VideoGames and Computer Entertainment

Overview

VideoGames and Computer Entertainment was an American video game magazine published by LFP Inc. (Larry Flynt Publications) of Beverly Hills, California, from December 1988 to September 1996. It was one of the first magazines to cover console games, computer games and arcade games together in a single publication, and it was produced by veterans of Electronic Games, the magazine that had founded video game journalism earlier in the decade. It later retitled itself VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine.

Origins in ANALOG Computing

The magazine grew out of the video game coverage in ANALOG Computing, the Atari computer magazine published by Lee Pappas. Pappas recognized that the reviving home game market of the late 1980s — driven by the Nintendo Entertainment System — supported a dedicated magazine, and he expanded ANALOG's game column into a standalone title. Andy Eddy became executive editor, and the staff included Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel, the pioneering journalists who had co-founded Electronic Games with Joyce Worley; Kunkel wrote his famous "Game Doctor" advice column for the new magazine.

Launch and Schedule

The first issue appeared in December 1988, published bimonthly; from April 1989 the magazine went monthly. Its appearance coincided with the consolidation of the post-crash American game industry around Nintendo, Sega and the home computer, and its all-formats remit — consoles, computers and coin-operated arcade games in one magazine — distinguished it from platform-specific rivals such as Nintendo Power and from computer-only titles.

Editorial Approach

The magazine combined reviews, strategy features and cheat codes with industry reporting carried over from its editors' Electronic Games heritage. Its annual awards were divided between console and computer categories, acknowledging the two cultures it served. Having Katz and Kunkel on staff gave the magazine institutional memory reaching back to the industry's first boom, and its coverage treated games as a medium worthy of the same critical apparatus as film or music.

LFP and Beverly Hills

The publisher, LFP Inc. — Larry Flynt Publications — issued the magazine from its offices at 9171 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Flynt's company, best known for Hustler, maintained a diverse magazine portfolio in this period, and its video game title was a mainstream, all-ages publication produced by the Pappas editorial team. The magazine's long run under LFP made it one of the more stable American game titles of the early 1990s.

Retitling to VideoGames

In the mid-1990s the magazine shortened its name to VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine. Reference sources differ on the exact issue of the change — the Video Game History Foundation's holdings place it at issue 80 in September 1995 — but the retitle reflected the market's shift: computer entertainment no longer needed separate billing as consoles came to dominate the industry's growth.

Spinoffs: Tips & Tricks and TurboPlay

The magazine's success supported companion titles. Tips & Tricks spun off its strategy and codes coverage into a dedicated magazine that long outlived its parent. TurboPlay was a sister publication devoted to NEC's TurboGrafx-16 console. The little family of titles made the Beverly Hills operation one of the significant game magazine publishers of the period.

Closure

The magazine ended with its September 1996 issue — 92 issues by the Video Game History Foundation's count — in the consolidation that followed Ziff Davis's expansion in game publishing, which absorbed much of the market's advertising and talent. Its closure closed the line of descent from Electronic Games through ANALOG to the modern game press.

Legacy

VideoGames and Computer Entertainment is remembered for proving that a single magazine could serve console, computer and arcade players at once — the model that the multi-platform game press still follows — and for keeping the founding generation of game journalists, Katz and Kunkel above all, at the center of the field's coverage into the 1990s.

The magazine's personnel gave it a pedigree no competitor could match. Bill "The Game Doctor" Kunkel and Arnie Katz had effectively invented video game journalism at Electronic Games in the early 1980s; at VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, under executive editor Andy Eddy and publisher Lee Pappas — who had incubated the title as a column in ANALOG Computing — they applied the same critical apparatus to the Nintendo-era industry. That continuity explains the magazine's distinguishing editorial choice: covering consoles, computers and arcade games in one publication, with annual awards split between console and computer categories, when the market's fashion was fragmenting into single-platform titles. Its Beverly Hills home at LFP, 9171 Wilshire Boulevard, was an unlikely address for a games magazine, but the arrangement delivered a decade of stability rare in the sector. The spin-offs — Tips & Tricks, which outlived its parent, and TurboPlay for the TurboGrafx-16 — showed a small publishing group building a family the way magazine companies had always done. When the title closed in September 1996 after 92 issues (having retitled itself VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine in its final phase), it closed the Electronic Games lineage that had defined American game writing for fifteen years.

The magazine's schedule tells its market story: launched bimonthly in December 1988 as the NES era consolidated, monthly from April 1989 as the 16-bit contest opened, and sustained through the industry's early-1990s peak. Its all-formats remit was a wager that the same reader played arcade games, owned a console and used a computer — true of the era's core audience, and a wager the specialist titles of the later 1990s abandoned as the market segmented. The late retitling to VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine acknowledged the new reality in its own way, dropping "Computer Entertainment" as consoles swallowed the industry's center, shortly before the September 1996 closure in Ziff Davis's consolidation of the field. Ninety-two issues under two titles, shepherded by the journalists who had founded the field's press at Electronic Games, give the magazine a documentary completeness for the industry's second age that few rivals match.

Its review culture carried the same inheritance. Katz and Kunkel had built Electronic Games on the premise that games deserved criticism with standards — that a review was a consumer act and a critical act at once — and the Beverly Hills magazine's reviews, annual awards and Game Doctor counsel applied that premise to a far larger industry. The cheat codes and strategy features that filled its back pages served the player; the front of the book served the medium. Holding both services in one title for eight years is the magazine's editorial achievement, and the reason its name survived its own retitling in readers' memory.

Tips & Tricks, its strategy spinoff, long outliving the parent title is the group's neatest survival story: the parent proved the audience, the spinoff inherited the most durable part of its service — codes and solutions, the content readers kept — and carried the Beverly Hills operation's name into a later era of the industry. The parent magazine's 92 issues remain the fuller record, but the lineage's total span, from a column in ANALOG Computing to a 2000s tips magazine, is among the longest in American game publishing.

Directory Facts

VideoGames and Computer Entertainment was a video game magazine published by LFP Inc. in Beverly Hills, California, United States, from December 1988 to September 1996. The magazine is defunct.