When word hit that GamePro magazine went down, it was a painful moment for gamers and geeks.
With this economy still in terrible shape, it’s almost certain that we are going to see more print publications tumbling like dominos.
Darren Franich of Entertainment Weekly weighed in on the loss of GamePro, headlining his story, Farewell Childhood, and for gamers, GamePro was their bible.
“For me, GamePro was an oasis of sanity,” Franich writes. “Proof that there were other people,smart people, adult people who dug videogames as much as I did.”
At first I didn’t understand what Franich meant, because I grew up with video games in the early 80’s, when everyone played them, and they were the coolest thing around.
But in Franich’s era, gaming was geek domain before it exploded again in recent years. And Franich, like everyone else at the mag, wrote under a geekish pseudonym, Keith Staskiewicz, and other contributors went under names such as Scary Larry, Boba Fatt, and Den Elektro.
Of course there were other gaming magazines, but for Franich, and other gamers, but GamePro was incredibly fun. To try and save the magazine, it went quarterly, and Franich also writes, “It’s unclear if the videogame industry even needs journalism: No other medium has been so inextricably tied into the rise of social networking.”
Geekdom also got hit hard with the loss of Wizard, the great geek journal that covered comics, superheroes, and superhero movie adaptations, proving that the geek world has gotten hit just as hard as anyone during the recession.
It’s especially sad because when the geeks are behind something, myself included, their enthusiasm is practically boundless, and it’s just simply too bad that magazines can’t survive on enthusiasm alone.
