EGM Media announced today that it is launching a new Kickstarter for a product called The Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium. As the name implies, it’s a compilation of stories from the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) gathered into a book that spans the publication’s 25-year history. The Kickstarter launched today and, within a few hours, surpassed its primary goal of $60,000, with over 800 backers at the time of this writing.
The Compendium is a physical book that contains interviews, historical background and features from EGM’s many years in print. It also features stories about the magazine itself. In addition to the book, the Kickstarter also funds the EGM Digital Archive, which will, according to its creators, ideally contain fully readable versions of every EGM ever printed. It’ll be sympatico with the Compendium, with the latter containing codes that link to article topics within the Archives.
Mollie L. Patterson, co-author of the Compendium, said in a statement, “As someone who read Electronic Gaming Monthly at its beginning and worked for it at its end, I feel honored to be able to help preserve its 25 years of history and heritage in this new book project. Across all of those issues, there’s so much to rediscover both about the video games industry and EGM itself, and we can’t wait to share our efforts with everyone.”
Crowdfunding gaming’s archives
GamesBeat also spoke with Josh Harmon, another of the authors, who said that he, Patterson and EGM founder Steve Harris came up with the idea for the magazine: “We reached out to former editors and other industry folks to ask if they’d be willing to participate, and we’ve been delighted with the response. At some point we realized that, with all the work we were doing to catalog the magazine for our own research, we were already most of the way toward being able to set up an archive of all the back issues. So we went ahead and did that too.”
Gaming media, particularly physical media such as magazines, has not fared well recently. Earlier this year, GameStop shuttered Game Informer Magazine as well as its website. UK-based PlayStation magazine PLAY also shut down earlier this month. EGM itself was shut down as a physical magazine in 2014, continuing as a website for the last few years. The Kickstarter’s most extreme stretch goal — for $250,000 — is a new print issue of the magazine.
Harmon acknowledged the diminishing fortunes of gaming magazines, saying, “To me, The EGM Compendium is a small way to say that all the work those talented journalists put in over the decades is worthy of preservation. We can catalogue it and make sure it’s easy to access and navigate, even for someone who never read it back in the day—even for someone who, like me, might not have even been born when EGM first started. I think that’s important.”
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