Electronic Gaming Monthly Coming Back

skulluminati writes "It looks like the late, great, gaming mag EGM, which was canceled earlier this year by publisher Ziff-Davis, will now be making a comeback. Steve Harris, the founder of EGM, has acquired the trademark and publishing rights to the magazine. As a reader of EGM for 19 years (almost since the beginning) it is great to see the brutally honest, independent voice of the gaming community rise from the ashes."

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[eldavojohn]

I never had a subscription to EGM though I did borrow them from my friends and accept old copies to pour over as a kid. To me they were the first game magazine to really put an effort into the layout and design of the magazine ... and also use very high quality paper. This was reflected in the price and I recall having a subscription of PC Gamer (at $20/year) which paled in comparison.

The one problem I had with EGM was the ads. There were so many of them. I grew up on a farm where I read my magazines cover to cover and sometimes more than once. Although the ads in EGM were very well done and artsy (usually) they did get to be a bit much. Sometimes it felt like I had a three pound advertisement of glossy photos in my hands. EGM sometimes felt like my older sister's Vogue magazines: 90% ads because the consumer actually liked them. Now, PC Gamer was by far worse (I suspected most of the articles being written by a worker for the company of the product being reviewed) and I'm not even sure that's around anymore.

I kept every single one of my Popular Mechanics magazines. You will not find a single PC Gamer though or any of the old EGMs.

I appluad EGM and hope they make it back. I often enjoyed their lists and articles, I must admit I wouldn't have noticed if they had gone under aside from the Slashdot articles.

I also assume this means more ads since that model is getting harder and harder to sustain ... but at least they'll be nice looking ads and hopefully be kept out of the articles by a well defined line of self respect.

Re:On paper? Why?

[wjh31]

it's a much bigger deal if you drop your laptop when you are on the shitter

brutally honest? Not what I remember...

[solios]

Where I grew up, there were four gaming mags readily available - Nintendo Power, Game Players, GamePro, and EGM.

At the time, Nintendo Power was low on ads and high on lengthy strategy articles and reviews (which were really just long form ads, but hey). GamePro seemed to be targeted at eight year olds, with more of an emphasis on the comic avatars of the editors than actual games, and they had a hefty dose of ads. GamePlayers had a pretty solid balance of gaming coverage and advertisements, and EGM...

What I remember of EGM is that it was thicker than the other mags, more than half advertisements (making Wired look like Readers Digest for ad density), and what content there was seemed to be made up almost entirely of screenshots. Oh, and a ridiculous over-emphasis on fighting and action games.

In the mid 90s, if you wanted the most bang for your buck, Nintendo Power was it. If you owned a non-Nintendo system, then Game Players was where it was at. The remaining contenders offered more ads and empty space than actual content, and were priced inversely - EGM had the highest price tag and boasted the thickest page count... but when you cut out all of the ads, all of the fluff, and boiled it down to actual gaming coverage, you came up several pages short of the content of Game Players or NP, and your wallet the lighter for it.

I don't miss EGM for the same reason I don't read Wired - the internet - even without adblock! - gives me a much more favorable Ads-to-Content ratio, with the added bonus of not paying five bucks for a two paragraph review and two pages of screenshots of the latest Final Fantasy that comes with twenty pages of Madden 09 strategy.