Long before video games had university programs, professional criticism, enormous online publications, or a well-defined history of their own, Johnny L. Wilson was helping decide what serious writing about games could look like. During nearly two decades associated with Computer Gaming World, he watched personal computer games grow from products sold in plastic bags at neighborhood computer shops into a major entertainment business populated by recognizable designers, multimillion-dollar publishers, national conventions, and increasingly sophisticated players.
Wilson was there not simply as an observer. As writer, editor, editor-in-chief, and eventually editorial director, he helped shape how one of the most influential American computer-game magazines approached reviews, industry reporting, criticism, and historical writing. He later carried that experience into Wizards of the Coast, Paizo Publishing, independent game distribution, books on game history, and university classrooms.
His path into the field was unusual even by the standards of an industry filled with unusual career changes. Wilson held a doctorate in Old Testament studies, taught theology, pastored churches, played historical wargames, and wrote religious material before computer games became his profession. Yet those different parts of his life were never as disconnected as they might appear. Wilson approached games as systems that could be studied, argued about, interpreted, and placed within larger cultural traditions.
By the time historians began looking backward at the early decades of electronic games, Wilson had already spent years doing something close to historical work from inside the industry itself.
From Theology and Wargames to Computer Games
Wilson’s interest in writing started well before his association with computer games. In a lengthy 2012 interview with Steve Fulton, he remembered making his own little stories as a child and writing an unsigned church column for the Santa Maria Times while still in high school. Graduate school led to published Sunday school material, while his interest in gaming produced an after-action report for PW Review, a publication associated with historical miniature wargaming.
Games were already part of the social world in which Wilson moved. One of his longtime gaming friends was Russell Sipe. Wilson later recalled that they had met while performing in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible during college and remained gaming companions through college and graduate school. Their interests ranged across board wargames, role-playing games, miniatures, and strategy titles. They also became acquainted with University of Louisville professor Tom Cleaver and playtested what eventually became Avalon Hill’s computer game Galaxy.
Wilson earned his Ph.D. in Old Testament studies and moved into teaching and ministry. A later professional biography identified his doctorate as coming from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1981, while contemporary profiles described him as a former Southern Baptist minister who had moved into computer-game journalism.
Computer gaming initially remained a hobby. Wilson remembered using an Apple II in a church member’s classroom while she graded papers. He would play games during the afternoon, return home, type his thoughts, and bring the resulting reviews to Sipe. At other times he used the computers in Sipe’s office and wrote with an early Apple word processor called Magic Window.
Eventually he bought a Commodore VIC-20 partly because there were VIC-20 games that needed reviewing. When that machine was no longer enough for the work, he bought a used Apple II Plus and expanded it to 64K. Wilson had therefore reached one of the stranger milestones in the history of games journalism: he was reviewing computer games before he even owned the computer that would become his primary reviewing machine.
Russell Sipe, Computer Gaming World, and the Early Magazine
The history of Wilson’s career cannot be separated from Russell Sipe and Computer Gaming World, but the distinction between their roles is important.
Sipe founded Computer Gaming World in 1981 after recognizing how little dedicated coverage computer games received from the general computer press. Wilson was not a co-founder, despite later accounts that sometimes described him that way. Wilson himself was explicit about this in his 2002 retrospective, writing that although people sometimes assumed he had been there from the beginning, Computer Gaming World had been established by Sipe.
Wilson nevertheless became involved early. The magazine’s own December 1989 account stated that he began writing for CGW in 1982. Before joining the staff formally, he also helped with the practical work surrounding a small independent publication, including mail, shipping, convention appearances, and other tasks. Wilson later remembered the operation as almost astonishingly primitive by the standards of later publishing. Text was prepared on an Apple II, transmitted to a typesetter over a 300-baud modem, physically cut into columns, and pasted onto boards with wax. Screenshots were photographed from computer displays, processed in black and white, cut out, and added to the layouts by hand.
The magazine itself was growing alongside the computer-game hobby. Sipe moved the operation from a kitchen table to a bedroom, then into a converted garage and eventually into larger offices. Wilson remembered watching circulation rise from only a few thousand copies to more than 100,000 during their years together.
The turning point in Wilson’s own career came in 1986. After leaving his teaching position and church, he needed another line of work. Sipe needed editorial help. Wilson joined Computer Gaming World on a half-time salary, although he later said that he worked something much closer to full time and supplemented his income by teaching at a business college at night.
The magazine’s contemporary record provides the clearest chronology. Wilson joined the staff full-time as Associate Editor in October 1986. Three years later, in the December 1989 issue, Sipe announced that Wilson had been promoted to Editor. He explained that the promotion largely formalized responsibilities Wilson was already handling, praising his news gathering and analysis and noting that the magazine increasingly sought to function as both a consumer publication and a trade-style source of information about the game industry.
Turning Game Reviews Into Serious Journalism
One of Wilson’s most important contributions was not a single article or review. It was an editorial philosophy.
Computer Gaming World expected reviewers to spend substantial time with the products they judged. Wilson later wrote that adventure and role-playing games were supposed to be played all the way through, while reviewers of strategy games were expected to understand them well enough to win. Whenever possible, reviewers were supposed to evaluate the commercial version actually sold to customers rather than a specially prepared preview build.
Those standards were expensive in time, even when they were cheap in money. Some games could require forty hours or more to finish, while CGW paid freelance writers only modest rates. The result was an unusual contributor pool. Wilson recalled using military officers for wargames, a professional driver for a driving title, science-fiction writers for science-fiction games, and specialists from other fields when their expertise could illuminate what a simulation was attempting to accomplish.
The magazine also became known for contributors with strong individual voices. Scorpia became one of the best-known adventure and role-playing writers in computer-game journalism, while M. Evan Brooks brought extensive knowledge to wargames. Wilson’s recollections of editing them reveal a publication in which disagreement was accepted as part of serious criticism rather than automatically edited away.
His account of Scorpia’s review of Darklands is particularly revealing. Wilson initially disagreed with her harsh judgment of the game’s instability because his own copy had behaved comparatively well. After spending more time pursuing the game’s ending, however, he encountered the same severe crashes she had reported and concluded that her experience had better represented what many players would face. The episode illustrated a principle Wilson repeatedly emphasized: the reviewer’s obligation was ultimately to the reader.
Advertising complicated that relationship, but Wilson argued that advertising should create an obligation to review a flawed game rather than an obligation to praise it. If a company was paying to put a product in front of CGW readers, he believed those readers deserved to know when the product was bad. He remembered angering advertisers with negative coverage even while the magazine was accused by some readers of being too friendly with the same companies.
This approach helped make game reviewing something more substantial than product description. A reviewer was expected to understand a game’s systems, play enough to expose problems that appeared late in the experience, and tell readers when the advertised product did not work as promised.
Awards, Ratings, and a Changing Audience
The professional software industry noticed Wilson’s work. The Software Publishers Association selected him as Best Software Reviewer, an honor confirmed both by the association’s historical awards records and by Computer Gaming World itself in 1991.
At the same time, the audience for computer games was expanding beyond the comparatively specialized hobbyists who had supported publications like CGW in their earliest years.
One visible result was the introduction of star ratings. Wilson later admitted that he had resisted numerical shorthand because he wanted readers to actually read the review. Eventually, however, he concluded that the magazine’s younger and more casual audience sometimes failed to recognize just how negative a written review could be unless the judgment was made unmistakable.
The stars did not replace editorial debate. According to Wilson, proposed ratings were discussed in meetings jokingly called the “Star Chamber,” where editors could spend hours defending their assessments before the scores were approved.
Wilson also believed game journalism needed independence from the race to publish first. In later recollections he criticized what CGW writers called “shrink-wrap reviews,” meaning judgments produced after too little time with the actual game. He considered the increasing pressure for previews, screenshots, and rapid publication one of the threats to the deeper style of game criticism he preferred.
That concern became more important as game journalism turned into a competitive commercial field rather than a small network of specialist magazines.
Covering an Industry as It Became an Industry
Wilson’s importance to video-game history comes partly from timing. He was covering computer games during a period when many of the industry’s conventions, business practices, genres, personalities, and institutions were still being invented.
The Video Game History Foundation preserves a recording of Wilson’s May 8, 1989 presentation at the Computer Game Developers Conference titled “The Press and Games.” The session addressed how developers communicated with journalists, who wrote reviews, what publishers’ public-relations departments did, and how news about a new game reached the public. It captures Wilson discussing the relationship between games and the press while that relationship was still developing.
He also wrote about the business behind games rather than treating software as a succession of isolated products. Sipe’s 1989 announcement praising Wilson specifically emphasized his news gathering and analysis, reflecting CGW’s ambition to report on the game industry itself.
By 1993, the industry had grown enough for the Los Angeles Times to interview Wilson about interactive entertainment, multimedia, violence, ratings, hardware, and the changing perception of adult game players. Wilson argued that play had value beyond childhood because games allowed people to test different strategies and identities within systems where failure carried limited real-world consequences.
He was also thinking about questions that remain central to game criticism. Discussing violence, Wilson argued that one of the problems with early electronic games was technological and structural. Violence was comparatively simple to simulate, while meaningful conversation, social reaction, and nonviolent problem solving required much more complexity. He therefore wanted games to offer multiple solutions instead of making violence automatically the easiest answer.
Those comments reflected something deeper about Wilson’s approach. He did not see games merely as toys to rank. He saw them as cultural systems capable of teaching players how to think about decisions, consequences, history, morality, and society.
Writing Video Game History While It Was Happening
Wilson became a historian of games before “video game historian” was a common professional description.
In November 1991, Computer Gaming World published his “A History of Computer Games.” The article attempted to organize the still-young medium into a historical narrative, covering developments that included Adventure, Zork, Infocom, publishers, designers, technological changes, and the evolution of different forms of computer entertainment. A surviving excerpt preserved by the Interactive Fiction Archive shows Wilson reconstructing Infocom’s origins at MIT, the development of Zork, the company’s expansion, its attempt to move into business software, its acquisition by Activision, and its eventual dismantling as a distinct development operation.
The timing matters. This was 1991. Many of the people involved were still active. Major companies of the 1980s were only recently gone or transformed. The commercial personal computer industry itself was scarcely more than a decade old.
Wilson continued doing this kind of work. In February 1993, he published “On Location in the Great Underground Empire,” another substantial treatment of Infocom and the culture surrounding its games. The Interactive Fiction Archive still catalogs the article among its historical Infocom material.
For historians today, such articles are useful in two ways. They are secondary histories describing earlier events, but they are also primary documents showing how the early game industry understood its own past while many of the participants were still available to be interviewed.
Wilson occupied an especially valuable position because he had relationships throughout the business. Designers, publishers, journalists, developers, and convention organizers were not distant historical names to him. They were people he encountered while reporting.
From Reviews to Books About Games
Wilson’s interest in examining games extended beyond magazine journalism.
In 1990, Osborne published The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook. The book placed Wilson among the early generation of writers producing substantial companion works around computer games rather than merely magazine reviews. He followed it with The SimEarth Bible in 1991.
In 1992, he and Alan Emrich published Sid Meier’s Civilization, or Rome on 640K a Day. The 376-page book went well beyond a simple list of hints. Contemporary descriptions advertised extensive tables, charts, formulas, technological information, strategic approaches, and ways of understanding the systems underneath Civilization.
That kind of writing anticipated later forms of game analysis in which critics examined not only whether a game was entertaining but also what assumptions its systems encoded.
The largest historical project associated with Wilson was High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, written with Rusel DeMaria and published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill in 2002.
Wilson later explained that DeMaria conceived the project as an accessible, visually rich history and brought Wilson aboard partly to provide additional credibility, firsthand knowledge, and industry stories. Wilson estimated that he contributed roughly a third of the work to the original project, while emphasizing that the overall concept and approach were DeMaria’s.
The book appeared at an important moment. Wilson believed interest in game history was rising around the turn of the millennium because the children who had grown up with early electronic games had become adults, while the larger culture was finally accepting that the game industry was not going away. Once games achieved that legitimacy, people naturally began asking what had come before.
That observation describes much of the historical field that followed. Game archives, museums, preservation projects, academic programs, oral histories, and specialized historians would increasingly attempt to reconstruct a past that Wilson had experienced firsthand.
Ziff-Davis and the Transformation of Computer Gaming World
The scale of Computer Gaming World changed dramatically during Wilson’s tenure.
When the Los Angeles Times interviewed him in December 1993, Wilson described a magazine that had grown from an early 48-page publication with a small targeted readership into a magazine with tens of thousands of paid subscribers and issues exceeding 200 pages. Ziff-Davis had purchased the publication that year, turning what had begun as Sipe’s independent operation into part of a major publishing company.
Wilson became editor-in-chief and later editorial director. In his own retrospective account, he remembered receiving stock as part of his compensation before the sale, which became valuable when Ziff-Davis acquired the magazine.
Corporate ownership brought resources and distribution, but it also changed the environment. Competition from PC Gamer intensified during the 1990s. Wilson later believed that CGW was losing visibility partly because its competitor had stronger retail distribution. He also recalled increasing corporate concern that the magazine’s editorial leadership appeared older than the expanding audience for fast-moving genres such as first-person shooters and real-time strategy games.
Eventually Wilson moved from editor-in-chief into the broader position of Editorial Director while younger leadership assumed day-to-day control of the magazine.
Looking back, he acknowledged decisions he regretted. He wished he had resisted some of the pressure for preview-oriented coverage, pushed harder for an effective online presence, and preserved stronger relationships with longtime specialists such as M. Evan Brooks and Scorpia. At the same time, he remained proud of the central philosophy that had guided Computer Gaming World. The magazine, he believed, had taken games and the people who made them seriously at a time when much of the wider culture did not.
In April 2000, GameSpot reported that Wilson was leaving Computer Gaming World for Wizards of the Coast. At Wizards he would oversee publications including Dragon, Dungeon, and Amazing Stories. The move closed one of the longest and most influential careers associated with CGW.
Wizards of the Coast and the Creation of Paizo
Wilson’s publishing career did not end with Computer Gaming World.
At Wizards of the Coast he became Group Publisher for its periodicals, applying lessons learned from years in magazine publishing to properties connected with tabletop gaming, fantasy, and Star Wars. His responsibilities placed him at the intersection of computer-game journalism and the older tabletop world that had helped shape his interests decades earlier.
When Wizards decided to divest its magazine operations, Wilson played an important role in what happened next.
Lisa Stevens later recalled that Wilson contacted her shortly before Christmas 2001 to explain that Wizards wanted to separate itself from a magazine business that included Dragon, Dungeon, Star Wars Insider, and the Official Star Wars Fan Club. Wilson had the magazine experience that Stevens and Vic Wertz lacked, and the three became owners of the new Paizo Publishing. Paizo officially began operations on July 1, 2002.
Contemporary trade coverage identified Wilson as Paizo’s president and former Group Publisher of Periodicals at Wizards of the Coast. The company’s early staff retained much of the experience of the Wizards publishing group, while Wilson served as one of the people providing continuity between the old operation and the new company.
Paizo’s own later institutional history makes clear how significant his reputation was. When Wilson left the company in December 2003 after disagreements over how the magazine business should be managed, Lisa Stevens recalled that Lucasfilm had written protection tied specifically to his continued presence into its arrangement with Paizo because he was the experienced magazine executive involved in the new company.
Paizo would ultimately become one of the most important tabletop publishers of the twenty-first century, particularly through Pathfinder. Wilson’s time there was comparatively brief, but he was present at the moment the company was created.
Manifesto Games and the Search for Another Publishing Model
Wilson remained interested in how games reached audiences.
In September 2005, he and designer Greg Costikyan announced Manifesto Games, an attempt to create a digital distribution business aimed at independent and niche game developers. The idea was to use online distribution to provide a market for games that might not fit the increasingly expensive, hit-driven retail model of major publishers.
The project did not become a dominant distribution platform, but the thinking behind it reflected problems that would become increasingly important. Digital storefronts were changing how games were sold. Independent developers were looking for alternatives to the traditional publisher and retail structure. Smaller games needed ways of finding audiences outside the economics of boxed software.
Wilson, who had entered games when software could be sold in plastic bags through independent computer stores, had now lived long enough in the industry to participate in experiments with downloadable distribution.
Bringing Game History Into the Classroom
Perhaps the most natural final stage of Wilson’s career was teaching.
By the 2010s, he was teaching game-related courses at DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media. These included History of Games, History of Video Games, Introduction to Game Design, and Ethics in Games and Cinema.
His approach to game history was broad. Rather than treating electronic games as though they had suddenly appeared with Pong or the Atari 2600, Wilson connected them with older traditions of play. His History of Games course moved through subjects such as Senet, chess, gambling games, wargames, role-playing games, trading-card games, and video games while examining the cultures that produced them.
That approach reflected his own life as a gamer. Wilson’s experience did not begin with an arcade cabinet. It stretched across historical miniatures, board wargames, role-playing games, early mainframe programs, the Apple II, and the expanding PC industry. For him, the history of electronic games belonged within the much longer history of people constructing systems of rules and then using those systems to model conflict, chance, society, imagination, and human behavior.
Wilson also worried about the game industry’s tendency to forget its own past. In his 2012 interview, he argued that designers could learn from old interfaces, abandoned ideas, technical limitations, and previous failures rather than assuming that only the newest technology mattered. Teaching game history was therefore not simply preservation. It was a way of giving future designers a larger collection of ideas from which to work.
Why Johnny L. Wilson Matters to Video Game History
Johnny L. Wilson’s importance is difficult to reduce to a single job title.
He was not the founder of Computer Gaming World. Russell Sipe deserves that credit, and Wilson repeatedly gave it to him. What Wilson became was one of the central people responsible for guiding the publication as both the magazine and the computer-game industry grew far beyond their early hobbyist roots.
He helped establish expectations that reviewers should actually understand the games they judged. He encouraged criticism that looked beneath graphics and advertising to examine systems, design choices, and consequences. He treated game designers as people worth interviewing and the game business as an industry worth reporting on. He participated in professional discussions about how developers and journalists should interact. He wrote histories of computer games before the field of video-game history had become firmly established. He wrote books about individual games and later helped produce a broad illustrated history of electronic games.
His career also connects an extraordinary number of chapters in gaming history. Through Computer Gaming World he was present during the rise of personal computer gaming. Through Wizards of the Coast he entered the world of major tabletop and fantasy publishing. Through Paizo he participated in the creation of a company that would become central to modern tabletop role-playing. Through Manifesto Games he experimented with digital distribution for independent developers. Through DePaul he helped bring the history and ethics of games into formal education.
Perhaps the best explanation of Wilson’s significance came from his own reflections on Computer Gaming World. He remembered once sitting with colleagues in New York’s Algonquin Hotel and thinking about the great magazines whose writers had helped define eras of American culture. Then he realized that, for a brief period, he had been part of something similar. Computer Gaming World had become one of the publications through which an emerging art form learned to talk about itself.
That is why Wilson belongs in the history of video games even apart from the individual articles, reviews, books, companies, and courses attached to his name. He spent much of his career standing between the people who made games and the people who played them, asking what the medium had been, what it was becoming, and whether it was being taken seriously enough.
Today, when old magazines are being digitized, developer interviews preserved, conference recordings cataloged, and early computer games studied as cultural artifacts, much of the evidence historians use comes from people who recognized that games were worth documenting while the events were still happening.
Johnny L. Wilson was one of them.
Sources & Further Reading
Computer Gaming World. “A Changing of the Guard.” No. 66 (December 1989). https://manuals.plus/m/b184c2fdbf28ef10c0b32aae62b13e0d2c1e84b140190a5c9b42b606d02e0faf
Wilson, Johnny L. “The Press and Games.” Presentation at the Computer Game Developers Conference, May 8, 1989. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/agents/people/236
Wilson, Johnny L. “A History of Computer Games.” Computer Gaming World, no. 88 (November 1991). https://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/articles/GamingWorld91.txt
Wilson, Johnny L. “On Location in the Great Underground Empire.” Computer Gaming World, February 1993, 19–21. https://mirror.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/articles/
Computer Gaming World. No. 67 (January 1990). https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/magazines/computer_gaming_world/Computer%20Gaming%20World-1990_01_issue67.pdf
Computer Gaming World. No. 83 (June 1991). Contemporary coverage of Wilson’s Software Publishers Association Best Software Reviewer award. https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/magazines/computer_gaming_world/Computer%20Gaming%20World-1991_06_issue83.pdf
Computer Gaming World. No. 100 (November 1992). Includes Johnny L. Wilson’s editorial material and Wilson and Alan Emrich’s GenCon/Origins coverage. https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/magazines/computer_gaming_world/Computer%20Gaming%20World-1992_11_issue100.pdf
Computer Gaming World. No. 109 (August 1993). “State of the Industry.” https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_109.pdf
Computer Gaming World. No. 111 (October 1993). Contemporary material concerning the Ziff-Davis era and Wilson’s editorial position. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_111.pdf
Video Game History Foundation. “Computer Gaming World.” Archival collection. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/29
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/
Takahashi, Dean. “Johnny L. Wilson / Editor, Computer Gaming World.” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1993. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-12-13-fi-1580-story.html
Riley, Sheila. “Bringing New Depth to Computer Gaming.” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1999. https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0304/p17s1.html
“Screen Play: Software Adventure Games for Personal Computers.” Washington Post, April 24, 1989. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1989/04/24/screen-play-software-adventure-games-for-personal-computers/c40aa762-3c1d-408a-b542-2b243c5559ef/
GameSpot. “Wilson Leaving CGW.” April 27, 2000. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/wilson-leaving-cgw/1100-2450912/
Software Publishers Association. “Past Winners.” CODiE Awards. https://codieawards.com/past-winners
DeMaria, Rusel, and Johnny L. Wilson. High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games. Berkeley, CA: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 2002. https://www.finna.fi/Record/kavi_kirjasto.17372
Wilson, Johnny L. The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook. Berkeley, CA: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1990. https://www.alibris.com/The-SimCity-Planning-Commission-Handbook-Johnny-L-Wilson/book/6090661
Wilson, Johnny L. The SimEarth Bible. Berkeley, CA: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1991. https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/author/johnny-l-wilson/
Wilson, Johnny L., and Alan Emrich. Sid Meier’s Civilization, or Rome on 640K a Day. Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 1992. https://www.nobleknight.com/P/2147961420/Sid-Meiers-Civilization—Or-Rome-on-640K-a-Day
Wilson, Johnny L. “Your Design in Computer Game History.” In Game Developer’s Market Guide. 2003. https://dokumen.pub/game-developers-market-guide-1nbsped-1592001041-9781592001040.html
Wilson, Johnny L. “My First Gen Con.” Kobold Press, August 4, 2010. https://koboldpress.com/my-first-gen-con-johnny-wilson/
Paizo. “Paizo Publishing’s 10th Anniversary Retrospective: Year 0, 2002, The Thrill of Starting Something New.” 2012. https://paizo.com/blog/paizo-publishing-s-10th-anniversary-retrospective-year-0-2002-mdash-the-thrill-of-starting-something-new
Paizo. “Paizo Publishing’s 10th Anniversary Retrospective: Year 1, 2003, Fine-Tuning the Magazine Business.” 2012. https://paizo.com/blog/paizo-publishing-s-10th-anniversary-retrospective-mdash-year-1-2003-mdash-fine-tuning-the-magazine-business
ICv2. “Johnny Wilson of Paizo Publishing on Dragon 300 and Dungeon 95.” September 21, 2002. https://icv2.com/articles/games/view/1841/johnny-wilson-paizo-publishing-dragon-300-dungeon-95
ICv2. “WotC Spins Off Magazines, Star Wars Fan Club.” July 10, 2002. https://icv2.com/articles/games/view/1616/wotc-spins-off-magazines-star-wars-fan-club
GameSpot. “Industry Veterans Launch Manifesto Games.” September 29, 2005. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/industry-veterans-launch-manifesto-games/1100-6134620/
Retromags. “Computer Game Forum.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/publications/united-states/computer-game-forum/
Avatars 97. “Speakers.” 1997. Contemporary conference biography of Johnny L. Wilson. https://www.ccon.org/conf97/program/speakers.html
Norwescon. Norwescon 23 Program Book. 2000. https://history.norwescon.org/items/show/629
Classic Video Game & Literature Symposium. “Speakers 2015.” 2015. https://www.cvgls.com/speakers-2015
Maher, Jimmy. “The Game of Everything, Part 9: Civilization and Economics.” The Digital Antiquarian, 2018. https://www.filfre.net/2018/05/the-game-of-everything-part-9-civilization-and-economics/
Code Like It’s 198x. “Computer Gaming World.” Magazine bibliography and issue index. https://code198x.com/vault/magazines/computer-gaming-world/
Retromags. “Computer Gaming World.” Publication archive and issue guide. https://www.retromags.com/publications/united-states/computer-gaming-world/