It is with great regret that we learnt today of the potential closure of the gaming website CVG. Having been announced in a statement the website’s owners, Future plc, are entering into a forty-five day consultation period which may see the selling off of the site’s brand and its eventual shutdown. Beginning in 1981 Computer & Video Games, as it was then known, started out life as the world’s first gaming-orientated magazine. While other publications were generally devoted to the hardware of computing, CVG declared itself fun and entertaining.
At the same time it became an online hub for other well-known gaming magazines such as PC Zone, Xbox World and NGamer. Despite an attempt in 2008 to produce a new magazine in print, this soon proved unsuccessful and the title has remained in its online format ever since. It’s a sad thing to see a name with so much history behind it being put on the chopping block. The magazine had been around ever since the early days of Space Invaders, seen the rise and fall of Sega and the dawning of the Xbox. With luck the name will live on in one form or another, but things will never quite be the same.