Computer Gaming World

» see cgwmuseum.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

computer gaming world's peak years overlap with my own pc-magazine years, but in different languages and on different shelves. in turkey in the late nineties i was buying level dergisi and pc world türkiye on a kid's allowance. cgw was the english-only us version of the same category. you would see issues of it on the shelf at the english bookshop in ankara at three times the cover price. you read them standing there. you did not buy.

russell sipe launched cgw in november 1981. he was a baptist minister who left the pulpit to start the first dedicated computer-game magazine. the publication ran twenty-five years and shipped 268 issues. ziff-davis bought it in 1993 and kept it under the same name through the late-nineties pc-gaming boom, when each issue ran around five hundred pages and circulation hit roughly three hundred thousand. the new york times called it "the bible of computer game purists" in 1999.

in august 2006 ziff-davis and microsoft announced cgw would be retired and replaced by games for windows: the official magazine. the rebrand carried the editorial staff and most of the column formats over to the new title. the november 2006 issue was the last one with the cgw name on the cover. games for windows: the official magazine itself lasted seventeen issues and folded into a website in 2008. the chain of dependent products that all came out of cgw was done before the decade was out.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the run ~

twenty-five years is a long time for a single magazine. cgw survived the 1983 video game crash, the rise of consoles, the transition from 5.25-inch floppies to cd-roms, the dial-up era, and the broadband era. the editorial line was hardcore. cgw was the place where wargames and grand-strategy games got serious column-inches. it carried the pc-gaming canon: civilization, masters of orion, system shock, baldur's gate, half-life, all the long-form pc titles that did not fit the cover-blurb sensibility of the console magazines next to it on the rack.

~ the rebrand ~

games for windows was a microsoft marketing initiative meant to make pc gaming visible alongside xbox. ziff-davis renamed cgw under that brand in 2006. the editorial staff and the reviewers stayed. only the name changed and a microsoft logo went on every cover. the rename did nothing for circulation. print pc-magazine subscriptions were collapsing across the board and cgw's was no exception. the new title was killed in 2008 after seventeen issues.

~ what got buried with it ~

a generation of pc gamers got their critical vocabulary from cgw. it was the place strategy games got reviewed at length and where turn-based titles got the same column count as action games. a 4x review could run four pages with an interface chart in the gutter. the games-for-windows brand died and the cgw archive at archive.org is now where you go to read the original civilization 2 review or the system shock postmortem. the magazine had a long tail in jeff green, its last editor, who left for ea after the shutdown and became one of the loud voices on twitter about how pc games used to get covered.

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