Computer Games Magazine

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

~ the obit ~

Where I did my PC gaming between 2002 and 2005, you paid a man at a counter for an hour of Counter-Strike and walked out again. Computer Games Magazine ran on the other model entirely: a thick American monthly with a disc stuck to the cover, mailed to your house because you had posted a check to a shop in Vermont. That shop is the reason the magazine existed for eighteen years, and the company that eventually owned both of them is the reason it stopped.

It began in October 1988 in Britain, as Games International, edited by Brian Walker. It was retitled Strategy Plus with a fresh issue one in October 1990, and in 1991 Walker sold it to Chips & Bits, an American mail-order games retailer in Vermont run by Tina and Yale Brozen. The new owners renamed it Computer Games Strategy Plus. Circulation reached about 130,000 a month by the middle of the decade and 184,299 by 1998, which made it the third largest computer game magazine in the United States. Steve Bauman, the editor-in-chief, put it at 220,000 the following year.

In January 2000 theGlobe.com bought Chips & Bits, the magazine and its publishing arm in one transaction. The buyer was a dot-com community portal with a famous 1998 IPO and no obvious reason to own a games magazine, and the magazine grew anyway. Circulation hit 240,000 by March 2000 against a print run of roughly 300,000, and BPA International measured the July to December average at 374,576 with the December issue at 450,515. The website, cdmag.com, was averaging a million unique visits a month. The redesign from the June 2001 issue is where the name shortened to Computer Games Magazine.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a mail-order shop in vermont ~

For most of its life the magazine was owned by the shop whose catalog it effectively lived next to, which is a conflict of interest nobody in the hobby press seemed troubled by at the time. It is also why the thing existed at all. Chips & Bits had a reason to put strategy game coverage in front of strategy game buyers, and Bauman's editorial operation got a decade of stability out of that logic while independent titles folded around it.

Ed Mitchell of the magazine reckoned in 2000 that it was the biggest magazine published in Vermont in any field, which sounds like a joke until you remember that Vermont has fewer than 700,000 people in it. Strategy Plus also bought the website Online Gaming Review in August 1998, two years after OGR had itself been bought by a print publisher, and the site was eventually consolidated into the magazine's own.

~ the spam judgment ~

By 2006 theGlobe.com was a holding company for a scatter of internet businesses, one of which sent commercial email. MySpace sued under the CAN-SPAM Act over messages pushed at its users. A California court found theGlobe liable in late February 2007, and the company's own SEC filing estimated potential damages of roughly forty to a hundred and twenty million dollars against a business that did not have it.

On 13 March 2007 theGlobe shut its entire print operation. Gamasutra had the story that day from independent sources, noting that a final judgment had not even been entered as of 5 March. The last issue of Computer Games Magazine is dated April 2007, number 197. Of magazines published exclusively about computer games, only Computer Gaming World ran longer.

~ the leftovers ~

The same closure took MMO Games Magazine with it. That one had launched as Massive Magazine, put up a website in June 2006, reached newsstands in September, went quarterly in January 2007 and managed three issues in total before its parent's legal bill arrived. Now Playing, another theGlobe title, had already stopped in 2006 for the same underlying reason.

So a print magazine that had come through two ownership changes and the long slide of the games newsstand was finally stopped by an email marketing judgment concerning a social network it had never written about.

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