GameFan

• 1. Introduction

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  GameFan was born in September 1992 from an unlikely starting point: an advertising supplement meant to sell imported Japanese video games. Tim Lindquist, Greg Off, George Weising, and Dave Halverson launched it under the name Diehard GameFan, and what began as a promotional tool quickly became something stranger and more interesting. The small text reviews were rough around the edges. Critics and readers noticed them precisely because of that roughness. Underneath the lack of polish was something that felt genuine, even urgent.

  The magazine staked out ground that distinguished it from every other gaming publication in the United States. Most American magazines printed screenshots on cheap paper, and the images came out dim and muddy. GameFan used high-quality paper. The screenshots looked like the games actually looked. That alone was enough to build a readership. By the time the original magazine folded in December 2000, it was reaching more than 100,000 readers every month.

  But the story of GameFan is not simply the story of better paper stock. It is the story of a publication that covered anime before most Americans knew what anime was, handed out awards under pseudonyms, sparked a racial controversy that required a bilingual apology, and then attempted a comeback a full decade after closing its doors. What follows will trace all of it, from the name borrowed from a Japanese Sega magazine to a relaunch that collapsed under the weight of a 20-hour workday.

• 2. Origins and Identity

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  The name Diehard GameFan was inspired by a Japanese Sega magazine called Megafan. That borrowing was no accident. The publication from its earliest days looked east, covering imported games from Japan at a time when most American magazines barely acknowledged they existed.

  Editor profiles in the magazine were illustrated with caricatures drawn by Terry Wolfinger. The approach to editorial identity was deliberately anonymous. Writers used pseudonyms rather than bylines, which created an unusual side effect. Dave Halverson, one of the founders, could review the same game multiple times in the same issue under different names. That practice would later draw scrutiny, but in the early days it was simply part of how the magazine operated.

  Coverage of anime set GameFan further apart. While other gaming publications stayed narrowly focused on software and hardware, GameFan treated the surrounding culture as worth documenting. The magazine tracked emerging American interest in Japanese animation and folded that coverage into its regular sections. It also ran a comic strip called The Adventures of Monitaur, an anime-derived series featuring a character drawn specifically for the strip. The rest of the magazine's staff appeared in the strip as characters too. Monitaur's recurring villain was called The Blowmeister, who stood in for the leadership of rival publications like Electronic Gaming Monthly. In 1994, the magazine and two new startups, Dark Moon Productions and Dark Moon Comics, began discussions about turning Monitaur into a full-length animated film, to be produced by Dark Moon Productions Inc and a sister company called DMP Multi-media, founded by Andrew Spencer and Gary Tucker. Those plans did not advance.

• 3. The Controversy of 1995

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  The September 1995 issue of GameFan contained text that should not have been there. Inside what was supposed to be a review of the football game College Football '96, readers found a passage discussing a Namco combat flight simulator called Ace Combat instead. The writing was poor. Embedded within it were derogatory references to Japanese people and a self-deprecating racial comment attributed to people from Southern California.

  The official explanation the magazine gave was that a rogue employee had deliberately inserted the text to damage the magazine's relationship with its Japanese audience and fan base. Later accounts told a different story. According to those reports, the offending text was actually a piece of internal joke filler that someone had forgotten to remove before publication. Either way, the text reached readers.

  The response was formal and bilingual. An apology dated the 24th of August 1995 appeared in the October 1995 issue of DieHard GameFan, printed in both English and Japanese. That choice of languages reflected the magazine's core audience. Its reputation had been built on coverage of imported Japanese games and affection for Japanese popular culture. Publishing the apology in Japanese was a direct acknowledgment of where the harm had landed.

• 4. The Golden Megawards

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  Each year GameFan's editors voted on what they called the Golden Megawards, selecting winners across a wide range of categories. The awards became one of the magazine's most distinctive features, offering a snapshot of what editors actually valued rather than what advertisers preferred.

  In 1992, the inaugural Megawards gave the nod for Best Game to Wonderdog on the Sega CD. Streets of Rage 2 on the Genesis won Best Action Fighting Game. The Best RPG honor went to Soul Blazer. The following year, 1993, Gunstar Heroes on the Genesis took Game of the Year, with runners-up including Star Fox and Landstalker. The Sega CD version of Lunar won Best RPG. The Atari Jaguar and the 3DO were both named Best New System, reflecting the magazine's openness to platforms that mainstream publications often underplayed.

  By 1994, Final Fantasy III on the Super Nintendo won Best RPG while Earthworm Jim on the Genesis took Game of the Year. In 1995, Yoshi's Island on the Super Nintendo swept several categories including 16-Bit Game of the Year and Action Platform Game of the Year, while Jumping Flash on the PlayStation won the 32-Bit category. The 1996 awards were anchored by Tomb Raider, which took the top GameFan Game of 1996 honor, with Resident Evil and Super Mario 64 among the runners-up. Virtua Fighter 3 won Coin-Op Game of the Year. Guardian Heroes took the Side-Scrolling category, a game that rarely appeared at the top of mainstream award lists.

• 5. After the Magazine Closed

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  When GameFan stopped publishing in December 2000, the people who had built it scattered into new projects that kept parts of it alive. Dave Halverson, the original editor-in-chief, went on to found Gamers' Republic and then Play Magazine, staffed largely by former GameFan and Gamers' Republic writers. Gamers' Republic ran for 35 issues before closing in July 2001, a casualty of the dot-com bubble's collapse. Play lasted considerably longer, reaching 97 issues before its publishing company filed for bankruptcy.

  Tim Lindquist took a different path. Together with other original GameFan team members, he launched Hardcore Gamer, which ran for 36 issues before shifting its focus entirely to a website. Lindquist's group also built a strategy guide publishing operation called DoubleJump Books, later renamed OnionBat Books.

  The original name Diehard GameFan returned as well, though not in print. Alex Lucard, with Dave Halverson's blessing, launched a website called Diehard GameFAN. The site covered major releases but also made room for indie games, a nod to the original publication's willingness to cover what other outlets overlooked.

• 6. The 2010 Relaunch

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  After the bankruptcy of Fusion Publishing shut down Play, Dave Halverson returned to the GameFan name. In April 2010 the magazine appeared on newsstands again, with Rob Duenas serving as art director and a small team of staffers who had worked on Play. The relaunched version was available both in print and through GameFan's own online shop as a digital edition.

  The first two issues carried a flip-magazine format. The front portion was GameFan as expected. Readers who turned the magazine upside down found MovieFan, a separate section covering film, anime, and comics. In its second and final issue, MovieFan published one of the last known interviews with filmmaker Satoshi Kon, who died not long after. Starting with issue 3, the MovieFan section was cut, though later issues continued covering anime and comics in a format similar to Play.

  The first five issues arrived on a reliable bi-monthly schedule. Then advertising revenue problems hit. Issue 6 did not appear until August 2011, eight months after issue 5, and came out with a completely new editing team led by James Bacon. Issue 7 was assembled by just three people: Halverson, Duenas, and Bacon. It came out in December 2011. Duenas then resigned. He stated publicly that he had worked 20 hours a day for two weeks straight and was still short cover art. He said he bore no ill will toward Halverson and would still have helped with cover illustrations or layouts if asked. Bacon left shortly after for reasons he did not publicly state.

  A press release dated the 18th of April 2012 announced future plans under the Paper Planet brand name. The company outlined app development for mobile devices and a new online channel called GameFan TV. Only one element of that plan was ever built: a YouTube channel. Wesley Ruscher, formerly of Destructoid, was named editor-in-chief but resigned after issue 8, saying the magazine lacked the means to cover his basic living expenses.

  Issue 9 arrived in February 2013, months past its planned holiday 2012 release, worked on by only Halverson and a writer named Greg Orlando. Issues 8 and 9 were sold exclusively in digital format. By June 2013, GameFan's web presence had been largely inactive for about a year. In February 2015, the magazine returned again with issue 10, released simultaneously in print and digitally on Magzter with a promotional code. The layouts were simplified and the Monitaur mascot was redesigned.

  On the 6th of May 2015, GameFan announced a partnership with Destructoid that was supposed to bring the magazine to a monthly schedule. The deal produced exactly one issue. As of January 2019, no new updates about the magazine's status had appeared.