In the spring of 1981, Russell Sipe was driving down the Orange Freeway near Anaheim Stadium with a computer game on his mind. The game was Strategic Simulations’ Computer Air Combat, and Sipe had run into problems while playing it. What he wanted was simple enough: a magazine article that could tell him more about the game.
There was a problem. He could not find one.
Years later, writing in the fiftieth issue of Computer Gaming World, Sipe remembered realizing during that drive that nobody was covering computer games with the depth he wanted. The thought that someone ought to start such a magazine quickly became another thought: why not do it himself?
Sipe had no publishing experience. He had previously been a Southern Baptist minister and had left the ministry in 1979. Yet within months of that drive he had formed Golden Empire Publications, gathered money from family and friends, and begun preparing a magazine devoted to an industry that was itself still being invented. By November 1981, the first issue of Computer Gaming World was in readers’ hands.
Over the next twenty-five years, CGW would grow from a small publication assembled partly on a kitchen table into one of the defining magazines of computer game culture. Its pages recorded the rise of the Apple II and Commodore machines, the emergence of the IBM PC as a gaming platform, the growth of Sierra, Origin, Electronic Arts, MicroProse, LucasArts, Blizzard, id Software, and countless other developers, the arrival of CD-ROMs and 3D graphics, and finally the Internet revolution that would make a monthly computer game magazine increasingly difficult to sustain.
In the process, Computer Gaming World did more than report on the history of PC gaming. For a quarter century, it helped create it.
A Problem on the Orange Freeway
Sipe’s idea came at a moment when computer games occupied an unusual place in the larger game business. Arcades were booming, Atari’s Video Computer System had brought cartridge games into millions of homes, and personal computers such as the Apple II were creating a smaller but rapidly developing software market.
Computer games could also be considerably more complicated than many contemporary console and arcade releases. Strategy games, simulations, adventures, role-playing games, and computerized wargames could require lengthy manuals and hours of experimentation. Players often needed more than advertising or a short description on a software box to understand what they were buying.
Sipe believed those players needed a publication that treated their hobby seriously.
After deciding to pursue the idea, he spent roughly two weeks talking with people in the computer game business and with publishers familiar with the smaller board game magazine market. In June 1981 he created Golden Empire Publications Inc. and brought together a small group of investors made up largely of relatives and friends.
More than twenty possible magazine titles were considered, including The Computer Gamer, The Floppy Gamer, Computer Games, Game Bits, Software Wars, and even Kilobaud Warrior. Sipe eventually settled on Computer Gaming World because the name suggested something larger than a magazine filled only with reviews. He wanted coverage of game strategy, design, designers, companies, and the business surrounding the new medium.
With about $6,000 available, work began on a November launch.
Sipe soon discovered that he would not be entering the field alone. Electronic Games and Softline were also preparing publications in 1981. All three appeared within a short period, evidence that computer and electronic gaming had grown large enough to support a new kind of specialized journalism.
Building the First Issue by Hand
The first Computer Gaming World looked very different from the thick magazines that would appear during the publication’s 1990s peak.
The November/December 1981 issue ran forty pages. Russell Sipe was listed as editor, Kirk Robinson as assistant editor, Suzanne Sipe handled operations, and Tim Finkas was responsible for art and layout. A single copy cost $2.75, while six issues could be purchased through a yearly subscription for $11.
Its contents already showed what Sipe meant when he described a magazine interested in the entire world of computer gaming. Chris Crawford wrote about the future of computer wargaming. Bob Proctor examined SSI’s Torpedo Fire. William Edmunds discussed RobotWar. There were strategy pieces, reviews, maps, and articles that approached computer games as systems worth studying rather than novelties to be briefly described.
Even the production of that first issue reflected how small the operation was.
Finkas later remembered being responsible for the original CGW logo, masthead, headings, illustrations, cover art, and other graphics. This was before desktop publishing had transformed magazine production. Typeset columns had to be physically cut and positioned on page-sized boards. Finkas recalled assembling the first issue on the kitchen table at his parents’ home.
The now-famous first cover showed a dragon emerging from a computer screen toward the player. Finkas later explained that he wanted the image to represent the ability of computer games to pull players into fantastic worlds.
It was an appropriate image for a magazine arriving just as the boundaries of those worlds were beginning to expand.
A Magazine for a New Kind of Gamer
Early CGW devoted considerable attention to the sort of strategy games and simulations that interested Sipe and many of the magazine’s original readers. Strategic Simulations, Avalon Hill, Sir-Tech, Automated Simulations and Epyx, and other early publishers appeared regularly in its pages.
Yet the magazine expanded as computer gaming itself expanded.
By January 1984, CGW was referring to a readership of roughly 25,000. The publication remained bimonthly during its earliest years, increased to nine issues annually during 1986 and 1987, and became monthly in 1988. The November 1990 issue became the first to exceed one hundred pages.
Its survival during the upheaval in the early 1980s was particularly important. Johnny L. Wilson, who would become one of the magazine’s defining editors, later argued that CGW benefited from remaining focused on personal computers while competitors devoted more attention to cartridge consoles. When the American console business collapsed, the smaller computer game audience remained a viable niche for a carefully managed publication.
That focus also gave the magazine an identity. CGW was often dense, sometimes technical, and willing to devote substantial space to a game if its editors believed the subject deserved it. The magazine assumed that many readers wanted to understand how games worked, how their systems interacted, whether their historical simulations were credible, and whether a complicated game remained interesting after dozens of hours.
Computer games were becoming more sophisticated, and CGW developed alongside them.
By the time the magazine reached issue 50 in August 1988, Sipe could look back on nearly seven years in which both the publication and the medium it covered had changed dramatically. Four years later, the November 1992 hundredth issue carried Sipe’s retrospective under the title “3900 Games Later.” The title referred to the thousands of review copies that had reached CGW since its earliest days.
A magazine that had begun with $6,000 and a handful of people was becoming an institution.
Johnny Wilson and the Culture of CGW
Johnny L. Wilson had known Russell Sipe long before either man became associated with computer game journalism. They had met in college and shared interests in board wargames, role-playing games, and other tabletop games.
Wilson later remembered playtesting the computer game Galaxy with Sipe and becoming fascinated by the possibilities of games on personal computers. When Sipe launched CGW, Wilson began contributing reviews. At first he sometimes played games on other people’s computers because he did not own a machine capable of running everything he needed to cover.
He eventually joined the magazine more formally, first helping Sipe with editing and writing. Sipe later made him editor and part owner before the sale of the publication to Ziff Davis.
Wilson’s tenure coincided with one of the most important transformations in computer gaming. The relatively specialized market of the early 1980s gave way to increasingly ambitious role-playing games, simulations, graphic adventures, strategy titles, first-person shooters, and multimedia productions. The IBM-compatible PC moved steadily toward the center of the computer game business.
CGW’s writers became personalities in their own right. Among the most remembered was Scorpia, whose role-playing game coverage became closely associated with the magazine. Writers such as M. Evan Brooks developed similarly specialized followings, while the magazine’s growing stable of contributors allowed it to cover an increasingly diverse industry.
Wilson later described an editorial culture that took reviews seriously. When CGW adopted star ratings, the score proposed by a reviewer could be debated by the editorial staff in meetings that sometimes lasted for hours. The number at the end of a review was not supposed to replace the argument made in the text.
Looking back in 2012, Wilson believed CGW’s most important achievement was that it treated games and the people making them seriously at a time when much of the wider culture did not. He remembered the magazine as an honest attempt to serve readers and to look behind the marketing surrounding an increasingly valuable entertainment business.
That attitude helped make CGW useful for something its original editors could not have completely anticipated. Decades later, its old issues became a remarkably detailed record of how players, critics, and developers understood computer games at the exact moment those games were new.
Ziff Davis and the Magazine at Full Scale
By the early 1990s, CGW had grown far beyond the small Golden Empire operation of 1981.
The October 1993 issue announced one of the biggest changes in the magazine’s history. Ziff-Davis Publishing Company had acquired Computer Gaming World along with Kids & Computers.
For CGW, joining Ziff Davis meant becoming part of one of the most powerful computer publishing organizations in the United States. Ziff Davis already published titles such as PC Magazine, PC Week, PC Computing, MacUser, Windows Sources, and Computer Shopper.
CGW’s announcement assured readers that the magazine would retain its staff, editorial direction, and location while gaining the larger company’s financial resources, marketing experience, and distribution power. Ziff Davis president J. Scott Briggs praised Sipe and Wilson and described CGW as the leading publication in its category.
The acquisition marked the end of one chapter, but not the magazine itself. Sipe gradually moved away from the publication, while Wilson remained an important editorial figure during the Ziff Davis period.
The magazine continued expanding through the great PC gaming boom of the 1990s. These were the years of Doom, Myst, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, Diablo, Quake, Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, Half-Life, and countless other releases that pushed computer gaming into a much larger cultural and commercial space.
CGW grew physically along with the business it covered. The December 1997 issue reached 506 pages, the largest issue in the magazine’s history.
It was an extraordinary distance from the forty-page magazine Tim Finkas had assembled by hand in 1981.
From Sipe and Wilson to Jeff Green
Editorial leadership changed as the magazine entered a new century. Wilson eventually left the editor-in-chief position, George Jones led the magazine around the turn of the millennium, and Jeff Green became editor-in-chief during the early 2000s.
The personality of CGW changed with its staff and with the audience around it, but the publication remained centered on PC gaming. The games themselves were changing rapidly. Persistent online worlds, broadband Internet access, downloadable patches, modifications, digital distribution, and online communities were making the personal computer an increasingly connected gaming platform.
The same developments that made PC gaming more dynamic were beginning to undermine the traditional game magazine.
For most of CGW’s life, a magazine could perform several jobs at once. It could deliver news, previews, reviews, screenshots, strategy advice, interviews, advertisements, demo software, and access to a community of other enthusiasts. By the early 2000s, the Internet could perform almost all of those jobs faster.
The question facing Jeff Green and his staff was no longer simply how to make a good computer game magazine. It was how to make a monthly computer game magazine necessary when its readers could receive gaming information every hour of every day.
The Internet Changes the Rules
By 2006, Green was speaking openly about the problem.
In an interview with Ars Technica, he explained that CGW articles could be written six or seven weeks before the finished magazine appeared on a newsstand. That delay had once been tolerable because rival magazines operated under similar limitations. It became much harder to justify when websites could publish reviews and news almost immediately.
CGW experimented with separating what print and the Internet were expected to do.
Review scores could appear online quickly while the magazine concentrated on longer discussions of games after players had spent more time with them. The staff worked with FileFront to connect magazine coverage with downloadable demos, patches, modifications, and other files. Green argued that print needed to offer depth, strong writing, unusual subjects, and analysis that readers could not obtain simply by refreshing a website.
Another casualty was the cover disc. CDs packed with demos and videos had once been a valuable reason to buy a computer gaming magazine. Broadband connections and increasingly large game demos made them far less useful. CGW dropped the disc rather than move to a more expensive DVD and reduced its cover price from $8.99 to $4.99.
The magazine also widened its definition of what PC gaming coverage could include. Green discussed covering modifications, maps, patches, hardware, machinima, fan projects, and online communities rather than treating a boxed retail game as something that existed only on its release date.
It was an attempt to adapt CGW to the very world it had helped document.
The difficulty was that the transformation was happening quickly. A publication founded because Russell Sipe could not find detailed information about one game now existed in a world where a player could find thousands of discussions about a game before the next magazine issue reached a mailbox.
The End of the Computer Gaming World Name
In August 2006, another major change was announced. Ziff Davis would replace Computer Gaming World with Games for Windows: The Official Magazine, using Microsoft’s Games for Windows branding.
Corporate filings later described the move directly. Beginning with the December 2006 issue, Ziff Davis said, Computer Gaming World was rebranded and its name changed to Games for Windows: The Official Magazine.
The November 2006 issue of CGW was therefore its last under the original title. It was issue 268, published twenty-five years, month for month, after the first November 1981 issue.
For longtime readers, losing the CGW name carried considerable symbolic weight. Yet the initial change was more a rebranding than a complete replacement of the publication. The first Games for Windows cover explicitly identified the magazine as “Formerly Computer Gaming World,” and much of the CGW staff remained in place.
Green also emphasized that the Microsoft branding did not mean Microsoft controlled the magazine’s editorial judgments. Contemporary accounts of the first issue described essentially the same editorial staff working from the same operation, now beneath a different title and visual identity.
The new name, however, could not solve the larger economic problem facing print game journalism.
Games for Windows continued for seventeen issues. In April 2008, the print publication came to an end and its remaining editorial operation was shifted toward the 1UP network. Ziff Davis executives pointed to the migration of PC gamers and advertising toward the Internet as the basic reason for concentrating resources online.
The successor publication had lasted less than two years.
The lineage that began with Russell Sipe’s drive past Anaheim Stadium had finally reached the end of its life on paper.
From Disposable Magazine to Historical Record
There is an irony in what happened next.
Computer game magazines were designed as current publications. Their previews became obsolete when games shipped. Their hardware recommendations aged as processors and graphics cards changed. Their news could be outdated within weeks.
Yet that same immediacy is what makes old issues of Computer Gaming World so valuable today.
A modern history of a game can explain how important Ultima, Civilization, Doom, Diablo, or Half-Life eventually became. CGW can show what informed players thought about those games before anyone knew what their long-term reputation would be.
Advertisements preserve the prices, promises, and visual language publishers used to sell software. Reviews show what critics valued at particular moments. Letters reveal what players argued about. Industry columns capture technological predictions that sometimes came true and sometimes failed spectacularly. Interviews preserve the words of designers while they were still building careers that later became legendary.
The magazine also spans an unusually important period. Its first issue appeared when personal computer gaming was still a small hobby built around machines such as the Apple II. Its final CGW issue appeared after online worlds, broadband connections, digital distribution, modern 3D graphics, and Internet game journalism had transformed the meaning of PC gaming.
That history has survived because collectors and preservationists recognized its value.
The Computer Gaming World Museum has preserved scans of the magazine’s complete run from November 1981 through November 2006. The Video Game History Foundation Library maintains a complete CGW collection along with all seventeen issues of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine, allowing researchers to follow the publication from its beginning through the end of its print successor in April 2008.
Why Computer Gaming World Matters
Computer Gaming World mattered because it appeared when computer gaming needed a language for talking about itself.
Russell Sipe did not begin with a grand plan to create one of the most important archives of early video game history. He wanted better information about a game he was playing. From that simple frustration came a magazine that spent twenty-five years explaining games to the people who played them.
CGW watched computer games move from floppy disks and monochrome monitors to CD-ROMs, 3D accelerators, broadband connections, and persistent online worlds. It watched small developers become major publishers, hobbyist programmers become celebrated designers, and computer gaming grow from a specialized pastime into a multibillion-dollar industry.
Its own history followed that transformation. A few people with $6,000 could assemble the first issue with physical paste-up on a kitchen table. Sixteen years later, a single issue could exceed five hundred pages. Less than a decade after that peak, the Internet had changed the economics of game journalism so thoroughly that even a respected twenty-five-year-old title could lose its place in print.
That does not make the story of Computer Gaming World one of failure. Quite the opposite.
For hundreds of issues, CGW occupied a position that would be difficult for any publication to recreate. It was close enough to the birth of commercial computer gaming to know many of its pioneers personally, yet it lasted long enough to document the moment PC games became one of the dominant forms of interactive entertainment.
When Johnny Wilson looked back on his years with the magazine, he remembered believing that CGW had taken games seriously before most people did. That may be the clearest explanation of its historical importance.
Long before video game history became an academic field, long before museums began collecting game software and development materials, and long before old magazines were scanned into digital archives, Computer Gaming World was already recording that history one issue at a time.
Sources & Further Reading
Computer Gaming World. Vol. 1, no. 1. November–December 1981. Golden Empire Publications. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/digital_objects/10400
Sipe, Russell. “The Greatest Story Ever Told (Well, Maybe Not the Greatest; But It Isn’t Bad).” Computer Gaming World, no. 50 (August 1988): 6–9. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?id=50&pub=2&year=1988
Sipe, Russell. “3900 Games Later: CGW’s Retrospective on 11 Years of Computer Gaming.” Computer Gaming World, no. 100 (November 1992): 8–32. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?id=100&pub=2&year=1992
Computer Gaming World. No. 111. October 1993. Golden Empire Publications. CGW Museum. https://cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?id=111&pub=2&year=1993
Computer Gaming World. No. 208. November 2001. Ziff Davis. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/9151
Computer Gaming World. No. 250. April 2005. Ziff Davis. CGW Museum. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_250.pdf
Computer Gaming World. No. 268. November 2006. Ziff Davis. CGW Museum. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?id=268&pub=2&year=2006
Games for Windows: The Official Magazine. No. 1. December 2006. Ziff Davis. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/13643
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Computer Gaming World.” Collection MAG-CGW, November 1981–April 2008. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/29
Computer Gaming World Museum. “Computer Gaming World Museum.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/about/index.php
Finkas, Tim. “Dragons, Dreamworlds, and… Diskettes: An Interview with Original CGW Cover Artist Tim Finkas.” Interview by Computer Gaming World Museum. August 1, 2004. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/columns/index.php?id=2
Fulton, Steve. “Interview Johnny L. Wilson Former Editor of Computer Gaming World (Full Length Version).” Game Developer, October 16, 2012. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/interview-johnny-l-wilson-former-editor-of-computer-gaming-world-full-length-version-
Wilson, Johnny L. “The Way It Used to Be!” Just Adventure, December 11, 2002. https://www.justadventure.com/2002/12/11/the-way-it-used-to-be/
Riley, Sheila. “Bringing New Depth to Computer Gaming.” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1999. https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0304/p17s1.html
Kuchera, Ben. “Can Print Magazines Remain Relevant? Jeff Green from Computer Gaming World Tackles the Hard Questions from Opposable Thumbs.” Ars Technica, May 17, 2006. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/05/3989/
Kuchera, Ben. “Pt. 2 of the Opposable Thumbs Jeff Green Interview: How Computer Gaming World Plans to Stay on Top of an Online World.” Ars Technica, May 18, 2006. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/05/4017/
Kuchera, Ben. “Computer Gaming World Now under Microsoft Branding.” Ars Technica, August 2, 2006. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/08/4863/
Dobson, Jason. “Ziff Kills CGW, Launches Games for Windows.” Game Developer, September 2006, 4. https://media.gdcvault.com/GD_Mag_Archives/GDM_September_2006.pdf
Kuchera, Ben. “Games for Windows Magazine Shuts Down, Staff Moves Online.” Ars Technica, April 8, 2008. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/04/games-for-windows-magazine-shuts-down-staff-moves-online/
Ziff Davis Holdings Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2004. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2005. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1124566/000095012305003624/y04580e10vk.htm
Ziff Davis Media Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2005. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2006. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1124566/000095012306004030/y18951e10vk.htm
Ziff Davis Media Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2006. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2007. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1124566/000095012307004874/y32595e10vk.htm
Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. Finding Aid to the 1UP Collection of Electronic Gaming Media Coverage, 1999–2004. The Strong National Museum of Play, 2016. https://www.museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-the-1UP-Collection-of-Electronic-Gaming-Media-Coverage_012517.pdf
ISSN International Centre. “Computer Gaming World.” ISSN 0744-6667. ISSN Portal. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/0744-6667
Code Like It’s 198x. “Computer Gaming World.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://code198x.com/vault/magazines/computer-gaming-world/
RetroMags. “Computer Gaming World.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/computer-gaming-world/
Remo, Chris. “Microsoft Officially Launches Games for Windows Line.” Shacknews, September 18, 2006. https://www.shacknews.com/article/43900/microsoft-officially-launches-games-for
Cole, Vladimir. “Games for Windows Magazine Hits Newsstands.” Engadget, November 18, 2006. https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-18-reviewing-games-for-windows-magazine-issue-01.html