Crispin and I recap our highs and lows at EGM through the decades in another Sore Thumbs reprint, updated for your reading pleasure.

But don't forget, this isn't really goodbye anymore, as EGM is coming back under new (old) ownership, via Steve Harris, the original publisher and owner of the magazine.

By Shoe and Crispin

With UGO's takeover of the 1UP Network back in January, Electronic Gaming Monthly's 20-year run came to an abrupt end with a blurry Wolverine cover (January 2009 issue) because UGO didn’t want it and Ziff couldn’t afford to keep printing it. EGM is just dead, dead, dead...gone forever...a legendary magazine that had its place in gaming history but is to be no more.

It stinks we can’t have the official last EGM to hold, read, and keep -- yet another Ziff Davis mag whose life got cut short without even a chance for a goodbye issue (see Computer Gaming World/Games for Windows Magazine).

A lot of people out there were lashing out at UGO and its parent company Hearst for the layoffs and for EGM’s closing, but trust me, they were barking at the wrong suits. I don’t need to say much more, because Jeff Green, former editor-in-chief of CGW, said it all on his must-read blog (MTV Multiplayer also shed some light on this).

In addition to everything Jeff said, do know that Ziff Davis Media was burdened with this unbelievable debt that made it near impossible for it to achieve its goals with the 1UP Network. Kill IGN or GameSpot with 1UP’s traffic? Kill Game Informer/PC Gamer with EGM/CGW’s circulations? Not when every penny you made was going back to pay off massive interest payments. It was like trying to scoop out all the water in the ocean...with a PlayStation 3. Why did so many people leave there over the last two years? A lot of us knew this was coming.

Hopefully the current 1UP team is having much better luck with this, and the new EGM is better prepared for this rocky market. But enough moping. Crispin and I decided the best way to celebrate EGM’s memory is to complain about everything (done) and have some silly awards to give us an excuse to get all nostalgic (see below). Let’s have at it!

Favorite Cover

Shoe: BattleStation! (EGM #213, March 2007). The art team came up with a brilliant concept, making fun of PS3's "white room" campaign with a tomato smeared on the console to show how it was disappointing gamers at the time. Too bad that issue tanked at newsstands, which I'm sure Sony didn't cry over.

Runner up: Kingdom Hearts 2 (EGM #201, March 2006) with the four different covers, each with a different theme (Tron, Halloween, Steamboat Willie, and normal). I also loved both Final Fantasy covers that Yoshitaka Amano did exclusively for us (EGM #146, September 2001 and #172, November 2003), which couldn't have been done without EGM's James Mielke.

Crispin: Sonic Adventure (EGM #112, November 1998). The art team knew what they were doing when they integrated a keep-on-truckin' hedgehog with a minty Dreamcast swirl (which incorporates the cover lines for a super-clean look). The combo is so vibrant that doctors prescribe a welder's helmet and lead apron for safe viewing.

Lots of other EGM covers qualify as art -- the final, unpublished Ryu vs. Ken image (above) and the Amano Final Fantasy covers leap to mind -- but I'd frame this slice of Silver Age Sonic's life in a heartbeat.

Least Favorite Cover

Shoe: I can't pick any of the covers from the early '90s because they're of the "so bad they're good" variety, so I'll go with Console Wars (EGM #194, August 2005). Let's just say no giant hammer of inspiration hit us that month.

Crispin: Oh, so many easy pickin's among the Fabio and Bruce Willis guest appearances, anatomy-defying commissioned illustrations (I'm pretty sure Ryu has a compound fracture on that Street Fighter 3 cover), and high-concept high jinks. But I'm going with this totally forgettable, unsellable cover for Unreal Tournament (EGM #137, December 2000). Why? Because it's a fucking concrete wall.

Thrill at the exposed rebar! Marvel at the giant Unreal logo! Wonder at the surely spectacular laser battle that you can't see...because it's behind a friggin' concrete wall! Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one? Oh, right, it was my idea. Brainstorming a cover image for a game with no recognizable characters ain't easy.

Favorite Cover Story

Shoe: Guitar Hero 2 (EGM #208, October 2006). Oh man oh man, go read that story if you can. It's like a written version of VH1's "Behind the Music." Also, The Future of Videogames (EGM #215, May 2007) was an incredible collection of great articles about such a wide variety of topics -- it's one of the best EGMs ever.

Crispin: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (EGM #113, December 1998). It wasn't the most hard-hitting or insightful EGM cover story every (but then it's never easy to get too deep with a game from press-shy Nintendo), but our 30-page tabloid style "Hyrule Tattler" cover story sure was fun to work on. A massive staff effort -- complete with a diary of our first day in the game and a hilarious column by John Davison as Hyrulian fashionista Bruce Suchard -- this story sticks out as an example of EGM at its most inventive and irreverent.

Least Favorite Cover Story

Shoe: BattleStation! Man that was pure hell trimming down SCEA's Jack Tretton's interview down from over 20,000 words to about 7,000. I didn't want to cut anything, but yet I had to. It took forever. Runner up: Hudson Hawk (June 1991). Hudson Hawk...really?

Crispin: MechWarrior 2 (EGM #90, January 1997). "All 12 Mech Specs Revealed!" crows the cover blurb. And we deliver! Inside: two pages of weapon loadouts and heat-sink limits for every battlebot in this PS1 adaptation of the PC game. Again, this travesty is a sweet child of mine, the best I could come up with under a 12-hour deadline after spending the previous two weeks slaving away on a special Shadows of the Empire strategy guide. Hint: Shoot the dianoga trash gobbler in the left tentacle!

Ex-EGMer You'd Like To Touch Base With Again

Shoe: I know who Crispin's going to pick (I would pick him, too, but I'll just tag along with Crispin's imaginary meet over coffee), so I'll go with these other dudes: the old crew of Scott Paris, Paul Ojeda, and Roach. These guys took me in and showed me how they partied in Lombard, Illinois. I miss those guys.

Also: RIP Andy Baran.

Crispin: I KIT with most of my old work BFFs via social-network stalking, but I'd sure like to find out what happened to my Semradical first boss, the apparently living-off-the-grid Ed "hi guy!" Semrad.

Ed scolding Shawn Smith and Crispin. It wasn't really like this back in the day...much.

EGM's High Point

Shoe: All those exclusives! Street Fighter 3 and 4, Halo 2 and 3, Soul Calibur 2, SOCOM 2, Xbox reveal, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Zelda: Twilight Princess...I think I gave a little Macaulay Culkin "yes!" fist-pump each time I landed a big one.

Crispin: The era of the "Too many games!"/Xbox vs. GameCube/moving from Chicago to San Francisco. Long before the specter of Ziff bankruptcy loomed, these ad- and content-rich issues marked my salad days at EGM.

EGM's Low Point

Shoe: The Fighting Force/Gex 3D/Apocalypse triple cover (EGM #96, July 1997). This three-way split cover run was nothing more than a sorry attempt to kiss up to the publishers for all three games. Hey, why do one favor for one company when you can do three one-third favors for three different companies? It was one of the few, rare times I was embarrassed to be associated with the mag.

Also once, I worked 21 days straight in a row, 12-16 hours each day, with the occasional overnight stays at the office during that span. I was a smelly, stagnant blob of a vegetable of a man. I can't believe I wrote anything coherent during that time.

Crispin: When Ed Semrad asked me to write a positive preview of the putrid Contra: Legacy of War after Shoe accurately quoted the game's producer in an earlier preview saying the game "needed some work." Ed feared Shoe's preview had damaged our relationship with Contra publisher Konami, and he wanted me to write a more upbeat preview to fix that relationship. If anyone bought the game because of my preview, I'll surrender myself to your Legacy of War warcrimes tribunal.

Favorite Anecdote

Shoe: At one E3, Shane Bettenhausen, Bryan Intihar, and Mark MacDonald played a cruel trick on me. These former EGM editors told me they just saw this awesome game called Winx Club, and that I should go after a cover story exclusive on it asap. "Don't worry about its title...it's great, trust us." So I run into Marc Franklin, Konami's PR guy at the time, at a party and brought it up as something we might want a scoop on.

He was a little surprised that I was interested (Winx Club Google and prepare for the onslaught of girlie) and proceeded to tell me about how they figured there's a wide-open market out there with older brothers handing their PS2s down to their younger sisters -- then it hit me. This is a little girls' game. I confirmed this with Marc and realized that I've been had...bad.

Marc helped me get them back, though. He wrote this angry email for me about how EGM backed out of this Winx Club cover and that Konami was very upset about this, and I forwarded it on to the three jackasses, telling them how they're in big trouble for getting me into this mess. Shane and Mark didn't really fall for my counter-prank, but poor little Bryan did. That was good enough for me.

Crispin: Oh man, too many to count. Guess I'll go with the first time I had unfettered access to the EGM game closet. Way back in the Chicago days, if you wanted to get a game from the library, you had to wait until the managing editor fell asleep at his desk, then slip the closet key from around his neck. I am only just barely exaggerating.

One weekend, I somehow wound up with that key. I spent the next 48 hours gorging on games -- everything I ever wanted to play for every system I never had, from the 3DO to the Sega CD, plus all the classic SNES stuff and even ROMs for games that never came out. It was a childhood dream come true: a magic room full of every game ever made for every system up to the recently launched PS1.

Random Thing We'll Miss The Most

Shoe: Those 16-hour work days, with the occasional overnight stay at the office. Yeah, they stunk and I hated them, but there's something that miss about those youthful and careless days. We're already a bunch of goofy guys -- add in slap-happy sleep deprivation and things get seriously wacky! I'm talking about office-chair races; all furniture/desk items/wall decorations turned upside down when that cubicle's inhabitant was away (I caught Crispin red-handed and red-faced admiring his 180-degree treatent of my desk); and Decapitato, the throwing of the ringed blade down dark hallways at each other whenever the power went out in our old Lombard, Illinois offices.

Crispin: The peeps.

Parting Words

Shoe: I said it all above, but more than missing the magazine, I'll miss being with some of my bestest friends in the world. I hope in their new adventures and careers, they don't move more than five miles away from me. Keep it in the area code!

Crispin: EGM was 12 years of my life; compacting my feelings into a pithy missive is a suicide mission. So I'll just share the very first lesson I learned at EGM's Lombard, IL, offices: Street Fighter's Ryu is pronounced "ree-you." Who knew? And my last lesson as I left EGM's San Francisco, CA, offices: Fortune favors the bold. With that in mind, I have no doubt that every EGM alum will continue to do great things.