Game Informer Found Dead, Gamestop Top Suspect

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Just yesterday, news swept through social media, “Gamestop has murdered Game Informer by blunt-force trauma to the head. The magazine’s body was found abandoned at the side of the highway, bloodied, and dismembered.”

So maybe that’s overreacting, or maybe it’s not that far off from the truth. At least, not according to Kotaku.

Staff at the magazine, which also publishes a website, weekly podcast, and online video documentaries about game studios and developers, were all called into a meeting on Friday with parent company GameStop’s VP of HR. In it they were told the publication was closing immediately, they were all laid off, and would begin receiving severance terms. At least one staffer was in the middle of a work trip when the team was told.

Every URL for the Game Informer website now redirects to the official statement, erasing more than a decade of articles, reviews, and original reports that helped establish a record of the notoriously secretive and volatile video game industry.

It’s no secret that layoffs have been devastating the game’s industry lately. From Microsoft and Embracer Group killing studios left and right, to Paradox’s “Life By You” Sim’s competitor canceled and binned forever. It’s a sign of inflation, and the coming recession. CEOs and billionaires trying to cash-in as much as they can, at any cost, no matter what happens, before the whole world is wondering where all the money and jobs went.

The AI bubble has increased this eighty-fold, as companies realize this passing fad is a gigantic waste of money that nobody in the right mind will be using by the end of 2025.

But … the crisis of the economy aside, it’s just like Gamestop to murder something that has been a cornerstone of what’s left of the nineties for over thirty years. I remember when I was just a kid, reading copies of Game Informer, reading about Tomb Raider, reading about Everquest. I still have a copy of Game Informer (an issue from the nineties) lying around somewhere, and as I grasp hold of the past in any way I possibly can–The corpo-juggernauts swing the pendulum again, and again.

I find myself wishing Geocities was still around, wishing Aol Instant Messenger were still a thing. Wishing we were all still organizing our top friends on Myspace, and playing Mafia Wars on a much less brain-melting version of Facebook.

It’s easy to romanticize what I felt was good and cool about the past, and look at everything with rose-tinted glasses. But, have you ever considered? Maybe it actually really was better during the nineties.

I mean … we had consoles with no fees for online connections, and games with no forever-patching and hundred dollar DLC. The internet took longer to connect to and it was easy to get bumped offline, but there was so much wonder and excitement involved in connecting and logging on.

Worlds Chat, Yahoo chatrooms, Geocities, cheat code webpages, and flash games.

We really did have it all, didn’t we?

Generation Zed caught the tail-end of this, and Alpha will never know what a normal and cool internet looks like, and I feel they’ve missed out on something that was so … defining. Like turning on Breaking Bad only after Walter’s commanded Jesse to a shoot a chemist in the head. And the magazines, what’s wrong with magazines?

Fricken crap, man, Apple has a whole section in their news app with digitized magazines you can just read and enjoy, and we couldn’t put Game Informer on that?

Fuggin’ shit.

Like, I get it, in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a magazine and there are much greater relics of the nineties that never should have gone away. But it does pain me just a little, every single time the mad rush for infinitely expanding profit kills something I used to know as a child.

And it is for that reason that I write down my experiences, and that I share them. Because Gamestop and Microsoft can’t kill my thoughts if I write them down hard enough.