When Computer Gamer appeared in Britain in the spring of 1985, its title captured a change that was already taking place around home computers.
Only a few years earlier, magazines devoted to machines such as the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, VIC-20, and Atari computers often treated games as one part of a much larger computing hobby. Readers were expected to type programs into their machines, learn BASIC, experiment with hardware, and understand the computer as something more complicated than an entertainment system. Games mattered enormously, but they shared the page with programming tutorials, utilities, technical advice, and the broader promise of home computing.
By the middle of the decade, gaming was beginning to become an identity of its own.
Historian Graeme Kirkpatrick has argued that British gaming culture took recognizable form during this period as games gradually separated themselves from the wider world of home-computer hobbyism. The specialist press played an important part in that process. Magazines did not simply tell people which software to buy. They developed ways of judging games, celebrated high scores and expertise, built communities of readers, and increasingly addressed those readers not merely as computer owners, but as gamers.
The name Computer Gamer therefore suited its moment remarkably well.
Published monthly by Argus Specialist Publications, the magazine survived for only 27 issues, from April 1985 through June 1987. It never developed the longevity of Computer and Video Games, CRASH, or some of the other major British publications surrounding it. Yet its brief life offers an unusually clear look at a moment when British computer journalism was moving from the culture of computing toward the culture of gaming. The entire run survives, making it possible to follow that transformation issue by issue.
Before Computer Gamer There Was Games Computing
Computer Gamer did not begin from nothing.
Argus Specialist Publications had already been publishing Games Computing, a British multi-format magazine that ran for 15 monthly issues from January 1984 through March 1985. Elspeth Joiner served as editor, and the magazine belonged to an earlier style of home-computer publishing in which playing games and making them could exist side by side.
Surviving issues preserve type-in programs, adventures, reviews, and invitations for readers to contribute software of their own. One April 1984 notice asked readers to submit original programs along with explanations of how the code worked and information that might help owners of other computers convert the program to their own machines. The magazine was not merely describing software as a commercial product. It was encouraging readers to participate in software creation themselves.
That approach reflected the culture from which British computer gaming emerged. Buying a home computer did not necessarily mean simply inserting a cartridge or loading a commercial game. Magazines could provide pages of BASIC code that readers manually entered, debugged, modified, and sometimes redistributed among friends.
By early 1985, however, the British computer-magazine market was becoming fiercely competitive.
The March 1985 issue of CRASH discussed several changes across the industry. Big K had closed. Personal Computer Games had also disappeared. Advertising revenue was becoming increasingly important, and publishers were fighting for both readers and software-company advertising. In the middle of that uncertainty, CRASH noted another change: Argus was transforming Games Computing into Computer Gamer.
Rather than abandon the title entirely, Argus attempted to give it a new identity.
April 1985 and the First Computer Gamer
The first issue of Computer Gamer was dated April 1985.
Its surviving pages make the magazine’s ambitions immediately apparent. This was a large multi-format publication filled with reviews, software advertising, competitions, programming material, charts, arcade coverage, and other features intended to appeal directly to people who used their computers primarily for games. The issue ran to 124 pages, and its advertising alone provides a snapshot of the British software industry in early 1985.
Gremlin Graphics, Quicksilva, Mirage, and numerous other publishers and retailers appeared within its pages. Games such as Tir Na Nog, Everyone’s a Wally, Cyclone, Zombie Zombie, and Strontium Dog: The Killing were part of the commercial environment surrounding the magazine.
The magazine still carried traces of the culture that had produced Games Computing. Rory Newman’s “Into Games” material taught readers about programming, while other portions of the issue treated software as something to be examined, played, ranked, discussed, and sometimes created.
That combination is important.
Computer Gamer did not represent a clean break between the age of the home-computer hobbyist and the age of the video game consumer. It sat directly between them. A reader could study programming techniques in one part of the magazine and then turn a few pages to find commercial advertisements urging them to buy the newest releases.
The magazine was helping make gaming a specialized interest while still carrying pieces of the older participatory computer culture with it.
Eecaan and the Magazine’s Science-Fiction World
Argus also tried to give Computer Gamer something that a simple collection of reviews could not provide: personality.
For much of its early life, the magazine wrapped itself in a playful science-fiction identity. Archival descriptions note that issues commonly used terminology such as “Transmission” for issue numbers and “Stardate” for publication dates, while covers and design elements leaned heavily into planets, aliens, and futuristic imagery.
At the center of the concept was Eecaan, an “Interplanetory Adviser” from the fictional planet Aargon.
Contemporary advertising for the magazine presented Eecaan as a member of an Association of Supreme Players who would monitor developments in the games industry and offer guidance to readers. The same promotion promised reviews of new releases, adventure features, help with difficult games, high scores, type-in programs, competitions, hardware coverage when relevant to gaming, and a readers’ club.
The character might seem like a small piece of 1980s magazine silliness, but later scholarship gives it greater significance.
Robin Bootes, in his study of the early British gaming press, places Computer Gamer among publications that increasingly communicated with their audiences through fictional personalities, mascots, and exaggerated editorial voices. These devices made a magazine feel less like a technical manual and more like membership in a particular culture. The reader was not merely receiving information from anonymous experts. The reader was being invited into a shared imaginary world built around gaming.
That approach suited Computer Gamer. Its title already defined the person it wanted reading the magazine. Its design attempted to define the world that person inhabited.
Reviews, Charts, and the British Software Market
At the practical level, however, readers still needed to know what was worth buying.
Game reviews therefore formed one of Computer Gamer’s most important functions. In an era when screenshots on a cassette box and advertising claims could be misleading, magazines served as one of the few independent ways to judge a game before spending money on it.
The magazine also tried to show readers what other people were buying.
Its first seven issues carried Gallup software charts. The April 1985 issue printed an all-format chart based on the week ending February 12, and later issues expanded the coverage to individual machines such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, and Atari. Those surviving charts now have historical value beyond their original purpose because they provide a contemporary record of which games were circulating successfully through the British market.
Advertising provides another record.
The first issue’s pages preserve promotions from software houses large and small, mail-order retailers, hardware companies, and publishers trying to stand out in a rapidly expanding market. Later issues document different waves of releases as companies including Ocean, U.S. Gold, Gremlin, Bug-Byte, and others competed for attention.
A surviving magazine therefore functions almost like an archaeological layer of the software industry. Reviews reveal what critics thought. Charts reveal what people were buying. Advertising reveals what publishers were trying to sell.
Computer Gamer preserved all three.
The Arcade Was Still Part of Computer Gaming
The magazine was not interested exclusively in games played at home.
Mike Roberts’s recurring arcade coverage connected British computer players to the coin-operated industry. Early installments of the “Coin-Op Connection” discussed contemporary arcade releases, placing the home-computer market alongside the games still appearing in amusement arcades.
That connection mattered in the middle of the 1980s because home gaming and arcade gaming had not yet become entirely separate historical worlds. Arcade machines remained important technological and cultural reference points. Home versions of arcade hits were heavily marketed, players compared conversions against the machines they had encountered in arcades, and publishers regularly licensed recognizable coin-op properties.
For a magazine trying to speak to the “computer gamer” rather than simply the computer owner, arcade gaming belonged naturally within the conversation.
When the Magazine Became a Game
One of the most distinctive elements of Computer Gamer was its willingness to turn the magazine itself into a place where readers could play.
Type-in software continued the older home-computing tradition. Rory Newman’s recurring “Into Games” series demonstrated different programming techniques, and surviving program archives show how the feature gradually developed ideas such as title screens, instructions, scrolling messages, joystick routines, customizable controls, and high-score tables.
Some programs became complete games.
The November 1985 issue, for example, published Jonathan Brough’s Gamerquest, a text adventure for the BBC Micro. The BBC Micro Games Archive preserves the title today and identifies Computer Gamer itself as its publisher.
This aspect of the magazine can be difficult to appreciate from the perspective of modern games journalism.
A contemporary website can provide a downloadable game, but a printed magazine in 1985 could ask the reader to create the game through the act of typing. The boundary between journalist, programmer, reader, and player was unusually thin. Someone could read about games, learn how games worked, enter code from the magazine, and then play the result on the same machine.
Computer Gamer was gradually positioning games as products worth reviewing and collecting while still preserving an older idea that games could be made, changed, and shared by the audience itself.
Heroic Warrior Adventures
Beginning with issue 7 in October 1985, the magazine added another unusual form of interactive entertainment.
The “Heroic Warrior Adventures” were gamebook-style adventures published directly within Computer Gamer. Instead of loading software, readers navigated branching stories on the printed page, carrying the traditions of role-playing games and interactive fiction into the magazine itself.
The series continued principally from issues 7 through 19. Surviving records identify adventures including “Beoden’s Journey,” “Night of the Living Dead,” “Starforce Trooper,” “The Necromancer’s Tower,” “Pyramid of the Werejackal,” “Commando Raid,” “Mines of Mithros,” and “The Icy Wastes.”
Their presence broadened the meaning of a gaming magazine.
Computer Gamer could review a commercial cassette, explain how to program a home computer, discuss an arcade machine, provide playable software through printed code, and turn several pages of the magazine itself into an interactive adventure.
It was less a publication about one platform than a publication organized around the idea of play.
Tony Hetherington and the First Eighteen Issues
Tony Hetherington served as editor through the magazine’s first 18 issues, taking Computer Gamer from its April 1985 beginning through September 1986.
During that period the magazine established most of the identity now associated with its surviving run. The science-fiction presentation, broad multi-format coverage, type-in programming, gamebook experiments, reviews, competitions, arcade material, and heavy commercial advertising all belonged to a publication searching for a distinctive place on crowded British newsstands.
Archival staff reconstructions identify a wider group of contributors around the title, including Eric Doyle, Jayne Goin, Gordon Hamlett, Mike Roberts, and David Bishop at various points in the magazine’s history.
The September 1986 issue was Hetherington’s last as editor. The following month marked a change at the top.
Eric Doyle Takes Over
With issue 19 in October 1986, Eric Doyle became editor.
The transition did not immediately erase the magazine’s existing identity. Hetherington continued to contribute, and many familiar elements of Computer Gamer remained. Yet the publication was entering a difficult period for British home-computer magazines.
Competition was intense, and the market itself was evolving.
By this point readers could choose among publications dedicated to individual machines as well as broad multi-format titles. CRASH had established a strong Spectrum identity. Zzap!64 served Commodore players. Computer and Video Games remained a formidable multi-format competitor. Other magazines entered and disappeared as publishers fought for sales and advertising.
The problem for Computer Gamer was no longer proving that games deserved their own magazine.
By late 1986, the existence of a specialized gaming press had already helped settle that question. The challenge was convincing enough readers that Computer Gamer was the gaming magazine they needed to buy.
The February 1987 Relaunch
Argus responded with another reinvention.
Issue 23, dated February 1987, introduced a major redesign. The science-fiction identity that had made the earlier magazine unusual was reduced in favor of a more conventional gaming-magazine presentation. Archival descriptions identify this issue as the point at which the publication was redesigned around a more straightforward gaming format.
The issue remained heavily connected to the commercial software market. Its advertising included Short Circuit, 10th Frame, Deep Strike, Knucklebusters, World Games, and other contemporary releases and promotions. The March issue continued with advertisements for games including Top Gun, Krakout, Thanatos, Cobra, Grange Hill, and Gauntlet: The Deeper Dungeons.
Argus had not abandoned Computer Gamer.
It was trying to save it.
The February redesign represented an attempt to make the magazine easier to sell in a market that had become more mature, more competitive, and increasingly dominated by publications with clearly defined personalities of their own.
The experiment would have very little time to work.
Four Months Later, Computer Gamer Was Gone
In June 1987, CRASH reported that Computer Gamer had closed.
Unlike many later accounts of discontinued magazines, the report was written while the closure was happening and included information from Argus itself. According to Argus circulation director Raymond Lewis, the February changes had not been sufficient to keep the title alive.
Computer Gamer was selling about 23,000 copies a month and had very few subscribers. The June issue would be the last. Argus had no plans to sell the title or merge it into another magazine.
The timing was particularly striking.
Only four months separated the major relaunch from the announcement that the magazine was finished.
The final issue, number 27, appeared in June 1987. Reviews and advertisements still filled its pages, creating the strange normality common to magazines that vanish while their subject continues racing forward. Games continued to be released. Companies continued buying advertisements. Writers continued judging new software.
Then there was no issue 28.
Across 27 issues and slightly more than two years, Computer Gamer had undergone two transformations. First, Games Computing had been reinvented as a magazine explicitly built around the gamer. Then Computer Gamer itself had been redesigned in an effort to survive the increasingly unforgiving British games-magazine market.
The second transformation did not save it.
More Than a Failed Magazine
Judging Computer Gamer simply by its relatively short lifespan would miss much of what makes it historically interesting.
The magazine existed during one of the most important transitions in British gaming culture.
When Games Computing began in January 1984, the home computer still belonged visibly to a culture in which users were encouraged to program, experiment, and treat games as one activity among many. When Computer Gamer replaced it in 1985, the emphasis moved toward the player.
Even the titles tell part of the story.
“Games Computing” described an activity associated with computers.
“Computer Gamer” described a person.
That shift was larger than Argus. Academic studies of the British gaming press have shown how magazines helped develop the language, values, identities, and expectations that gradually separated video gaming from general home computing. Reviews became specialized criticism. Players accumulated knowledge that distinguished experienced gamers from newcomers. Letters pages, rankings, competitions, characters, humor, and recurring features gave readers a sense that they belonged to a recognizable culture.
Computer Gamer participated directly in that process.
A Snapshot of Gaming Before the Console Era Changed
The magazine’s dates also give its surviving run another historical importance.
Its entire existence fell into the period immediately before Nintendo and Sega would increasingly reshape British gaming around dedicated consoles. Computer Gamer belonged firmly to the age of cassette tapes, multiple incompatible home-computer formats, BASIC listings, arcade conversions, bedroom programmers, mail-order software houses, and newsstands crowded with magazines competing to explain it all.
A reader in 1985 might own a Spectrum while a friend owned a Commodore 64 and another used an Amstrad. The same game could appear in several substantially different versions. Arcade machines remained important reference points. Printed magazines were among the main ways players discovered new releases, compared scores, found cheats, learned programming tricks, read rumors, and decided what to buy.
Within only a few years, the structure of the industry would change substantially.
Computer Gamer did not survive long enough to follow gaming into that next era.
That is precisely why its 27 issues remain so useful.
Why Computer Gamer Matters
The importance of Computer Gamer is not that it became Britain’s largest gaming magazine or that it outlasted its competitors. It did neither.
Its value comes from the world preserved between its covers.
The magazine records British software advertising during the height of the home-computer boom. It preserves contemporary reviews before later reputations hardened into accepted gaming history. Its Gallup charts record what people were buying. Its arcade columns show the continuing relationship between coin-op and home gaming. Its type-in programs preserve a culture in which readers could become programmers. Its Heroic Warrior Adventures demonstrate how a magazine could itself become an interactive medium.
Most importantly, its transformation from Games Computing into Computer Gamer captures a much larger transformation.
The computer was becoming a games machine.
The person sitting in front of it was becoming a gamer.
For 27 issues between April 1985 and June 1987, Computer Gamer tried to speak directly to that new identity. It eventually lost the commercial battle for the newsstand, but the culture it represented did not disappear.
It became the future of video games.
Sources & Further Reading
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer. Nos. 1–27. April 1985–June 1987. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/computer-gamer
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer, no. 1. April 1985. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/computer-gamer/1/0/1985/4/0
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer, no. 7. October 1985. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/computer-gamer/7
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer, no. 10. January 1986. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/computer-gamer/10
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer, no. 15. June 1986. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/computer-gamer/15/0/1986/6/0
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer, no. 16. July 1986. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/computer-gamer/16
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer, no. 18. September 1986. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/computer-gamer/18/0/1986/9/0
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer, no. 23. February 1987. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/computer-gamer/23
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer, no. 24. March 1987. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/computer-gamer/24/0/1987/3/0
Argus Specialist Publications. Computer Gamer, no. 27. June 1987. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gamer_Issue_27_1987-06_Argus_Press_GB
Argus Specialist Publications. Games Computing. January 1984–March 1985. World of Spectrum. https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/
CRASH. “Games Mags Close.” No. 41, June 1987. https://www.crashonline.org.uk/41/news.htm
CRASH. “Fear + Loathing.” No. 41, June 1987. https://crashonline.org.uk/41/minson.htm
CRASH. Editorial. No. 14, March 1985. Discussion of changes in the British computer-magazine market and the transition from Games Computing to Computer Gamer. https://crashonline.org.uk/14/editrl.htm
ISSN International Centre. “Computer Gamer.” ISSN 0269-8250. ISSN Portal. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/0269-8250
ComputerHits. “Sources and Chart Coverage.” Database of Gallup software charts published in Computer Gamer and other British computer magazines. https://computerhits.org/sources/
BBC Micro Games Archive. “Gamerquest.” Jonathan Brough, 1985. Originally published through Computer Gamer. https://www.bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=2112
Demian’s Gamebook Web Page. “Computer Gamer / Heroic Warrior Adventures.” https://gamebooks.org/index.php/Series/1903/Show
Bootes, Robin. “The Emergence of Gamer Culture and the Gaming Press: The UK Videogame Magazine as Cultural and Consumer Guide, 1981–1993.” PhD diss., Newcastle University, 2016. https://theses.newcastle.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/3527
Kirkpatrick, Graeme. The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK Gaming Magazines, 1981–1995. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137305107
Kirkpatrick, Graeme. “Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field: UK Gaming Magazines and the Formation of Gaming Culture 1981–1995.” Game Studies 12, no. 1 (2012). https://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/kirkpatrick
Kirkpatrick, Graeme. “How Gaming Became Sexist: A Study of UK Gaming Magazines 1981–1995.” Media, Culture & Society 39, no. 4 (2017): 453–468. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0163443716646177
VIC-20 Listings. “Computer Gamer.” VIC-20 Listings. Accessed October 11, 2026. https://www.vic20listings.freeolamail.com/mag_compgamer.html
VIC-20 Listings. “Games Computing.” VIC-20 Listings. Accessed October 11, 2026. https://www.vic20listings.freeolamail.com/mag_gamescomp.html
Abandonware France. “Computer Gamer.” La Bibliothèque d’Abandonware Magazines. Accessed October 11, 2026. https://www.abandonware-france.org/bibliotheque/magazines/computer-gamer-180/
RetroMags. “Computer Gamer.” Accessed October 11, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/computer-gamer/
World of Spectrum. “Magazine Preservation Project.” Accessed October 11, 2026. https://worldofspectrum.net/spectrum-magazines-preservation/
Atari Compendium. “Computer and Video Game Magazine Archives.” Accessed October 11, 2026. https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/magazines/magazines.html