GamePro's magazine for parents circa 1993

Once upon a time there was a magazine to teach parents what video games are really like called PlayRight, but like a news station that only reports good news, it had the half-life of a housefly. A subscription-only magazine lasting four issues from 1993-1994, PlayRight was created by the editors of GamePro as "the first video game publication written expressly for parents."

PlayRight's rise and fall is chronicled in Kevin Gifford's "Game Mag Weaseling" on GameSetWatch. After the magazine collapsed, a PlayRight column lived on in GamePro magazine until 2004. Gifford assumes due to shrinking page counts at the magazine the column was cut.

Certainly on the surface, PlayRight was a sincere effort by the best video game magazine at the time to create some good PR for the industry. Sadly, good PR doesn't help if nobody is paying attention to you anymore -- that's when you need marketing, or to be owned lock, stock and barrel by a national video game retail outlet like Game Informer.