When the first issue of VideoGames & Computer Entertainment reached readers in December 1988, the American video game business looked very different from the industry that had nearly collapsed only a few years earlier. Nintendo had rebuilt the home-console market, Sega was challenging for a place beside it, personal computers were becoming increasingly capable game machines, and arcades were still important gathering places for players. What had not completely caught up was the American gaming press.
VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, commonly shortened to VG&CE, entered that opening with an unusually broad idea of what a video game magazine could be. It reviewed console games, computer software, arcade releases, and portable titles, but it also published strategy guides, industry commentary, news, letters, historical pieces, and discussions about the culture developing around electronic games. Its creators included people who had already helped establish American video game journalism earlier in the decade, and over the next eight years the magazine would document the transition from the NES era into the beginning of the 32-bit generation.
By the time the publication disappeared in 1996, its name had changed, its computer coverage had vanished, and the crowded gaming-magazine market looked little like the one it had entered. The surviving run, preserved today by the Video Game History Foundation and other archives, provides one of the richest printed records of how American gaming culture changed between the late 1980s and mid-1990s.
From Electronic Games to Video Game Digest
The story of VG&CE begins before the magazine itself existed.
Joyce Worley Katz, Arnie Katz, and Bill Kunkel had already played a major role in creating American video game journalism. In 1981, the three helped establish Electronic Games, which the Computer History Museum identifies as the first American magazine devoted to video games. The publication initially appeared as an experiment intended to determine whether enough readers were interested in a magazine about electronic games, but it succeeded well enough to move from annual publication to bimonthly and eventually monthly issues.
Then the American video game market collapsed. Electronic Games tried to adapt, eventually becoming Computer Entertainment, but its first publication run ended in 1985. Katz, Kunkel, and Worley had already formed KKW, Inc., a company that supplied game-related writing and other work to publishers.
Another important figure was Lee H. Pappas. Pappas and Michael DesChesnes had founded A.N.A.L.O.G., an Atari-oriented publication that became A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing. By the later 1980s, its pages included a section called “Video Game Digest,” where Katz, Worley, and other experienced writers could address games beyond the narrow boundaries of a single computer platform.
An April 1988 installment of “Video Game Digest,” for example, featured Katz and Worley writing about the history of video gaming. The article discussed subjects ranging from Spacewar! and early computer laboratories to the development of commercial electronic entertainment. It was the kind of approach that would become important to VG&CE: games were not treated merely as products to buy, but as part of an industry and culture with a history worth documenting.
The transition came during 1988. Pappas sold his magazines to Larry Flynt Publications and moved to California to work for the company. According to the Computer History Museum’s Joyce Worley Katz collection finding aid, the recovering video game business convinced Pappas that the time was right for another dedicated gaming publication. He hired KKW to help create and provide editorial material for what became VideoGames & Computer Entertainment.
The December 1988 Premiere
The first VideoGames & Computer Entertainment was dated December 1988 and ran 100 pages. The Video Game History Foundation identifies Larry Flynt Publications as the publisher, while the surviving magazine demonstrates just how expansive the editors intended the subject of “video games” to be.
The premiere covered the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, Atari XE Game System, Macintosh, Apple computers, Amiga, Commodore 64, IBM-compatible PCs, and Atari ST, while also reporting on older Atari consoles. Much of the issue was built around a large 1989 buyer’s guide that accounted for roughly thirty-seven pages. Lee Pappas and David Plotkin introduced readers to the major game systems, while the rest of the magazine attempted to make sense of a market that was rapidly expanding again.
That scope was important. A reader did not have to identify exclusively as a Nintendo player, computer gamer, Sega owner, or arcade enthusiast to find something useful. VG&CE approached electronic gaming as one connected hobby at a time when the boundaries between computer and console audiences were still being negotiated.
The magazine initially appeared somewhat cautiously. Issue 1 was dated December 1988, Issue 2 February 1989, and Issue 3 April 1989. Beginning with the May issue, however, new editions followed monthly. The experiment had rapidly become a regular publication. The full surviving chronology now preserved by the Video Game History Foundation makes that early expansion particularly easy to trace.
A Magazine for Almost Every Machine
By January 1990, VG&CE had grown substantially. Issue 12 contained 164 pages and sold for $2.95 in the United States. Its coverage included the NES, Sega Master System, newly arrived Sega Genesis, Atari computers, IBM PC, Amiga, Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, and arcade games.
The contents reveal why the magazine occupied an unusual place on the newsstand. It could publish a lengthy strategy guide for Wonder Boy III beside an article about emerging cyberspace and virtual-reality technology. Reviews could sit next to industry news, technical features, reader correspondence, and discussions about where electronic entertainment might be headed.
Two years later, the January 1992 issue had reached 176 pages. By then its platform coverage included the NES, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear, Atari Lynx, TurboGrafx-16 and its CD hardware, multiple computer formats, and arcade releases. A reader could move from a Phantasy Star III guide to Super Nintendo hardware coverage, portable reviews, arcade games, industry commentary, and discussions of gaming fanzines without leaving the same magazine.
That breadth makes surviving VG&CE issues particularly valuable as historical documents. A specialized Nintendo or Sega magazine can provide an excellent record of one company’s ecosystem, but VG&CE captured machines competing beside one another. The magazine’s pages allow modern readers to see the industry more closely to the way someone standing in a software store or browsing a newsstand might have experienced it.
Andy Eddy, KKW, and the Writers Behind VG&CE
Although Katz, Kunkel, and Worley helped establish the magazine’s editorial foundation, VG&CE developed around a larger group of writers and editors. Andy Eddy became one of its most visible editorial figures, while Pappas remained important behind the scenes.
Chris Bieniek provides one of the clearest firsthand accounts of how people entered that world. Bieniek remembered discovering the premiere issue and sending Eddy a package containing NES reviews he had written. Eddy responded with a contract to publish one of them. Bieniek continued contributing, attended industry events, and eventually joined the magazine’s California staff in 1992.
His recollections also help reconstruct everyday magazine production before digital screenshots, downloadable press kits, and online trailers transformed the work. Bieniek remembered a Beverly Hills office shared with other publications and even a Neo Geo arcade cabinet in the hallway. He described console screenshots being produced with an expensive Sony video printer and remembered how custom artwork was commissioned for covers and feature illustrations.
Sometimes that process produced strange results. Bieniek recalled artists having to illustrate games from limited reference material, which could cause characters or moves to look noticeably different from the games they were supposed to represent. His solution was to begin preparing video references so artists could better understand what they were drawing.
These details may sound minor, but they reveal something easily forgotten about print-era gaming journalism. Producing a game magazine required physically acquiring games, photographing screens, attending trade shows, mailing material, speaking with public-relations representatives, preparing layouts, commissioning illustrations, and finishing pages weeks before readers finally saw them.
Building a Gaming Community Before the Web
VG&CE also became more than a catalog of products.
One particularly significant example was Arnie Katz’s attention to gaming fanzines. Katz encouraged readers to create their own publications and eventually wrote a regular column called “Fandango,” where amateur gaming magazines could be discussed and reviewed.
Research published by The Strong National Museum of Play argues that Katz’s work was important to the development of an interconnected American video game fan culture. Beginning around 1990, “Fandango” gave young editors a place where their homemade publications could be recognized by a national gaming magazine. Katz encouraged readers to become participants in gaming culture instead of remaining isolated consumers.
Before internet forums, social media, YouTube, Discord, and gaming websites made communication nearly instantaneous, these networks operated through photocopies, envelopes, postal addresses, letters columns, conventions, and references printed inside professional magazines.
A fanzine mentioned by Katz could suddenly become known to readers hundreds or thousands of miles away.
In that sense, VG&CE did not merely report on gaming culture. Parts of the magazine actively helped create it.
A Crowded Newsstand Changes the Competition
The environment that had allowed VG&CE to establish itself did not last long.
By the early 1990s, American gaming magazines were multiplying. Electronic Gaming Monthly offered enormous amounts of console material. GamePro used a colorful and highly accessible presentation that appealed strongly to younger readers. Official and platform-specific publications competed for readers who cared primarily about Nintendo, Sega, computers, or individual systems.
Bieniek later remembered VG&CE as a leader during its earliest years but believed competitors eventually found formats that connected more effectively with the expanding console audience. He also thought the magazine needed stronger preview coverage and pushed to create a recurring previews section after joining the staff.
The problem was not simply editorial quality. Magazine economics mattered enormously.
Bieniek recalled that advertising sales could directly influence the number of pages a publisher could afford to print. On a crowded newsstand, a reader holding a few dollars might compare two gaming magazines and see one with substantially more pages. Even a publication with strong writers could look like a poorer value beside a physically larger competitor.
Modern retrospective assessments have consequently tended to view VG&CE as somewhat different from the louder magazines that eventually overshadowed it. Time Extension, for example, has highlighted its veteran writers and willingness to publish longer discussions about the industry, describing surviving issues as especially useful windows into early 1990s gaming.
The Departure of KKW and the End of the Original Formula
Another major change arrived in 1992.
Steve Harris, associated with Electronic Gaming Monthly, hired Katz, Kunkel, and Worley to help revive Electronic Games, the publication they had helped establish a decade earlier. The revived magazine began appearing in 1992, taking three of VG&CE’s foundational figures away from the publication.
VG&CE continued under Eddy and the remaining staff, but the gaming market was changing rapidly. Console sales had become increasingly important; the 16-bit competition between Nintendo and Sega was producing constant news, handheld systems were fighting for attention, and publishers needed to decide whether covering both computers and consoles still made commercial sense.
By 1993, Larry Flynt Publications decided that the original formula needed to change.
From VG&CE to VideoGames
The August 1993 issue, numbered 55, was the final regular edition published as VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. Its contents still reflected the old multi-format identity, with console reviews, portable games, strategy material, arcade coverage, and other familiar departments under Andy Eddy’s editorship.
Then the computer half of the magazine’s identity disappeared.
Issue 56, dated September 1993, debuted as VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine. The Video Game History Foundation identifies this issue as the formal beginning of the renamed publication, while the Computer History Museum records that the redesign coincided with a decision to abandon computer-game coverage and concentrate on console gaming.
The first renamed issue listed Chris Gore as editor and ran 96 pages, considerably leaner than some of VG&CE’s large early-1990s issues. Its American cover price was $4.95.
Bieniek remembered the period as one of uncertainty over leadership and editorial direction. Mike Davila moved into a larger editorial role, Gore became editor in chief, and Bieniek later became executive editor before eventually moving to another publication. He also remembered an initial sales increase after the redesign, although he believed the magazine had become more dependent on whichever major game appeared on a particular cover.
The title change represented more than a new logo. The word “Computer” disappearing from the masthead showed where the American gaming market, or at least the magazine’s management, believed the larger audience could be found.
The Magazine That Created Other Magazines
One of the strongest measures of VG&CE’s influence can be found in the publications that grew from it.
The Video Game History Foundation traces several titles to the VG&CE operation, including TurboPlay, DuoWorld, Computer Player, and Tips & Tricks. The research material assembled for this article likewise points to that family of publications as one of the magazine’s most important long-term legacies.
Tips & Tricks proved especially durable. Launched in 1994 under Larry Flynt Publications, it concentrated heavily on strategies, codes, secrets, and information that helped players progress through games. Chris Bieniek became one of its key editors, and the magazine continued in various forms until 2011. The Video Game History Foundation directly identifies it as a VG&CE spinoff.
The success of those descendants illustrates how much material the original magazine had attempted to place under one roof. Computer gaming could become its own publication. Strategy and cheat material could sustain another. A particular console family could support specialized magazines. What had once been departments within a broad publication gradually became publishing niches of their own.
Ziff-Davis and the Final Issue
VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine continued through the arrival of a new hardware generation, surviving long enough to see the industry move beyond the 16-bit era that had defined much of VG&CE’s prime.
Its final regular edition was Issue 92, dated September 1996.
The end was abrupt.
A contemporary report in the September 16, 1996 issue of Mediaweek stated that Ziff-Davis had acquired the assets and subscriber list of Videogames from Larry Flynt Publications. Rather than continue the magazine, Ziff-Davis closed it and transferred its subscriptions to Electronic Gaming Monthly. The trade publication placed the transferred readership at approximately 118,000 and reported that the additions would bring EGM’s circulation to about 523,000.
The Computer History Museum’s account reaches the same basic conclusion. LFP sold VideoGames to Ziff-Davis in late 1996, and the publication was terminated.
A magazine created when American gaming journalism still had large stretches of open territory had finally been absorbed into a much more competitive publishing industry.
What VG&CE Preserved
The disappearance of VideoGames did not erase its importance.
Today, the Video Game History Foundation preserves the entire 92-issue sequence associated with VideoGames & Computer Entertainment and VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine, along with a special issue. Its digital archive allows researchers to move from the 100-page December 1988 premiere through the September 1996 finale.
Those pages preserve far more than reviews.
They capture advertisements for forgotten games and accessories, arguments about new technology, reader reactions, artwork commissioned before publishers could simply download high-resolution promotional assets, prices, subscription offers, strategy guides, trade-show reporting, rumors, screenshots, letters, and predictions that sometimes proved correct and sometimes spectacularly wrong.
They also preserve the moment when “video games” could comfortably describe the NES, Sega Genesis, Commodore 64, Amiga, Macintosh, IBM PC, TurboGrafx-16, Atari Lynx, arcade machines, and experimental technologies inside the same magazine.
That may be VG&CE’s greatest historical value.
The publication existed during a period when the modern video game industry was still being assembled. Its original writers carried experience from the first wave of American gaming magazines. Its younger contributors entered journalism during Nintendo’s revival of the console business. Its pages recorded the rise of Sega, the expansion of handheld gaming, the growth of fan publishing, and the shift toward the multimedia and 32-bit age.
By September 1996, the magazine itself was gone, but the gaming world it had spent eight years documenting had become too large for any single publication to contain.
Sources & Further Reading
Video Game History Foundation. “VideoGames & Computer Entertainment / VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine.” Video Game History Foundation Library. Collection covering 92 regular issues and one special issue, December 1988–September 1996. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/6
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 1, December 1988. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1141
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 2, February 1989. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/6
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 3, April 1989. Retromags. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/video-games-and-computer-entertainment/videogames-computer-entertainment-issue-3/
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 5, June 1989. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1145
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 8, September 1989. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1148
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 12, January 1990. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1152
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 25, February 1991. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1165
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 36, January 1992. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1176
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 40, May 1992. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1180
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 44, September 1992. Retromags. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/video-games-and-computer-entertainment/videogames-computer-entertainment-issue-44/
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 52, May 1993. Retromags. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/video-games-and-computer-entertainment/videogames-computer-entertainment-issue-52/
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 55, August 1993. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/6
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine. No. 56, September 1993. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/677805d5-f5ca-440c-bb28-475df519602f
Larry Flynt Publications. VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine. No. 92, September 1996. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/6
Video Game History Foundation. “VideoGames & Computer Entertainment / VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine.” Digital Archive. Digitized collection of 93 items. https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/677805d5-f5ca-440c-bb28-475df519602f
Katz, Arnie, and Joyce Worley. “The History of Video Gaming, Part 1: In the Beginning….” A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing, no. 59, April 1988, 71. https://www.atarimagazines.com/analog/issue59/video_game_history.php
Video Game History Foundation. “A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing.” Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/22
Chen, Charlotte. Guide to the Joyce Worley Katz Video Game Slide Collection. Mountain View, CA: Computer History Museum, 2009. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/finding-aids/102695458-Katz/102695458-Katz.pdf
Computer History Museum. “Joyce Worley Katz Video Game Slide Collection.” Computer History Museum Archive. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/finding-aids/102695458-Katz/102695458-Katz.pdf
Bieniek, Chris. Interview by Mikolai Napieralski. “Chris Bieniek Interview: From VG&CE to Tips & Tricks.” Forgotten Worlds, 2024. https://www.forgottenworlds.net/blog/chris-bieniek-interview
Kunkel, Bill. Interview. C64.COM, November 16, 2010. https://www.c64.com/gt_display_interview.php?interview=10
Fulton, Steve. “An Interview with Bill Kunkel.” Game Developer. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/an-interview-with-bill-kunkel
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Paper, Please: What I’ve Learned (So Far) from Three Decades of Video Game Fanzines.” June 28, 2019. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/paper-please-what-ive-learned-so-far-from-three-decades-of-video-game-fanzines/
“Ziff Closes ‘Videogames.’” Mediaweek, September 16, 1996. World Radio History. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Mediaweek/1996/Mediaweek-1996-09-16.pdf
ISSN International Centre. “VideoGames & Computer Entertainment.” ISSN 1059-2938. ISSN Portal. https://portal.issn.org/resource/issn/1059-2938
OCLC. “VideoGames & Computer Entertainment.” OCLC 25300986. WorldCat. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/25300986
OCLC. “VideoGames.” OCLC 29194384. WorldCat. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/29194384
Retromags. “Video Games & Computer Entertainment.” Retromags Magazine Archive. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/video-games-and-computer-entertainment/
Retromags. “Video Games & Computer Entertainment Cover Gallery.” Retromags. https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/72-videogames-computer-entertainment/
Internet Archive. Video Games & Computer Entertainment, September 1989. Larry Flynt Publications, 1989. https://archive.org/details/video-games-computer-entertainment-september-1989
Video Game History Foundation. “Tips & Tricks.” Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/54
Video Game History Foundation. “TurboPlay.” Video Game History Foundation Library. The archive identifies TurboPlay as a bimonthly VG&CE spinoff published from 1990 to 1992. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/resources?field%5B%5D=title%26filter_fields%5B%5D=published_agents%26filter_values%5B%5D=Larry%2BFlynt%2BPublications
Napieralski, Mikolai. “10 Forgotten Gaming Magazines That Are Worth Remembering.” Time Extension, January 1, 2025. https://www.timeextension.com/features/best-of-2024-10-forgotten-gaming-magazines-that-are-worth-remembering
Napieralski, Mikolai. “Videogames and Computer Entertainment Magazine.” Forgotten Worlds. https://www.forgottenworlds.net/videogames-computer-entertainment