one: I love videogame magazines. I've been an avid consumer of them from the moment Nintendo Power appeared in my mailbox; I have at least one copy of all the major books throughout the years, from the august Electronic Gaming Monthly to the short-livedGame Buyer and Incite magazines (God, Incite was such a fucking awful magazine). I was reading Edge before it was cool, man. I've bought all the publications that Dave Halverson's been associated with, even though, in GameFan magazine, he gave Bug! a 98%.
Although the market for these gaming magazines is rapidly disappearing in this wacky Web 2.0 world, there is something about the amalgamation of glossy paper and glue that feels authoritative. It brings to mind a simpler era I'm nostalgic for, a time before NeoGAF and New Games Journalism, a time when it was okay to just scan images from Famitsu for a cover story, when new and exciting things happened to grammar and spelling.
two: I wanted to get my history published in some two-bit hack fanzine, complete with interviews and graphics and stuff. The emergence (or to put it more accurately, my awareness) of GameSetWatch's magweaseling
column renders my idea irrelevant and stupid, because Kevin Gifford does such a better job than I ever could.
Today could mark the beginning of the end for print gaming magazines. Chris Kolher's Game|Life blog reports that Ziff-Davis Media, Inc. filed for bankruptcy. ZD publishes my two favorite mainstream books, EGM and Games for Windows Live (formerly Computer Gaming World), and although the game group (the two print magazines and the 1up.com website) is not supposed to be affected by this filing, it's no secret that ZD had been trying to get out of the game publishing world -- it attempted to sell the game group last year, and while many companies were eager to snatch 1up.com, none wanted the print publications along with it.
So, in honor of Ziff-Davis' bankruptcy filing, I'm going to take a short look at the history of the first "real" games magazine I ever saw, Electronic Gaming Monthly. Note that this article may contain gross inaccuracies, because I no longer have many EGM's lying around to reference and most of the "gossipy" information is stuff I remember hearing on either EGM Live* or Player One podcasts.
EGM: The Sendai Years (1989-1996)
Twin Galaxies is responsible for a lot of joy in my life. Without it, there would be no King of Kong, one of the great documentaries of the modern era. No one around to organize classic gaming tournaments. Above all, there would be no home for a high-school dropout with a serious enthusiasm for old games, like Steve Harris.
In late 1988, Harris used some money he earned hosting a videogame tournament to start Electronic Game Player, which lasted four whopping issues and is exceedingly rare today. Luckily, a small magazine distributor in Chicago saw the potential in EGP and gave $70,000 to Harris to start a new magazine -- Electronic Gaming Monthly -- for which the distributor (whose name eludes me at the moment) would act as the sole distributor. Harris named his publishing house Sendai, after the capital city in the TÅhoku region of Japan. Why he did this, I do not know.
The first issue debuted in the spring of 1989, as a one-off buyer's guide. It did well, and the magazine was launched properly that summer. I know almost nothing about the earliest of the early days -- Steve Harris was EIC for a while, then Ed Semrad took over (we'll get to him in a minute), no one bothered to hire a copy editor, Ken Williams made his debut as Sushi-X -- a pretty blatant swipe of Famitsu's mystery reviewer Taco-X, not that stealing ideas (and images) from Famitsu was a rare occurrence then -- and much merriment was brought to the sick children of America when their parents bought them a copy of EGM to make the chicken pox more bearable.
courtesy of Magweasel
The first issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly I read was issue 46. I was in like second grade. God, I loved every garish thing about it. Unlike Nintendo Power, this magazine had information about upcoming games, which was an incredibly novel concept at the time. It felt fresh and edgy. There was an except of a terrible Street Fighter II comic printed in the back that maybe had a shot of Chun-Li's panties.
After the 50th issue, the magazine underwent a pretty significant redesign. Every game preview was accompanied with a "The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly," section that rarely told you what was good, bad, or ugly about it. The issues released in the holiday season were of insane size; if I remember correctly, December 1994 was nearly 500 pages long. Compare that to the current EGM's -- I'd guess the standard EGM today is 100 pages.
Ed Semrad was the EIC at the time. Before EGM, he wrote a videogame column in the Milwaukee Journal. Most reports indicate that was an incredibly weird, angry man, with a gigantic son or son-in-law who was at the office in Lombard, IL quite frequently. Chris Johnston, the former news editor at EGM, stated that he never once saw Ed Semrad play anything; Andy Baran was the guy who primarily wrote the reviews under Ed's name in the Review Crew. Occasionally, Ed would write something when he felt very strongly about an issue, such as the Virtual Boy. He wrote a review for at least one VB game, slamming it. Funnily enough, Ed Semrad had a detached retina and therefore couldn't play anything on a system requiring stereoscopic vision. And so on.
Oh, and Sushi-X was Ken Williams. That's pretty much all I know about the Sendai days.
Stay tuned for part 2, which may or may not ever be written!
sources used in article include: wikipedia, mag weasel, chris johnston's "egm chronicles," [link], information gleaned from podcasts, and my own spotty memory.
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