In the summer of 1986, Japan hardly seemed to need another video game magazine. Nintendo’s Family Computer had already transformed the country’s home gaming market, and newsstands were filling with publications eager to explain new releases, reveal secrets, print maps, and help players through increasingly complicated games. Family Computer Magazine, Famicom Hisshōbon, Marukatsu Famicom, High Score, and Beep were among the publications competing for the attention of a generation that was turning the Famicom into one of Japan’s defining entertainment machines.
Into that crowded market came a strange new magazine from ASCII.
Its name was Famicom Tsūshin, meaning roughly “Famicom Communication.” It had grown out of a section in the computer magazine LOGiN, and its first independent issue went on sale on June 6, 1986. The National Diet Library catalogs that first number as the June 20, 1986 issue, an apparent difference between the date the magazine reached stores and its printed issue date rather than a contradiction in the historical record.
Forty years later, that publication is still alive.
The title eventually shortened to Famitsu, expanded beyond Nintendo hardware, became Japan’s first weekly video game magazine, established one of the industry’s most recognizable review systems, survived repeated changes of ownership, moved onto the web and into digital publishing, and reached its fortieth anniversary in 2026.
Its history is also the history of Japanese video game journalism growing up alongside the industry it covered.
From LOGiN to Famicom Tsūshin
Before Famitsu existed as its own magazine, its roots were planted in the pages of LOGiN, ASCII’s influential personal computer magazine.
During the early 1980s, Japanese video gaming was still divided between several overlapping worlds. Arcades remained important, personal computers supported a growing community of technically inclined players and developers, and dedicated home consoles had not yet completely reorganized the market. When Nintendo released the Family Computer in July 1983, that balance began to shift dramatically.
The Famicom’s rapidly growing audience created a demand for information. Games were becoming larger, secrets and hidden techniques were becoming part of playground conversation, and players wanted more than advertising. They wanted strategies, previews, maps, commentary, and some way of deciding which of the flood of new releases deserved their money.
ASCII’s LOGiN began covering the Famicom through a dedicated section called Famicom Tsūshin. Former editor Gōzō Shiozaki later remembered this period as one in which computer-magazine journalists were watching the Famicom boom become too large to ignore. Eventually, what had begun as one part of a computer magazine became large enough to stand on its own. Famitsu’s own institutional histories continue to identify its origin as a LOGiN feature that developed into an independent game magazine.
Hirokazu Hamamura, another figure who would become closely associated with the publication, joined ASCII in 1985. He later recalled working first with LOGiN and then serving on the Famicom Tsūshin editorial staff from the magazine’s launch. His career would eventually take him from editor to editor-in-chief and into senior management, making him one of the people whose professional life paralleled the growth of Japanese game media itself.
When Famicom Tsūshin became independent in 1986, however, success was far from guaranteed.
Entering a Crowded Famicom Magazine War
Famicom Tsūshin arrived after several competitors had already established themselves.
Famitsu’s own retrospective history describes 1986 as a period crowded with game magazines. Publications such as Family Computer Magazine, usually shortened to Famimaga, already had readers and recognizable identities. A newcomer needed some reason to be noticed.
One difference was speed.
Rather than beginning as a conventional monthly publication, Famicom Tsūshin promoted a biweekly schedule. In a business increasingly driven by announcements, release dates, rumors, strategies, and competition for new screenshots, getting information onto newsstands more quickly mattered.
Another difference was personality.
The first issue did not present itself like a solemn technical journal. Famitsu later remembered that its mixture of comedy, unusual features, editorial personalities, and game information helped distinguish it from competitors. Editors and writers who ordinarily might have remained invisible behind the magazine became recognizable figures in its pages. The publication developed a tone that could move between serious information and deliberate silliness.
Famitsu’s own retrospective compared some of that atmosphere to late-night television. Game coverage could coexist with jokes, eccentric columns, reader interaction, comics, and features that were memorable precisely because they did not treat every page as a formal consumer guide.
That editorial personality became one of the magazine’s great advantages. Readers were not only following games. They were following the people talking about games.
How a Video Game Magazine Was Made Before the Digital Age
The physical process of producing a game magazine in the 1980s was difficult in ways that are easy to forget in an era of direct-feed screenshots and digital publishing.
In a 2024 oral-history interview, former Famicom Tsūshin editor Gōzō Shiozaki and former Family Computer Magazine editor Naoto Yamamoto described how game screens had to be photographed before modern capture technology became readily available.
Editors and photographers could place consoles and television screens inside darkrooms and attempt to photograph the image at the right moment. A game without a convenient save feature might need to be played from the beginning repeatedly just to reach the scene required for one photograph. Pausing did not always solve the problem because some games made sprites disappear when paused.
Producing a single useful screenshot could therefore require technical improvisation, patient gameplay, photography, layout work, and repeated attempts.
The rest of the magazine was hardly easier. Shiozaki remembered writers racing to finish material before typesetting deadlines and pushing production as far as printers would tolerate. Corrections could still be made dangerously close to printing. In one story, a barcode problem was discovered after a large print run had already been produced, forcing people to go to the warehouse and physically correct copies.
He also recalled a Famitsu print run of roughly 300,000 copies in connection with that incident, illustrating the scale the magazine had reached.
These accounts matter because magazines such as Famitsu were not simply observing early video game culture. Their staffs were inventing methods for documenting an interactive medium with publishing technology that had never been designed specifically for it.
Every screenshot, map, review, and strategy page required someone to figure out how to turn an experience happening on a television screen into something understandable on paper.
Cross Review and the Power of the Score
Among Famitsu’s most enduring creations was its Cross Review.
Rather than presenting one review as the judgment of the publication, the system developed around several reviewers evaluating the same game. In the familiar form of the feature, four reviewers score a title out of ten, producing a possible combined score of forty points. Famitsu later categorized highly rated games into Silver, Gold, and Platinum Hall of Fame levels.
The feature became important enough that the phrase “Famitsu score” could become part of the conversation surrounding a game’s Japanese reception.
The system also provided something particularly useful during the pre-internet era: disagreement on the printed page. One reviewer might forgive a difficult control system because of an ambitious idea while another could penalize the same game for frustration. Readers could see that evaluation was not necessarily a single institutional verdict.
Cross Review began in 1986 and remained important enough that Famitsu devoted a major part of its fortieth-anniversary celebration to reproducing the reviews of every game that had received a perfect forty-point score.
The significance of those reviews eventually extended beyond consumer advice. Academic researchers have treated the archive as historical evidence. Yuxi Liang’s research published through the Ritsumeikan University Game Research Center analyzed Weekly Famitsu Cross Reviews from the 2000s using text analysis, treating decades of magazine criticism as a body of evidence through which changing approaches to games and hardware could be studied.
That transformation is notable. Reviews originally written to help someone decide whether to purchase a new game eventually became source material for scholars attempting to reconstruct the history of game culture.
From Famicom Magazine to General Video Game Magazine
The name Famicom Tsūshin made perfect sense in 1986. Over time, it also became increasingly misleading.
Nintendo no longer had the console business to itself. NEC’s PC Engine, Sega’s Mega Drive, Nintendo’s Super Famicom, handheld systems, CD-based hardware, and eventually Sony’s PlayStation and Sega’s Saturn created a market in which a serious gaming publication could not assume that its reader owned only one platform.
Different publishers responded in different ways.
In their later oral history, Shiozaki and Yamamoto described how the publishers behind Famimaga expanded toward separate publications dedicated to individual systems, including magazines oriented toward platforms such as the PC Engine and Mega Drive. Famitsu increasingly took the opposite path, developing the identity of a broader general-interest game magazine.
That decision proved crucial.
A magazine tied too closely to one machine risked having its fate tied to the commercial life of that machine. A publication centered on games themselves could follow readers from Nintendo to Sega to Sony and beyond.
Famitsu’s brand gradually became larger than the Famicom named in its original title.
Becoming a Weekly Magazine
Speed became even more important as the Japanese game industry expanded.
Beginning with the issue sold on July 12, 1991, Famicom Tsūshin moved to weekly publication. Famitsu’s institutional history describes it as the game industry’s first weekly magazine. The surviving archive also identifies the July 26, 1991 issue as the first numbered issue of the weekly era, another example of how sales dates and printed cover dates can differ.
The change fundamentally altered the publication.
A monthly magazine could provide reflection and extensive features, but a weekly magazine could participate in the rhythm of the industry almost continuously. Announcements, previews, interviews, sales information, reviews, strategies, rumors, and release schedules could reach readers while they were still current.
Weekly production was punishing, but it also gave Famitsu an advantage as competition for exclusive information intensified.
Shiozaki later remembered how the growth of game companies and game advertising had created commercial pressure for publications to become faster. Editors knew exactly how difficult weekly production would be, but Famitsu eventually made the leap.
The weekly schedule helped turn the magazine into a recurring record of Japanese gaming culture. Rather than checking in once every month, Famitsu could document the industry almost as it happened.
When Famitsu Became Its Real Name
Readers had already been shortening Famicom Tsūshin to “Famitsu” for years.
Eventually the nickname became stronger than the original title.
The National Diet Library records Famicom Tsūshin as running from 1986 through 1995, ending with issue 367 dated December 29, 1995, and identifies Famitsu as its successor publication. Famitsu’s own retrospective material explains that the abbreviated name became the official title around the end of 1995, with the new title appearing as the publication entered 1996.
The change was more than cosmetic.
By then, Famicom Tsūshin was covering an industry far larger than Nintendo’s Famicom. The shortened title preserved decades of reader recognition while removing an increasingly outdated platform reference.
A nickname created by convenience had become one of the most recognizable names in Japanese gaming journalism.
ASCII, Enterbrain, and KADOKAWA
Famitsu also survived changes far beyond the game consoles it covered.
Its original publisher was ASCII, one of the important companies in Japan’s computer and technology publishing world. The National Diet Library’s records preserve this early publication history and the later succession of companies attached to the magazine.
Enterbrain later became closely associated with Famitsu and its wider family of gaming publications. In 2004, both ASCII and Enterbrain joined the KADOKAWA corporate group, according to KADOKAWA’s own corporate history.
Further restructuring followed.
On October 1, 2013, KADOKAWA absorbed nine subsidiaries in a major consolidation that included Enterbrain. That same year, KADOKAWA’s corporate chronology noted that Weekly Famitsu had reached its 1,300th issue.
The brand later became associated with Gzbrain, which changed its corporate name to KADOKAWA Game Linkage on October 1, 2019. In announcing the change, the company specifically identified Famitsu as one of the media brands through which it intended to connect games and users across magazines, websites, video, events, esports, and other forms of media.
By that point, defining Famitsu simply as a magazine no longer captured everything the name represented.
The Internet Changes What a Weekly Magazine Is For
The internet presented a challenge more serious than the arrival of any competing print magazine.
For decades, publication frequency had been an advantage. Going from monthly to biweekly and then weekly made Famitsu faster. The web destroyed that equation because information could now be published immediately.
Famitsu responded by becoming part of that new environment rather than treating print and digital media as mutually exclusive.
The Famitsu.com website developed into a major part of the brand, while an electronic edition of the magazine began with the October 28, 2011 issue. Famitsu’s institutional chronology also records a change from Friday to Thursday sales beginning in August 2009, reflecting changes in the surrounding game software market.
The distinction between the magazine and website became sharper as digital news accelerated.
Current Weekly Famitsu editor Hiroko Saga explained in 2026 that, beginning around 2018, breaking news increasingly became the responsibility of Famitsu.com while the print magazine concentrated more heavily on substantial feature packages. Some modern features can extend to more than fifty pages, considerably larger than the typical feature packages remembered by editors from earlier periods.
It was a logical reversal of the strategy that had made Famitsu weekly in 1991.
When print had once been the fastest practical way to reach a national audience, weekly publication represented speed. Once websites became faster than any physical magazine could possibly be, the printed edition could survive by providing something different: permanence, design, depth, collectability, long-form interviews, retrospectives, and large features built to be kept.
Forty Years of Famitsu
On June 6, 2026, Famitsu reached its fortieth anniversary.
KADOKAWA Game Linkage marked the anniversary with a series of special issues beginning with the massive June 18, 2026 issue, released on June 4. The anniversary edition exceeded 400 pages and included more than 140 pages of commemorative artwork and messages from over eighty game companies.
The magazine also devoted eighty-two pages to a history of games and Famitsu from 1986 through 2025, drawing on photographs, old pages, and information accumulated during four decades of publication.
Cross Review received its own retrospective treatment, with the anniversary material revisiting every title that had achieved the feature’s perfect forty-point score.
Perhaps more revealing than the size of the anniversary issue was the participation surrounding it. Developers, publishers, artists, editors, and creators contributed material because Famitsu’s history had become intertwined with their own.
Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, reflecting on his memories of the magazine during its fortieth anniversary year, singled out Cross Review as one of the things he associated most strongly with Famitsu. He recalled The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time becoming the first game to receive a perfect forty and described the value of reading multiple opinions alongside other information such as sales rankings.
A feature invented for readers in the 1980s had become part of the memory of one of the industry’s most important designers.
Why Famitsu Matters to Video Game History
Famitsu matters because it did more than report on video games.
Its archives recorded how games were introduced, marketed, reviewed, discussed, ranked, criticized, and remembered across several generations of hardware. Its pages captured the transition from the Famicom boom to the 16-bit console competition, the arrival of PlayStation and Saturn, the rise of 3D gaming, portable systems, online play, smartphones, downloadable games, indie development, streaming, and esports.
For historians, those pages preserve things that retrospective memory often loses.
An old Famitsu issue can show what information players actually had before a game launched. It can reveal which titles received enormous attention and which were treated as minor releases. Advertisements preserve the language publishers used to sell games. Reviews show what critics valued at particular moments. Letters and reader features reveal how players talked about the medium. Interviews capture developers before later success changed the way their careers were remembered.
Even the production methods tell part of the story.
There is a direct line from editors sitting in darkrooms attempting to photograph television screens in the 1980s to a modern multimedia operation publishing instantly to the web, producing video, participating in events, covering esports, and still sending a physical weekly magazine to newsstands.
The technology changed. The purpose remained surprisingly consistent.
Famitsu existed to connect people who made games with people who played them.
That connection began inside a computer magazine when the Famicom looked important enough to deserve its own section. It became an independent magazine in 1986, went weekly in 1991, outgrew the Famicom name in the mid-1990s, survived major corporate reorganizations, adapted to the internet, and reached its fortieth anniversary in 2026.
Few publications have watched so much of video game history pass directly through their own pages.
For that reason, the history of Famitsu is not simply a story about Japanese publishing. It is one of the longest continuous records of what happened as video games moved from a booming new consumer pastime into one of the world’s major cultural industries.
Sources & Further Reading
Famitsu. “Famitsu 40th Anniversary Special Site.” 2026. https://www.famitsu.com/special/content/40th/
Famitsu. “Famicom Tsūshin ga Sōkan Shita Hi” [The Day Famicom Tsūshin Was Founded]. June 6, 2020. https://www.famitsu.com/news/202006/06199512.html
Famitsu. “Famitsu ga Sōkan 35-Shūnen” [Famitsu Celebrates Its 35th Anniversary]. June 6, 2021. https://www.famitsu.com/news/202106/06222671.html
Famitsu. “Famitsu ga Sōkan 38-Shūnen” [Famitsu Celebrates Its 38th Anniversary]. June 6, 2024. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202406/7009
Famitsu. “Famitsu Sōkan 40-Shūnen: Jitsu wa Gyōkai Hatsu no Game Shūkanshi” [Famitsu’s 40th Anniversary: The Industry’s First Weekly Game Magazine]. June 6, 2026. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202606/76813 ファミ通.com
Famitsu. “Game to Famitsu no 40-nen” [Forty Years of Games and Famitsu]. June 2, 2026. Famitsu article
Famitsu. “6-gatsu 6-nichi wa ‘Famitsu 40-Shūnen’ Kinenbi!” [June 6 Is Famitsu’s 40th Anniversary!]. June 4, 2026. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202606/76949 ファミ通.com
Famitsu. “Famitsu 40th Anniversary: Commemorative Visuals from Game Companies.” June 11, 2026. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202606/76883 ファミ通.com
Weekly Famitsu. No. 1950, June 18, 2026 issue. KADOKAWA Game Linkage, 2026. Anniversary issue released June 4, 2026. Famitsu anniversary issue information
Weekly Famitsu. June 16, 2016 special issue. KADOKAWA, 2016. Famitsu 30th anniversary issue overview
Famitsu. “Hamamura Tsūshin: Famitsu 30th Anniversary Special.” June 2, 2016. Famitsu anniversary interview
National Diet Library. “Famicom Tsūshin.” NDL Search. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/en/books/R100000002-I000000045487 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
National Diet Library. “Famitsu.” NDL Search. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/en/books/R100000002-I000000097914 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
National Diet Library. “Zōkan Famicom Tsūshin” [Supplement Famicom Tsūshin]. NDL Search. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/en/books/R100000002-I000000077364 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
National Diet Library. “Family Computer Magazine.” NDL Search. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/en/books/R100000002-I000000043347 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
Shiozaki, Gōzō. 198X no Famicom Kyōsōkyoku. Tokyo: SB Creative, 2024. SB Creative book record
Tahara, Seiji. 1989-nen no Famicom Tsūshin: Famitsu in 1989. Tokyo: Enterbrain, 2013. KADOKAWA book record
4Gamer. “The History of Famitsu vs. Famimaga: Interview with Gōzō Shiozaki and Naoto Yamamoto.” August 30, 2024. 4Gamer interview
4Gamer. “The History of Famitsu vs. Famimaga: Interview with Gōzō Shiozaki and Naoto Yamamoto, Part 2.” August 30, 2024. 4Gamer interview, part 2
GameBusiness.jp. “Interview with Hirokazu Hamamura.” June 28, 2023. GameBusiness.jp interview
Sega. “Hirokazu Hamamura Interview.” Virtua Fighter 20th Anniversary. January 16, 2014. Sega Virtua Fighter anniversary interview
Zen University, Content Industry History Archive Research Center. “Hirokazu Hamamura Oral History Collection.” Accessed October 13, 2026. Zen University archive
Bungeishunjū. “Interview with Weekly Famitsu Editor-in-Chief Hiroko Saga.” Bunshun Online, 2026. Bunshun Online interview
Inside. “Weekly Famitsu 40 Years × Animedia 45 Years: Editors-in-Chief Conversation.” July 17, 2026. Inside interview
KADOKAWA. “‘Weekly Famitsu’ 30th Anniversary! Commemorative Special Issue and Famitsu Festival 2016.” June 2, 2016. KADOKAWA press release プレスリリース・ニュースリリース配信シェアNo.1｜PR TIMES
KADOKAWA. “Corporate History, 2003–2012.” Accessed October 13, 2026. KADOKAWA corporate history
KADOKAWA. “Notice Concerning Corporate Consolidation.” 2013. KADOKAWA corporate notice
KADOKAWA Game Linkage. “Notice of Company Name Change.” October 1, 2019. KADOKAWA Game Linkage PDF
KADOKAWA Game Linkage. “Corporate Profile.” Accessed October 13, 2026. KADOKAWA Game Linkage
Liang, Yuxi. “Fashion of Game Consoles Seen from Journalism: Consideration on Game Reviews in ‘Weekly Famitsu.’” Replaying Japan 1 (2019): 79–92. Ritsumeikan University repository PDF Ritsumei Repository
Koyama, Yūsuke. Nihon Dejitaru Gēmu Sangyōshi: Famicom Izen kara Sumaho Gēmu made [History of the Japanese Digital Game Industry: From Before the Famicom to Smartphone Games]. Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin, 2016. National Diet Library record 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
Uemura, Masayuki, Kōichi Hosoi, and Akinori Nakamura. Famicom to Sono Jidai: Terebi Gēmu no Tanjō [The Life and Times of the Nintendo Famicom: The Birth of Video Games]. Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 2013. National Diet Library record 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
Game Developer. “Analysis: The State of Game Magazines in Japan.” 2008. Game Developer article
Video Game History Foundation. “Japanese Game Magazine Collection.” Game History Library. Accessed October 13, 2026. VGHF collection record
Video Game History Foundation. “Weekly Famitsu, Demon’s Souls, 2009.” Game History Library. Accessed October 13, 2026. VGHF archival record
Video Game History Foundation. “Weekly Famitsu No. 1665, PlayStation 5 Launch Material.” November 12, 2020. Game History Library. VGHF archival record
Video Game History Foundation. “Weekly Famitsu No. 1698, Elden Ring Coverage.” July 1, 2021. Game History Library. VGHF archival record
Japan Magazine Publishers Association. “Print Circulation Database.” Accessed October 13, 2026. Japan Magazine Publishers Association database