At the beginning of 1982, a customer receiving a piece of mail from Video Take-Out was not opening what most people would recognize as a video game magazine. The first surviving newsletter was only two pages long, closely connected to a North Hollywood mail-order business, and packed with the information that mattered to someone trying to buy games at the time.
There were Atari cartridge numbers, projected shipping dates, price changes, notices about discontinued titles, information about upcoming Activision releases, and even an order form for Pac-Man shirts. Video Take-Out reported that it had seen Atari’s planned new master game system and passed along what it knew about upcoming Intellivision cartridges. At the end of the second page, the newsletter assured customers that Video Take-Out intended to keep them informed as 1982 developed into what it expected would be an extraordinarily exciting year for games.
That little sheet eventually became Computer Entertainer, one of the most valuable surviving records of the American video game industry during the 1980s.
The publication grew out of Video Take-Out, a mail-order video game retailer operated by sisters Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan. Their position as retailers turned out to be critical. They did not simply wait for press releases to arrive. They needed to know what publishers were actually shipping because customers were attempting to order those products from them. Decades later, historians would discover that this commercial necessity created something far more important than an ordinary store newsletter. It created a month-by-month record of the American game business.
The Video Game Update Gets Its Name
The first three surviving issues were simply Video Take-Out newsletters. By the summer of 1982, however, the sisters were building something larger, and readers were invited to help name it.
The July 1982 issue announced that 14-year-old Freeman Leung of Newport, Rhode Island, had won the naming contest. Among the suggestions he submitted was The Video Game Update. Video Take-Out selected it and awarded Leung a $25 gift certificate. The newly named publication carried the subtitle, “A Critical Newsletter for the Serious Gamesman,” and cost two dollars.
That July issue already looked considerably more ambitious than the original two-page retailer sheet. It covered the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, discussed upcoming hardware, examined games from Atari, Activision, Imagic, Coleco, Parker Brothers and numerous smaller companies, and introduced a rating system that separated the quality of graphics from the quality of play.
The editorial voice was unusually direct. The writers were willing to say that a product looked disappointing, that another company appeared capable of becoming a major force, or that an announced system might have difficulty surviving an increasingly crowded marketplace. They also understood that the number of companies entering the video game business was becoming difficult for consumers to follow. The newsletter told its readers that Video Take-Out wanted to help them decide both what to buy and what to avoid.
That combination of criticism, retail information and industry reporting gave The Video Game Update an identity different from a simple catalog. Video Take-Out might have been selling games, but its newsletter was increasingly behaving like a specialist publication.
Reporting From Inside the Game Business
The retailer connection gave Badeaux and Dolan an advantage that would become more valuable as the decade progressed.
They had to know when games were supposed to arrive. Each month, publishers could be contacted about shipping schedules, delays, and cancellations. Those updates were then published for readers. When expected dates changed, later issues could change with them.
Video game historian Kevin Bunch has explained how important this became to reconstructing early game chronology. For releases from late 1982 onward, he identifies Computer Entertainer and The Video Game Update as his principal source, supplemented with newspapers and other periodicals. In a Video Game History Foundation discussion, Bunch recalled that the publication contacted publishers for monthly shipping updates, while Frank Cifaldi emphasized that the editors could do this so effectively because Video Take-Out itself was ordering and selling the products.
The newsletter was not perfect. Bunch has noted that dates sometimes remained uncertain and that newspapers or other evidence can correct or refine particular listings. That is normal for contemporary reporting. What makes the publication remarkable is the consistency of the attempt.
For historians, the difference is enormous. A modern database can assign a year or date to a game without showing where that information originated. The Video Game Update instead catches games while they were moving through the marketplace. A title could be scheduled, delayed, shipped, reviewed, and advertised across consecutive issues. The record preserves uncertainty as it happened rather than smoothing everything into a clean retrospective chronology.
Surviving the Video Game Crash
The timing of the newsletter’s creation could hardly have been more dramatic.
It appeared during the enormous expansion of the American home console market and then continued publishing through the 1983 and 1984 industry collapse. Many American publications that had depended heavily on console gaming disappeared. The Video Game Update did not.
That survival is one of the major reasons the publication matters today. The Video Game History Foundation describes Computer Entertainer as one of the few American video game publications to continue without interruption through the crash and consequently one of the rare American press sources still regularly covering home consoles in the middle of the decade.
The magazine itself changed with the market.
Home computers were becoming increasingly important to its readership. By April 1984, the first issue of Volume 3 appeared under the new primary title Computer Entertainer. The Video Game Update did not vanish completely. It was reduced to a secondary identification beneath the broader title. The Video Game History Foundation’s archival description identifies the April 1984 issue as the first to make Computer Entertainer the primary name.
The change made sense. The first page of that April issue discussed reader questionnaires showing increased ownership of machines such as the Commodore 64, Apple computers, Atari computers and the Coleco Adam. What had started with Atari and Intellivision cartridges now existed in a market where the boundary between video game machine and home computer was increasingly important.
Rather than tie itself to the declining fortunes of one generation of consoles, the publication expanded its field of vision.
Watching the Console Market Come Back
That flexibility placed Computer Entertainer in a remarkable position when console gaming began rebuilding in the United States.
The October 1985 issue carried a lead article titled “The Rebirth of Video Games.” The issue included a Nintendo Game System update alongside computer software coverage, demonstrating how naturally the publication could move between the recovering console business and the established home computer market.
This was a period when continuous American console coverage was unusually difficult to find. Computer Entertainer had never completely abandoned the field. It was therefore present as Nintendo attempted to establish the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States, and its surviving issues preserve contemporary American reactions rather than memories written years later.
The importance of that position becomes especially clear in June 1986.
The Super Mario Bros. Review
In Volume 5, Number 3, Computer Entertainer reviewed Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Today there is nothing unusual about finding thousands of reviews, retrospectives and rankings of Super Mario Bros. In 1986, the situation was completely different. American console journalism was still recovering from the disappearance of much of the earlier specialist press. The Video Game History Foundation identifies the Computer Entertainer review as one of the very few contemporary American reviews of the game.
The reviewers recognized something special. They praised the game’s colorful and humorous presentation, music, hidden surprises, and most importantly, the depth behind its apparently straightforward action. The review effectively placed the game among the rare titles capable of becoming genuinely addictive classics.
That review now carries historical weight beyond whether its writers liked Mario.
It shows what an informed American observer thought when the game was new, before Super Mario Bros. had accumulated decades of reputation and before Nintendo’s dominance of the later 1980s could be taken for granted. The magazine was evaluating a product in real time.
The same quality makes its coverage of the Nintendo Entertainment System, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and other major releases valuable. The reviewers did not know which games would become permanent parts of gaming culture. They were simply attempting to tell their readers what was worth playing.
That uncertainty is exactly what makes contemporary criticism useful to historians.
Criticism Without the Benefit of Hindsight
Computer Entertainer was not only a release-date service. Its reviews preserve the tastes and expectations of players during a rapidly changing technological period.
The magazine rated graphics and gameplay, published longer critical comments, produced Awards of Excellence, and eventually developed reader awards and a Hall of Fame. Games were judged according to the hardware on which they appeared rather than simply compared against software running on more powerful machines. The July 1982 issue explicitly explained that games for a given system were being compared with other games for that system.
This matters when reading early reviews now. A visually simple Atari 2600 cartridge was not necessarily being judged against the emerging capabilities of the Commodore 64 or later NES. The magazine attempted to evaluate software within the expectations of its own platform.
Its tone could also be sharp. Poor games were not protected merely because a company supplied information or because Video Take-Out might sell them. Even in the earliest issues, the editors openly described weak graphics, simple play, or disappointing conversions.
That willingness to criticize helped transform a retailer newsletter into journalism.
From the Mailbox to the Modem
The publication’s experimentation was not confined to print.
In the middle of the 1980s, Video Take-Out operated a bulletin board system known as The Hotline. Material connected with Computer Entertainer was made available electronically, pushing part of the publication beyond the limitations of a monthly paper newsletter. Contemporary documentation describes Computer Entertainer files appearing online and the service carrying additional computer news. The surviving research record also points to coverage of The Hotline in publications such as InfoWorld and Commodore Magazine.
For a publication that began with photocopied price sheets and mail orders, the transition is striking.
Video Take-Out had started by mailing customers information about cartridges they could purchase. Only a few years later, readers with modems could obtain information electronically. In miniature, the publication’s development reflected a much larger change in computer culture, from printed hobbyist information toward networked communities and digital distribution.
Five Years of Continuous Publication
By 1987, simply reaching a fifth birthday was worth celebrating.
Computer Entertainer produced a special Fifth Birthday Edition that looked backward as well as forward. It included a history of Apple II gaming, previous Awards of Excellence, recommended software, reader favorites, and reflections on the publication’s own first five years. Later issues remembered the special edition as part of a broader celebration of five years of continuous publication.
The magazine also invited readers to participate in a Readers’ Hall of Fame, selecting favorite entertainment programs from the years the publication had covered. The idea continued beyond the anniversary, allowing later games to join the original inductees.
By this point, Computer Entertainer had become an archive of its own history.
That became even clearer in February 1989 with the publication of the Master Index and Awards, 1982-1988. Instead of forcing subscribers to hunt through years of back issues, the index offered researchers and readers a way to trace earlier reviews and awards across much of the magazine’s run.
What began as information too temporary to outlive the next shipment of cartridges had become information worth indexing.
The Video Game Update Returns
The publication never entirely forgot its original identity.
Beginning in April 1988, The Video Game Update returned more prominently as part of the publication’s branding. By then the title carried history behind it. Readers who had followed the newsletter from its earliest years had watched the Atari boom, the market collapse, the rise of home computers, Nintendo’s American expansion and the beginning of another major period of console competition.
The industry had changed dramatically, but the publication’s original purpose remained recognizable. Tell readers what was coming, what had actually shipped and whether it was worth their money.
Few surviving publications provide such a continuous view across that particular span of American video game history.
The Final Issue
Computer Entertainer continued into 1990.
The last known issue was Volume 9, Number 4, dated July 1990. After more than eight years of reporting, reviewing, tracking, and cataloging electronic entertainment, publication ended.
The final months almost disappeared from the archival record.
Marylou Badeaux had kept official bound reference copies covering 1982 through 1989, and those volumes eventually became the core of the Video Game History Foundation’s collection. The 1990 issues had not been bound, however, leaving the final portion of the run more vulnerable. To complete the archive, the Foundation turned to game historian Leonard Herman, who had subscribed to the publication and still possessed rare copies. His collection supplied scans for the final issues, including July 1990.
A newsletter that had once existed to tell customers whether a cartridge was shipping survived in part because one of those customers kept his copies.
Marylou Badeaux, Celeste Dolan, and a Rare Place in Games Journalism
The history of Computer Entertainer is also the history of the two sisters who sustained it.
Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan co-created and operated a publication during an era when the American video game business was still defining what specialist games journalism even looked like. The Video Game History Foundation identifies Computer Entertainer as the earliest console video game magazine known to have been run by women.
Their position was unusual in another way. They were simultaneously retailers, editors, reviewers, industry observers, and information gatherers.
Those overlapping roles could never satisfy the later ideal of a completely separated press and retail ecosystem, but historically they were precisely what made the publication useful. Video Take-Out needed accurate information to operate, and the newsletter transformed that information into a public record.
Badeaux finally discussed the publication at length with the Video Game History Foundation for a 2025 episode of the Video Game History Hour. The interview covered the creation of the newsletter with Dolan, the problems of operating a mail-order video game business, and the methods the sisters used to gather detailed information from publishers.
By then, historians had already spent years discovering how much of the industry’s forgotten chronology was hiding in those pages.
Preserving Computer Entertainer
The publication’s modern history changed dramatically in 2025.
The Video Game History Foundation acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer and digitized its complete surviving run. Marylou Badeaux had previously donated her bound reference copies, and after Celeste Dolan’s death, another set of bound copies became available. Having duplicate material allowed the Foundation to debind one run and rescan the pages at higher quality without sacrificing the remaining intact reference set.
The Foundation then made the magazine available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
That decision transformed an extremely rare periodical into an unusually accessible historical source. Researchers can now move from the two-page Video Take-Out sheet of early 1982 through The Video Game Update, Computer Entertainer, the fifth-anniversary material, the master index and the final 1990 issues without having to assemble scattered private collections. The formal VGHF finding aid confirms the surviving holdings and the provenance of the collection.
The attached research material for this article likewise points to the complete VGHF archive and its formal finding aid as the strongest primary-source foundation for reconstructing the publication’s history.
Why Computer Entertainer Matters
Many old game magazines are valuable because they preserve reviews, advertisements, or screenshots. Computer Entertainer does all of those things, but its historical importance goes deeper.
It records the American home video game business on both sides of the crash.
Its earliest pages show retailers struggling to predict when Atari and Intellivision games would arrive. Its 1982 issues capture a marketplace crowded with companies convinced they could become the next major cartridge manufacturer. Its later issues show home computers becoming increasingly important as the early console business contracted. Then the same publication was still there when Nintendo entered the American market, and Super Mario Bros. began building a new generation of console players.
The magazine also preserves the uncertainty of history as it happened. Games are delayed. Products change names. Companies appear with great confidence and then vanish. Systems described as the future sometimes become footnotes, while titles reviewed as promising new releases eventually become landmarks.
That is why historians such as Kevin Bunch continue using it. The magazine provides not simply memories of what happened but dated evidence produced while events were unfolding.
For a publication born as a two-page mail-order newsletter, that is an extraordinary legacy.
A Paper Trail Through the First Great Era of Home Games
In early 1982, Video Take-Out told customers what Atari cartridges were coming, how much they would cost and when the store hoped to receive them.
Eight years later, the publication that grew from those sheets had documented one of the most turbulent periods in the history of electronic entertainment.
It watched Atari at its height, recorded the flood of competing hardware and software, continued publishing through the American market collapse, followed home computers through their expansion, documented Nintendo’s return of the dedicated console to prominence, and reviewed games that later became foundations of the medium.
Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan could not have known that historians decades later would use their shipping updates to determine when games were released or search their reviews for the first American reactions to classics.
They were trying to keep readers informed.
That simple purpose is exactly what made Computer Entertainer endure. The newsletter captured video game history before anyone knew which parts of that history would matter.
Sources & Further Reading
Video Take-Out. Video Take-Out Newsletter 1, no. 1 (ca. early 1982). Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Take-Out. Video Take-Out Newsletter 1, no. 2 (ca. early 1982). Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Take-Out. Video Take-Out Newsletter 1, no. 3 (April 1982). Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Take-Out. The Video Game Update 1, no. 4 (July 1982). Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Take-Out. The Video Game Update, vol. 1, nos. 5–12 (August 1982–March 1983). Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Take-Out. The Video Game Update, vol. 2, nos. 1–12 (April 1983–March 1984). Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Take-Out. Computer Entertainer 3, no. 1 (April 1984). Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Dolan, Celeste. “Time for Some Serious Soul Searching?” Computer Entertainer 4, no. 1 (April 1985): 1. VTO Inc.
Video Take-Out. Computer Entertainer 4, no. 7 (October 1985). Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Take-Out. Computer Entertainer 5, no. 3 (June 1986). Video Game History Foundation Library. Includes the contemporary American review of Super Mario Bros. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Take-Out. Computer Entertainer 6, no. 3 (June 1987). Video Game History Foundation Library.
Video Take-Out. Computer Entertainer: Special Fifth Birthday Edition. Spring 1987. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/19197
Video Take-Out. Computer Entertainer 7, no. 1 (April 1988). Video Game History Foundation Library.
Video Take-Out. Computer Entertainer: Master Index and Awards, 1982–1988. February 1989. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/19176
Video Take-Out. Computer Entertainer 9, no. 4 (July 1990). Video Game History Foundation Library. Final issue. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Computer Entertainer.” MAG-CEVGU. Collection finding aid, 1982–1990. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Computer Entertainer / Video Game Update, 1982–1987.” MAG-CEVGU-BOUND.8287. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/15378
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Computer Entertainer / Video Game Update, 1988.” MAG-CEVGU-BOUND.88. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/15379
Gold, Marcia. “Considering Video as a Way of Life.” Billboard, August 28, 1982, VM-10. Google Books.
Kleiner, Karen. “Billboard Conference.” Softline 2, no. 6 (July–August 1983): 45.
InfoWorld Staff. “Bulletin Boards.” InfoWorld 8, no. 19 (May 12, 1986): 31.
Gutman, Dan. “I Didn’t Know You Could Do That With a Modem!” Commodore Magazine 8, no. 11 (November 1987): 80. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/11-commodore-magazine/page/n81/mode/1up
MicroTimes. “Bulletin Boards.” No. 39 (January 1988): 118.
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Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters. New York: Oxbridge Communications, 1991, 148. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/oxbridgedirector0000unse/page/148/mode/1up
The Standard Periodical Directory. 16th ed. New York: Oxbridge Communications, 1993, 359. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/standardperiodic0000unse_x0y0_6edition1993/page/359/mode/1up
Katz, William A. Magazines for Young People: Formerly Magazines for School Libraries. 2nd ed. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1991, 149.
Salvador, Phil. “VGHF Acquires Early Game Magazine Computer Entertainer.” Video Game History Foundation, August 6, 2025. https://gamehistory.org/computerentertainer/
Kunimune, Robin. “Episode 137: Computer Entertainer.” Video Game History Hour. Video Game History Foundation, August 6, 2025. Interview with Marylou Badeaux. https://gamehistory.org/episode-137-computer-entertainer/
Video Game Newsroom Time Machine. “Marylou Badeaux: Warner Records, Computer Entertainer, Video Game Update, Video Take-Out.” June 30, 2026. https://videogamenewsroomtimemachine.libsyn.com/
Kunimune, Robin. “Ep. 13: Living Atari’s History with Kevin Bunch.” Video Game History Hour. Video Game History Foundation, January 6, 2021. https://gamehistory.org/ep-13-living-ataris-history-with-kevin-bunch/
Bunch, Kevin. “Release Dates.” Atari Archive. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.atariarchive.org/release-dates/
Bunch, Kevin. “Atari VCS Game Release Dates.” Atari Archive. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.atariarchive.org/atari-vcs-game-release-dates/
Mahardy, Mike. “Collector Has First and Only English Super Mario Bros. Review.” IGN, January 30, 2014. Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Archived IGN article
Hamilton, Kirk. “The First and Only English-Language Review of Super Mario Bros.” Kotaku, January 29, 2014. https://kotaku.com/the-first-and-only-review-of-super-mario-bros-1512006398
Loguidice, Bill. “Computer Entertainer / The Video Game Update 1982–1990 Newsletter Archive Now Freely Available.” Armchair Arcade, August 13, 2025. https://armchairarcade.com/perspectives/2025/08/13/computer-entertainer-the-video-game-update-1982-1990-newsletter-archive-now-freely-available/
Coopee, Todd. “Computer Entertainer.” Toy Tales, March 22, 2026. https://toytales.ca/computer-entertainer/
WorldCat. “Computer Entertainer.” OCLC 14192197. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://search.worldcat.org/title/14192197