I first started reading Computer Gaming World when I was in college back in the mid-80’s, and for most of the time it’s been in print I’ve been a regular reader, sometimes subscribing and sometimes picking it up off magazine racks. It’s only been over the past 3-4 years that I stopped reading it altogether, and I guess I’m part of the problem, as the editor recently announced the end of the print magazine. The sad truth is the web has completely displaced magazine for most sources of information for me, and I guess for enough others that it was no longer economically viable. The good news is the editor, Jeff Green, and several of the other regular writers still have a job with the publisher, writing web content for the 1up.com web portal that’s the umbrella site for a lot of the print publications, and they’ll still be producing their excellent podcast, GFW Radio. I hope this works out from an economic standpoint, though I have to admit that I’m worried based on what I know of the situation with newspaper publishing, the decline of print revenue, and their inability to scale up their web presences and the ad dollars they make from them to replace the income lost from the print side. Here’s hoping those equations work differently in the magazine business and for 1up, because Jeff and crew are talented and funny folks and it would be a shame to see them broken up. Meanwhile, a tip of the virtual cap to an old friend – so long Computer Gaming World, loved ya while you lasted, mostly.

Oh, and here’s also hoping they abandon ‘Games For Windows’ and revert to Computer Gaming World…I never liked that switch, for obvious reasons.