Magazine racks will be falling over with joy next March when video game print publication Electronic Gaming Monthly officially returns to bookstores and beyond. The all-new but still familiar EGM has inked a deal with Time/Warner to handle marketing and sales.
EGM is dead. Long live EGM! The struggling game magazine that shut down in January after nearly twenty years in print is returning later this year, courtesy of Electronic Gaming Monthly founder Steve Harris.
Ziff Davis may shutter Electronic Gaming Monthly, according to Jason Young, CEO of the ailing publisher. The company announced earlier this week it was shutting down the print version of PC Magazine, a publication that has been in existence for 27 years, shifting focus to its online sibling. And it may do the same for EGM.
The first issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly ran back in May of 1989. But even those of us who read it probably don’t still have the issue on their nearest coffee table. Now Retromags has gone back in time, stolen some poor kid’s reading material and posted it out of spite. Well, that, or they paid a bit too much for an antique issue after months of searching, spent hours retouching any signs of aging in Photoshop and then made it available to us in PDF for free. You can go with whichever version of the story best reaffirms your faith in humanity and the power of the human spirit. We’ll be catching up on the latest rumours about Mega Man 2.
Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 001 (May 1989) [Retromags via GnomesLair]
The publisher of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Games for Windows Magazine, Ziff-Davis Media, failed to make an interest payment yesterday and announced that it was negotiating with its lenders to restructure a rather sizable debt. The company, which also owns the web sites 1UP, FileFront, GameVideos, MyCheats and GameTab, owes some $US390 million, a figure which CEO Josh Young says “was put on the company when it was a very different scale.” The group now employs less than 300, down from 1200 at one point.