Computer and Video Games

» see computerandvideogames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The magazine and i never met. British games monthlies were not on Turkish newsstands in the nineties, and by the time i had my own money the version of CVG i could reach was the website. That is the strange shape of this one. It spent twenty three years as an object i had no way to buy, then sixteen more as a page anybody with a modem could open, wherever the modem happened to be.

The first issue is dated november 1981 and there was no category for it to belong to yet. It ran a piece on Space Invaders alongside advice on how to learn programming, which tells you how open the question still was about what these machines were actually for.

EMAP published it and it grew. Reviews carried a numerical score, and the highest scorers earned a C+VG Hit logo that publishers then printed on their boxes, which is the point where a magazine stops describing a market and starts moving it. Audited circulation was 106,000 for the second half of 1986. In 1992 it bundled a handheld supplement called Go!, back when handheld gaming needed explaining to people.

Then the decline that took every print magazine. EMAP sold it to Dennis Publishing in february 2001, and Dennis sold it on to Future in 2004. The october 2004 issue was the last one printed. The name did not stop there. computerandvideogames.com had been running since 1999 and simply became the whole of CVG, which bought it another eleven years.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was first at ~

The Golden Joystick Awards started in 1982 as the magazine's own annual prize. The first results were published in april 1983 alongside photographs from a ceremony in Berkeley Square, where the radio DJ Dave Lee Travis handed best game of the year to Jetpac. It is the longest running awards ceremony in games and it moved onto the web with CVG.com in 1999.

That is the part that survived. The awards outlived the magazine and then outlived the website, and they now belong to a publisher that closed both. A prize can be detached from the masthead that invented it and carried on by whoever holds the trademark.

~ what really happened ~

In may 2014 Future opened a forty five day consultation on closing CVG along with other games sites, part of a restructuring the company said it needed quickly. CVG got a reprieve in june and paid for it in july, when the UK writing team went from five people to three. Future announced the closure properly in december 2014.

The site went dark on 26 february 2015 and every url was pointed at GamesRadar+. That is a specific kind of ending. Nothing returns a 404, so nothing looks broken, and thirty three years of a masthead resolves quietly to a different one.

~ what replaced it ~

In 2019 several of the people who had written for CVG started Video Games Chronicle. The domain was gone and the trademark belonged to somebody else, so they built a new one, which is the only way a masthead ever really moves. It was never the paper and it was never the url. It was who happened to be in the room.

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