Games Magazine -- September/October 1977 -- Issue 1 -- Number 1 (#1)

I still remember the first issue of Games magazine I ever purchased. It was the October 1993 issue, and I purchased it on an Amtrak trip layover at Chicago's Union Station. Looking at the cover puzzle, I knew I could have some success. The puzzle showed 16 candy bar wrappers without their names, and the reader's job was to identify the candy bars. As a 12-year-old with a sweet tooth, I knocked out the puzzle on the second leg of our train trip.

Part of what impressed me was that something as everyday as candy bars could be made into an entertaining and visually-appealing puzzle. I would later learn that Games always seemed to have a knack for finding a puzzle everywhere. I would go on to subscribe to Games through the 1990s, giving up the subscription when I entered college (a 4-year degree in mathematics was puzzle enough for me). I'd also go on to purchase the "best of" books: Games Big Book of Games (1984), Games Big Book of Games II: 10 Great Years (1987), Giant Book of Games (1991), and Giant Book of Games Volume 2 (1995). Today, Games is known as Games World of Puzzles, and I'll still pick up an issue from time to time. But I cut my teeth on 1990s-era Games.

Thanks to the internet's ability to archive just about anything, it is possible to view scans of those original issues of Games magazine. In this post, I'd like to walkthrough the very first issue from September/October 1977. The magazine looked quite different from its 1990's iteration, but I was surprised to see a few Games staples that started with issue number 1.

Games #1 sold for a buck twenty-five (about $6.25 in 2023 dollars) and didn't feature a puzzle on the cover. (Puzzles on the cover wouldn't happen for a year or two.) On the cover was Rodin's The Thinker holding a copy of the first issue of Games, which also had Rodin's The Thinker holding a copy of the first issue of Games, etc.

Per the masthead, Allen D. Bragdon is the editor of this issue. Bragdon doesn't stay on for long; in fact, this may be his only issue as editor. For you Will Shortz fans, he won't be on the masthead until about issue 10.

The classic Eyeball Benders feature of Games makes its debut in this first issue, with 23 pictures on pages 6 and 7 to try and deduce. Clues are included to help the reader.

Feature articles include Laura King Palmer's "The Lure of the Labyrinth" and Mark Tatz's and Jody Kent's "Rebirth: The Tibetan Game of Liberation" (from their 1977 book, available for checkout on the Internet Archive).

The first contest, with first prize being a Fairchild Video Entertainment System, was titled "Millionaire". The object was to find an unabbreviated word in Webster's Third New International Dictionary Unabridged that, when its letters are converted to numbers and multiplied together, that product comes as close to 1,000,000 as possible. In this contest, A=1, B=2, ..., Z=26.

Assuming that there is a valid word that has a product of exactly one million, we can use the prime factorization of 1,000,000 to determine possible factors and possible letters for the contest word. The prime factorization is (2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5), so B's and E's are allowed. We can use as many 1's as needed, so A's are allowed. We can also combine factors, so 4's (D's), 8's (H's), 10's (J's), 16's (P's), 20's (T's), and 25's (Y's) are also allowed. Can you form a word that fits the rules of the contest using A's, B's, D's, E's, H's, J's, P's, T's, and Y's?

Jack Luzzatto is the crossword puzzle editor for this issue, and he's certainly got the skills to do so. According to XWord Info, Luzzatto created 292 crosswords for The New York Times between 1942 (!) and 1979. (The New York Times crossword premiered in February 1942; Luzzatto's first contribution was published in May.) He'll serve as the author of all the crosswords in the Pencilwise section--yes, the Pencilwise section has been a staple since issue 1!

Pencilwise doesn't distinguish its puzzles by difficulty using stars (that came much later). However, they did show the pictures and brief bios of the people who playtested the crossword puzzles. I'm glad that they dumped this feature after a few issues--though it makes a comeback in a random issue later. Pencilwise contains seven crossword puzzles of various difficulty, including two "Illustrated" crosswords, where some of the clues are drawings. The sixth puzzle, Murphy's Law, represented the year 1977 in the special 20th Anniversary issue of Games. Crossword #7, though not referred to by its eventual name, is the premiere of the World's Most Ornery Crossword, which allowed the solver to use easy or hard clues.

There are a surprising number of word searches--8 in all (9 if you count the Crypto-Search puzzle). All of the word searches are rectangular in shape, with no hidden messages in the uncircled letters; of course, later issues of Games would use shaped grids relevant to the theme and would hide messages in the uncircled letters. There are also three mazes and a connect-the-dots puzzle based on an M.C. Escher painting. There aren't too many unique puzzles to call out, though they include a puzzle to color the states of the continental United States a la the Four-Color Theorem (which I think was a postulate at the time of publication).

We also get our first instance of a Photocrime, a set of pictures forming a classic mystery that needs to be solved. A second contest appears involving the classic puzzle charades. Not the parlor game where you act out stuff--instead, it's a form of verse where you describe the syllables of a keyword or person.

On page 53 is a strange puzzle by Captain Yaacov Adam called "Night Watch". In the puzzle, you are given information about the mast lights of various ships. Then, you are given an image of lights. The goal of the puzzle is to determine what ships are in the picture given the lights that you see. While I couldn't get too far into the puzzle, I can't help but think that this is just the kind of puzzle that Games would be known for in its later years: puzzles based on everyday (well, everyday for a navy captain) and unique situations. Puzzles can be found anywhere, if you know where to look.

There's a nice Mappit puzzle (another staple of Games over the years). There's no theme around these close up images of maps, but the solver's goal is to identify the state each map excerpt is taken from. Two of the images are identified as traps, since they aren't in a U.S. state. (One image is of Washington D.C., and one image is from the Moon.) And at the end, we have the Answer Drawer.

It's interesting to see what premiered in the first issue and stayed with the magazine through much of its run: Eyeball Benders, Photocrime, Mappit, Pencilwise, contests, and the World's Most Ornery Crossword (even if it didn't go by that name in this issue). Many other features will premiere later, including cryptograms, Wild Cards, the difficulty ratings, Double Cross, and cryptic crosswords. Heck, even the Games wordmark would take a few issues to evolve into its classic look.

I hope to make this a regular series on the blog. So far, I've read through the first six issues of the magazine's run, and I hope to share how the magazine comes together into what we became familiar with in the 1990s and beyond. Until then, this is Scotty Euclid; thanks for reading!