Growing pains...
By Crispin
Back when we started this blog a month or so ago, we promised super-secret stories from our days at EGM. Time we started delivering on that promise, eh? So here’s a story from just before Shoe and I started at the magazine, from back in 1995—a transitional time for a publication that at that point still went by the unwieldy title Electronic Gaming Monthly.
Here’s some history to set things up: In the early to mid-’90s, EGM fell into the habit of featuring fighting games on nearly every cover, alternating between the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat series. Hey, you can’t blame the mag’s editors: Those games were huge, and putting them on the cover sold issues.
Enter the PlayStation and its new franchises. Editorial director Joe Funk took the bold move of putting one of those new franchises—car-combat game Twisted Metal—on the cover. EGM founder Steve Harris (who at this point was still heavily involved in the magazine’s editorial content) found out about the cover choice too late to make the switch to a safer-bet fighting game. He wasn’t happy about it. I mean, he really wasn’t happy. For proof, squint your eyes and check out this email exchange between Harris and Funk (read Funk’s email at the bottom first, then Harris’ reply up top). The subject header alone tells the story….
Well, the issue did go to press and ended up selling well—probably because Twisted Metal was such an awesome game and a herald of big changes in the industry. We can look back on EGM’s Twisted Metal issue with pride today and see it as a sign that the mag was on top of the biz. But now you know that, behind the scenes, tempers flared.