Video games as a medium are so young that describing anyone as a "grandfather" of the industry comes off as a little bit of a misnomer. That being said, Bill Kunkel is unquestionably the grandfather of video game journalism. After writing the first regular game review column for Video magazine in the late '70s, he helped start the first American consumer magazine for gaming, Electronic Games, in 1981.

Kunkel has meandered a bit since those days, writing for comics and wrestling magazines, and even working as a game developer and design consultant for a time. But he's always come back to game journalism, bouncing between a variety of print and online outlets before recently becoming the editor-in-chief of Tips & Tricks magazine starting with the January 2007 issue. I caught up with Kunkel at his Michigan home and talked to him about his career, his new magazine, and his thoughts on the industry. Here are some highlights of our conversation.

On the impact of the Internet on game journalism:
"They like to say 9/11 changed everything; well, the Internet changed everything for game journalism. In the '80s right through the '90s it was all about the magazines; they held sway completely. Once the Internet got established, basically magazines started dying because so much of game journalism had become about news – the signing, the specs for the next generation system that hasn't come out in Japan yet. That kind of obsession – everything here is kind of OK and boring, but everything that's coming is infinitely more exciting – when you get readers conditioned to think that's what it's all about, magazines don't stand a chance in hell against the Internet."

On the changing face of Tips & Tricks:
"With Tips & Tricks, we're trying things that nobody else has tried. We're doing a magazine that has traditionally been exclusively about strategy, either extended strategy guides or cheat codes, and we're adding our own lifestyle content to it. Lots of columns covering everything from game-based movies, music in games, to columns on things like World of Warcraft and feature articles.

"The major problem that we've had is that, up until the January issue, we didn't have an e-mail address. Right away, that turns off computer literate readers. I felt we had to re-establish our credibility, give them a reason to contact us by e-mail. Only 10- and 11-year-olds actually sit down and take out a lined notebook and write letters comment. They would get a lot of them, but as a result our top demographic was hitting like twelve years old... It's been a process of basically trying to attract new readers.

"It used to be up to half the back of the book would be cheat codes... I'd like for this to be a magazine that someone who has no interest in any of the three games being strategized in-depth could still pick it up and find enough content in it to make it an interesting read for them."

On the usefulness of printed strategy vs. the Internet:
"Let's say I want strategy for Virtua Fighter 5. Do I want to go to GameFAQs which is going to have 20 strategy guides in ASCII, unedited, written by god-knows-who, or would I rather have one that was correct, that had nice pictures, that had maps, that used streaming video to show people rather than tell people. With the web, it's like a quantity over quality issue. I'd rather have one good guide than 20 done by chimpanzees."

Advice for journalists starting out:
"Love of the game is never enough. ... People can tell you they like something or they don't like something, but it's very rare they can tell you why. When young writers come up to me and say, 'I want to get into game journalism, what should I do?' well, the fact that they tell me they want to get into game journalism means they're obviously interested in games. Well, everybody else here is interested in games too. How about the journalism end? Study journalism, learn the rules, learn how to proofread, learn how to do research. Search engines are one of the most marvelous gifts given to writers, and so few know how to use them..."