Now that Computer Gaming World is officially Games for Windows, it’s probably a great time for the Ziff Davis people to upload the covers of every single CGW printed. They’ve also made available the complete text of the first 100 magazines, stretching from 1981 to November 1992 – an amazing resource for people as interested in the history of gaming as I am, not to mention an excellent window on how the gaming press was different when there was barely any gaming press to speak of.

It’s easy to forget how important wargaming was to the early computer gaming industry. Board game publisher Avalon Hill was a major player in the electronic gaming world. Mark Evans Brooks used the pages of the magazine to compile an encyclopedic list of wargames that had been published (now available here.) Because there was little going on in the strategy realm outside of the standard wargame model, Civilization was covered in the wargame section. For a long time, CGW just classified games as “strategy” and “adventure”.

It’s interesting how the covers have changed, too. They are a little reflection on the rise and fall of genres. Look at all the flight sims that earn covers in the 1988 to 1993 period. The last airplane to make a cover was for Crimson Skies in early 2000, but that was more an action/arcade game than a flight simulation.

The 100th issue (November 1992) has a great series of capsule histories of the first decade of CGW (or “3900 games later” as they phrase it). And the ads are always great. They used to have a stock market section, for crying out loud!

Kudos to CGW/G4W for doing this. If I didn’t have so much work to do, I’d waste my day just reading this old stuff.