In the history of video games, attention naturally settles on designers, programmers, company founders, and the games themselves. The people standing on the other side of the screen are harder to recover. Players bought the cartridges, wrote letters, visited trade shows, argued over hardware, and built the audience that kept the industry moving, yet most left very little behind that historians can follow.
Howard Hisel is an unusual exception.
A longtime Computer Entertainer subscriber from Park Forest, Illinois, Hisel appears repeatedly in the surviving record of American video-game culture during the second half of the 1980s. His opinions on games were published by the magazine. He attended Consumer Electronics Shows. Photographs documented him at gatherings of gaming enthusiasts. Most remarkably, in 1987 Acclaim Entertainment recruited Howard and his son Patrick to spend four days demonstrating The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago.
Howard was not an Acclaim employee, a Square programmer, or a professional reviewer. He was something arguably just as revealing for historians trying to understand the period: an enthusiastic adult player at a moment when video games were still frequently treated as children’s entertainment. The surviving issues of Computer Entertainer allow us to follow that enthusiasm across several years, from letters about favorite games to a remarkable weekend when being a dedicated subscriber turned into a place behind an industry trade-show booth. Pasted markdown
An Adult Gamer Before WorldRunner
Howard Hisel was already appearing in the pages of Computer Entertainer before Acclaim came calling.
In November 1986, the magazine published comments from “Howard Hisel of Park Forest, Illinois” in a feature called “The Joys of Videogaming.” Hisel discussed Sega’s World Grand Prix and Nintendo’s Mach Rider, two games built around speed and racing. His comments about World Grand Prix were especially personal. He explained that the game allowed him to experience something he had imagined since childhood, the fantasy of competing in Grand Prix racing. He also praised the excitement of Mach Rider. Pasted markdown
That small appearance tells us something important. Howard’s involvement with games was not created by the 1987 CES appearance. Acclaim did not simply pull an available Chicago resident into its booth. By late 1986, Howard was already engaged enough with the hobby to write about games and have his opinions published.
The publication carrying those comments is itself significant. Computer Entertainer began as The Video Game Update, a newsletter connected to the Video Take-Out mail-order business operated by sisters Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan. It survived the 1983 to 1984 American video-game industry collapse and continued regularly covering console gaming during years when relatively few American publications did. The Video Game History Foundation now considers it especially valuable because it provides contemporary reviews, release information, advertising, reader correspondence, and other evidence from a period with substantial gaps in the American gaming press.
That environment gave people like Howard a public voice. Instead of only documenting what manufacturers wanted to sell, Computer Entertainer preserved what ordinary players thought about the machines and games arriving in stores.
Acclaim Goes Looking for Players
In the spring of 1987, Howard’s relationship with the magazine led to something considerably larger.
The International Summer Consumer Electronics Show was scheduled for May 30 through June 2 in Chicago. CES was not a gaming convention in the modern sense. It was a massive electronics industry trade show, and contemporary reporting estimated that more than 100,000 people attended the 1987 summer event. Television equipment, audio products, computers, software, and emerging technologies competed for the attention of retailers, distributors, reporters, and other industry visitors.
Among the companies preparing for the show was Acclaim Entertainment.
According to the June 1987 issue of Computer Entertainer, Acclaim’s Rob Holmes contacted the magazine with an unusual request. He wanted to know whether its subscriber base included enthusiastic Nintendo Entertainment System owners living around Chicago who might be interested in demonstrating a new game throughout the four days of CES.
The magazine supplied several names.
Holmes chose longtime subscriber Howard Hisel and his son Patrick.
It was a remarkable bridge between three parts of the young console industry. A publisher needed capable players. A specialist magazine knew its audience personally enough to suggest some. Two consumers then crossed temporarily from the audience side of gaming into the commercial machinery of the industry itself.
For Howard and Patrick, there appears to have been little hesitation.
Computer Entertainer reported that Howard took two days away from his job at Ford Motor Company so he could work the show. Patrick missed two days of school. Together, father and son volunteered for four days of what the magazine called “booth duty.”
Their assignment was The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner.
Four Days of 3-D WorldRunner
What happened next survives because Computer Entertainer checked in with the Hisels during CES.
The magazine reported that Howard and Patrick were “having the time of their lives” demonstrating the game. More revealingly, Rob Holmes was apparently surprised by how seriously they approached the assignment. Rather than simply playing when visitors approached the booth, Howard and Patrick stayed late and practiced so they could reach deeper sections of the game during future demonstrations.
That detail transforms the story from a curious promotional appearance into something far more recognizable to anyone familiar with dedicated gaming culture.
They wanted to be better at the game the following day.
There was a practical reason. Demonstrating a video game at a trade show is different from playing one at home. The player becomes part of the sales presentation. Visitors might only stand at a booth for a few minutes, meaning the person holding the controller needed to make the product look active, interesting, and polished. Reaching farther into WorldRunner meant showing more of what Acclaim hoped to sell.
But Computer Entertainer interpreted the behavior in another way. To its editors, Howard and Patrick were examples of the enthusiasm already common among the magazine’s readers. The publication described the pair as “gaming fanatics” and observed that many subscribers would have considered four days at CES a dream assignment.
For a historian, that sentence is particularly valuable. It captures an enthusiast culture that existed before internet forums, streaming, social media, esports arenas, and modern fan conventions made highly committed adult players easy to see.
Howard Hisel was not unusual because he loved games that much.
He was unusual because his enthusiasm happened to be documented.
The Game Behind the Demonstration
The game Howard and Patrick were demonstrating also occupied an interesting place in video-game history.
Known in full as The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner, and promoted more simply as 3-D WorldRunner on its North American packaging, the title came from Square during the company’s pre-Final Fantasy years. Its Japanese development team included people who would soon become closely associated with one of gaming’s most famous franchises.
Square veteran Hiromichi Tanaka later recalled that company head Masafumi Miyamoto met programmer Nasir Gebelli through a gathering connected with CES. Gebelli had already developed a reputation through his Apple II work, and Square’s staff knew his programming. According to Tanaka, once Gebelli joined them, their first game together was The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner, followed by Rad Racer. Final Fantasy came afterward.
Hironobu Sakaguchi also identified WorldRunner as one of the Famicom games he worked on during the early portion of his career.
Artist Kazuko Shibuya contributed graphics to the project. Koichi Ishii later remembered Shibuya’s character sprites in WorldRunner and Rad Racer as representative of her pixel-art style during that period.
The game therefore sat immediately before the project that would transform Square.
What distinguished WorldRunner commercially was its attempt to create the impression of movement into a three-dimensional world. The player controlled a running character from behind as the landscape rushed toward the screen. The North American release pushed the 3-D feature aggressively, including glasses and placing “3-D” prominently in the game’s marketing.
For Acclaim, which published the NES version in North America, this made the game well suited to CES. It was something that could be shown rather than merely explained. A person walking through an electronics trade show could see the scrolling landscape, watch someone running and jumping through it, and immediately understand the visual selling point.
That person holding the controller might have been Howard Hisel.
A Subscriber Inside the Video-Game Business
Howard’s appearance also says something about how different the American gaming business still was in 1987.
Today publishers can recruit professional content creators, competitive players, influencers, contracted demonstrators, and specialized event staff. In this case, an Acclaim cofounder contacted the editors of a newsletter and asked whether they knew some dedicated Nintendo players nearby.
They did.
The arrangement reflects the comparatively intimate scale of the enthusiast side of the industry. Computer Entertainer was not merely broadcasting information toward an anonymous mass readership. Its editors received letters, recognized longtime subscribers, published their opinions, met some of them at trade shows, and apparently knew enough about them to recommend individuals when an industry contact needed serious players.
Howard’s ordinary working life makes the account more striking. He was employed by Ford Motor Company, yet took two days away from work to spend four days helping demonstrate a Nintendo game. Patrick was still a student and sacrificed two school days for the same opportunity.
For a brief period, gaming enthusiasm carried father and son onto the floor of one of the largest electronics shows in America.
Then the show ended.
Howard returned to being a subscriber.
But he did not disappear from the historical record.
Back at CES in 1989
Two years later, Howard Hisel returned to the pages of Computer Entertainer in a way that shows how serious his interest remained.
The July 1989 issue identified him again as a “Long-time subscriber” from Park Forest, Illinois. Howard had toured CES and, according to the magazine, “played every game he could get his hands on.” Afterward, he sent the publication his favorites from the show.
His selections crossed platforms and genres.
Howard chose Thunder Force II on Sega Genesis as his favorite game across all systems. He selected David Crane’s A Boy and His Blob for the NES and Lucasfilm’s Loom among the most innovative titles he saw, while also praising Loom visually. The magazine identified him as an “avowed strategy and wargame player” and reported his enthusiasm for Dragon Force and Battle of Britain.
This is useful because it prevents the 1987 WorldRunner story from standing alone.
Howard was not simply remembered because Acclaim once happened to choose him. Years after the demonstration, he was still following new hardware, attending CES, playing broadly, and sending informed opinions to the gaming press.
The same page of Computer Entertainer also discussed its substantial adult readership, noting that adult players had always made up an important part of its audience. Howard fit neatly within that community. In an era when Nintendo advertising often emphasized children and families, a parallel culture of adult enthusiasts was buying the same machines, following industry developments, and eagerly waiting for the next generation of hardware.
Photographed Among the Gaming Community
Howard’s connection with that community survives visually as well as in print.
The July 1989 issue of Computer Entertainer carried photographs from a CES reception. Captions identify Howard among subscribers watching activity around Sega’s Mega Drive and NEC’s PC Engine, two machines central to the approaching 16-bit competition in North America. The photographs place him physically within the enthusiast and industry environment described in the magazine’s articles. Pasted markdown
Another photograph appeared in the February 1990 issue. Taken at a Computer Entertainer reception during CES in Las Vegas, its caption identifies three subscribers: Leslie Thompson, Renwick Thompson Jr., and Howard Hisel.
By then, Howard’s connection to Computer Entertainer stretched across several years.
The magazine had published his opinions in 1986. It had connected him with Acclaim in 1987. He toured CES and supplied recommendations in 1989. Photographs documented him participating in magazine gatherings. In 1990, he was still appearing in its pages.
The surviving pieces form something rare: a miniature documentary history of an ordinary American video-game enthusiast during the NES era.
“Since When Aren’t People Ready for Improvement?”
Howard’s final documented comments are also among his most interesting.
By early 1990, Nintendo’s competitors were pushing more technologically advanced hardware into the American market. Sega had the Genesis. NEC had the TurboGrafx-16. Atari had introduced the handheld Lynx.
The March 1990 issue of Computer Entertainer published reader responses concerning Nintendo and the question of when consumers were ready for more advanced systems.
Howard was unimpressed with the idea that the market needed to wait.
“It looks like Nintendo is more than a little scared,” he wrote, before pointing toward Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and Lynx. His central question was simple: “Since when aren’t people ready for improvement?”
The comment captures the perspective of an enthusiast who had spent years watching the home-console industry develop.
Howard had been writing about Sega and Nintendo games in 1986. He had demonstrated a visually ambitious NES title in 1987. He had played upcoming Genesis software at CES in 1989. By 1990, he was comparing competing hardware generations and demanding continued technological progress.
His interest was not tied to one company.
He appears instead as the kind of consumer the growing console industry increasingly needed: informed, curious, willing to buy multiple systems, interested in technological improvement, and willing to cross traditional assumptions about who video games were supposedly for.
Howard Hisel and the Forgotten History of the Player
There is a temptation when writing video-game history to treat consumers as numbers.
A game sold this many copies. A console reached this many households. A company captured this percentage of the market.
Those statistics matter, but they flatten the people behind them.
Howard Hisel gives us another kind of evidence.
He was a man from Park Forest who wrote to a gaming newsletter about World Grand Prix and Mach Rider. He subscribed long enough for the editors to know him. When Acclaim needed someone trustworthy to demonstrate an upcoming Nintendo game in Chicago, his name was supplied. He took time away from Ford, brought his son, spent four days playing The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner, and stayed after hours because he wanted to get better at it.
Two years later, he was back at CES trying every game he could. He had opinions about Thunder Force II, Loom, strategy games, and the next generation of consoles. Photographs caught him among other subscribers examining the machines that would define the beginning of the 1990s.
There is no evidence that Howard Hisel became a professional game developer or built a career inside the industry. There is also not enough evidence to connect unrelated genealogical or biographical records for people with the same name to the Park Forest gamer, so those details should remain outside his story unless future documentation establishes the connection. Pasted markdown
What the surviving evidence does establish is more focused and, in its own way, more valuable.
Howard Hisel was a documented adult video-game enthusiast at a formative moment in American console history.
For four days in 1987, that enthusiasm put him and his son inside an Acclaim booth demonstrating a Square game whose creators were only months away from beginning the era of Final Fantasy. Howard’s part in that history was small, but it was real, preserved in contemporary reporting rather than reconstructed from memory decades later.
Video-game history belongs to programmers and publishers, but it also belongs to the people who waited for new releases, argued about new hardware, wrote letters to magazines, traveled to trade shows, and kept playing long after the convention floor closed.
Howard Hisel was one of them.
And unlike most, we can still see him there.
Sources & Further Reading
Computer Entertainer. “The Joys of Videogaming.” Computer Entertainer 5, no. 8 (November 1986): 11. https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/newsletters/video_game_update/computer_entertainer_nov86.pdf
Computer Entertainer. “CE Subscriber Chosen for Game Demos at CES.” Computer Entertainer 6, no. 3 (June 1987): 13. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Computer_Entertainer_6-3.pdf
Computer Entertainer. Review of The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner. Computer Entertainer 6, no. 7 (October 1987). https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/newsletters/video_game_update/computer_entertainer_oct87.pdf
Computer Entertainer. “One Reader’s Favorites at CES.” Computer Entertainer 8, no. 4 (July 1989): 9. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Computer_Entertainer_8-4.pdf
Computer Entertainer. “CES Reception Photographs.” Computer Entertainer 8, no. 4 (July 1989): 9. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Computer_Entertainer_8-4.pdf
Computer Entertainer. “CES Reception Photograph.” Computer Entertainer 8, no. 11 (February 1990): 3. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Computer_Entertainer_8-11.pdf
Computer Entertainer. Reader comments by Howard Hisel. Computer Entertainer 8, no. 12 (March 1990): 8. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Computer_Entertainer_8-12.pdf
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Computer Entertainer Collection, 1982–1990.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/208
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/
Acclaim Entertainment. The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner: Game Pak Instructions. 1987.
Acclaim Entertainment. The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner. Nintendo Entertainment System packaging. 1987. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/587785-3-d-worldrunner/media
Nintendo of America. The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide. Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 1987.
Sharpe, Roger. “On the Home Front, Part III: Acclaim Entertainment Winning Praise for Software Efforts.” Cash Box, March 5, 1988, 32. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/80s/1988/CB-1988-03-05.pdf
Consumer Electronics Association. 1987 International Summer Consumer Electronics Show Official Directory. Chicago, May 30–June 2, 1987. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/subjects/216
Ferrell, Keith. “CES and COMDEX: A Tale of Two Cities.” COMPUTE!, no. 87 (August 1987): 14. https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue87/CES_and_COMDEX_A_Tale_Of_Two_Cities.php
Atkinson, Terry. “A Little of Disc, a Little DAT, and More.” Los Angeles Times, June 5, 1987. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-05-ca-2991-story.html
Square Enix. “FINAL FANTASY III 30th Anniversary Special Interview Vol. 1.” Interview with Hiromichi Tanaka. Final Fantasy Portal Site, 2020. https://na.finalfantasy.com/topics/171
Square Enix. “FINAL FANTASY III 30th Anniversary Special Interview Vol. 2.” Interview with Koichi Ishii. Final Fantasy Portal Site, 2020. https://na.finalfantasy.com/topics/176
Barder, Ollie. “Hironobu Sakaguchi Talks About His Admiration for ‘Dragon Quest’ and Upcoming Projects.” Forbes, June 29, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/06/29/hironobu-sakaguchi-talks-about-his-admiration-for-dragon-quest-and-upcoming-projects/
Marchiafava, Jeff. “A Look Back at 3D Console Gaming.” Game Informer, July 1, 2010. https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2010/07/01/a-look-back-at-3d-console-gaming.aspx
Craddock, David L. Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1: The Fatalities and Fandom of the Arcade Era. Boca Raton, FL: Digital Monument Press, 2022. https://www.longlivemortalkombat.com/
Shmuplations. “Kazuko Shibuya Interview.” 2013. Accessed October 12, 2026. https://shmuplations.com/kazukoshibuya/