GamePro

• 1. Introduction

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  GamePro magazine launched in 1989 with a cover painted by game illustrator Marc Ericksen, and within a few years it was reaching 300,000 readers every month. It covered every platform it could find: consoles, computers, handhelds, arcade cabinets. For over 22 years it was a fixture in North American gaming culture, and then, on the 5th of December 2011, it shut down. What kept that run going so long? Who built it, what did it invent, and why did it still matter decades after the internet changed everything about how people found out about games?

• 2. Founding Figures

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  Patrick Ferrell started what would become GamePro in late 1988, working out of houses across the San Francisco Bay Area alongside his sister-in-law Leeanne McDermott and the husband-wife design team of Michael and Lynne Kavish. The group leased their first real office in Redwood City, California at the end of 1989. After publishing the first issue, the founding team lacked the cash flow to sustain growth, so they went looking for a major publisher. They found IDG Peterborough, a New Hampshire-based division of the global media giant IDG. A merger and acquisition team led by IDG Peterborough President Roger Murphy, along with Jim McBrian and Roger Strukhoff, completed the acquisition. The magazine was then spun off as an independent business unit of IDG, with Ferrell staying on as president and CEO. John Rousseau joined as publisher, Wes Nihei took on the editor-in-chief role, and Francis Mao came aboard as art director. It was Mao who hired Marc Ericksen to paint that debut cover. Ericksen produced five of the first ten covers for the magazine, eventually creating eight in total, and he continued producing double-page spreads for the popular monthly Pro Tips section.

• 3. The ProTip and Its Legacy

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  Dan Amrich, a former GamePro writer, explained the editorial logic behind ProTips: writers were encouraged to caption the three-to-seven images used in each article with short expert advice. That practice gave the magazine a distinctive voice. One image that circulated online claimed to show a GamePro review of Doom from 1993, with a caption reading "PROTIP: To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies." The apparent advice struck readers as absurdly self-evident, and it spread widely as a meme, inspiring a wave of similarly obvious captions. The image turned out to be a fake, created as an April Fools' joke for the fansite doomworld.com. Even so, the meme endured because it captured something true about the ProTip format. GamePro had genuinely pioneered the concept of captioning images with bite-sized expert advice, and the format was influential enough to become a target of parody long after the magazine had ceased publication.

• 4. Rating Systems and Reviews

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  From the start, GamePro rated games across five categories: Graphics, Sound, Gameplay, FunFactor, and Challenge. The "Challenge" category was later dropped and "Gameplay" was renamed "Control." Scores ran on a scale of 1.0 to 5.0 in increments of 0.5, though a 0.5 score was eventually added as an option. The first game to receive that lowest possible score was Battle Arena Toshinden URA for the Sega Saturn. Starting in October 1990, each score was accompanied by a cartoon face called the Gamepro Dude, with different expressions for different ratings. Those faces remained in use until around 2002. Some game publishers valued GamePro's ratings highly enough to print them on retail boxes. After 2002, the five-category system was replaced by a single overall star rating on a 1.0-to-5.0 scale, displayed as filled and hollow stars beside each review. An Editors' Choice Award went to any game that earned 4.5 or 5.0 stars. Editors also used comic book-style avatars and nicknames when bylines appeared on reviews, a practice that ran until January 2004, when a redesign dropped the avatars.

• 5. Launching E3

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  In 1993, Patrick Ferrell sent Debra Vernon, GamePro's VP of marketing, to a meeting between the games industry and the Consumer Electronics Show. Vernon saw an opening, and the team at what was by then called Infotainment World acted on it. Ferrell partnered with the IDSA to produce a standalone trade show for interactive entertainment. The result was E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which went on to become one of the biggest trade show launches in the industry's history. The company name Infotainment World itself dates to that same year: in 1993, GamePro Inc. was renamed to reflect the growing number of different publications the company was running. GamePro TV, a nationally syndicated show hosted by J. D. Roth and Brennan Howard, was also part of that broader media expansion. The show ran for one year in syndication and a second year on cable channels.

• 6. Redesigns and Decline

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  George Jones arrived at GamePro in 2006 as an industry veteran brought in to oversee a major internal shift from a print-first to an online-first publishing approach. The March 2007 issue was the first to reflect his overhaul: more HD game images, more reviews and previews per issue, community content from GamePro.com, and insider news. That same year, the long-running Lamepro April Fools' parody ran its final edition; it had appeared every April until 2007, offering two to five pages of satirical fake news and humorous game titles. In October 2009-20-year industry veteran John Davison joined the company as executive vice president of content. Under Davison, the magazine and website were both redesigned in early 2010, shifting the editorial focus toward the people and culture of gaming. Davison resigned in September 2010, and Julian Rignall replaced him as vice president of content in November 2010. GamePro published its final monthly issue in October 2011, then attempted a quarterly format on higher-quality paper stock. That quarterly lasted exactly one issue before the company announced on November 30 that the magazine and website would shut down on the 5th of December 2011.

• 7. What Survived

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  Despite the closure of U.S. operations in 2011, GamePro continued to operate internationally in France, Germany, and Spain. The magazine had run international editions across at least nine countries at its peak, including Portugal, Italy, Turkey, Australia, Brazil, and Greece. Australian GamePro had been published bi-monthly by IDG from the 10th of November 2003 to February 2007, with Stuart Clarke as its founding editor and Chris Stead succeeding him in January 2006. The Australian edition reported doubled sales between 2006 and 2007, yet was discontinued as a result of internal restructuring. After the U.S. shutdown, GamePro's web presence migrated into PC World as a small games section. The domain Gamepro.com outlasted the magazine itself, remaining online after the print edition folded. The online site had launched in 1998, moved from San Francisco to Oakland in 2002, and had been updated daily throughout its run, making it the longest-lasting piece of the GamePro brand.