Electronic Gaming Monthly (print)

» see egmnow.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

electronic gaming monthly first shipped on march 31 1989, three years before nintendo power's competition really mattered. steve harris ran it out of sendai publications, the same outfit that ran the us national video game team. issue one had the sega genesis on the cover at a moment when most us households still had nes catridges in a shoebox. for the next twenty years egm was where the kids who cared about every console at once read about every console at once.

ziff-davis bought sendai in 1996 and folded egm into its gaming portfolio alongside computer gaming world and the egm² spinoff. the magazine grew through the playstation and dreamcast years, peaking around 2002 at over half a million paid subscribers. the review crew of three editors with separate scores became the iconic format. the editors' personalities mattered. crispin boyer and dan hsu were recognizable bylines for a generation of readers, the kind of voices print critics rarely became after print stopped being a primary medium.

ziff-davis collapsed financially across 2008. on january 6 2009 the company sold 1up.com to ugo and shut electronic gaming monthly's print operation in the same announcement. there was no final issue to speak of as a planned send-off; the magazine simply stopped. steve harris bought the brand back a few months later and relaunched a smaller version in april 2010, then in print again for a stretch before moving fully digital. the twenty-year ziff-davis run is what is dead. the 2010-onward brand survives as a website.

i did not read egm. it was not a thing that arrived in turkey in any reliable way. what i had access to in the relevant years was level magazine in turkish at the kiosk and whatever gamefaqs and ign carried over the 33.6k modem at home. the larger ankara bookshops sometimes had an imported edge or pc gamer for the price of a meal, never egm. i discovered the magazine later from forum threads where someone scanned an old review of a game i had played, with three different scores stacked at the top of the page.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the format egm pioneered, three editors reviewing the same game with separate scores out of ten, was the magazine's defining feature. nintendo power gave one verdict; egm gave three voices with the inevitable disagreement. that meant readers got the spread of opinion rather than the official line, and it made the review pages something you wanted to read even if you already owned the game. it was the closest thing print games coverage had to a debate format.

the late 90s through the early 2000s were egm's high years. the magazine carried previews of japanese games that would not reach the us for months, with screenshots that were sometimes the only english-language reference for the title until release. the "trickman terry" cheat-codes section ran every month with cover-art-quality drawings of the trickman himself, a small reminder that the magazine was made by people who liked the medium.

~ the slide ~

by 2005 ign and gamespot had eaten most of the previews-and-news function. ziff-davis tried to keep up by pouring engineering into 1up.com, which became the strongest editorial games site on the web for a stretch. the cost was that egm the print magazine and 1up.com the website were drawing from the same staff pool with the same budget. the print product thinned and the web product never quite hit profitability.

the 2008 ad-market collapse killed ziff-davis's ability to carry both. the company had been through bankruptcy and refinancing several times across the decade. selling 1up.com to ugo and shuttering egm was the cheapest way out of the games division. the staff found out the same day the rest of the industry did, which was a recognizable end-of-an-era detail in the games-press obituary genre that emerged from that month.

~ what got buried with it ~

the print-deadline rhythm of games journalism died with magazines like egm. a monthly cycle meant editors had to play a game for three weeks, then write and fact-check the review under enough pressure to make every paragraph carry weight. that compression produced a particular kind of writing voice. the web version of the same writers, on a same-day publish cycle, never developed the same rhythm because it did not have to.

egm also carried the last meaningful japanese-import preview pipeline in english-language games press. the magazine had editors who flew to tokyo game show and brought back exclusive screens of games no us reader had any other way to see. with egm gone, that function moved to twitter accounts and youtube channels that did not have the same curatorial layer. famitsu and dengeki kept doing it in japanese, but the english-language window was the magazine.

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