Gamest (1986 - 1999)

1986 - 1999

dead asia

a japanese magazine about arcade machines and nothing else, first printed on 5 may 1986 and coming out every two weeks by 1993. it started on shoot 'em ups and scoring tables, then turned with street fighter ii and became the written record of competitive fighting games in the country that invented them. its reader-voted awards are still quoted by people who never held a copy. shinseisha went bankrupt in 1999 and issue 274, dated 30 september, was the last one. the staff walked to ascii and started monthly arcadia instead.

~ the obit ~

Gamest arrived in my life backwards, as a citation. English-language writing about Japanese arcade games keeps referring to the Gamest Awards as though everybody already knows what they were. if you follow the reference back you find a magazine that had already closed by the time I was properly online. really though, it ended in 1999. I was on dial-up in Turkey and nowhere near an arcade in Japan.

this is mostly told from the outside. look, the first issue came out on 5 may 1986, published by Shinseisha in Tokyo. It grew out of a fanzine called the VG2 Newsletter that Uemura Bankita had been putting together earlier in the decade. Gamest covered arcade cabinets. honestly, not consoles and not home computers, only the machines, at a moment when the arcade was still where Japanese games got decided.

It went monthly in '87 and onto a two-week cycle by 1993. The early years were shoot 'em ups and the scoring tables that came with them. back then. either way. Then Street Fighter II happened and the magazine turned with it. through the middle of the nineties Gamest was the closest thing competitive fighting games had to a paper of record.

~ the rap sheet ~

Born	5 may 1986, first issue from Shinseisha in Tokyo
Peak	fortnightly from 1993, with the Gamest Awards as Japan's arcade verdict
Killed	30 september 1999, issue 274
Lifespan	thirteen years
Made by	Shinseisha, Ltd.
Killed by	its publisher going bankrupt underneath it

~ the rise ~

The reader pages did the real work (cant remember the exact year). Gamest Island ran in every issue and it was where players sent their own material in, which meant the magazine was partly written by the people buying it. Artists came up through those pages, including Mine Yoshizaki, who would later draw Sgt. Frog, han, who ended up at Treasure, was in there too. The line between audience and staff was thin enough to walk across (if memory serves).

i saw this from a distance, mostly. back then. readers and published voted The Gamest Awards once a year. they became the nearest thing Japanese arcade games had to an official verdict. Games that won are still described as Gamest Award winners in writing done decades afterward, by people who never saw a copy. That is a strange afterlife for a print title working to a two-week deadline.

~ the last issue ~

this part you had to be in the US for, and i kind of was not. for whatever reason. to be fair, shinseisha went bankrupt in 1999. look, issue 274 came out on 30 september that year and was the end of it. Nothing about the closure had to do with the magazine failing at what it did. The publisher underneath it stopped, and everything the publisher printed stopped at the same moment.

~ what it became ~

this part i was not really around for, but anyway. Most of the editorial staff walked over to ASCII and started Monthly Arcadia within the year. ASCII would go on to become Enterbrain. Arcadia did the same job for the next generation of arcade players and kept going until the arcades themselves thinned out. The people were the asset, which is usually true of magazines and almost never how they get valued.

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still, what Gamest documented is largely gone in the physical sense. to be fair, the cabinets were scrapped and the scoring records it kept survive as scans passed between collectors. in those days. It was the first magazine to treat the arcade as a culture worth writing down rather than a place to spend coins. the writing down is the part that lasted.

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