Ken Tidwell passed away on May 6, 2026, and you might not have heard of him, but if you're playing modern games these days, you can thank Tidwell for helping spread knowledge of this industry three decades ago.
In mid-1994, Tidwell founded The Game Cabinet, one of the first sites devoted to coverage of modern games. For those who don't know what the internet was like in 1994, here's Tidwell's description of the site:
The Game Cabinet is a monthly games magazine distributed exclusively on the World Wide Web. The magazine primarily covers family, beer and pretzel, and strategy games with an occasional nod to war games, miniatures, and role-playing games. Readers are encouraged to look elsewhere for information about computer games.
The content of the individual issues of the magazine have, due to the nature of this new medium, accumulated at this site to form a large database of information about games. The Game Cabinet holds rules, rule variants, reviews and random information about games from around the world.
"Due to the nature of this new medium"! Here's a bit more along these lines from Tidwell's "about me" page:
Originally, the Cabinet was stocked with articles I had written for Sumo or The Game Report supplemented with articles gleaned from the Net. The readership continues to grow each month. Back in September, 1994, there were around 300 loyal Game Cabinet readers. By September, 1995, there appeared to be somewhere around seven hundred serious readers (some folks download upwards of one hundred articles each month!), about as many casual readers, and an even larger number that peek in occasionally. By September, 1996, readership had grown to somewhere around 5,000 regular readers and the Cabinet was receiving over 15,000 visits per month (where a visit is defined as a series of requests from a single IP address with each request occurring within 15 minutes of the previous request — whew! We tend to log 6 or 7 hits for each visit — some folks download more pages, some less.). As of September, 1997, the Cabinet logs 40,000 visits per month and I just don't like to think about how many readers that frighteningly large number represents. And you can be sure they each mail me individually when an issue is late! Finally, after no updates for one year, in early September, 2000, the Cabinet was still getting 45,000 visits each month. Yowza. And two years on after the Cabinet all but fell silent, in August, 2001, it has dropped off to only 70,000 visits per month. That's right — it's still going up! Who said the Web was dead?
One of the big draws of The Game Cabinet was a collection of English-language game rules for European games that were attracting interested parties in the UK and the U.S.
Even today, in addition to those rules, the site features the contents of issues 0-24 of Mike Siggins' Sumo, which dates from 1989 to 1995. Want to check out a contemporaneous review of Klaus Teuber's Die Siedler von Catan? Mike Siggins — another 1990s game influencer before "influencer" was a word — has you covered.
You can also dig into game reviews of titles from the 1990s, while finding out what SPIEL was like in the mid-1990s. (If you're curious about the game prices listed, 10 DM is approximately US$6.)
Outside of gaming, Tidwell was an entrepreneur who was involved with software startups over four decades. (HT to Brian Bankler for this information.) Tidwell recounts some of his business history in his profile on The Game Cabinet.
If you feel so inclined, you might consider leaving a note on BoardGameGeek's memorial page for Ken Tidwell.
Finally, to hear the history of The Game Cabinet from Tidwell himself, you can check out this 2023 interview with Mark Johnson for episode 220 of his Boardgames To Go podcast.
