About GameFan

GameFan

GameFan, originally DieHard GameFan, was an American monthly video game magazine published from October 1992 to December 2000 and based in Agoura Hills, California. Started by Tim Lindquist, Greg Off, George Weising and Dave Halverson, it covered domestic and imported video games at a time when few American publications took imports seriously, and it became known for enthusiastic reviewing, dense pages of colourful screenshots, high-quality paper and extensive coverage of Japanese anime.

The original magazine ran for eight volumes before ceasing publication in December 2000. Halverson relaunched GameFan in April 2010 as a combined video game and film magazine, but the revival was short-lived, hampered by internal conflicts and low advertising revenue.

Beginnings as an Import Catalogue

GameFan began in September 1992 as an advertising supplement connected to the DieHard Gamers Club, created to sell imported video games, primarily from Japan. The name was inspired by Megafan, a Japanese Sega magazine. What changed the supplement's fate was its small text reviews and descriptions: readers responded to writing that, though unrefined, conveyed genuine passion for the games, and the reviews took on a life of their own until the catalogue had become a magazine.

The first issue is dated October 1992. The magazine's editors presented themselves through caricatures drawn by Terry Wolfinger rather than photographs, and wrote under pseudonyms and cartoon personae. That anonymised approach freed the writers from some of the conventions of competing publications, although it also allowed editor Dave Halverson to review the same game multiple times under different pseudonyms, a practice that became part of the magazine's legend.

Look, Paper and Screenshots

GameFan's most immediately visible difference from rivals such as Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro was visual. It used high-quality paper and filled its pages with game screenshots that were more colourful and more accurate to the actual in-game graphics than readers were used to seeing in American magazines. In an era before online video, when most players judged unfamiliar, and especially imported, games from magazine pictures, that screenshot density was a genuine service as well as a style.

The layout matched the writing: crowded, energetic and opinionated, with extensive coverage of important games and long features on subjects other magazines treated briefly. GameFan was also notable for how early and how seriously it covered anime, whose American audience overlapped heavily with the import gaming audience, helping to build the combined games-and-anime identity that distinguished it on the newsstand.

Editors and Publishers

Dave Halverson was the magazine's defining editor, listed alongside David Hodgson and Eric Mylonas among its editors over its run. The magazine passed through a succession of publishers: the DieHard Gamers Club from 1992 to 1996, Metropolis Media from 1996 to 1998, Shinno Media in 1999 and 2000, and BPA International for its final issues from August to December 2000. Its ISSN was 1092-7212.

By 2000 the magazine had a monthly print circulation of more than 100,000, a substantial figure for an independent games title competing against larger publishing houses, though not enough to carry it through the industry downturn and its own corporate instability at the end of the decade. Halverson, the original editor-in-chief, went on after GameFan to publish Gamers' Republic and then Play, continuing the enthusiastic, import-aware style in new titles.

Coverage and the Golden Megawards

GameFan's annual awards, the Golden Megawards, were chosen by its editors and chart the consoles of the 1990s. In 1993 the Game of the Year was Gunstar Heroes for the Sega Genesis; in 1994 it was Earthworm Jim; in 1995 Yoshi's Island for the Super NES, with Jumping Flash named 32-bit game of the year; and in 1996 Tomb Raider led a field that included Resident Evil, Super Mario 64, Nights and Tekken 2. The awards consistently included categories for import games, reflecting the magazine's founding mission, with titles such as Final Fantasy V, Clockwork Knight and Enemy Zero recognised years before, or entirely without, American releases.

The range of the awards, covering arcade translations, handheld games, role-playing games, soundtracks and new characters as well as headline categories, mirrored the magazine's coverage. GameFan treated presentation, music and import status as things its readers cared about, and its scoring culture rewarded spectacle and technical achievement on systems from the Genesis and Super NES through the Saturn, PlayStation, 3DO and Nintendo 64 eras.

Monitaur and Magazine Personality

The magazine's sense of theatre extended to an in-house comic strip, The Adventures of Monitaur, an anime-derived series in which the title character, drawn only for the strip, appeared alongside caricatures of the magazine's staff personae. Monitaur's storylines pitted him against The Blowmeister, a figure representing the leadership of rival magazines such as Electronic Gaming Monthly. In 1994 GameFan and two start-ups, Dark Moon Productions and Dark Moon Comics, agreed to launch a Monitaur comic book series, and discussions were held about a full-length animated movie, underlining how far the magazine's ambitions reached beyond print.

The 1995 Controversy

GameFan's darkest episode came in its September 1995 issue, when text containing derogatory comments about Japanese people appeared in place of a paragraph in a sports game review, in an article that, as printed, discussed a Namco flight simulator rather than the football game it was supposed to cover. The magazine's official explanation was that a rogue employee had sabotaged the issue to alienate its Japanese audience; later reports indicated the text was filler, an internal joke that was accidentally printed after someone neglected to remove it.

An apology dated August 24, 1995 was published in the October 1995 issue in both English and Japanese, and a further apology appeared in November 1995. The incident remains a standard cautionary tale in games publishing about filler text and production discipline, and it is inseparable from any honest history of a magazine whose identity was built on admiration for Japanese games and culture.

The Final Years and Closure

Through the late 1990s GameFan covered the transition from 16-bit machines to the PlayStation, Saturn and Nintendo 64 and then toward the next generation, but its publishing base kept shifting, from Metropolis Media to Shinno Media and finally to BPA International for the last five months of 2000. The final issue was Volume 8, Issue 12, dated December 2000, and the original magazine ceased publication with it.

The closure came as the American games magazine market was contracting and consolidating, and as the internet began to take over the news and import coverage that had once been print's preserve. GameFan's website, gamefan.com, did not long outlive the magazine as an active concern.

The 2010 Relaunch

In April 2010 Dave Halverson relaunched GameFan as a magazine covering both video games and film. The revival traded on strong nostalgia for the original among readers who had grown up with it, but it was short-lived, suffering from internal conflicts and low advertising revenue, the same structural problem that faced almost every attempt to revive a print games magazine in the online era. The relaunch did not re-establish the title on a lasting basis.

Legacy

GameFan is remembered as the American games magazine that most openly loved its subject. Its import coverage helped legitimise Japanese games and anime for American readers in the early 1990s, its screenshot-led design raised expectations for how games should look in print, and its pseudonymous, caricatured editorial culture gave it a personality that more corporate rivals did not attempt. Facsimile interest, retrospectives and the continued careers of its editors in later magazines have kept its reputation alive well beyond its eight-year original run.