Electronic Games was probably the first major video game magazine. I'm not sure if Computer Gaming World preceded it, either, but as that was devoted to computer games, EG surely gets the nod as the first video game magazine that covered arcade video games and home video game systems (as well as computer games and LED/LCD handhelds).
I also consider Electronic Games in its original incarnation to be the best video game magazine ever made. It covered all of the systems and games with equal enthusiasm--I've never noticed any bias towards or against any particular system, no matter how popular or unpopular the system was. The writing was intelligent, and always "on the level" in the sense that they never talked down to the reader. The reviews didn't have numerical ratings, so it was necessary to read the text of the article to see how the reviewer felt.
When the video game industry crash of 1983-1984 occurred, the magazine shifted focus towards computer games (as most consumers were doing at that time). Later, they renamed the magazine Computer Entertainment. That only lasted a few issues, until the magazine dissolved in 1985.
A few years after that, the main people behind EG (Arnie Katz, Bill Kunkel, and Joyce Worley) started Video Games & Computer Entertainment. That was probably one of the best post-crash magazines. I don't think it was quite as good as its predecessor, but it was quite good. After a few years, they left VG&CE, and about that same time VG&CE underwent a similar shift to its predecessor of years past--but in the opposite direction. The magazine started to put less emphasis on computer games, and the magazine was renamed Video Games. Unfortunately, the writing really started going downhill, and after a while, that magazine fizzled out, too.
Meanwhile, Katz, Kunkel, and Worley started a competing magazine, published by Sendai (the EGM publishers), called...Electronic Games! For some reason, though, this incarnation of EG just didn't click with me. I guess it didn't click with too many people, because after a year or two, it mutated into another magazine called Fusion, and then after that into Intelligent Gamer, and then eventually the whole thing went kaput.
I don't know what Katz, Kunkel, and Worley are doing today, but I'd really like to see a magazine like the EG of two decades ago. Most print magazines these days are either juvenile, or "know-it-all", or very biased towards or against certain systems, or go off on stupid tangents like covering hip-hop music or Japanese animation or other such things that no one really gives a darn about when they buy a VIDEO GAME magazine, or a combination of all of these. That's not to say that there's no merit in the current magazines, just that they can't compare to the intelligent yet friendly tone of the early EG and early VG&CE magazines. I'd like for some of the current magazine writers to track down some of these early magazines for inspiration.
