Slashdot Mirror
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...
Going the way of Kilobaud Microcomputing and Byte or (sadly) Computer Language Magazine.
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."
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.
To shutter a business implies the facilities are abandoned and the windows are shuttered or boarded up.
A business can close every night and reopen in the morning. You may not like the term, but when a business is shuttered, it implies that it is permanently closed.
my business is currently shuttered but we are still open.
fucking sunshine
47
That's just adorable :D
I didn't realize it was still going. I still have some old issues from the Sinclair Spectrum era lying around somewhere.
Depends what you mean by "still going" as the original magazine ceased publishing almost ten years ago (*) when Future publishing bought the title (apparently it overlapped with their own GamesMaster magazine, which is still going today in its printed form (**)).
:-)
I don't know how much continuity there was before and after that takeover, though to be fair, the title had already been sold previously, from its original publishers EMAP, to Dennis Publishing.
Isn't Wikipedia wonderful?
(*) Apparently they briefly relaunched it a few years back- or more accurately, reused the name- as "CVG Presents", a short-lived run of magazines each dedicated to a single game series (e.g. Grand Theft Auto). But that's long-defunct too.
(**) Mind you, that was a spinoff from the TV show that finished in the late 90s, so technically that's not *its* original form!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
Duh, he's Mrs. Henderson's husband.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Ted Nelson wanted to do that (bill content reader and pay content creator) w/ Xanadu --- well worth reading up on.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
E.T. phone it in
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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!
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.
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.
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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