The number 88 on a Metacritic page. A "Very Positive" badge on a Steam listing. A YouTube essayist delivering a 45-minute verdict. A TikTok that declares a game "mid" in twelve seconds. These are the tools of modern game criticism, and we treat them as obvious — as though they were always here.
They were not. The entire vocabulary of game reviews — scores, aggregates, review bombing, critic credibility — was built from scratch over roughly four decades by writers, editors, fans, and entrepreneurs who were mostly making it up as they went. Understanding the history of game reviews changes how you read a score. It helps you know whose voice to trust, and why so many of those voices eventually became untrustworthy.
The First Words Written About Games
Game criticism did not begin with magazines. It began with a single column in a photography and electronics publication.
In 1978, Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz launched "Arcade Alley" in Video magazine, writing alongside co-columnist Joyce Worley. It was the first regular consumer-facing column about video games in North America, appearing in the same publication that reviewed cameras and Hi-Fi equipment. The three writers had no editorial model to follow. They invented one — covering arcade machines, early home consoles, and the games being released for the Atari 2600 with the same serious enthusiasm they might apply to audio gear.
Six years earlier, journalist Stewart Brand had published a feature in Rolling Stone about a group of programmers playing Spacewar at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory — the first time a mainstream publication treated gaming as a culture worth covering. But Brand's piece was a one-off. Kunkel, Katz, and Worley built something that returned monthly.
As Kunkel later said in an interview with Game Developer magazine: "We saw this as a hobby, a lifestyle... We knew there would be enough product and we weren't even counting on the joystick explosion." The column was premised on the belief that games mattered — which was, in 1978, a minority opinion.
The First Dedicated Magazines
By 1981, the gaming audience had grown large enough to support publications built entirely around games. That year, Computer and Video Games launched in the United Kingdom in November, followed by Electronic Games in the United States — the first magazines dedicated entirely to covering the medium, according to the documented history of video game journalism.
Electronic Games, co-founded by Kunkel and Katz after the success of "Arcade Alley," established the editorial template that persists today: news, letters, previews, reviews, strategy guides. The formula feels intuitive now, but someone had to invent it. By 1982 the publication had become the definitive authority for American gaming enthusiasts.
Then came 1983. The North American video game market crashed catastrophically. Consumer confidence — particularly in Atari 2600 titles, after a flood of poorly made cartridges — evaporated. Of approximately eighteen color gaming magazines in print before the crash, only Computer Gaming World survived. The nascent critical ecosystem nearly died before it had a chance to grow.
It recovered because Nintendo would not let it stay dead. The NES arrived in North America in 1985, and with it a new wave of dedicated publications. Nintendo Power launched in 1988 as what was effectively an in-house promotional magazine, but it established subscriber expectations for authoritative game coverage. Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) also debuted in 1988 — its first issue dated March 1989 — founded by Steve Harris under Sendai Publications, and it quickly became the publication of record for multi-platform gaming.
EGM pioneered a format that would become standard: multiple critics reviewing the same game, each assigning their own score. For major releases you might see four separate numerical grades. The average gave readers something real — not one person's opinion but a genuine cross-section of informed reactions. The magazine also became known for elaborate hoaxes: its April 1992 issue ran the "Sheng Long" prank in Street Fighter II that fooled a generation of players, demonstrating that serious game coverage and genuine wit were not incompatible.
GamePro (launched May 1989) brought a more consumer-friendly approach, emphasizing accessibility over depth. And in 1992 DieHard GameFan arrived with a different philosophy entirely — championing obscure titles and Japanese imports that mainstream magazines ignored. Between them, these publications established that game criticism was not a monolith. Different outlets had different values, different audiences, different ideas about what mattered.
Japan Built It Differently
While North American and British magazines were developing their critical vocabulary, Japan was building its own — and it looked different.
Famitsu launched in 1986 as Famicom Tsūshin, a specialist magazine that grew from a column in the broader technology publication Login. The format it developed became iconic: four critics reviewing the same game independently, each scoring it out of ten. The scores are added for a maximum of 40.
The system emphasized consensus through independence. Four reviewers who could not see each other's scores before submitting their own had to genuinely agree for a game to earn a high number. A perfect 40/40 was extraordinarily rare. According to Wikipedia's Famitsu history, only thirty games have earned a perfect score across nearly four decades, beginning with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998.
In Japan, Famitsu served much the same function that Metacritic later would in the West — as an authoritative aggregator whose numbers shaped sales expectations and carried real financial weight. It got there by a different method: curation through editorial process rather than algorithmic aggregation.
The Internet Rewrites the Rules
Gaming websites began appearing by 1994-1995, though print still dominated. The real shift came in 1996 when GameSpot launched, followed by IGN — bringing professional publishing standards to real-time coverage and reaching a global audience that no print magazine could match.
What those sites gained in immediacy, they traded for something else. The monthly rhythm of a print magazine forced critics to sit with games. A review published in the next issue had been written by someone who finished the game, thought about it, and went back to check their impressions. A web review published on launch day was written under different conditions: fast, competitive, live before most readers could verify the claims themselves.
The web also atomized authority. Readers could now read a dozen reviews of the same game simultaneously and note where they disagreed. The institutional voice of a single publication cracked. Trust migrated from publications to individual critics — you did not trust the outlet; you trusted the specific writer at the outlet whose taste aligned with yours.
Metacritic and the Number That Changed Everything
In January 2001, Marc Doyle, his sister Julie Doyle Roberts, and their University of Southern California classmate Jason Dietz launched Metacritic. The premise was simple: aggregate review scores into one number. The execution was more complex. The site weighted scores based on a publication's "stature" — a formula Metacritic still refuses to disclose publicly.
The site won Webby Awards and became the industry's dominant reference point within a few years. Its influence quickly moved beyond its original purpose. Publishers began using Metacritic scores in marketing materials. Financial analysts used them as early sales predictors. And, most consequentially, some publishers began tying developer bonuses directly to Metacritic thresholds.
The most cited example: Fallout: New Vegas (2010), developed by Obsidian Entertainment, received an 84 on Metacritic. Publisher Bethesda's bonus threshold required an 85. Obsidian missed the bonus by a single point. The studio disclosed this publicly after the fact, and the revelation reshaped how the industry discussed aggregate scores. A tool designed to help consumers choose games had become a high-stakes target with real financial consequences for the people who built those games.
The Ethics Cracks Show
With money and influence came pressure — and eventually compromise.
In 2007, Jeff Gerstmann, editorial director at GameSpot, published a negative review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. Eidos Interactive, which had purchased substantial advertising space on GameSpot promoting that same game, was unhappy. Shortly after the review published, Gerstmann was fired. GameSpot's parent company never officially confirmed the connection, but Gerstmann confirmed it himself years later. The incident crystallized a structural problem that print magazines had managed through institutional separation of advertising and editorial departments — a separation that online outlets with more direct advertiser relationships struggled to maintain.
A 2012 controversy in the UK — in which journalists were publicly seen accepting branded promotional gifts at publisher events — further damaged the credibility of institutional game coverage and pushed major outlets to publish explicit disclosure policies. The policies could not recover what had already been lost: the trust that decades of print consistency had built, eroded in a few years of visible conflicts.
These pressures — advertiser influence, score inflation, review bombing — are part of why the evolution of review culture today looks so fractured. It is not that criticism got worse in absolute terms. It is that each platform solved one version of the trust problem while generating a new one.
The Personality Era and What Comes After
By the 2010s, individual YouTube critics had accumulated audiences that dwarfed most professional outlets. Channels built around game analysis — from long-form essays to personality-driven review shows — drew viewers who had lost faith in institutional coverage. The format opened game criticism to voices that print had always excluded: niche genres, regional markets, hardware communities that no magazine ever served at scale.
The trade-off was that YouTube's incentive structure rewarded engagement over accuracy. Strong takes got clicks. Careful, qualified analysis got watched by fewer people. When short-form video arrived, it compressed criticism further — a verdict that lived on TikTok had seconds to deliver a judgment. Whether a game was "mid" could reach millions of viewers before most of them had played the opening hour.
Each generation of platform changed not just how reviews were delivered, but what a review was for.
What the History Actually Tells You
The history of game reviews is ultimately a history of trust: who earned it, who squandered it, and how the mechanics of earning it shifted with every new platform.
The writers at "Arcade Alley" earned trust through consistency across years of columns. The magazines earned it through editorial processes that kept advertising and criticism separate. GameSpot and IGN earned it through professional production standards and fast coverage. Metacritic tried to engineer trust through aggregation. YouTube critics earned it personally — by being honest enough and distinctive enough that audiences kept returning.
Each model worked until it didn't. Each platform had a vulnerability that someone eventually exploited.
Understanding that arc is part of reading a review well. A score from a publication with decades of reader trust behind it carries different weight than one from an outlet with a disclosed advertiser relationship. An aggregate matters when the inputs are genuinely independent; it matters less when its weighting is opaque and its scores can be manipulated by coordinated campaigns. A YouTube critic you have watched for years may understand your taste better than any critic who does not know you exist.
Your own critical history — the opinions you have built across hundreds of hours of play — is part of this story too. You can browse and track your games at The EndWiki, write your own reviews, and build a record of what you actually thought. Your history of game reviews does not live on Metacritic. It lives with you.
