This week brought the depressing news that Games for Windows magazine (GP: omg, how I hate that name; the mag will always be Computer Gaming World, or CGW to me...) will henceforth be an online-only publication.

The decision is clearly related to publisher Ziff-Davis' ongoing financial woes, and one supposes that the online option is better than no CGW, er, GFW at all.

On a personal note, CGW was always my favorite gaming mag, and I'm thinking back into the mid-1980's here, when Russel Sipe and Johnny Wilson began publishing news and reviews for games appearing on systems like the Commodore 64, Apple IIe, Amiga and the original IBM PC.

Along with platformers, text adventures and RPGs, wargames (hence, the 1986 cover at left) were big in those days, and that's how I discovered CGW. The local hobby shop where I bought monster board games like Fire in the East and Advanced Squad Leader carried the magazine. Curious, I picked up a copy, and later, another. Ultimately, CGW convinced me that gaming on a computer was preferable to a tabletop: no more weeks of leaving a campaign set up on a table in a spare room, no more worries that the cat would jump up and scatter weeks worth of moves. The computer did the setup, calculated line-of-sight and all of the other minutia, and then saved it all when your session was done. For a board gamer, it was a revelation.

I continued to read CGW and, in 1994, finally persuaded them to let me do some writing. At the time CGW had a presence on the old Prodigy network and I wrote reviews for little kid games. It was very tedious, because Prodigy's formatting required that only a certain number of characters could be on each line and this had to be manually counted.

Eventually I graduated over to writing the occasional print review for the magazine, especially for sports titles. Sierra's Front Page Sports Football was huge back then, maybe bigger than Madden, at least on the PC. I got a surprise phone call one night in 1996 from Terry Coleman, a CGW editor, who offered me a shot at writing the mag's sports gaming column. I jumped at the opportunity, and was lucky enough to maintain that column for nearly two years.

Even then, CGW went through periodic cutbacks. By late 1997 most of the genre-specific columns had been dropped, including mine. Jeff Green, the current editor-in-chief, had arrived during my run as sports columnist and was a great guy to write for.

Even after I stopped writing for CGW, I kept on reading. Although I own and play all systems, I am, at heart, a PC gamer. I'd bump into Jeff, Terry and some of the old CGW crew occasionally at E3. A number of CGW writers moved on to game industry jobs over the years, including Terry, editor Johnny Wilson and flight sim expert Denny Atkin.

Over at 1up, Jeff Green blogs a virtual wake for the print version of CGW/GFW:

Well, goddamn. Here's a post I hoped I'd never have to write... This is tough. This is just not in any way "good news."

For me personally, the closing of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine is not just a business decision (though, obviously it's exactly that in reality), but feels more akin, in fact, to the passing of a loved one... It feels like a giant gaping hole in my life...

What began life as a fairly humble, black-and-white, pamphlet-sized 'zine under Russell Sipe and Johnny Wilson grew over the years into an industry titan, the game magazine by which all others both modeled themselves and were judged. Times changed, winds shifted, editors moved on, but I can tell you that in all these 27 years, the magazine known first as CGW and then GFW was always known for its integrity, for its intelligence, for neither talking down to the readers nor to the hobby itself...

Here's an online CGW "museum"...

UPDATE: Here's an online petition to bring back CGW