Finished: Late 2019 All issues
Few moments in my personal video game history were as pivotal as picking up the second issue that early 1982 day after school. One of the my neighborhood cohorts showed us his copy and within minutes we were on our ten speed bikes racing toward the newsstands. Long before the internet a small town of 13,000 could support three newsstands, and that's on top of every grocery store, drug store, department store, and convenience store selling magazines too.
Videogaming was a thing. A hobby or pastime that gets big enough to get a magazine has by some sort of metric made it and as I turned the pages I began to understand what a much bigger world it was. From handhelds to consoles to the vast unknown of computer gaming it was all masterfully covered by the now legendary journalists Bill Kunkel, Joyce Worley, and Arnie Katz. In that second issue they establish review standards and journalistic integrity that only makes their comprehensive coverage of the field so amazing.
I missed one or two issues over the years but in 1985 the run ended shortly after transforming to Computer Entertainment, which was the launching point for my Commodore 64 collection. Consoles were done, and videogame magazines were gone with them. Over the years I referenced them from time to time as I built my retrogame collection.
I eBayed them during the Purge ahead of my wedding, not seeing much reason to keep them around without the games. A few years later I began to regret it, and finally in the summer of 2019 I decided to see if I could round them up. How hard would it be to complete, I wondered.
It took about four months without much effort, but some amount of cash. I consider them essential research materials if I continue to ramble online about it well into my sunset years.
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