The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) announced its acquisition of Computer Entertainer, one of the earliest American publications devoted to video gaming.
Founded by sisters Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan, the monthly magazine ran from 1982 to 1990. It originally launched as The Video Game Update, a single-page black-and-white newsletter supporting their Los Angeles-based mail-order business, Video Take-Out. The publication quickly became popular with gaming enthusiasts, evolving into a dedicated resource for video game news and reviews. Remarkably, it was one of the few gaming publications to survive the 1983–84 industry crash, making it an invaluable historical artifact.
In a 1982 interview with Billboard, Dolan explained their entry into the video game market: “Video games are selling like crazy right now. We added them to our inventory, because they seemed to be a natural extension of selling videotape. We were one of the original outlets for Atari games, and we stayed with them even when it looked like video games were going nowhere.”
VGHF has digitized nearly the entire run of Computer Entertainer using issues donated by Badeaux and Dolan. To fill in the final seven missing issues, game historian and former subscriber Leonard Herman contributed his personal copies. The full collection is now freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
“Big day for us!”, VGHF founder and director Frank Cifaldi shared on social media. “In many ways, this was a project 13 years in the making for me. When I discovered this publication, there was exactly one issue online; now all 100-plus are perfectly scanned, text searchable, and a free public utility for anyone to use however they want to.”
Since its founding in 2017, VGHF has focused on recovering, restoring, and archiving materials from the gaming industry. Its physical and digital collections serve as vital historical resources for researchers, educators, and historians.
Explore the archive at gamehistory.org.
