the English language is that it is a true democracy.
The meanings of words, in common use, are defined by the vote of the masses. There is no regulatory authority that says what meanings a word can and cannot have...there are only teams of lexicographers who document the meaning-decisions that the masses have already made.
If "RPG" refers to a type of computer game these days, then that's what it means now. Maybe it didn't use to, but it does now.
Incidentally, "irony" can now mean "coincidental," "unisex" means "omnisex", "begs the question" can mean "raises the question," and "irregardless" is a real word that means "regardless."
And so on. These are facts. Accepting them will make your life a lot easier.
Then you must be trolling...or a very new gamer. These were big for most of the 90's and very early 2000s, before blogging really took off.
Impressive that they lasted this long [..] I'm not sure what a gamer would need a magazine for
If you'd paid attention, you'd have noticed that the "magazine" has been online only (i.e. a website) for the past ten years.
:-O
To be fair, if you *had* made that mistake, it would at least make your question a less stupid one, i.e. "I'm not sure what a gamer would need a [printed] magazine for [in this day and age]".
Which is of course perfectly understandable. OTOH, if you really *did* mean this to refer to its entire lifetime from the early-1980s onwards, then yes, it was an utterly stupid question that suggests you're barely old enough to remember the dial-up Internet era, let alone what things were like before the Internet became widely available to the public in the mid-90s.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
But wait there's more possible news about the plane in Southeast Asia...this just in, this was a different plane entirely, this one took off and landed successful, but it was definitely a plane. More on these developments with our in depth reporting on this latest no-development.
For me, Metacritic replaces any "IGN, Gamespot, CVG" review.
Metacritic might be full of "fake and childish" user scores, but overall, the user scores are alot more accurate than the "paid for" reviews most websites dish out.
Welcome to the future, more honest and free.
RPG is something only a skiddie would want to use. The most awful thing to come out of H+APL+.1
I started getting C&VG from the first issue. Back then they were mainly a magazine full of BASIC listings for the Atari 800, BBC, Apple, TRS80, MZ80K, ZX81 etc. They also had ongoing tutorials on adventure game writing and the like. More bizarrely, they also had a play by mail space game, which I never played (had to pay as I remember) which featured every issue. You posted your next moves and got a computer print out of the results a few weeks later. You thought waiting for cassettes to load was slow gameplay? Pah! For me though, it was key. I first learned programming by typing in the Atari 800 listings (which never worked first time) by checking the typos then working out 'ah, that must be what changes the colour of the border' etc. Between the monthly listings and a BASIC primer, I was away. Later on I moved onto 6502 assembler and later C once I had an Atari ST. Somehow that chain of events resulted in me writing systems generating millions in revenue for banks. Thanks C&VG! I did stop getting the magazine after a few years but decided to submit a game I had in mind. I pulled out all the stops, wanting it to be the best Atari game they'd published. It had (ignore if you're not an Atari 8bit type) multiple DLIs, redefined character sets, sprites, assembler subroutines and all sorts of twiddly things. I then went and bought an issue to get the address to send my masterpiece to. Arse, they'd stopped doing listings several issues earlier. :-(
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
You're 47 and don't remember the era when these magazines came with type-it-yourself game code, the only games reviews you could find anywhere, and (later) great demo and shareware discs?
Where were you from 1981-1995?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
E.T. phone it in
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Why, you often play a ROLE in the context of a fictional world, it has nothing to do with rolling a die
49 here, and I'm not sure what a gamer would need a magazine for, either, today. Ten years ago, before the internets and the googles were everywhere, they were still a good idea. In fact, many of the computer and gaming magazines from the '80s and '90s have been scanned, and you can find PDFs of them, because the information is still interesting and useful to retro-gamers.
And the reason you've never heard of them is probably because it's a UK magazine, which a quick check of the first link in TFS would reveal.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Sure, back in the day I typed plenty of code from magazines. I'm speaking of the present when I point out that there may be no reason for gaming magazines.
>OTOH, if you really *did* mean this to refer to its entire lifetime from the early-1980s onwards,
Of course I didn't mean that Any stupidity was in your interpretation of my post.
At 57, I don't recall that particular magazine. I certainly had several different books and magazines for entering in codes on my Sinclair, Color Computer, and IBM. But I really didn't subscribe to any outside of physical gaming ones (The Dragon, White Dwarf, Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer, Autoduel Quarterly). While I did play games on my systems, generally it was the shareware stuff up to Commander Keen, Castle Wolfenstein, and Doom, which I picked up, news wise, from usenet and ftp download sites before purchasing the actual games. Then Quake, Duke Nukem, and Hexen :) In the mid-90's it was recommendations from my Lan party friends. Command and Conquer, Red Alert, Starcraft, and Brood War were the ones I most remember. We did play some Carmageddon and Splat Pack from time to time :) There were plenty of other games I picked up after that like Diablo and Diablo II or Dungeon Keeper or, what was that name, Black and White? I think I still have the CDs. Now I play Rocksmith on my PC, run RPG's (Deadlands now), and play board games. Too many quick twitch kids out there for me to have fun on line.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Sure, but even the masses use "games" to mean more than just computer games. If you ask the masses what Scrabble or Chess are, they will say "games". Games are more than just computer games even for the masses, and there were magazines about games long before the magazine 'Computer and Video Games' existed.
Lines are blured:
http://www.maximumpc.com/
or
http://www.gamespot.com/
Yes, but "gaming" is not used outside computer gaming.
Future has downsized a couple of times. Turnover is high and quality employees quit or get laid off. There had been no leadership in years. This isn't the only publication disappearing.
Source: Future employee
You're joking, right? Gaming means "gambling" outside of video games.
My state's "Gaming Commission" sure as hell doesn't care about video games. Unless you count slots or video poker, I guess.
Gaming the system...
I have my stacks of C&VG stored on one of my shelves. Got close to 90% of the issues I think.
They really were something else. The writing on the longer pieces was top notch, and the news and previews had lots of exclusives. They had really connected writers. And those front pages... best ever.
The 90s were not too kind to it as it had to fight more kiddy targeting publications and all the media was fed through the same hose. At least we got Edge from then on.
When the context is already established as "computer gaming," it is acceptable to sometimes just say "gaming" during the conversation. Casual conversation does not require that every phrase be fully-qualified. When context can serve to disambiguate, it is usually sufficient.
http://www.64apocalypse.com/images/cvg/mag1.htm
Hopefully they don't get slashdotted. Wow, was it really 30 years ago that I started typiing in games by hand from this magazine.... then realised that I could modify and adapt them the more I leant about BASIC. Result : 20 year career in IT coming up this July.
Sure, but in this case it probably would have been better to qualify it. The only context given was the magazine title and one extra word would have removed the confusion.
This was a great magazine during the 8 and 16 bit home computer / console era. I only bought two each month; CVG which was pure games and had good laughs (so called reader letters answered by 'the yob' - hilarious) and ACE which also featured games, but also a lot of other stuff (these guys were heavy into VR back then already) and a bit more serious and technical. Still have all those magazines from late 80's early 90's...
Of course I didn't mean that. Any stupidity was in your interpretation of my post.
On the contrary, I was the only person to guess you *might* not have meant that (*). That's what everyone else thought... quite reasonably, as it *would be* the most sensible interpretation assuming you'd actually bothered to read the summary!! That makes clear that the magazine hasn't been sold in printed form for almost a decade. In that context, saying "I'm not sure what a gamer would need a magazine for" serves no purpose unless it referred to the years it *was* being published (i.e. 1981 to 2004).
That's why everyone else thought you were utterly clueless. I was the only one who figured out that your comment was somewhat less stupid *if* you'd made the mistake others did of not properly reading the summary and assuming the printed magazine was still going (rather than it being the offshoot website under threat as is made clear).
To be blunt, my view was somewhat more charitable than it needed to be, assuming you'd committed the minor stupidity of not reading the summary, rather than the major stupidity implied by most people's understandable interpretation of your comment...
(*) Though I couldn't discount the possibility that you really *were* that clueless!
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