EGM Media introduced immediately that it’s launching a brand new Kickstarter for a product referred to as The Digital Gaming Month-to-month Compendium. Because the identify implies, it’s a compilation of tales from the journal Digital Gaming Month-to-month (EGM) gathered right into a e book that spans the publication’s 25-year historical past. The Kickstarter launched immediately and, inside a couple of hours, surpassed its main purpose of $60,000, with over 800 backers on the time of this writing.
The Compendium is a bodily e book that comprises interviews, historic background and options from EGM’s a few years in print. It additionally options tales concerning the journal itself. Along with the e book, the Kickstarter additionally funds the EGM Digital Archive, which can, in response to its creators, ideally include totally readable variations of each EGM ever printed. It’ll be sympatico with the Compendium, with the latter containing codes that hyperlink to article matters throughout the Archives.
Mollie L. Patterson, co-author of the Compendium, stated in a press release, “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 additionally spoke with Josh Harmon, one other of the authors, who stated that he, Patterson and EGM founder Steve Harris got here up with the concept for the journal: “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, significantly bodily media comparable to magazines, has not fared effectively just lately. Earlier this yr, GameStop shuttered Recreation Informer Journal in addition to its web site. UK-based PlayStation journal PLAY additionally shut down earlier this month. EGM itself was shut down as a bodily journal in 2014, persevering with as an internet site for the previous couple of years. The Kickstarter’s most excessive stretch purpose — for $250,000 — is a brand new print challenge of the journal.
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.”
