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Whenever I speak to gamers who seem to have a rosier recollection of video game journalism than I do, one thing to immediately creep afloat in my mind is whether the notion of an endeavor once noble, objective, and devoid of emotion, was indeed on an ever-so-steady linear decline towards subjectivity, emotion and pure politicization. As I poured over my long-lost memories of reviews I’d read back to the late 2000s, and even my faintest recollections of very old gaming mags, I started to believe more that if a component of disingenuity wasn’t at least partly motivating these efforts of revisionism, it was certainly ahistorical to believe anything of the sort. If anything, video game journalism is better for its subjectivity, and has been much worse when it was still “objective”-whatever that word means.
But memories can be deceiving-if anything was evidenced by the penchant to believe anything was noble when it once wasn’t, I certainly couldn’t be safe from exhibiting similar behavior. So what I did is I dug up the oldest video game magazine I could find from a publicly available library online, trying to gleam from it as much context for what could be considered as the root for much of what video game journalism is now.
