Bill Kunkel, also know as “the Game Doctor” and “the Grandfather of Videogame Journalism,” passed away on Sunday, September 4. He was a pioneer in the field of videogame journalism, having been a co-founder of Electronic Games magazine in 1981 along with Arnold Katz.
Kunkel served as the Executive Editor for Electronic Games until it was shut down in 1985. (It would reemerge, for a time, in the early 1990s with him on board.) It was the first magazine of its kind to be found in the United States, and Kunkel made a name for himself with his “Game Doctor” columns that would later make it into a number of other publications, including Electronic Gaming Monthly and Computer Gaming World.
Even if you aren’t old enough to have read his original work, you’ve surely felt his influence. He and the others Electronic Games invented terms like “Easter egg” and “screenshot,” and he was a proponent of the term “videogame.” (Although he acknowledges that “video game” is the more search engine-friendly of the two.)
