A lot of people look back on the early days of the magazine with rose-tinted glasses and talk about how terrible the current publication is in comparison to its formative years, but... no. There are three possible explanations for the "EGM was best in 1990!" syndrome:

  • The person in question was 8 years old in 1990 and hasn't revisited the old pubs since developing a sense of taste;
  • The person in question never developed a sense of taste; or
  • Severe brain damage.

Which isn't to denigrate the people responsible for the early days of the magazine -- like gaming itself, gaming periodicals are slowly evolving and gradually growing up. (The fact that the market chose not to support XBN suggests readers could stand to do a little growing up, too, but I suppose I'm nearly over my cattiness limit for this post, so let's skip that tangent for now.) The original EGM crew created a magazine very much in keeping with its times... but, fortunately, the times have advanced.

Anyway, I figured the best way to go about this would be to start at the beginning... so here's EGM #1, May 1989. Photos here, not scans, because I don't feel like spending half an hour just getting images. This is a blog, not an online archive.

Yes, the cover is basically an ocean of text spliced together with the box art to Mega Man 2. Notice it's the U.S. National Video Game Team's Electronic Gaming Monthly. Apparently there was a magazine called Electronic Gaming which gave birth to EGM, but we don't have any of those around the office.

I bet that bonus MagMax poster alone sold a million of these.

The interior, featuring the "top ten" games according to some unknown metric. Blaster Master is number one, it appears. Because, really -- who doesn't love battling a race of metal mutants to save a lost radioactive frog?

Fancy layouts, too. Who needs Quark XPress?

How tenuous the line between editorial and advertising. Right page, an ad for Atari's super-awful arcade driving game Hard Drivin'. Left page, a feature on Hard Drivin' which calls it "the first arcade hit of the year" and features a lot more exclamation points than any detached journalist should be allowed to use. In fact, given the janky clip-art layout approach of the mag, the lack of writer attribution and the rather hyperbolic nature of the text, it's impossible to tell if this is EGM-penned content or an ad. Boundary-bending content like this eventually became such a problem in game magazines of the time that they were forced to adopt the practice of indicating "advertorial" content with a disclaimer at the bottom.

And Hard Drivin'? Sucks way harder than it drives.

More advertorial content, although this is a little more upfront about its nature. It's for Taxan, of all companies. Not familiar with Taxan, you say? Well, they published some utterly crap NES games and vanished. Or maybe they were devoured by a bigger company. I don't care. The important thing is that they're not around anymore, so we're all safe from the company that brought us Fist of the North and Low-G Man.

Fun trivia: the guy who wrote this section was a fellow by the name of Ken Lobb. Can I have an LOL, please?

The back section of the magazine is all black-and-white and includes this rundown of upcoming systems. Oooh at the Japanese Super Famicom prototype! Chuckle at the incredibly optimistic "1990" target date for Super NES! Gasp at this new-fangled "Gameboy"! Scratch your head in puzzlement at the section on the... Konix Slipstream? Huh?

The real prize in this issue is the review section. EGM #1 was the single instance in which the reviews didn't fall into the Weekly Famitsu-inspired "review round-up" format; instead, each game was given its own single page. And don't look for numerical scores: EGM's debut issue featured the system later adopted by Daily Radar in which games were ranked from Direct Hit! to, presumably, Miss! I think there were two increments in between: Hit! and Near Hit! I'm hedging my bets, though, because nothing in this issue was given a Miss! rating, so maybe it was a three-point scale. Who knows. More importantly, who cares?

The reviews are actually quite good for their time, and also differ significantly the later console-only issues of the magazine by featuring both PC and Amiga games. The tiny multi-angle breakdown approach EGM used through the '90s never did much for me, although I do like the magazine's current format (which takes a multi-angle approach that usually provides enough space for substantive commentary).

Like most old magazines, EGM #1 has much more value as a curio than as an actual piece of journalism. Still, it's interesting to look back at the origin of the country's biggest gaming publication. I just hope Shoe doesn't come over to my cubicle and beat me to death with his cast for exposing his mag's rough start....