Bill Kunkel – Critics

Bill Kunkel co-founded Electronic Games magazine in 1981 — the first newsstand magazine dedicated to video games — earning him the title "The Game Doctor" and recognition as the first professional gaming journalist.

Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz launched Electronic Games in December 1981 when Reese Communications agreed to publish what most editors considered an absurd proposition: a monthly consumer magazine about arcade and home video games. Kunkel had previously written about pinball and coin-op machines for play-industry trade publications, giving him both the vocabulary and the critical framework to cover games as a legitimate cultural product rather than a curiosity. Electronic Games introduced bylined reviews, a letter column, cover features on designers, and hardware comparisons — the structural vocabulary of games journalism that every subsequent publication would inherit. Kunkel continued writing about games for two decades after Electronic Games folded, contributing to numerous outlets and authoring game-design guides under the "Game Doctor" byline until his death in 2008.

Notable Work:

Co-founded Electronic Games magazine in December 1981, the first newsstand video game magazine in the United States
"The Game Doctor" column — a long-running reader advice feature that personalised games coverage for a mainstream audience
Established bylined game reviews as the standard format, giving credibility to games criticism as a profession
Co-authored multiple game strategy books in the 1980s under the Game Doctor imprint

Key Facts:

Electronic Games won a National Magazine Award nomination in 1983 — one of the earliest critical validations of games journalism
Kunkel and Katz coined the term "Easter egg" to describe hidden content in games in a 1982 Electronic Games article
The magazine covered Atari 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision, and arcade games with equal seriousness from its first issue
Electronic Games folded in 1985 but was revived briefly in 1992; Kunkel wrote for Videogaming & Computergaming Illustrated in the interim