Video games journalism

Video game journalism is a branch of journalism concerned with the reporting and discussion of video games. It is typically based on a core reveal/preview/review cycle. There has been a recent growth in online publications and blogs.

The first magazine to cover the arcade game industry which is still in continuous publication is the subscription-only trade periodical, Play Meter magazine, which began publication in 1974 and covered the entire coin-operated entertainment industry (including the video game sector). Consumer-oriented video game journalism began during the golden age of arcade video games, soon after the success of 1978 hit Space Invaders, leading to hundreds of favourable articles and stories about the emerging video game medium being aired on television and printed in newspapers and magazines. In North America, the first regular consumer-oriented column about video games, "Arcade Alley" in Video magazine, began in 1979 and was penned by Bill Kunkel along with Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley. The late 1970s also marked the first coverage of video games in Japan, with columns appearing in personal computer and manga magazines. The earliest journals exclusively covering video games emerged in late 1981, but early column-based coverage continued to flourish in North America and Japan with prominent examples like video game designer Yuji Horii's early 1980s column in Weekly Shōnen Jump and Rawson Stovall's nationally syndicated column, "The Vid Kid" running weekly ran from 1982 to 1992.

The first consumer-oriented print magazine dedicated solely to video gaming was Computer and Video Games, which premiered in the U.K. in November 1981. This was two weeks ahead of the U.S. launch of the next oldest video gaming publication, Electronic Games magazine, founded by "Arcade Alley" writers Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz. As of 2015^[update], the oldest video game publications still in circulation are Famitsu, founded in 1986, and Electronic Gaming Monthly, founded in 1989.

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