EGM Compendium Interview: Josh Harmon Shares Book Features, Stretch Goals, and Lost Issue #237

Serving as the definitive history of video games through the pages of the #1 gaming magazine, the Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) Compendium has made a tremendous impact, raising approximately $400,000 of its original $35,000 goal in less than two weeks.

As an avid reader of EGM throughout its 25-year run, we were honored to speak with EGM Compendium co-author Josh Harmon about the sheer passion going into this ambitious new project. 

EGM Compendium Interview: Josh Harmon Shares Book Features, Stretch Goals, and Lost Issue #237

Gamers Heroes  

Congratulations on your success!

I’m a huge reader of EGM – I actually worked with Demian Linn at Raptr; he’s the one who got me in the gaming industry in the first place. I learned a lot about writing from him, and still use some of his principles to this day.

Hearing from somebody who actually worked at EGM, that was my dream job in high school!

Josh Harmon 

I got to be on a little bit at the end of the print run, so to see my name in there with my little photo and bio, favorite genres, and all that stuff was fantastic. 

This is obviously a much better and more exhaustive way for me to take that kind of passion that I had for EGM growing up and deliver something that will hopefully satisfy all the wonderful people who decided to come out and give their support to the campaign.

Gamers Heroes  

Absolutely! So I guess the first question is, for the readers at home, how did this project come to be in the first place?

Josh Harmon  

The way that this project came to be is we were thinking about if we were going to do video game books under the EGM brand.

We think EGM has a unique perspective on that. Having been in the industry for so long, we were thinking “What is the best possible EGM book?” 

We went through a bunch of different ideas, having long conversations for a long time asking “What should we do?”

At some point, we said “You know what, maybe the best way to do that would be a book about EGM?”

This book is all the history that you can learn about in EGM. This is a testament to all the people who worked so hard for so many years to put this great gaming magazine to life. We can really celebrate it; we can share the history that’s in there. 

For people that might not have been EGM readers, they’re going to learn interesting new things about gaming history, because this is kind of a monthly record of what was going on in the gaming industry that we can resurface for people. 

If there’s younger people out there who might want to know more about gaming history dating back to the NES age, this is a cool way for us to resurface that for them and introduce them to EGM and all these wonderful people who worked for so many years to make this magazine such a hit.

Gamers Heroes  

Absolutely – and I I still pick up magazines. There’s still definitely a market.

On that same note, what are some of the highlights you have while working at EGM that you want to include in this project? Did you trade jabs with Seanbaby? Uncover the identity of Sushi-X?

Josh Harmon  

I probably think the coolest moment for me would be just getting to do a Review Crew column review. For me, that was always so cool.

But then obviously I get some behind the curtain scuttlebutt. You do find out some secrets, and we’re going to share some of that with you in the book. So if you’ve ever been curious as to who Sushi-X was (that’s multiple people), you will find out.

It’s kind of the secret history of all that stuff.

I think for me, personally, the big thing when I was actually working on the magazine was just being able to be a part of institutions like that. To be part of a review career where there’s three people in a column sharing their different opinions and sometimes even arguing a little bit back and forth because we don’t agree with each other. 

That was super cool to me, being able to have my bio in there. Then I came back, obviously at the tail end, but being such a passionate fan of EGM back in the day.

I remember when I was like, “You know what? We should bring back some of the feedback. Features that I was really passionate about.” 

We brought back one of my favorites, which was “Grudge Match,” where we would just tell silly little jokes hitting something video game related versus something not video game related. 

It’s been really funny; Not to toot my own horn, but after we came back, I’m like “Some of these are actually pretty good jokes!”

I stand by these jokes! It’s cool that I could enter myself, in some small part, into the legacy of this thing that was so formative in me as a writer. 

It obviously was the most rewarding thing about working for EGM. 

I think this project is so exciting for me because it’s that on an enormous scale; I’ve gotten to reach out to those very same people that first inspired me to be a writer, and have conversations with them and get them excited about joining in on this project, really celebrating their legacy.

I think it’s been a great chance for me to take all the passion that I felt about EGM for so long and kind of channel it into making the best book that I can possibly make, and I really hope that that comes across in everything we’re doing.

We’re so grateful to the backers for making this such a huge success and letting us do the best possible version of it – and it does seem like that is coming across!

If there’s one thing that I want to convey, it’s that we are so passionate about doing this right, and doing all the people who worked on the magazine, doing everything that they did justice and then making sure that everybody who was a fan of EGM from any era is going to feel satisfied with this project when we when we deliver.

Gamers Heroes  

I noticed that on Twitter too – a lot of people are sharing about how they wanted to get into the gaming space. I think it shows in show you crushed the stretch goals. There are a lot of people that feel the same way, including myself.

Josh Harmon  

It has been just truly an incredible response. All the cliches you hear people say, and you realize they’re all true: It is humbling, it is inspiring.

It is an honor to have so many people share their passion and just say, “You know what, you guys are on the right track. This is worth doing. We want to be a part of it.” That is truly the best feeling. 

It’s not just that; we have people reach out to share their stories. There’s a man who went on to become an animator in the animation industry. He sent in because he still had it, a scan of when his letter art of Sonic the Hedgehog appeared in EGM .

Obviously, he had an interest in art from a young age. He got a tiny little spot in EGM, and then went on to capitalize on that love of art, to become an animator and work on big name stuff that you would recognize. 

It’s just been so cool to get stories like that from people, and then everybody sharing, “This was my first issue of EGM. I loved the April Fool’s jokes.”

Like you said, it’s just it’s been so cool to see so many people are still passionate about something, even though, obviously the print magazine has not been out with the new numbered issue since 2014.

This is 10 years on from that, and there’s still just so much passion, so many people willing to share their love of the magazine. 

It’s very cool for me that I can participate in this project delivered them. But it’s also just cool to know that I’m not alone. I’m thinking, EGM was the coolest thing when I was growing up like I am. I very much would be backing this project at the highest tier.

Gamers Heroes 

On that same note, I saw that you’re working with YouTube celebrities like SNESdrunk and SegaLordX – fantastic names! I grew up 16-bit, so this is after my own heart!

What’s like working with this new school, old school talent? 

Josh Harmon  

My co-author Molly has been in charge of the outreach to those people. I will say it is interesting, because we were having these conversations, “Who do we want to include in this project as a voice that can share their memories of EGM or classic gaming?”

Obviously, we want people who worked at EGM and game developers. But then we got to thinking about it. In a way, I think that EGM was kind of early in jumping on this cultural trend of it being a very personality-driven magazine. 

One of the things I like to talk about is the review crew was always individual people, and sometimes they didn’t agree on stuff. So you really got the sense that this was about personalities coming together to make a magazine, not the magazine being the sole arbiter of what’s good or bad. 

It was people having a discussion, and you got attached to certain personalities. You knew Che Chou, or Greg Sewart might be an expert on card games, so you would maybe pay a little bit more attention to their score than some of the other people you knew who agreed with had similar tastes.

I really do think that you can see how so many people consume gaming media these days, which are these very personality-driven instances where you can see who the author is. 

They kind of wear who they are on their sleeve, and you go to them because you know them. They either entertain you, or you agree with their perspectives and their kind of personalities. 

So we were, of course, these people are the people that we see kind of doing the same things today that EGM was trying to do, whether or not they read EGM or whether or not they think of themselves as being part of that like trajectory. 

I do think that a lot of these people are so good on YouTube with video essays or sharing gaming history, because they capture into kind of the same spirit of what we loved about EGM. 

We want these people to have a chance to participate, and hopefully we think kind of situate EGM in this legacy of past, present, and future. 

We do think that obviously most of the stuff that EGM covered is in the past; it is a retrospective book, but we’re putting out the book now. We’re building this community of amazing backers who want to come out and support it. 

We also would like to think that in the future, this book will help people remember the role that EGM kind of played in building the gaming landscape of today.

Gamers Heroes  

You mentioned the Review Crew, and I think that’s interesting. When it comes to scoring, everybody’s saying 7 is average, whereas for EGM’s three scores, 5 was average – full stop. 

How do you feel about the current gaming landscape and scoring methods? We’re on Metacritic and OpenCritic, and are actually on the lower end when it comes to scores. However, we manage to give everything a fair shakedown. 

How do you feel about how scoring is done these days versus how it was in the Review Crew days?

Josh Harmon  

It’s actually funny that you mentioned 5 being average!

We put together the digital archive, where we indexed every single piece of content that was in every magazine, and we’re gonna put that up where you can go through with hyperlinks and read all the original content for people that either add it as an add on for the Kickstarter or at certain tiers, we include that feature.

The first thing I did when we have all the reviews in with all of the scores is go into the spreadsheet that we’ve assembled to compile this before we import it into a database. I actually calculated for myself what the actual average scores EGM game was.

Maybe it’s because EGM didn’t review every game that was ever released. Some of them went into Seanbaby’s “Rest of the Crap,” where they didn’t really score at all.

But I was fascinated by that, because you’re right. EGM was so passionate about 5 being average, and clearly they were willing to be honest and opinionated, even when that might have angered some publishers. 

But it is interesting to see the actual kind of numbers, because that’s like one of the benefits of this project is we project is we have all the data. We have everything, and we can play with it and do whatever interesting things we want to – this kind of sort of stuff is interesting. 

To your point about modern gaming review scores: I think for me, personally, it’s one of the biggest things we’ve lost. 

It’s not just that scores are inflated; because maybe they are, maybe they arent; I don’t know. I don’t have all of that data to say whether it’s gotten easier to get a good score. 

I will say, I think the thing that I kind of lament as somebody who grew up reading gaming magazines, and specifically EGM, is as cool as it is to have Metacritic and OpenCritic on there as a way to surface more opinions about games and give you this kind of wider perspective of stuff.

Not only do people really only care about the score that you put on your own review, but there’s a whole subset of people that only care about the average score. The number of people who go in and will read all the text that you write about the game to make your argument is, in my experience, vanishing. 

I think that’s a shame.

One of the things that was great about reading EGM when I was growing up is you’d go into the magazine and you could see the scores. That’s fine, but it’s actually it’s funny, because I think most of the era I read Ziff Davis, they put the scores in the write up front-and-center, but the score was behind the text.

It was almost like an indicator, like you should read the whole text, because it’s more important than the score. It’s literally over the top of it. 

And I did! I read all the text in every review. I got everybody’s specific opinion. And obviously, being print, they had to be very conscious about space, so there were very condensed opinions in this space, but it was that I’m going to get the opinion of three different people on this game, and these people play these games every day. 

They think about it very deeply, and they’re trying to distill their expertise in a way that’s going to be informative. It’s going to be entertaining. 

That, to me, is the thing that I miss about modern game reviews, because what we have now is super good, super useful. Plenty of people do amazing work; again, I like Metacritic. I like OpenCritic. I think it’s a great way for people to stay informed about games. 

But I do think that you lose something from that experience of  a small group of people who really know their stuff that are coming into your home. You paid for this magazine, so you’re going to read every last word, you’re going to get their opinion, and you’re going to think about it in the context of when you actually play that video game. 

The story I like to tell too, is this is my origin of caring about game review scores. 

I was very young. I went into the store. I had my money saved up – I think it was a birthday check that I had. I was going to buy one game for my Nintendo 64, and I had two choices: It was Star Fox 64 and Superman 64.

I chose poorly and bought Superman 64 – I still have my Nintendo 64 cartridge. I don’t know how much of this is just me mythologizing myself, but in my head, that’s the moment where I said I need to start reading game reviews.

Gamers Heroes  

We’ve all had those moments! I’ve got a wall of shame too.

Josh Harmon  

Yeah, but this was me as a kid, blowing all that money I had saved up.

Shortly after that, I became an EGM subscriber, started reading religiously, and never turned back.

Gamers Heroes  

I see what you’re getting at.

I’m looking forward to the new print issue for the stretch goal that you mentioned. What would you like to see in that edition?

Josh Harmon  

So we’re trying not to get ahead of ourselves. As we were clear in messaging this on the campaign page, this was a amazing idea that we had for something that would be so cool to do. We want to make sure that the EGM Compendium is not the final chapter in the EGM story, that we do a little bit extra for the people that are so passionate about it and deliver something really cool. 

At the same time, we do not want that very exciting, very cool stretch goal that our community of backers has unlocked to distract from the fact that we are laser focused on: Making the book in the archive as much as it can be. 

We don’t have anything to share on that today, but we promise we will have updates, and we are going to go all out. I will say we’re going to make sure that it is a worthy continuation.

Gamers Heroes  

Taking it back a little bit, I know there’s a lost Street Fighter issue, and I’m sure there’s some work around that too. What can you tell us about that?

Josh Harmon  

I believe it’s issue #237; it’s the last issue with Street Fighter on the cover. That was an issue that did not go to print, but it was completely finished and ready to go.

When you go back and read it now, they’re obviously still scheduling interviews to talk with people that worked on it at that time, but it’ll be fun to see what their experience was like on it now that they know that it’s coming back. 

The editor-in-chief at that time, James Mielke, actually reached out to me and was like, “I saw this, and I had to tweet about it because I was getting a little choked up.” So he has a tweet out there talking about how exciting it is for him. 

We got our hands on the original production files and will be able to print it at the same quality you would have gotten. It will be unchanged from that original version, and will be just as though it had gone to print at that time. 

We are sending that out to everybody who backs it, some of our higher tiers, or can buy it as an add-on with your pledge. 

We thought that that was important, because this was honestly when we were thinking about cool things we wanted to do if we were gonna do if we were going do a Kickstarter campaign for the book, like, what are fun bonuses we could do? 

This was, I think the first thing that we got to, and more than one of us got to it independently. We were just like, that would be the right thing to do. If you’re an avid EGM collector, and you’ve got every issue, there’s a little gap. 236 and 238 when Steve Harris brought it back, that it seemed like it would never get filled in.

So much of this project is about doing justice to the people who worked on the magazine for so long; it seemed only fair to finally get all of that hard work they had done into print the way that they originally intended it to be, and to get that out to the fans who are the most dedicated and going to care the most about something like that.

Gamers Heroes  

So I know there’s a lot of different segments we’ve talked about, the Review Crew, Rest of the Crap, things like that.

What would you say your personal favorite segment is? Let’s do top three.

Josh Harmon  

So obviously the Review Crew is near and dear to my heart, and I already mentioned Grudge Match.

For some reason, I think that Grudge Match was always during the kind of Ziff Davis era when I was reading most avidly. I think that was always like, just so funny to me, you could tell.

When we brought it back for our era of different magazine, it was the same vibe. We could always tell that it was just a bunch of the editors just sitting around, being like “What’s the dumbest, funniest joke that we can slap in here?” 

I’m sure that EGM contributed to my own warped sense of humor. 

I was always a big fan of whenever EGM would do this – itwas obviously not a regular feature, but they would do the 150 greatest games of all time, or the 200 greatest games of all time. 

For me especially, I remember around issue 150 when my family had Internet access, but it was slow; you had to disconnect the phone. At that time, I think we were still on dial-up with very early DSL. 

I did not necessarily feel like I knew that much about video game history at that time; I never the consoles. 

I had a Genesis, I had a Nintendo 64, I had a PlayStation 2, but I never had a PlayStation 1. I never had an NES, remarkably, or an SNES. For me, I was seeing these little time capsules of “these are the greatest games of all time, and you should care about them.” 

Sometimes they would have commentary from game developers sharing out how these games that influence them. 

It was just this sense that EGM was not just concerned with the present or what games are coming out this year that you’re gonna be excited about, but that it was really also trying to document the history of the gaming industry and gaming as an art form. 

When EGM would run features like that, it was my entry into this past for me to understand the history of this hobby. 

It probably really turned me into not just being somebody who bought games and played them, but somebody who wanted to learn about gaming as an art form and all the history that was behind that.

That’s really what we’re doing with EGM Compendium; we’re again looking backwards and trying to connect all these dots to show you the story of gaming. 

I think that’s even when EGM was: This magazine that would come out every month, and then there would be a new one, and you would put it on a shelf, or throw it out, or do whatever you wanted to do with it. 

It still was trying to make sure that the history of everything that had come before was in your mind. So in a way, I think what we’re doing with the Compendium that is integral to the EGM ethos, right?

We are trying to make sure that we respect video games as a hobby in a way that I think that – even if you didn’t read EGM – this is going to be a fascinating read for you. You get to go back and see all this history as it played out in real time, and you get to learn about this cool magazine that you might not know about. 

If you get the digital art pack, you can go back and experience it for the first time. And if you’re an EGM fan? Wouldn’t you love the chance to read all these issues with fresh eyes?

Gamers Heroes  

Is there anything you’d like to add? 

How can we as journalists – not just me, but everybody else in the greater sphere – get the word out? Obviously, we’re promoting it via news, we’re promoting the Kickstarter, things like that. 

Josh Harmon  

Anything that you do share, we’re so grateful this has been above and beyond what we expected, and every day we’re going up further and further. 

We just announced that we’re going to have a new batch of three stretch goals. We’ve revealed the first one, which is for this issue. 

There is one thing I can share about we’re going to do for that. In 2004, EGM ran a contest called “Review Crew Survivor,” where people submitted to be considered for an honorary slot on the Review Crew. 

We’re going to do that again, so that any of our backers who want a chance to have their reviews on the Review Crew alongside some EGM editors, will be able to submit and kind of compete for that. So we have some things that we’re excited about that. 

We’re going to be revealing kind of slow drip, because obviously the initial success was far more than we ever anticipated. We’re so grateful that so many people have thrown their support behind the project. 

Honestly, just if you think that there’s anybody in your life that cares about video games and would be interested in this, just let them know.

Gamers Heroes  

I’ll see what I can do!

Josh Harmon  

The more we get the word out about this, and the more people that are interested, the cooler we can make it. 

That is true with every stretch goal, and even true beyond that. I think the level of support we’ve gotten has motivated us even more than we were already motivated to make this the absolute coolest tribute to EGM that we possibly can.

It is an enormous amount of pressure, but we fully intend to work as hard as we possibly can to live up to it.

I want to communicate how grateful we are to each and every person who has pledged to support the Kickstarter campaign. I especially want to communicate how grateful we are to everyone who worked on any issue with EGM in any capacity in the past. 

The response we’re getting is not about the work that me and Molly and our designer, Michael Hobbs, have put in; we’ll take 1/10 of 1% of the credit for the response. 

We understand that 100% of the response we’re getting is a testament to all those people who worked so hard for two-and-a-half decades to make EGM this institution that was so integral to so many people’s lives and foundational to how they think about video games.

We are so grateful that so many of them have agreed to work with us on this project to preserve that legacy; and we are even more grateful for the work that they did in the past that has made so many fans out of so many people to allow us to do this project, because it truly is an honor.

Gamers Heroes  

Well said!

Thank you so much for your time – I’m excited to see what’s next!

Fans can pledge their support for the Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) Compendium via its official Kickstarter page, with 16 days to go as of this writing.

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