Saving Game Informer: The effort to protect gaming history after GameStop's shutdown

Plus: Microsoft’s increase in game studios vs. its gaming output

Some of Game Informer’s earliest covers, from an online gallery preserved by the Internet Archive. Screenshot: Game Informer website via The Wayback Machine

GameStop’s sudden shutdown last Friday of Game Informer, the biggest video game magazine in the United States, has left about a dozen staffers out of work and threatened to wipe out the publication’s 33-year historical record of the game industry.

As of Monday, all links to the magazine’s website, which dates back to the 1990s, redirect to a single landing page.

Game Informer’s popular Twitter/X feed is also gone, pulled offline on Monday presumably by GameStop management shortly after it posted a message ”written by a former Game Informer member” saying farewell to the publication’s readership.

Questions now swirl around a valuable trove of games—”every game [that] Game Informer was shipped for coverage since 1991,” by one account—that is presumably still housed in Game Informer’s newest, never-completed offices in Minneapolis.

But there’s also one piece of good news: A forward-thinking project half a decade ago to preserve a big portion of Game Informer’s history—and by extension a part of gaming history—is blunting some of the damage.

“My mantra was that we needed to work as if the office might catch on fire tomorrow,” gaming historian Frank Cifaldi told Game File, when reached to discuss the 2019 preservation effort.