The last great gaming magazine is gone.

Game Informer was shut down suddenly.. What did it mean?

After more than 33 years of operation, the most well-known video game magazine in the United States was taken out with the grace of a swan crushed by an Acme anvil. 

Game Informer had its run cut shorter than expected earlier this month by its parent company GameStop, following years of the publication experiencing the same woes seen across both the journalism and gaming spheres: layoffs, downsizing and at one point losing its physical product. Mere months after relaunching a subscription service separate from the original Gamestop-tethered option, the website was replaced with a splash page with the personality of a Chat GPT-written obituary and all articles were made inaccessible. 

All of the articles the now unemployed writers could use were made impossible to download without the Wayback Machine. Any favorite reviews or interviews, and links related to them, were essentially made moot. It’s the classic situation we see corporations do to any gutted media outlet, a haphazard dumpster fire of deleting assets before the cogs that made the machine work could receive any sort of value from its corpse. Just like the layoffs at Bungie or one of the other media companies shut down and shuttered over the past several years, Game Informer was put down without celebration or recognition.

Game Informer deserved better not only as a legendary publication in the gaming space but as a very traditional, high quality publication that never edged into unprofessional or ill-equipped like much of their competition. Even when the staff was reduced, sections were cut or the content was less frequent than before, gaming’s favorite magazine stuck to its journalistic guns and methods.

What was Game Informer?

Game Informer, first established in 1991, was the longest running gaming magazine in the United States. Over the years the magazine built its name up alongside its fellow gamer periodicals like EGM and PC Gamer, putting its own spin on coverage by highlighting one upcoming game per issue for a feature article with other sections dedicated to reader questions, Q&A’s with developers, critical game reviews, neutral previews of upcoming games, a section dedicated to past scores and even a gaming trivia page at the very back.

Throughout the years, especially at the magazine’s peak in the late 2000s, Game Informer honed its sections to have their own specific tone. Want an honest review of a game? You knew what section to flip to. Want to know how Batman: Arkham Knight differs from the first game? Get to the cover article. There was even an annual joke section, Game Infarcer, that fooled even the most attentive gamer (not many of them) into believing the next Bioshock game involved an senile Big Daddy as the main character or that Halo 3 would have 90-player co-op. 

I still remember scathing reviews of Sonic the Hedgehog or the newest mediocre entry of Assassin’s Creed. They were honest when it came to reviews, which readers often complained about, but they were never nice to a game because other publications gave it glowing reviews. For the gamers who couldn’t afford the game they wanted, it was an easy way to preview it and know whether or not it was for you if the writer had similar taste.

Writers regularly cursed games they thought sucked, responded to rude reader questions with sass and even doubled-down on previous review scores when questioned. It was a true magazine when it comes down to it, deserving a place on the stands next to The New Yorker or Time or any other classic US publication.

Game Informer was a tight, well-written, solid gaming magazine that wasn’t afraid to joke around in the world of gaming. If the now-dead publication is remembered for anything, it’s for its stellar covers. The iconic covers for Epic Mickey, Metal Gear Solid 4, Tomb Raider’s reboot and Halo: Reach were artful depictions of games that box art could never accomplish. The focus was intrigue and each cover delivered, even up to more recent covers for games like Hades 2.

To me…

The only reason I can link anything related to old Game Informer is due to the efforts of archivists with the Internet Archive, with each issue saved online. But, I also personally own just about every issue since the early 2000s.

My reminiscent tone comes from my literal decades of getting these magazines in the mail and cracking them open dozens of times before the next one hit the doorstep of my childhood home. In that same home we have hundreds of Game Informer issues tucked away in cardboard boxes, narrowly avoiding the landfill each time my mom asks, “Do we have to keep these?” My brother introduced me to the magazine and we had the subscription for years, even after we both moved out and became independent. Game Informer was a norm in our household and issues could be found scattered around the house or stacked neatly for reference.

Each issue of Game Informer, in retrospect, strengthened my interest in journalism in a non-political sense. Games are a still-developing, complicated medium despite the still-present notion that children and people in their early-20s are its main audience. Game Informer gave credence to this belief, discussing gameplay mechanics, pacing, graphics and (my personal favorite) replayability at a much deeper level than, “Is this fun or not?” or “Is this game good looking?” 

Game Informer took into account how the game would feel to play dozens of hours in, how pacing affects the experience, how the game felt compared to its predecessors and competition and who the game’s audience truly is. Game Informer’s written reviews and analysis showed that games were more than just a lazy, brainless activity for those invested in its history, developments and longevity. If anything, Game Informer’s style in the 2000s was a template for modern-day game reviews, opting for more observation-based, sectioned criticism with a historical lens rather than straight-forward summaries of a single gaming experience. They also regularly used the numbered rating system, which started years of scoring discourse from people who never read the reviews. 

I devoured Game Informer issues monthly, my magazine of choice after I moved on from Highlight. It opened the door for my news reading habit, my long-winded opinions of games on my podcast episodes and an entire career in journalism years later. I also kept up my gaming habit because of my interest in the progress of the industry and my love of how fun games are, now getting deeper into game philosophy and development as games become more expensive than ever. Gaming as a hobby was never embarrassing or a  waste of time, because then that would mean any hobby was a waste of time. I also kept the critical eye every time I played and knew when I wasn’t having fun and better understood why. Did the gameplay loop get old? Did the story go left? Why was this experience rewarding or not from a player’s point of view?

Game Informer made a large impact on a booming industry up until its last, sudden day on the internet. It was the last well-made, true-to-journalism publication left in gaming. Now, all we have are aggregators, Twitter accounts, Kotaku’s often volatile quality, IGN’s content mill and the occasional deep dive article from one of our few prominent gaming journalist figures. Just like the rest of the industry, gaming journalism is in a much, some would consider worse, place than it was in the 2000s. The death of Game Informer is a morbid sign of the times, but luckily blogs like this one and podcasts galore are attempting to cover the spread.

RIP Game Informer.