Gamest

~ the obit ~

Gamest arrived in my life backwards, as a citation. English-language writing about Japanese arcade games keeps referring to the Gamest Awards as though everybody already knows what they were, and if you follow the reference back you find a magazine that had already closed by the time I was properly online. It ended in 1999. I was on dial-up in Turkey and nowhere near an arcade in Japan.

The first issue came out on 5 may 1986, published by Shinseisha in Tokyo. It grew out of a fanzine called the VG2 Newsletter that Uemura Bankita had been putting together earlier in the decade. Gamest covered arcade cabinets. Not consoles and not home computers, only the machines, at a moment when the arcade was still where Japanese games got decided.

It went monthly in 1987 and onto a two-week cycle by 1993. The early years were shoot 'em ups and the scoring tables that came with them. Then Street Fighter II happened and the magazine turned with it, and through the middle of the nineties Gamest was the closest thing competitive fighting games had to a paper of record.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

The reader pages did the real work. Gamest Island ran in every issue and it was where players sent their own material in, which meant the magazine was partly written by the people buying it. Artists came up through those pages, including Mine Yoshizaki, who would later draw Sgt. Frog. Han, who ended up at Treasure, was in there too. The line between audience and staff was thin enough to walk across.

The Gamest Awards were voted by readers and published once a year, and they became the nearest thing Japanese arcade games had to an official verdict. Games that won are still described as Gamest Award winners in writing done decades afterward, by people who never saw a copy. That is a strange afterlife for a print title working to a two-week deadline.

~ the last issue ~

Shinseisha went bankrupt in 1999. Issue 274 came out on 30 september that year and was the end of it. Nothing about the closure had to do with the magazine failing at what it did. The publisher underneath it stopped, and everything the publisher printed stopped at the same moment.

~ what it became ~

Most of the editorial staff walked over to ASCII and started Monthly Arcadia within the year. ASCII would go on to become Enterbrain. Arcadia did the same job for the next generation of arcade players and kept going until the arcades themselves thinned out. The people were the asset, which is usually true of magazines and almost never how they get valued.

What Gamest documented is largely gone in the physical sense. The cabinets were scrapped and the scoring records it kept survive as scans passed between collectors. It was the first magazine to treat the arcade as a culture worth writing down rather than a place to spend coins, and the writing down is the part that lasted.

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