The Video Game History Foundation has acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer, one of the first American video game magazines.
We’ve digitized the entire run of Computer Entertainer for the first time and released the magazine into the Creative Commons, allowing anyone to use it for research, publication, or any other purpose.
About Computer Entertainer
Computer Entertainer (originally titled The Video Game Update) was the newsletter for Video Take-Out, a mail-order retailer based in Los Angeles.
The magazine, which ran from 1982–1990, is the only known publication in the United States that regularly covered home console video games in the mid-1980s. Most console game magazines in the US went out of business during the 1983–84 industry crash… except this one.
As a result, Computer Entertainer is one of the only sources for American reviews of classic games like The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Super Mario Bros. And because it was run by a game retailer, this magazine is one of the only reliable sources of American game release dates during this period.
The newsletter, co-edited by sisters Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan, also has the unique distinction of being the earliest console video game magazine run by women.
To learn more about Computer Entertainer, listen to our interview with Marylou Badeaux on the Video Game History Hour podcast. This is Badeaux’s first ever interview about the magazine!
About the acquisition
The story of how the Video Game History Foundation acquired Computer Entertainer started in fall 2024, when we interviewed Marylou Badeaux for our podcast. Although we attempted to have co-editor Celeste Dolan on the show, she was unable to participate for health reasons. Sadly, we never heard her part of the story; Dolan died earlier this year, shortly after we recorded the episode.
Badeaux had previously donated her bound volume copies of Computer Entertainer to the Video Game History Foundation. After Dolan passed away, Badeaux offered to donate Dolan’s bound copies to our library as well, which gave us a duplicate run of this rare magazine.
We wanted to go one step further. We offered to acquire the intellectual property to Computer Entertainer outright, with the intent to digitize the entire run of the magazine and make it available for free.
Scanning Computer Entertainer
We had previously digitized Badeaux’s copies of Computer Entertainer using a traditional book scanner. However, the scans were poor quality and were missing some content due to the limitations of the scanning method we used.
We made the decision to debind one set of the magazines in order to rescan them at the highest possible quality. Having a second run of Computer Entertainer gave us an opportunity to redo our scans, without damaging the original copies.
We believe the extra effort was worth it. See for yourself!
Left: Our original scan of Computer Entertainer, Volume 4, Number 6. Notice the content missing near the right margin.
Right: Our rescan from our debound copies.
Additionally, we were able to digitize the final issues of Computer Entertainer, which were previously missing. Computer Entertainer was discontinued after July 1990, and because the final year of the magazine was never properly bound, neither Badeaux nor Dolan had saved copies of these issues.
We were able to source these last remaining issues from game historian Leonard Herman, who was a subscriber back in the day! He allowed us to scan his rare physical copies to complete our digital collection.
A free resource for everyone
Computer Entertainer is now available to read, search, and download for free via our digital archive.
We’ve released every issue of Computer Entertainer into the Creative Commons under an Attribution license. As long as you give appropriate credit to the Video Game History Foundation, you can use Computer Entertainer for whatever you want. You can put it in your YouTube videos, read it with your community on Twitch, or even use our scans in a commercial project like a documentary, a book, or a video game.
And that’s right: You can download it directly from our library portal! As part of our roll-out of Computer Entertainer, we’re adding the ability to download select items from our digital archive, starting with this magazine.
Computer Entertainer is a one-of-a-kind resource, and as its new owners, we’re proud to contribute it back to open culture. We hope that by sharing and celebrating this magazine together, we can also honor the memory of Celeste Dolan, to whom this magazine was important.