Dean Takahashi has written about games for The Wall Street Journal, Red Herring and the San Jose Mercury News. Most recently, he published a book about the development of the Xbox. He actually studied journalism in school, which helps explain the high calibre of publications he's written for. His work covering games is due to a mixture of timing and passion:

My path to game journalism was circuitous. I wanted to be a newspaper journalist in the early 80s while going to college. I went to journalism graduate school at Northwestern and got out in December of 1987. I took a job with the Dallas Times Herald. Daily newspapering was fun, and I was reassigned to an open business reporting job. I kept adding new beats, including high-tech. I stayed with that beat for 14 years. about seven years ago, I found myself at the San Francisco bureau of the Wall Street Journal. I was the youngest in the office and no one except me played computer games. the video game beat happened to be open and I volunteered to cover it. Ever since, I've specialized in game journalism, among other things. mostly I cover it as a business and write about the major companies and trends. Lately, at the San Jose Mercury News, I've begun doing game reviews as well. So my path was to become a professional journalist first and then I veered off into game journalism. it still doesn't take up all of my time so I cover a wide number of tech beats and stories as well. That's how I pay the bills. but game journalism is probably the funnest thing that I do.