Bill Kunkel dies at 61

Bill Kunkel, who helped invent video game journalism and create the first video game magazine in the United States, died on Sunday at his home in White Lake, Mich. He was 61.The cause was apparently a heart attack, his wife, Laurie Kunkel, said.Mr. Kunkel and his friend Arnie Katz are widely credited with starting the first published gaming column, called “Arcade Alley,” which began appearing in Video magazine in 1978.The column, a monthly look at new video game hardware and software, drew more readers as home gaming systems became popular in the in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1981, around two million home systems were in use in the United States.To cater to those new consumers, Mr. Kunkel and Mr. Katz teamed up with Joyce Worley to start a monthly magazine, Electronic Games, which had a circulation of more than 250,000 at its peak. The magazine coined descriptive terms like “screenshot,” for a still image of a game, and “play mechanics,” for the way a game is played.It was also the first of several outlets for a new column by Mr. Kunkel, “Game Doctor,” in which he answered readers’ questions.The magazine folded in 1985 after taking the name Computer Entertainment but was revived for three years in the early 1990s. Mr. Kunkel’s writing on the subject, however, characterized by a literacy lacking in most video game coverage, survived decades longer in other publications and online.William Henry Patrick Kunkel was born in Brooklyn on July 21, 1950. He wrote comic books for DC Comics and Marvel and covered wrestling for magazines like Main Event and Pro Wrestling Torch before reporting on video games.Mr. Kunkel also joined with Mr. Katz and Ms. Worley to form a company called Subway Software, which created games like Batman Returns and The Simpsons: Bart’s Nightmare for major publishers. He also taught a class on game design at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas while continuing to write about gaming, most recently on the Web site J2Games.In 2005, he published “Confessions of the Game Doctor,” a memoir about the early days of the gaming industry.In addition to his wife, Mr. Kunkel is survived by his sisters, Stephanie Giglio and Karen and Joellen Kunkel, and two brothers, Ken and Stuart.Mr. Kunkel bemoaned what he saw as the industry’s focus on processing power rather than on creativity.“The canvas keeps getting bigger, and ideas are getting smaller,” he told the gaming blog Gamasutra in 2005. “There are so many sequels, and so few new ideas.”