So, I will admit I fell behind in writing blog posts for today, so I had planned to post some cat pictures – and then this morning I learned that Game Informer had closed its doors.

Game Informer, for a large part because of its close ties to GameStop (and before it Funcoland) as retail stores never quite had the same level of cache to me as a bastion of games writing compared to other magazines – but it was a fixture of games writing nonetheless, and while under later editors GamePro did manage to turn its reputation around, Game Informer did have a sense of taking things a little more seriously than GamePro and GameFan did – though they didn’t have the coverage of import gaming that GameFan had (because Funcoland apparently didn’t have import titles serve as much of a significant part of their business the same way that the retailer who sponsored Diehard GameFan did).

That said, Game Informer, because of its corporate patronage by Funco and GameStop, was able to persist as a long-term bastion of print games journalism long after their American contemporaries had shifted to digital only, shut down entirely, or become dependant on Patreon (not that there’s anything wrong with that – I back Nintendo Force magazine).

RetroMags has announced that they’re going to start releasing their scanned Game Informer magazine archive, as Game Informer had maintained their own archives, and had asked Retromags not to release theirs while Game Informer was operational. I’m debating adding Game Informer into my magazine recap rotation – possibly when I run out of NextGen, since Game Informer honestly does serve as a solid magazine of record for the state of the game industry after NextGen’s closure – even if their editorial never got quite as inside baseball as NextGen did.

In the mean time – pour one out for a real one – and if you have a bookstore with a big magazine rack near you that has video game magazines on it (or other print magazines for a hobby you like) pick one up and help keep print alive!