GamePro (print)

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

~ the eulogy ~

gamepro launched in april 1989, the same year as electronic gaming monthly, into a us console market that was about to discover the genesis and the turbografx-16. patrick ferrell and leeanne mcdermott built it under idg's new hampshire division to be the multi-platform alternative to nintendo power's official line. the magazine ran with a cast of editor mascots: "the whizz" for sports, "scary larry" for horror titles, plus a rotating roster of cartoon personas for the other beats. the bit was that grown adults at idg were writing under those personas, which was the right tone for a magazine whose audience was mostly twelve to seventeen and who liked their reviewers to feel like part of a club.

through the 90s gamepro was on every us suburban newsstand alongside egm. the two magazines split the multi-platform audience evenly and read differently in a way that mattered to subscribers. egm leaned into critic personalities and review scores; gamepro leaned into preview screens and tip-and-trick sections written for kids who wanted help getting past a boss. peak circulation hit around 300,000 monthly in the high years. there was a gamepro tv show that aired in syndication for a few seasons, hosted by the same mascot characters, which gave the brand a presence outside the magazine itself.

the long slide came in the 2000s. idg cut staff repeatedly through the back half of the decade as gaming coverage moved online. by 2011 the print product was a shell of itself. idg announced in september 2011 that the monthly format was ending. the october 2011 issue was the last monthly. one quarterly version followed in november before idg shut the whole operation down on december 5 2011. gamepro.com was folded into pc world's gaming section, which itself died with pc world's own print run two years later.

i was not in the gamepro readership. the us-coded gaming print kiosk did not exist in turkey in any direct form. what came through were imports at istiklal-street bookshops in the larger cities at four to five times the cover price, plus the eventual gamepro.com which was accessible over the ttnet broadband connection my generation got around 2006. by then the website had already been overtaken by ign and gamespot in any case. i recognize the cover art from forum thread scans. the magazine itself i never owned.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

the mascot-editor thing is the part that aged most distinctly. gamepro's reviewers wrote under characters with cartoon avatars at the byline. the convention assigned each mascot a beat: the whizz handled sports games while scary larry covered the horror titles, with the rest of the cast spread across the other genres. it sounds gimmicky now and it was, but it gave the magazine a continuity of voice that egm did not have. you knew which character to look for in a section and what tone you would get.

tips-and-tricks was the magazine's revenue moat. before gamefaqs democratized faq culture in the late 90s, gamepro's protips were the cheapest way to get past a stuck section in a console game. the magazine ran a 1-900 game-counselor hotline in parallel to nintendo power's, which was a real revenue stream until the internet wiped both lines out across 1998-2000.

~ how it ended ~

by the time monthly print ended in october 2011, idg had already reorganized gamepro's editorial team twice. the website was running on a small staff with a content strategy that did not differentiate it from ign. the magazine itself had lost the kids-oriented protips niche to gamefaqs a full decade earlier and never replaced it with a new identity. the quarterly experiment in november 2011 was a low-budget farewell rather than a real pivot attempt.

idg's december 5 2011 announcement framed the shutdown as a website-first repositioning. that lasted only briefly. gamepro.com was rolled into pc world's gaming section in 2012, and the standalone gamepro brand effectively ceased to exist as an active publication. it was the cleanest death in the us console-print canon of the era because there was no revival attempt at the brand level.

~ the long tail ~

gamepro's surviving cultural footprint is mostly meme-shaped. the mascot bylines and one notorious cover slide called "fart blaster" live on as reddit retro-gaming scans, with cover art from the genesis-snes era resurfacing periodically as nostalgia threads. the magazine itself is not archived at the same depth as nintendo power or egm because idg never put its back catalog online in a coherent way. you can find scattered scans on archive.org but no official archive.

the larger arc gamepro sits inside is the death of the us console-print magazine as a format. nintendo power had a longer reach while egm had a more durable editorial reputation. gamepro had the protip and the cartoon mascot, which is a category of media that does not really have a successor at all on the modern gaming web.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »