Aside from the venerable Edge and the recently-relaunched Game Informer, it’s hard to find dedicated game magazines at your favorite bookstore in 2025. But even though they’re long gone, we’re not short of nostalgic odes to defunct titles like Nintendo Power or GamePro or Electronic Gaming Monthly.
Computer Entertainer doesn’t have the name recognition of any of those periodicals, but maybe it should, because no one was covering games like they were in the 1980s. And I mean that literally. It was published from 1982 until 1990 by Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan, sisters who also ran a video game store. There were other game magazines available in the 1980s, but from 1984 until 1987, Computer Entertainer was (most likely) the only magazine available in the United States that was solely dedicated to video games.
So why are we talking about this now? Well, the Video Game History Foundation has acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer and they’re making available to anyone, for free, through a Creative Commons license. That means that as long as you give credit to the VGHF, you can use articles from Computer Entertainer however you want.
I’ll let them explain.
Computer Entertainer (originally titled The Video Game Update) was the newsletter for Video Take-Out, a mail-order retailer based in Los Angeles.
The magazine, which ran from 1982–1990, is the only known publication in the United States that regularly covered home console video games in the mid-1980s. Most console game magazines in the US went out of business during the 1983–84 industry crash… except this one.
As a result, Computer Entertainer is one of the only sources for American reviews of classic games like The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Super Mario Bros. And because it was run by a game retailer, this magazine is one of the only reliable sources of American game release dates during this period.
The newsletter, co-edited by sisters Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan, also has the unique distinction of being the earliest console video game magazine run by women.
You can browse and download every issue of Computer Entertainer right now through the Video Game History Foundation’s Digital Archive. That includes the very first English-language reviews of Super Mario Bros., Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda, as well as twice-yearly reports from CES, juicy 40-year-old rumors, and even a few tidbits about games that never made it to store shelves.
It’s going to be fun to dig in to this classic magazine, and I’m planning to republish several of these historically-significant articles on Video Game Canon over the next few weeks.