Before game trailers appeared instantly on YouTube, before social media accounts leaked announcements from press conferences, and before a player could search the internet for a review within minutes of a game’s release, discovering what was coming next could be difficult. Screenshots, release dates, rumors, import news, cheat codes, and even basic information about Japanese hardware often reached American players through magazines.
Few publications became as closely identified with that world as Electronic Gaming Monthly.
Known almost universally as EGM, the magazine became one of the defining American video game publications of the 1990s and early 2000s. At various points its pages carried rumors from Quartermann, competing opinions from the Review Crew, enormous previews of upcoming consoles, letters from readers, strategy material, import coverage, industry reporting, and enough advertising to document nearly every major era of the console business.
The surviving archive is remarkably complete. The Video Game History Foundation preserves EGM’s numbered issues, special publications, supplements, and the magazines that preceded it, allowing much of the publication’s story to be reconstructed from the pages themselves rather than from memory alone. Its collection traces the lineage from Top Score in 1986, through Electronic Game Player in 1988, into EGM’s original 1989 to 2009 run and its later revival.
Before Electronic Gaming Monthly
EGM did not simply appear on a newsstand in 1989.
Its roots stretched back several years into competitive gaming and arcade culture. The Video Game History Foundation identifies Top Score, published by the Amusement Players Association from fall 1986 through 1987, as one of the direct predecessors preserved within its EGM collection. Five issues survive in the archival series. The publication was more closely tied to arcade gaming, scores, and organized competition than the magazine EGM would become, but the connection is important because it shows that the publication’s later fascination with rankings, insider information, and highly engaged players did not emerge from nowhere.
The next step was Electronic Game Player. The Video Game History Foundation preserves a complete four-issue run from 1988, immediately before the appearance of EGM. By then the formula was moving closer to recognizable enthusiast game journalism, with the emphasis expanding beyond competitive scores toward new games, hardware, and the rapidly changing home console market.
Steve Harris stood at the center of that development. Looking back in a 2009 interview after reacquiring EGM, Harris recalled that he had assembled the magazine’s original staff and served first as editor and later as publisher. He described the early editorial philosophy in simple terms: the magazine needed to know who its readers were, give them information quickly, and remain honest about the games it covered. That philosophy would survive numerous staff changes and eventually different owners.
The 1989 Buyer’s Guide and Issue Number One
Dating the true beginning of EGM can be slightly confusing because there was an Electronic Gaming Monthly 1989 Video Game Buyer’s Guide before numbered issue #1.
The buyer’s guide was dated February 1989 and edited by Steve Harris under Sendai Publishing. Its contents already contained much of the DNA of the magazine that followed. Harris opened with an editorial titled “The Best is Yet to Come!” There was an explanation of the U.S. National Video Game Team, game awards, arcade and home-game scoreboards, company information, reviews, and previews of the new generation of hardware approaching the American market. Coverage included the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System alongside the Mega Drive, PC Engine, Super Famicom, Atari systems, arcade machines, and computers.
Then came Electronic Gaming Monthly #1, dated May/June 1989.
The Video Game History Foundation catalogs the premiere numbered issue as a 68-page Sendai Publishing magazine. Its cover still prominently connected the publication with the U.S. National Video Game Team while promising coverage of Nintendo, Sega, Atari, computer software, and arcade games. Inside were reviews, previews, industry news, letters, scoreboards, hardware discussion, and the “Gaming Gossip” department.
What looks ordinary today was considerably more valuable in 1989. American players interested in the approaching Sega Genesis, NEC’s TurboGrafx-16, Nintendo’s future hardware, or Japanese games that had not yet appeared in American stores had relatively few places where all of that information could be gathered together. EGM positioned itself not simply as a catalog of games already available, but as a window into what players might be buying six months or a year in the future.
That forward-looking approach became one of the magazine’s most recognizable traits.
The Review Crew, Quartermann, and EGM’s Personality
Information alone did not make EGM distinctive. The magazine developed personalities and departments that readers could recognize from month to month.
One of the most important was the Review Crew.
Rather than present a game as though there were one unquestionable critical verdict, EGM became famous for placing multiple reviewers beside one another. An early example can be seen by the February 1991 issue, whose table of contents already advertised a Review Crew section alongside reader correspondence, Quartermann’s gaming gossip, news, previews, tricks, and high scores. Multiple critics could disagree sharply about the same release, giving readers a small panel of opinions rather than a single institutional voice.
The approach became deeply associated with the magazine. EGM’s own later description of its history specifically remembers readers waiting to see what verdicts the Review Crew would deliver and what information Quartermann would reveal. The same institutional history emphasizes a voice that tried to be knowledgeable without becoming too formal, opinionated without pretending opinion was fact, and closely connected to the game industry without wanting to appear controlled by it.
That mixture helped EGM feel less like a trade publication and more like a conversation among people obsessed with games. Staff members developed recognizable voices. Reviewers disagreed. Rumors were discussed alongside confirmed announcements. Letters allowed readers to challenge the magazine. Import coverage made Japan’s gaming industry seem a little less distant.
It was enthusiast journalism in the literal sense. The people writing the magazine sounded excited to be there.
Sheng Long and the Power of a Gaming Rumor
Perhaps nothing demonstrates EGM’s relationship with its readers better than a joke that escaped the magazine and became part of video game folklore.
The April 1992 issue, #33, contained what became the famous Street Fighter II Sheng Long April Fool’s trick. The preserved issue remains available through Retromags, and the hoax has followed the magazine ever since.
The joke claimed that players could encounter a mysterious fighter named Sheng Long by fulfilling an absurdly difficult sequence of conditions. The story appeared plausible enough to spread because Street Fighter II already seemed filled with secrets, rumors, unusual techniques, and half-understood information passed between arcades.
The result outlived the issue itself.
Players attempted the supposed trick. The character was discussed as if he might actually exist. Years later the hoax remained famous enough to become one of the best-known examples of gaming misinformation from the pre-internet era.
The episode also illustrates how powerful magazines could be at the time. A rumor printed in a major national publication did not meet an immediate wall of searchable videos, source code investigations, developer social media posts, and instant corrections. Readers experimented. Stories moved from friend to friend and arcade to arcade.
EGM was not merely reporting gaming culture. Sometimes it could create gaming folklore.
EGM Grows Beyond One Magazine
By the middle of the 1990s, EGM had become large enough to expand its name into related publications.
In July 1994, EGM2 appeared as a companion magazine. The Video Game History Foundation describes it as a monthly publication intended to appear between regular EGM issues, with more extensive strategy material, tips, and import coverage. The publication later evolved into Expert Gamer and eventually GameNOW. The preserved EGM2 / Expert Gamer / GameNOW collection stretches from 1994 to 2004 and contains 129 magazines.
That expansion reflected both EGM’s popularity and the explosive growth of the game industry around it.
The early 1990s had been dominated by Nintendo and Sega’s 16-bit competition. By the middle of the decade, readers were trying to follow the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, arcade hardware, Japanese imports, CD-ROM technology, and an industry increasingly capable of generating enough news to fill multiple publications.
A magazine that once had to convince readers that home video games deserved serious monthly coverage now faced almost the opposite problem. There was too much to cover.
From Sendai Publishing to Ziff Davis
One of EGM’s most important business changes arrived in 1996.
Ziff Davis acquired Sendai Publishing’s gaming properties in May of that year, moving EGM into a much larger publishing organization. The timing can become confused in abbreviated histories because issues were already in production around the transaction, but the archival record helps narrow the transition. The Video Game History Foundation catalogs issue #83 from June 1996 and issue #84 from July 1996 under Ziff Davis.
Changing corporate ownership did not erase the publication’s established identity. Steve Harris later credited editors and writers of the Ziff Davis era with continuing and expanding the magazine’s reader-focused philosophy.
The Ziff Davis years would include some of the magazine’s most recognizable editors and contributors and coincided with an extraordinary period in console history. Sony established the PlayStation as a major platform, Nintendo moved from the Nintendo 64 to the GameCube, Sega’s Saturn gave way to the Dreamcast and then to the company’s exit from console manufacturing, and Microsoft entered the business with Xbox.
EGM had front-row seats for all of it.
Three Hundred Pages of Video Game Culture
A surviving issue can sometimes communicate the size of EGM better than a circulation statistic.
Issue #113, dated December 1998, contained 300 pages. The Video Game History Foundation’s archival record confirms the enormous page count.
A magazine of that size was more than a collection of reviews. It was a physical record of the gaming marketplace. Advertisements, release schedules, peripherals, strategy products, previews, imports, reader letters, editorial commentary, screenshots, interviews, and review scores existed beside one another.
The same period produced one of the Review Crew’s most famous milestones. Metal Gear Solid received perfect scores from all four EGM reviewers in 1998, a result remembered because uniformly perfect verdicts had been exceptionally difficult to achieve under the magazine’s scoring system.
By the early 2000s, EGM was reaching an enormous audience. A Ziff Davis announcement reported circulation reaching 536,610 in 2002 after a 25.7 percent increase. Because the number came from the publisher it should be understood as a corporate circulation claim, but it still gives a sense of the commercial scale EGM had reached.
For hundreds of thousands of readers, receiving EGM was part of the monthly rhythm of being a video game fan.
When the Internet Changed the Meaning of “Monthly”
The internet gradually attacked the basic advantage on which gaming magazines had been built.
For years EGM could place screenshots, release information, rumors, and interviews in front of readers who had few faster alternatives. By the 2000s, gaming websites could publish those things immediately.
A “monthly” publication now faced websites operating every hour of every day.
EGM adapted in part through its relationship with Ziff Davis’s online gaming properties and the 1UP network, but the economics of print were changing. News had become difficult for a magazine to own because a story could be old weeks before an issue reached a mailbox. Reviews faced the same pressure as websites published verdicts around a game’s launch date.
What print could still offer was personality, editing, longer features, visual presentation, and the experience of having a curated package arrive all at once. Those strengths kept game magazines alive for years, but they could not prevent a broader collapse in much of the print market.
In January 2009, EGM’s original run finally reached its abrupt end.
The 2009 Shutdown and the Issue That Never Reached Readers
On January 6, 2009, contemporary reports revealed that Ziff Davis was selling its 1UP network to UGO Entertainment, part of Hearst, and that Electronic Gaming Monthly would close.
GameSpot reported that the January 2009 edition, issue #236, would be EGM’s last printed installment. Wired described the shutdown as the end of a nearly twenty-year magazine that had occupied a distinctive place in American gaming culture.
The ending was especially jarring because another issue had already been prepared.
The Video Game History Foundation’s collection records that issue #237 was never published in print. The archive instead preserves material around the missing end of the original run, making the unpublished issue one of the clearest reminders that EGM did not receive a carefully planned farewell edition.
For a magazine whose identity had been built around telling readers what was coming next, there was suddenly no next month.
Steve Harris Brings EGM Back
The closure turned out not to be the end of the name.
Steve Harris reacquired the rights to EGM in 2009. Speaking that September, he described his original role at the magazine and discussed plans to rebuild the publication under his control. Contemporary industry reporting later confirmed that EGM Media intended to return the magazine to American newsstands in 2010, with distribution once again involving Time Warner Retail.
When the revived EGM appeared in spring 2010, it did something symbolically important. It continued the old numbering.
The returning magazine was issue #238.
Rather than present itself as an unrelated publication borrowing a familiar brand, the new EGM treated itself as the continuation of the magazine interrupted in 2009. The Video Game History Foundation describes the second run as continuing the numbering and retaining much of the same general content and a number of familiar contributors.
The media world it returned to was very different from the one EGM had entered in 1989. Print gaming magazines no longer served as the primary delivery system for breaking information. The revived publication therefore existed in a market where a magazine had to justify itself through analysis, features, design, and the value of the EGM identity itself.
The Final Years of EGM in Print
The second print run continued into the middle of the 2010s.
Issue #264 appeared in summer 2014. The Video Game History Foundation identifies it as the last numbered regular issue of the revival, although EGM Media continued with several special publications and buyer’s guides into 2015.
In that sense, EGM did not have one clean ending.
There was the cancellation of the original Ziff Davis magazine in 2009. There was the rebirth in 2010. There was the end of regular numbered issues after #264. There were later specials. Then there was EGM’s life as an online publication.
That digital operation carried the name into another generation, but in January 2023 reporting emerged that EGMNOW’s editorial operation had shut down. By then the brand had traveled an extraordinary distance from a magazine created for players trying to learn about new NES, Sega Master System, and Japanese 16-bit games.
Yet even that was not the end of EGM as a historical object.
Turning a Magazine into an Archive
By the 2020s, EGM’s past had itself become valuable.
In 2024, a crowdfunding campaign for The Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium asked former readers to support a large-scale history and preservation project. The response demonstrated how much affection remained for the magazine. The Kickstarter ultimately drew 21,947 backers and more than $1.79 million in pledges.
The project was accompanied by something even more significant for researchers: an official EGM Digital Archive.
EGM announced that the archive would contain complete reproductions of all 264 numbered issues while indexing reviews, features, previews, people, games, and other material so that decades of coverage could be searched across the publication’s history.
The Video Game History Foundation has simultaneously assembled an institutional collection covering the original and revived magazines, precursors, buyer’s guides, supplements, and related material. Its EGM collection alone contains hundreds of items.
What once existed as disposable monthly entertainment has become an archive.
That transformation matters because old gaming magazines contain information that rarely survives elsewhere. Advertisements document prices and marketing strategies. Rumor columns show what players believed before announcements were confirmed. Reviews reveal contemporary expectations before decades of nostalgia reshaped reputations. Letters preserve the concerns of ordinary players. Previews document games that changed dramatically or never appeared at all.
A magazine designed to tell readers about the future became one of the best records of gaming’s past.
Why Electronic Gaming Monthly Matters
The historical importance of Electronic Gaming Monthly is larger than the question of whether its reviewers correctly judged a particular game.
EGM occupied an important position between the game industry and the people buying its products. It translated Japanese announcements for American enthusiasts, covered emerging hardware, evaluated releases, circulated rumors, published strategies, gave individual critics recognizable voices, and helped turn video game discussion into something readers could follow as a continuing culture rather than a collection of isolated products.
Its mistakes and jokes could matter almost as much as its reporting. Sheng Long became folklore. Quartermann taught readers to hunt for rumors. The Review Crew made disagreement part of the publication rather than something to be edited away. Giant holiday issues captured the excess of the industry’s booming years.
Most importantly, EGM’s lifespan crossed several radically different periods of video game history. Its ancestry reaches back to an era when arcade high scores and organized gaming competition helped define enthusiast culture. Its first numbered issue arrived during the NES revival of the American console market. It documented the 16-bit wars, the arrival of 3D consoles, Sony’s rise, Sega’s retreat from hardware, Microsoft’s entry, online gaming, and the eventual migration of gaming journalism from printed pages to websites.
Few American game publications survived long enough to experience so many of those changes firsthand.
Today the most striking image may not be a famous cover or a perfect Review Crew score. It may simply be the archive itself, hundreds of magazines sitting beside one another in chronological order.
Page by page, EGM preserved the excitement of not knowing what was coming next.
For readers in 1989, that was the point of the magazine.
For historians today, it is the reason the magazine still matters.
Sources & Further Reading
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Electronic Gaming Monthly.” Collection MAG-EGM. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/3
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 1, May/June 1989.” MAG-EGM.001. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/625
Sendai Publishing. Electronic Gaming Monthly 1989 Video Game Buyer’s Guide. February 1989. RetroMags. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/electronic-gaming-monthly/egm-video-game-buyers-guide/electronic-gaming-monthly-1989-buyers-guide/
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Top Score, Fall 1986.” Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/8800
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Top Score, Fall 1986–December 1987.” Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/8799
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Electronic Game Player, Vol. 1, No. 3.” Video Game History Foundation Digital Archive. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/digital_objects/13004
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Electronic Game Player, Vol. 1, No. 4.” Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/8809
Sendai Publishing. Electronic Gaming Monthly, no. 33. April 1992. RetroMags. https://www.retromags.com/files/file/2823-electronic-gaming-monthly-issue-033-april-1992/
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Electronic Gaming Monthly, Volume 9, Number 6, Issue 83, June 1996.” Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1826
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Electronic Gaming Monthly, Volume 9, Number 7, Issue 84, July 1996.” Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1827
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 113, December 1998.” Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1856
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 264, Summer 2014.” Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/9748
Video Game History Foundation Library. “EGM2 / Expert Gamer / GameNOW.” Collection MAG-EGM2. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/19
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Electronic Gaming Monthly Relaunch, Spring 2010–Fall 2015.” Video Game History Foundation Digital Archive. https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/aca598e5-87ec-4778-8937-e59bdf1c58ad
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Sendai Publishing.” Corporate Authority Record. Video Game History Foundation Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/agents/corporate_entities/7
Gilbert, Ben. “Interview: EGM Now’s Steve Harris.” Engadget, September 11, 2009. https://www.engadget.com/2009-09-11-interview-egm-nows-steve-harris.html/
Electronic Gaming Monthly. “About Us.” EGM. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://egmnow.com/aboutus/
Electronic Gaming Monthly. “The EGM Archive Is Now Live!” EGM. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://egmnow.com/the-egm-archive-is-now-live/
Harmon, Josh. “Welcome to the New EGM.” EGM. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://egmnow.com/welcome-to-the-new-egm/
Electronic Gaming Monthly. “Turning the Page.” EGM, April 14, 2020. https://egmnow.com/turning-the-page/
Kohler, Chris. “1UP Sold to Hearst Publications, EGM Closing Doors.” Wired, January 6, 2009. https://www.wired.com/2009/01/rumor-1up-sold/
Sinclair, Brendan. “Electronic Gaming Monthly Shutting Down.” GameSpot, January 6, 2009. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/electronic-gaming-monthly-shutting-down/1100-6202775/
Remo, Chris. “EGM Announces March Return for Magazine.” Game Developer, December 21, 2009. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/egm-announces-march-return-for-magazine
EGM. “The Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium.” Kickstarter, October 15–November 14, 2024. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egmbook/egmcompendium
ISSN International Centre. “Electronic Gaming Monthly.” ISSN 1058-918X. ISSN Portal. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1058-918X
RetroMags. “Electronic Gaming Monthly Video Game Buyer’s Guide.” Accessed October 13, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/electronic-gaming-monthly/egm-video-game-buyers-guide/
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Steve Harris.” Authority Record. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/agents/people/7