The function
In the absence of internet reviews, YouTube videos, or any real-time community feedback mechanism, the print gaming magazine served as the primary quality signal in a market where the product was expensive, non-returnable, and extremely variable in quality. A 2600 cartridge cost $30 in 1982 — equivalent to roughly $100 today. A wrong purchase was a significant financial mistake. The gaming magazine existed to reduce that mistake rate.
British publications led the way: Crash (dedicated to the ZX Spectrum), Zzap!64 (dedicated to the Commodore 64), Your Sinclair, Amiga Format, and dozens of others. American publications including Electronic Games (1981), Computer Gaming World (1981), and later Nintendo Power (1988) and GamePro (1989) served different markets with different emphases. The specialist gaming press, as a category, was one of the fastest-growing magazine sectors through the 1980s.
How games were reviewed
The review formats developed by gaming magazines varied considerably between publications but shared certain structural features. Most reviews included screenshots (which, on 8-bit hardware, were often more flattering than the actual game due to the time available to compose them). Most used numerical scores, either out of 10, out of 100, or as percentages across multiple criteria — graphics, sound, playability, lasting interest. Some publications, notably Crash in the UK, used aggregated panel scores to reduce individual reviewer bias.
The scores became the dominant cultural metric for game quality. A Crash Smash, the label attached to games scoring above 90 percent, was a commercial event. A Zzap!64 Gold Medal guaranteed sales. Publications that gave high scores freely lost credibility; publications with strict standards gained it. The scoring systems were imperfect and subject to advertising influence, but they were the best available proxy for quality in a market with no alternative mechanism.
The cultural function
Beyond reviews, gaming magazines created the vocabulary and the cultural context through which games were understood and discussed. The terminology of gaming — genres, tropes, the vocabulary of criticism — was largely developed in the pages of specialist magazines by writers who were thinking seriously about games before most academics or mainstream critics paid them any attention.
Magazines also created community in a pre-internet sense. Letters pages were genuine community forums — debates about game quality, tips and tricks shared by readers, arguments about which platform was superior. The Spectrum/Commodore rivalry that defined British bedroom computing culture in the 1980s was conducted primarily through magazine letters pages, with partisans on each side writing monthly diatribes that the editors published and encouraged because they drove reader engagement and newsstand sales.
The decline
The internet made gaming magazines obsolete in a specific and irreversible way: it made the publications' core functions — discovery, evaluation, community discussion — available faster, cheaper, and in greater depth than any print publication could match. Online reviews were available before a game's release date. Reader communities existed in real time rather than on a monthly letter-page cycle. Database sites could provide information that no printed reference could match in currency or breadth.
The decline was rapid. Publications that had circulations in the hundreds of thousands in the 1990s fell to tens of thousands in the 2000s and folded. Crash ceased publication in 1992, before the internet had reached a mass audience, because the Spectrum market had collapsed. Computer Gaming World, which had survived from 1981, ceased print publication in 2006. GameFan, GamePro, Nintendo Power — all folded between 2002 and 2012.
What the magazines left behind was the cultural infrastructure of gaming criticism: the idea that games could be evaluated seriously, that criticism required expertise, that the vocabulary for discussing game quality was worth developing. The internet inherited that infrastructure and extended it in volume while, in the view of many former magazine writers, losing something in the sustained attention and editorial discipline that print imposed. The argument is not entirely wrong. It is also, at this point, irrelevant.