Computer Entertainer releases this week! A preview for patrons

This week, we're launching a collection we've been teasing for a while. For our community of patrons, we're sharing the details early.

As we've mentioned before, we acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer, a game magazine that ran from 1982–1990, and this Wednesday we're adding the complete run to our digital library. What we haven't mentioned yet is that we are releasing the entire magazine into the Creative Commons.

Computer Entertainer is a key source of information about video games in the United States in the 1980s, and we wanted everybody to have it. We (meaning Frank) rescanned the entire run of Computer Entertainer, and we're putting it under a CC BY 4.0 license, meaning that as long as you properly credit VGHF, you can use it, for free, for any purpose.

YouTube video? Yes!

Twitch readalong? Go for it!

Want to use excerpts in a commercial project like a documentary, or a book, or even a video game? Not only can you do it, but people are already doing it! You can look forward to excerpts from Computer Entertainer appearing in the upcoming Atari 50: The Namco Legendary Pack DLC from Digital Eclipse.

Remind me why this is so special

To our knowledge, Computer Entertainer is the only magazine that survived the 1983–84 console industry crash in the United States. While other game magazines closed up shop when the market shrank, Computer Entertainer kept reporting on console and computer games. This is one of the only sources we have that covered the late lives of platforms like the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision, and the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

As a result, Computer Entertainer was also one of the few publications to review pivotal games like Super Mario Bros., Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and Final Fantasy. There weren't really other home console magazines until around 1988, so if you want to know what people in the US thought about these games back when they first came out, this may be one of the only sources for this!

And since Computer Entertainer was run by a mail-order video game retailer, they kept on top of reporting video game release dates. If you look up basically any 80s console game on Wikipedia, the release date information probably comes from Computer Entertainer.

In addition to rescanning every issue of the magazine we had previously digitized, we were also able to source the last missing issues of the magazine from game historian Leonard Herman, who was a subscriber back in the day! This means that our digital library has every single issue of Computer Entertainer available for the first time ever, re-digitized at the highest possible quality, free to read, search, and download. (Yes, you can download them directly from our library portal! This is a new feature we've added for the launch of Computer Entertainer.)

(Before and after: The existing scans of Computer Entertainer vs. our new scans.)

This is a big milestone for us. It's not just that this is our first IP acquisition (if you want to call it that), but it's also our first and biggest chance to contribute back to open culture. This benefits everyone, and we can't wait to see the renewed spotlight on this important resource.

See y'all on Wednesday!