About Electronic Gaming Monthly

Electronic Gaming Monthly

Electronic Gaming Monthly, universally known as EGM, was an American video game magazine based in Lombard, Illinois. Founded by Steve Harris in 1988 under Sendai Publications and first issued on March 31, 1989, it became one of the defining game magazines of the console era, famous for its multi-reviewer "Review Crew," its news and preview coverage, and its elaborate April Fools' jokes — most notoriously the 1992 Sheng Long hoax. Ziff Davis, its publisher from 1996, discontinued it in January 2009; Harris bought it back, relaunched it in print from April 2010 to a final issue in summer 2014 (issue 264), and later revived the brand online.

EGM's history traces the whole arc of American game magazines: born in the late-1980s revival of home consoles, dominant through the 1990s console wars, undermined by the web it helped create through 1UP.com, and sustained in the end by the nostalgia of the readers it raised.

Founding Under Sendai, 1988–1989

The magazine was founded in 1988 as U.S. National Video Game Team's Electronic Gaming Monthly, published by Sendai Publications, with Harris — a competitive arcade player associated with the U.S. National Video Game Team — as its founder. Its first issue is dated March 31, 1989. It entered a market being remade by the Nintendo Entertainment System, when players had few sources of independent information about games beyond the manufacturers' own publications.

EGM's independence was its founding proposition: news, previews and reviews of console games produced by enthusiasts rather than by a console maker. It grew rapidly with the 16-bit generation, and in 1994 it spun off a sister title, EGM², devoted to expanded cheats, tricks, maps and guides; that spin-off eventually became Expert Gamer and finally GameNOW.

The Ziff Davis Era, 1996–2009

After 83 issues, up to June 1996, EGM switched publishers from Sendai Publishing to Ziff Davis, the large technology publisher whose stable came to include EGM's sister publications Computer Gaming World, Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine and GameNOW. Under Ziff Davis the magazine professionalized and expanded through the industry's biggest decade — the launches of the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox and their successors — and until January 2009 it covered console hardware and software exclusively.

The Ziff Davis years gave EGM scale: in 2002 its subscriptions increased by more than 25 percent. Its staff of that era — editors-in-chief including Ed Semrad, Joe Funk, John Davison, James Mielke and Dan "Shoe" Hsu, and writers such as Crispin Boyer, Greg Sewart, Mark MacDonald, Jeremy Parish and Seanbaby — became some of the best-known bylines in game journalism, and alumni moved across the industry's magazines and websites.

The Review Crew and the Scoring System

EGM's signature institution was the Review Crew. Originally a team of four editors reviewed the games, each assigning a score and writing a few paragraphs; the system later expanded to a larger pool of reviewers, then contracted to teams of three and finally, in 2008, to individual reviewers for most games, with a pool of editors handling the biggest releases. The multi-score format was revolutionary for its candor: readers could see disagreement, discount a reviewer's known tastes and learn which critic shared theirs — including the famously harsh Ken Williams, who reviewed under the pseudonym Sushi-X.

For most of the magazine's life scores ran from 0 to 10. Awards marked the top of the scale: Silver for games averaging 8 to 9, Gold for 9 to 10, and Platinum for games receiving straight 10s — an award the magazine's policy made nearly unattainable until 1998, when the reviewers gave Metal Gear Solid four 10s. The highest-scoring game in an issue received a Game of the Month award, and from 2002 unanimously panned games could be named Shame of the Month; a zero score was almost never used, with rare exceptions including Mortal Kombat Advance and The Guy Game. In the April 2008 issue the numerical scale was replaced by letter grades, with a C defined as average and Silver, Gold and Platinum mapped to the B and A ranges.

Structure of the Magazine

A typical issue of EGM in its mature form was a highly formalized object. It opened with Insert Coin, the editor's letter, and Login, readers' letters with replies; continued through Press Start, general articles and the rumor column The Buzz; offered features, the EGM Interview and the cover story preview; previewed forthcoming games in Next Wave and Launch Point; and culminated in the Review Crew section, a Review Recap of the previous issue's scores, and Game Over, commentary pieces on the industry.

The magazine also maintained an annual ritual its readers anticipated: its Game of the Year selections, which over the decades honored titles from Double Dragon (1988) and Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) through The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) and BioShock (2007) — a canon that tracks the medium's own history.

April Fools and the Sheng Long Hoax

EGM was known for its April Fools' jokes, and one became legend. Its April 1992 issue presented Sheng Long, a supposed secret character in Street Fighter II, complete with fabricated screenshots and instructions for reaching him. The hoax fooled countless players, was repeated as fact by other publications around the world, and entered gaming folklore — Capcom's own later games played on the Sheng Long myth.

The hoax exemplified EGM's relationship with its readers: playful, expert and willing to exploit the information scarcity of the pre-web era, when a printed magazine's claims could not be checked in seconds. Few magazine jokes have ever had so long an afterlife in another medium.

International Editions and the Web

EGM expanded internationally in the 2000s. EGM en Español was released in Mexico in November 2002 by Editorial Televisa, with content adapted for Latin American readers; EGM Brasil began in April 2002 under Conrad Editora; EGM Italia ran from 2001 to 2003; and in 2006 editions appeared in Thailand, Singapore and Turkey. The Mexican and Turkish editions were cancelled amid Ziff Davis's financial problems in late 2008 and January 2009, and the Brazilian edition was rebranded EGW after the American magazine's suspension.

Online, EGM's first website was nuke.com in 1995; after Ziff Davis acquired Sendai's media group it merged with GameSpot, and in 2003 EGM's web home became 1UP.com, the Ziff Davis games network whose podcasts — including EGM Live* — extended the magazine's voice into audio. The web network would also be the instrument of the magazine's first death: it was the sale of 1UP.com that orphaned the print title.

Discontinuation in 2009

In January 2009 Ziff Davis discontinued EGM following the sale of 1UP.com to UGO Networks, part of Hearst. The magazine's February 2009 issue had already been completed but was never published — a ghost issue that became famous among readers and was later included as a special item in the magazine's retrospective publishing projects.

The closure was a landmark in the collapse of print game journalism: the web properties were considered the assets worth buying, and the flagship print magazine, still widely read, was treated as a liability. Staff dispersed across the industry, and for fifteen months one of the most recognizable names in games media simply did not exist in print.

The Harris Relaunch, 2010–2014

In May 2009 founder Steve Harris purchased the magazine and its assets back from Ziff Davis, and in April 2010 he relaunched EGM through his new company, EGM Media, LLC. The relaunch widened the magazine's coverage beyond consoles to PC and mobile gaming, reversing the console-only policy of the Ziff Davis years, and its associated website became egmnow.com — the address this directory records.

The revived print magazine ran until summer 2014, ending with issue 264. The numbered continuity was itself a statement: Harris's EGM presented itself not as a new magazine borrowing a name but as the same publication, resumed. Nevertheless, the economics of monthly print in the 2010s proved no kinder the second time, and the brand's future lay online.

The Web-Only Era and the Compendium

In March 2019 EGM announced a relaunch of its website with a new look and a focus on long-form features, original reporting and intelligent critique — under the backronym "Enjoy Games More." In April 2020 editor Josh Harmon announced the site would no longer publish long-form articles, prompting speculation it had shut down, before the announcement was amended to confirm that some form of daily news coverage would continue.

The brand's enduring value was demonstrated in October 2024, when EGM launched a Kickstarter campaign for The Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium, a retrospective book about the magazine's history. The campaign reached its $35,000 goal in under twenty-four hours and ultimately raised many times that amount, with a digital archive of all 264 published issues among its offerings — proof that EGM's first audience, now middle-aged, regards the magazine as a formative cultural object worth preserving at book length.

Legacy

EGM helped invent the grammar of game criticism. The multi-reviewer score box, the rumor column, the preview hierarchy, the annual awards and the playful contract with readers all became conventions of the field, carried into websites and video by the generation of journalists the magazine trained.

It also stands as a complete biography of the American game magazine: founded by a player in the arcade era, corporatized in the console wars, killed by the internet it had helped build, resurrected by its founder, and finally sustained as heritage. Issue 264 was the last of the print run, but the name's second life — as a website and as an archive its readers funded into permanence — suggests the magazine's real subject all along was not only games, but the community that grew up reading about them together.