The Video Game History Foundation has announced today that it has acquired the rights to the historic US magazine Computer Entertainer, and is making the entire magazine free for anyone to read or use.
Computer Entertainer was a magazine published between 1982-1990, and is significant for a few different reasons, such as being the first women-owned and operated game magazine and the only North American console-focused magazine to survive the entirety of the infamous 1980’s games industry crash in the States.
As a result, it's a great source of early info on a lot of classic Nintendo Entertainment System games, including Super Mario Bros., Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda, having been around at a time when Nintendo was making its first steps into American market.
According to the Video Game History Foundation's announcement, the non-profit has reportedly spent "dozens of hours" searching across the US to locate and "meticulously digitize" the magazine's entire eight-year run, with the contents now being available to search, view, and download from the organization's digital archives, which now contains over more than 3,000 full-text-searchable out-of-print video game magazines.
In addition to this, the non-profit also states that it is releasing Computer Entertainer for free under an open Creative Commons license, allowing anyone to reproduce or use the magazine (even for commercial purposes) with attribution to VGHF.
“I often call the period between 1985 and 1988 the ‘dark ages’ of the home console game industry in the U.S.,” Frank Cifaldi, the founder and executive director at VGHF wrote in a press statement. “Games and even entire systems were still technically being released, but without an enthusiast press to cover them, we don’t have a lot of insight into what people thought.
He continued, "Computer Entertainer gives us an incredibly rare glimpse into the rebirth that would define the industry as we know it today, and we are incredibly proud to offer the magazine in its entirety to everyone as a public utility.”
Phil Salvador, library director at the Video Game History Foundation, meanwhile, added, “Making Computer Entertainer openly accessible is part of our commitment to saving video game history. By preserving and sharing rare materials like this magazine, we're continuing to grow our digital library into a one-of-a-kind research tool that we believe is changing how people study the history of video games.”
If you want to find out more about the history of the magazine, the latest episode of the Video Game History Hour includes a chat with one the magazine's founders, Marylou Badeaux, going over the difficulties of running a mail-order business and how they sourced info in the days before the internet was even a thing.