For millions of young players growing up during the 1990s, discovering a new video game did not begin with a trailer, a livestream, or an algorithm recommending a video. It began at a newsstand, grocery store, bookstore, or mailbox. A brightly colored magazine might promise secret codes for Mortal Kombat, screenshots from the next Sonic the Hedgehog, strategies for an impossible boss, or an early look at a console that had not yet reached American stores.
Few magazines embraced that world as completely as GamePro.
First published in May 1989, GamePro arrived while the American video game industry was rebuilding itself around Nintendo and preparing for another period of explosive competition. It would survive the NES, Genesis, Super Nintendo, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii eras before finally disappearing in 2011. The Video Game History Foundation now describes it as one of the longest-running American video game magazines, preserving an essentially complete run from the May 1989 premiere through the final Winter 2011 quarterly.
Its longevity alone makes GamePro important. What made it memorable, however, was the personality built around it. Cartoon reviewers, exaggerated aliases, colorful rating faces, enormous screenshots, reader artwork, strategy sections, jokes, contests, and the seemingly endless supply of “ProTips” made the magazine feel less like a conventional technology publication and more like admission into a club.
For a generation learning how video game culture worked, GamePro helped teach the language.
From SuperPlay to GamePro
The story began before the first issue reached readers.
The organization that eventually became GamePro Media was established in 1988 as SuperPlay, Inc. The Video Game History Foundation dates the operation to October 1988 and records that SuperPlay produced the first issue before being acquired by International Data Group, better known as IDG, sometime after its publication. The May 1989 premiere therefore occupies an unusual place in the magazine’s history. It is the only issue of GamePro that was not credited to IDG.
Patrick Ferrell was one of the central figures in the magazine’s creation. Kevin Gifford, a later GamePro staff member who reconstructed the publication’s early history for Game Developer, described Ferrell’s original operation as a four-person team trying to capitalize on the extraordinary growth of the Nintendo Entertainment System. According to that account, the group financed a massive printing of the roughly sixty-page premiere issue and used it partly as proof that the magazine could become a viable business. Early editor Wes Nihei later remembered the operation as an entrepreneurial gamble being presented around the industry before GamePro had become the institution readers would eventually know.
The gamble worked.
IDG acquired the operation after the first issue, placing GamePro inside a much larger publishing company with experience producing technology magazines. The corporate identity evolved several times during the following years. The organization appeared under names including GamePro Publishing, GamePro, Inc., Infotainment World, IDG Games Media Group, and eventually GamePro Media. Archival records show that by Issue 25 in August 1991 it was formally identified as a division of IDG under the GamePro Publishing name.
What began as a small venture now had the resources to become something much larger.
Creating the GamePro Look
A successful gaming magazine in 1989 had to do more than provide information. It had to compete visually with the games themselves.
GamePro became exceptionally good at doing that.
One of the most important figures in establishing its visual identity was artist Francis Mao. Bright colors, illustrated editorial characters, oversized game artwork, expressive ratings graphics, and carefully arranged screenshots helped turn individual pages into something closer to comic-book layouts than the restrained technology magazines of the period.
Kevin Gifford later credited much of the magazine’s recognizable early appearance to Mao, along with the painted covers created during GamePro‘s formative years. By the end of 1990, many of the elements associated with classic GamePro were already established, including cartoon representations of editors and the famous faces used alongside review scores.
The design was perfectly suited to the audience GamePro eventually embraced. Former senior editor Dan Amrich recalled that the staff understood its readership skewed younger than that of magazines such as Electronic Gaming Monthly or Ultra Game Players. Rather than continually fighting that reputation, GamePro learned to make it part of the publication’s personality. The magazine could be colorful, strange, funny, and sometimes deliberately ridiculous because its readers enjoyed it that way.
That approach helped distinguish GamePro from competitors. Readers were not simply buying pages of hardware specifications and release information. They were entering a deliberately constructed world.
The GamePros Behind the Masks
Nothing represented that world better than the names attached to its writers.
Scary Larry. Major Mike. Air Hendrix. Dr. Zombie. Dan Elektro. Bro Buzz.
The aliases became one of GamePro‘s defining traditions. Staff members wrote through exaggerated personas accompanied by illustrated characters, giving the impression that the magazine was populated by a strange cast of gaming experts rather than an ordinary editorial department.
There was also a practical reason for the system. The early staff was small.
The use of multiple identities helped make the editorial operation appear larger, and individual writers could assume more than one persona. Dan Amrich later recalled that longtime editor Wes Nihei had several different names, while Amrich himself initially wrote as Bad Hare before becoming better known as Dan Elektro. He also used another identity, MC Squared, for a technical column explaining concepts such as anti-aliasing.
The personas eventually became far more than camouflage for a small staff. They became part of the brand.
Readers developed favorite reviewers. The characters appeared beside articles and reviews. Francis Mao illustrated them. For a young audience, seeing a familiar cartoon head beside a review created continuity from month to month, almost as though recurring characters from a comic book were explaining the newest games.
Not every editor loved the arrangement. Amrich later remembered questioning whether cartoon identities damaged the credibility of writers who wanted professional recognition under their own names. Management nevertheless considered the characters too closely associated with GamePro to abandon easily. The tradition survived for years because readers recognized it immediately.
Eventually, the personas became recognizable enough to escape the magazine itself. Limited-edition figures based on GamePro editorial characters were produced alongside licensed video game figures, an extraordinary example of how successfully the publication had turned its own staff identities into entertainment properties. Contemporary ToyMania coverage described editor figures including Dr. Zombie, Dan Elektro, Miss Spell, and Major Mike appearing as limited releases.
Few gaming magazines could claim that their reviewers became action figures.
ProReviews, ProTips, and the Experience of Reading GamePro
The personality would have meant little if readers had not found something useful inside.
Reviews were central to GamePro, but the magazine presented them in a way designed for quick comparison. Graphics, sound, control or gameplay, fun, and other qualities could be separated into scores rather than disappearing inside several pages of criticism. The accompanying rating faces gave readers an almost instant visual impression of how enthusiastically a game had been received.
Strategy was equally important.
Before walkthrough videos and searchable online guides became normal, getting stuck in a game could mean remaining stuck for days or weeks. Magazines provided passwords, hidden items, maps, boss strategies, fatalities, secret characters, and shortcuts that could dramatically change a player’s experience. GamePro built that demand into its identity with extensive strategy coverage and its famous ProTips.
The phrase survived long after the original context faded. A “ProTip” could be genuinely useful, painfully obvious, or unintentionally funny, and the term gradually became part of the vocabulary of online gaming humor. By the time GamePro disappeared, even former staff recognized that ProTips had become one of the publication’s most enduring cultural fingerprints.
For young players without constant access to an adult willing to buy another game whenever one became difficult, those pages had practical value. A single magazine could extend the life of several cartridges already sitting at home.
It could also create anticipation for games readers might not play for months.
GamePro at Its Commercial Height
By the middle of the 1990s, GamePro was no longer an uncertain publishing experiment.
A 1995 United States Postal Service Statement of Ownership listed John F. Rousseau as publisher, Wes Nihei as editor-in-chief, and International Data Group as owner. The magazine reported an average net press run of 975,211 copies during the preceding twelve months. Average total distribution was 533,346 copies, including more than 268,000 mailed subscriptions and more than 263,000 copies distributed through dealers, newsstands, and other outlets.
Those figures help explain why GamePro became so visible during the 16-bit and early 32-bit eras. Nearly a million copies might be printed for an average issue even though a substantial share of newsstand copies would ultimately be returned unsold. Hundreds of thousands still reached readers.
The numbers remained formidable as the industry moved into the PlayStation era. In 1999 the publication reported average paid distribution above 512,000, while its 2000 filing recorded average paid distribution of slightly more than 500,000 copies.
That scale gave GamePro enormous visibility at a time when magazines acted as intermediaries between game companies and consumers. Publishers wanted coverage because a preview, cover story, screenshot spread, or favorable review could reach hundreds of thousands of players. Readers depended on magazines because the same publishers could not simply upload hours of footage to YouTube or communicate directly through social media.
The magazine sat in the middle.
How a GamePro Issue Was Actually Made
The surviving GamePro archive allows historians to look behind the finished pages.
The Video Game History Foundation holds roughly 751 surviving press CDs from the magazine, covering material received primarily between about 1995 and 2004. Game publishers supplied screenshots, logos, artwork, press releases, and other promotional files. GamePro maintained those materials as an internal reference archive rather than discarding them once an article had been published.
Former art director Katrin Auch explained why during a Video Game History Foundation oral history. Artwork might be needed repeatedly for a review, a later strategy guide, another magazine project, or retrospective coverage. Staff therefore cataloged discs so that artwork for an older game could be located and reused. Images sometimes had to be scanned from physical film or transferred from formats such as ZIP disks before being organized digitally.
The archive also preserves page-layout material from the magazine itself. Former staff described working through the transition from older production methods into digital systems such as QuarkXPress and later Adobe InDesign. The surviving files can contain not only finished pages but underlying images, graphics, and material hidden beneath visible layout layers. In some cases, the files preserve assets connected to unreleased games that appeared temporarily in GamePro before disappearing from public view.
Magazine production operated under pressures unfamiliar to readers who only saw the finished issue.
Print deadlines were unforgiving. Amrich and Auch recalled that the printer had a specific window reserved for the magazine. Missing it did not simply mean uploading an article several hours late. A missed deadline could mean an issue arriving weeks late or potentially not appearing on schedule at all. Production staff therefore worked backward from fixed printing times while editorial and art departments rushed to finish pages.
Those surviving materials transform GamePro from a nostalgic collectible into something more valuable historically. They document how game journalism was physically produced during an era when publishers delivered artwork on discs, screenshots might arrive on film, and thousands of pages were assembled under deadlines for an audience waiting at newsstands.
GamePro Moves Online
The internet eventually began dismantling the information system that had made gaming magazines so powerful.
GamePro was not unaware of that change.
Its online history began during the commercial internet’s early years. Evidence from the magazine itself shows GamePro Online operating through America Online by the mid-1990s. Later accounts sometimes identify 1995 or 1996 as the beginning of this online presence, while the formal GamePro.com website belongs to a later stage in the brand’s digital development. Former staff remembered the AOL-era operation as an earlier form of the online publication rather than the mature web destination readers would encounter later.
The change presented both an opportunity and a threat.
Online publishing removed many of print’s restrictions. News could appear immediately. Reviews did not need to wait for the next month’s issue. Screenshots no longer had to justify expensive physical pages. Discussion forums allowed readers to talk directly to one another instead of sending letters and hoping to appear in a future issue.
Yet every improvement in online publishing weakened one of the reasons a monthly magazine had once been necessary.
During the 1990s, knowing something before the next kid at school might require buying a magazine. During the 2000s, it increasingly required opening a browser.
A Brand Larger Than the Monthly Magazine
For much of its history, GamePro attempted to extend itself beyond the basic monthly publication.
The Video Game History Foundation’s holdings include special editions, buyers’ material, strategy publications, and other releases in addition to the numbered magazine. The archive is large enough that the Foundation catalogs more than 300 GamePro-related items and notes an unusual numbering history in which Issues 81 through 90 were intentionally skipped to account for ten special and supplemental magazines published earlier in the run.
The brand also entered television. GamePro TV brought game coverage to syndicated television during the early 1990s, translating previews, tips, and the magazine’s identity into another medium at a time when regular television programming devoted to video games remained unusual.
International editions expanded the name still further, while specialized publications and related projects allowed the company to reuse the enormous quantity of artwork and game information passing through its offices.
The strategy made sense because GamePro was selling more than magazine pages. It was selling the idea that being a “pro” meant knowing the codes, upcoming releases, strategies, and secrets before everyone else.
The Audience Begins to Move Away
The problem was that the internet could perform that job much faster.
GamePro remained substantial during the early 2000s, but circulation figures eventually began to document a severe decline. Retromags’ compilation of postal and audited circulation records shows total distribution above 500,000 in several years around the turn of the century and as high as 558,269 in 2003. By 2007 the figure had fallen to 221,670. In 2009 it was 121,549, and the archive records 91,631 for 2010.
The 2009 Statement of Ownership illustrates the change especially clearly. Average net press run had fallen to 238,942 copies, while total paid or requested distribution averaged 119,350. Total distribution, including non-requested copies, stood at 121,549.
This was not simply a GamePro problem.
Gaming news had become a web-first business. Websites could report announcements while press conferences were still happening. Players could find cheats through search engines, download walkthroughs, watch gameplay footage, participate in message boards, read user reviews, and eventually watch entire games being played online.
A magazine arriving every four weeks could no longer compete primarily on speed.
It needed another reason to exist.
Reinventing GamePro for 2010
In 2009, GamePro Media brought in veteran editor John Davison and gave him the difficult task of reinventing the brand.
Davison understood that trying to rebuild the old GamePro for another generation of children was unlikely to succeed. Instead, the 2010 redesign attempted something almost opposite to the magazine’s classic formula. It targeted readers who remembered GamePro from childhood but had grown older and wanted longer, more thoughtful writing about games and gaming culture.
Much of the old structure disappeared. The cartoon identities, traditional strategy emphasis, and familiar ProTips gave way to deeper features, interviews, criticism, and a presentation designed to make print feel valuable rather than merely slower than the internet. Davison later explained that the goal was to reach people who still felt nostalgia for GamePro but now wanted a more mature publication.
It was an intelligent response to the problem, but the economics of print were moving faster than editorial reinvention could solve them.
A beautifully redesigned magazine still had to be printed, shipped, placed in stores, sold to subscribers, and supported by advertisers. Readers who once needed a magazine for news now received an endless supply of information for free.
The central question was no longer whether GamePro could produce a good magazine.
It was whether enough people still wanted any gaming magazine badly enough to pay for one.
One Final Attempt at a Quarterly
In 2011, GamePro made one last dramatic change.
The monthly schedule would end. Beginning with the Winter 2011 edition, GamePro would become a quarterly publication built around heavier paper, a larger physical format, additional pages, and material intended to remain worthwhile for longer than ordinary gaming news.
The strategy recognized a basic reality. A quarterly magazine could not beat websites at reporting yesterday’s announcements, so it would have to offer depth, design, and permanence instead.
Julian Rignall, then leading the editorial operation, described the proposed approach as a slower and more thoughtful form of game journalism. Instead of trying to summarize everything happening during a single month, the magazine could examine gaming within a wider cultural and historical context. He also acknowledged the possibility that the experiment might not work because print itself might already have declined too far.
The final monthly numbered issue was Issue 277, dated October 2011. The Video Game History Foundation preserves it alongside the next publication, MAG-GAMEPRO.278, the Winter Quarterly 2011 issue. That quarterly is the actual final American print issue of GamePro.
There would never be a second one.
The End of GamePro
On November 30, 2011, news spread that GamePro’s United States print and online operations were closing.
Contemporary reports stated that the independent GamePro website would shut down on December 5 and that gaming coverage would be incorporated into IDG’s PCWorld operation. IDG attributed the decision in part to insufficient advertising revenue, while most of the remaining staff faced layoffs.
GamesBeat reported that the move came only weeks after the first quarterly edition had appeared. Sources inside the company described a painful contradiction: editorial work could still succeed creatively while failing economically. The quarterly itself had been produced as a larger and more substantial magazine, but monthly print costs had already become difficult to sustain.
For a publication built around being early, fast, and useful, the final irony was unavoidable. The medium that had once made GamePro essential had become the burden it could no longer escape.
The website ceased operating independently on December 5, 2011.
After more than twenty-two years, the American GamePro era was finished.
What the Magazine Left Behind
The death of a magazine does not necessarily reveal how much it mattered.
Sometimes that becomes clearer years later.
Today, GamePro issues are historical documents of the game industry they once treated as current events. A preview that seemed disposable in 1996 may contain screenshots from an unfinished version of a game. An advertisement may preserve hardware pricing or marketing language unavailable elsewhere. A letters page can reveal what players were arguing about before message boards and social media captured those conversations digitally.
The surviving production materials go deeper. The Video Game History Foundation’s archive preserves hundreds of press discs containing game-company artwork, screenshots, promotional files, and press information that might otherwise have vanished. Its page-layout materials preserve traces of how those assets were transformed into magazine pages.
The magazine also preserved something less tangible.
GamePro belonged to an era when information about video games arrived in installments. Readers waited for issues. Screenshots were studied because moving footage might not be available. Rumors could survive for months. A strategy discovered in a magazine could travel through a school the next morning. A reviewer’s cartoon face might influence a purchase that required months of saved allowance or a birthday request.
That scarcity made individual pieces of information feel valuable.
The modern player has access to vastly more information, delivered almost instantly, but the experience is different. Thousands of videos can now explain a game before its release. Databases record every secret. Communities can solve mysteries collectively within hours. News that once filled an entire magazine cycle may now be forgotten before the end of the day.
GamePro existed on the other side of that transformation.
Why GamePro Matters to Video Game History
The importance of GamePro is not that every review was correct or every ProTip profound.
Its importance comes from the role it occupied between the video game industry and the people growing up around it.
For more than two decades, the magazine translated an expanding industry for a mass audience. It introduced readers to games they had never seen, taught them how to play games they already owned, created recognizable personalities around game journalism, and turned screenshots, codes, reviews, artwork, and industry publicity into a monthly record of how gaming culture saw itself.
It also lived long enough to experience nearly the entire rise and fall of the traditional American video game magazine.
GamePro began when printed magazines were among the best ways for a player to see the future of video games. It ended when that future was being streamed across the internet every minute of every day.
Between those two worlds were hundreds of issues, millions of printed pages, countless ProTips, strange cartoon identities, stacks of press CDs, frantic production nights, and generations of readers who learned that a new month meant another cover waiting on the rack.
The magazine disappeared in 2011.
The culture it helped build did not.
Sources & Further Reading
Video Game History Foundation. “GamePro.” Video Game History Foundation Library. Collection MAG-GAMEPRO. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/4
Video Game History Foundation. “GamePro, Issue 1, May 1989.” Video Game History Foundation Library. MAG-GAMEPRO.001. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/873
Video Game History Foundation. “GamePro Media.” Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/agents/corporate_entities/12
Video Game History Foundation. “GamePro Press CD Collection.” Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/219
Video Game History Foundation. “Digitized GamePro Press CDs.” Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/219/digitized
Video Game History Foundation. “GamePro Digital Layout Collection.” Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/accessions/66
Video Game History Foundation. “Episode 123: GamePro Magazine Collection.” Oral history with Dan Amrich and Katrin Auch. 2025. https://gamehistory.org/episode-123-gamepro-magazine-collection/
Salvador, Phil. “Library Highlight: The Art of GamePro.” Video Game History Foundation. https://gamehistory.org/library-highlight-the-art-of-gamepro/
Video Game History Foundation. “GamePro CDs 201–300.” Video Game History Foundation. 2026. https://gamehistory.org/gamepro-cds-201-300/
GamePro. No. 1, May 1989. Gaming Alexandria preservation scan. September 2020. https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2020/09/gamepro-issue-1-may-1989/
GamePro. No. 1, May 1989. RetroMags. https://www.retromags.com/files/file/2900-gamepro-issue-001-may-1989/
United States Postal Service. “Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation: GamePro, 1995.” Preserved by RetroMags. https://www.retromags.com/statements_of_ownership/gamepro_1995/
United States Postal Service. “Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation: GamePro, 2000.” Preserved by RetroMags. https://www.retromags.com/statements_of_ownership/gamepro_2000/
United States Postal Service. “Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation: GamePro, 2009.” Preserved by RetroMags. https://www.retromags.com/statements_of_ownership/gamepro_2009/
RetroMags. “GamePro.” Publication archive and circulation records. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/publications/united-states/gamepro/
GamePro. No. 66, January 1995. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/938
GamePro. No. 108, September 1997. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/970
GamePro. No. 277, October 2011. Video Game History Foundation Library. MAG-GAMEPRO.277. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1139
GamePro Winter Quarterly 2011. No. 278. Video Game History Foundation Library. MAG-GAMEPRO.278. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1140
Gifford, Kevin. “GamePro’s Journey Concludes: A Look Back.” Game Developer, December 6, 2011. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/gamepro-s-journey-concludes-a-look-back
Cifaldi, Frank. “GamePro’s Last Stand: How America’s Oldest Game Magazine Will Be Its Newest.” Game Developer, August 5, 2011. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/gamepro-s-last-stand-how-america-s-oldest-game-magazine-will-be-its-newest
Parker, Laura. “GamePro Shutting Down.” GameSpot, November 30, 2011. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/gamepro-shutting-down/1100-6346883/
GamesBeat. “So Long Childhood: GamePro Magazine Has Been Shut Down.” November 30, 2011. https://gamesbeat.com/gamepro-shut-down/
Johnston, Casey. “GamePro Magazine and Website to Shutter Next Month.” Ars Technica, November 30, 2011. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/11/gamepro-magazine-and-website-to-shutter-next-month-1/
Game Developer Staff. “After Twenty-Two Years, GamePro Shuts Down.” Game Developer, November 30, 2011. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/after-twenty-two-years-gamepro-shuts-down
CBS News. “GamePro Magazine Says Farewell.” November 30, 2011. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gamepro-magazine-says-farewell/
Shacknews. “GamePro Magazine and Site Being Shuttered.” November 30, 2011. https://www.shacknews.com/article/71332/gamepro-magazine-and-site-being-shuttered
Engadget. “Protip: GamePro Gives Up on Print and Online.” November 30, 2011. https://www.engadget.com/2011-11-30-protip-gamepro-gives-up-on-print-and-online.html
Gematsu. “GamePro Shuts Down.” November 30, 2011. https://www.gematsu.com/2011/11/gamepro-shuts-down
Amrich, Dan. “GamePro’s Dan ‘Elektro’ Amrich on the Media’s Perception of Xbox.” Interview by Shacknews. November 2020. https://www.shacknews.com/article/121390/gamepros-dan-elektro-amrich-on-the-medias-perception-of-xbox
Meyers, Michael. “GamePro History.” Interview and oral history. Forgotten Worlds. https://www.forgottenworlds.net/gamepro-history