A Definitive History of Video Games Through the Pages of the #1 Gaming Magazine
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hello again to our wonderful EGM Compendium community!
We’re preparing to send out our BackerKit survey, with the first batch of emails expected to go out Wednesday, February 12th. In case this is your first time backing a project on Kickstarter or using BackerKit for a campaign, we wanted to run down exactly what you can expect, and hopefully answer any big questions you may have.
Let’s start with timing. As I said above, we expect to start sending out surveys this coming Wednesday, with a randomly assigned 5% of backers at each pledge level getting them first, per BackerKit policy. This "Smoke Test" is to verify we have everything set up properly. If there’s any kind of issue, it’s better to catch it when only a handful of people are responding, rather than having to fix problems with thousands of you at once!
After we’ve confirmed all is good with the initial batch, we’ll send out surveys to the remainder of the backers, which we expect to happen on Thursday, February 13th. So if you don’t get the survey on Wednesday, don’t fret. It’s coming, and it’s coming soon. We’ll post a quick note here when the survey has gone out to all current backers.
What if you’re a late backer showing up to the campaign after the survey has already gone out? Don’t worry. BackerKit automatically imports new Kickstarter Late Pledges every few days, and sends out surveys to anyone who hasn’t yet received one. So if you back the campaign after the survey goes out, you’ll get yours via email within a few days.
We’ve mentioned this a few times in previous updates, but just to reiterate: The BackerKit survey will automatically go to the email associated with the Kickstarter account you used to back the campaign—the same one where you should be receiving this update right now.
If for whatever reason you haven’t receive the survey by Monday, February 17th, when you (and we) expect you will, please leave a comment here or reach out and we’ll investigate to make sure you get it. (And please double-check that it’s not in your spam folder first!)
As for what to expect from the actual survey, it’s quite simple on your end.
First, you’ll confirm your general location—your country and state or province, as necessary.
Then, if applicable to your pledge tier, you’ll get a few short questions to answer based upon the tier you supported. This includes things like what name you’d like to appear in the book (plus a backup name if you’re worried about someone sharing your first choice), and a contact email if one is required for your rewards.
Next, if you purchased any add-ons through Kickstarter, you’ll see a list allowing you to confirm they look correct. On the next screen, you’ll have a chance to modify your order by including other add-ons that weren’t part of your original pledge. Some of these will be familiar from the Kickstarter campaign, but we’ve added a few new ones in response to backer feedback, too. For example, you can now add a print copy of EGM #237 ("The Lost Issue") if you didn’t pledge for one initially (or, if you did, you can add a second copy if you’d like one to read and one to collect). You can also pledge for an extra print copy of the upcoming, all-new EGM #265 (or a first copy, if the rest of your order is digital).
Backers in the Special Collector's Edition, Quartermanniac, and Special Collector's Edition II Turbo tiers who want to upgrade their EGM Covers Poster to a larger 27"x39" size, shipped separately from the rest of their order rolled in a tube, can now optionally choose that as an add-on, too.
And finally, if there’s enough interest, we’ll be offering some new wearable EGM merch, so keep an eye out for that on the add-on page as well.
If your add-on selections require any additional information like a name in the book or contact email, you’ll fill out a few more basic questions to provide those details.
Next, you’ll enter your shipping address. For those backers who may be moving between now and when the book delivers, don’t worry. You’ll be able to return to BackerKit and update your address (as well as other aspects of your order) until we lock everything closer to the ship date (and we’ll give you some advance notice before that happens).
As the final step, if you have any outstanding balance as a result of new add-ons, you’ll need to provide your credit card information to BackerKit. Please note, however, that you will not be charged until we collect funds, closer to shipping.
And if you don’t have any outstanding balance, all you need to do is click to confirm, and you’re all set!
Finally, we wanted to offer one additional note to avoid confusion: The BackerKit survey will not include any of the questions related to backer voting for features and other content in The EGM Compendium or EGM #265. We didn’t want filling out the BackerKit Survey to be a long or complicated process, and we want to keep that fulfillment data separate from the voting data.
We’re in the process of setting up the voting on Google Forms now, and we’ll be sending out links to you via a Kickstarter update separately within the next few weeks.
We’re excited to start the BackerKit process with you and take this important next step in getting The EGM Compendium into your hands! Thanks again to all who have shown their support to EGM and the campaign—it is appreciated!
In order to craft a book like The EGM Compendium, we’ve put a lot of time, effort, and care into going back through every issue of EGM to create a detailed database on the games, industry personalities, writers, and articles that helped fill their pages. All of that data was essential to our goal of making sure that The EGM Compendium would be as definitive of a look back as possible at both the magazine’s decades-long run, and the games industry as a whole during those years.
Before even getting to EGM² or the various additional materials we’re adding to the Digital Archive, we’ve been looking through just over 40,000 pages across EGM’s 264 issues, and filled out over 21,000 rows of information about the content they contained. With so many pieces of individual data to sift through, we knew we needed to build tools to properly contextualize it all. In doing so, what we found was that we were also creating a powerful resource unlike anything else available, not just for gaming magazines but for any magazine ever.
Once we open up access to the Digital Archive, you’ll be able to go back and read through the pages of any of EGM’s issues in digital form, or additional materials like Buyer’s Guides and EGM² once they’re added. More and more in recent years, we’ve seen too many examples of video game magazines or sources of gaming history suddenly going away, so we consider the preservation of EGM’s print run a vital piece of our efforts.
The thing is, while letting you go back and read those issues digitally is important, there’s also so much more we can do with the platform we’ve created. The Digital Archive isn’t just about reading that content from EGM’s past—it’s also about searching for and finding it in a powerful new way.
At a base level, once logged in to the Digital Archive, you’ll be able to browse a list of every issue of EGM, pick any that you’d like, and then get an overview of what that issue contained. Press a button to jump straight into the news or rumors sections, check out a rundown of its reviews (complete with editors’ names and scores), or scroll through a list of features and previews to find the exact one you want to read—all before even looking at a single page of the magazine itself.
If you don’t know where to start, you can head over to one of our pre-built Indexes. There, you can dig through the archives for everything we’ve cataloged relating to a specific console, every time we interviewed a particular developer, all of the work of your favorite editor, and more. Most importantly, all of those options aren’t just focused on the biggest, most expected names and brands—we’ve also cataloged all the way down to those companies, game releases, writers, or interviewees whose appearance you might never have noticed when having so many pages to look through.
And, perhaps most exciting of all, we’ve built a powerful search engine to let you hone in on articles to an incredible degree. Want a list of the many times that Mortal Kombat showed up on the cover of EGM? Simple. Want to check out every preview we did for a Final Fantasy game where we talked to famed creator Hironobu Sakaguchi? You got it. What to see every Sega Genesis title that saw its U.S. localization canceled between the time we received the game for review and when the issue with said review hit? Yes, that’s an actual thing—and you can find the one game that fits that specific criteria using the Digital Archive.
For us, preserving the long history of EGM as a print publication isn’t just about making sure the issues themselves aren’t lost to time—it’s also about making sure that everything written within them isn’t lost in the shuffle. All of that comes through a huge amount of effort we’ve put into hand-cataloging the editorial contents of each issue, even when the details required to do so didn’t come easily. There have been more than a few times when a game only ever existed in the pages of EGM as a singular screenshot with no text to go along with it. To the extent that we’ve been able to, we’ve worked to track down names, platforms, and company details for even those small inclusions, so that you’ll be able to find them through search and on the issue page.
We can’t wait to tell (and show) you more about both the Digital Archive and The EGM Compendium itself, and we can’t thank you enough for your support in making sure that the long, rich history of EGM is accessible and modernized in a way that will help it endure into the future.
QUICK UPDATE ON BACKER KIT: Before we head off into the weekend, we also wanted to give you a quick update on the implementation of BackerKit. We are now planning to deploy the form that will allow you to provide your mailing address and other information pertaining to your reward tier (e.g., the name you want to appear in the book) sometime in the next two weeks. We will provide another update when this happens.
Please note: EGM Digital Archive design and functionality subject to change.
With 2025 officially underway, we’re hard at work on every aspect of The EGM Compendium, and making great progress on all fronts. We wanted to provide a detailed overview to our backers of where we’re at and where we’re headed.
Let’s start with the most important update: For reasons we'll outline below, we need to push back our original delivery estimate of February. You can now expect your physical copy of The EGM Compendium to ship this summer, with the current shipment date now planned for late July 2025.
The EGM Digital Archive currently remains on track for our original launch window, Once we finish the final few tweaks and tests, we'll update you with specific launch plans, including the date we'll open access and how you'll be able to set up your account.
We understand the delay of the book will be disappointing to some, and we’d like to be as transparent as possible about the reasons.
In short, the great success of the campaign brought with it some new and unexpected challenges, most crucially with printing. Prior to launching the campaign, we had planned to have a print run of a few thousand copies and had negotiated a time slot with our intended printer to produce the book on a schedule that fit conveniently during an open space in their schedule. As the response to the Compendium grew, we found ourselves outgrowing this schedule and the printer we had originally selected. The amount of time they required to produce a book of this size, in this quantity, made it impossible for them to honor the original timeline. Additionally, they informed us they would no longer be able to produce some features of the book internally, which would’ve complicated production immensely. These realities have made it necessary for us to find an alternate home for the printing of the project.
The good news is that we’ve already connected with several large printers capable of producing the highest-quality product much sooner than the original printer would have been able to do it and without requiring the sub-contracting of certain elements. While we have been given specific schedules from each of the printers who are in consideration on the project and have been assured that the July delivery date will be met, we want you to know that equally important to us is making sure that they are capable of delivering only the very highest quality, and we’re confident in the short list of printers we’ve compiled.
While the change in printers is the primary driver behind the delay, we should also acknowledge that the success of the campaign has made the Compendium an even more ambitious project, and your support has inspired us to go beyond our initial plans, and even beyond the announced the stretch goals. You can expect more interviews, more pages, and more gaming history throughout the book. As such, the added time required to switch printers will also enable to better deliver on this more ambitious vision and make the best possible version of the book without rushing. You can read more specific details on our progress below, but know that the extra time will be put to good use. We can also now confirm that your copy will be more than 350 pages, up from our original estimate.
This is a project that is literally 35 years in the making, and we’re hopeful that all of you understand that we’re implementing this delay for the right reasons.
Note that while it will take a bit longer to get the book done, we are already gearing up for production of the other rewards and are looking at ways to deliver those items as they are completed. As we get closer to the start of actual fulfillment we will of course keep you in the loop and provide updates and pictures of the final products and keep you clued in on the shipping dates for your rewards.
We’ve received countless words of encouragement and thanks for keeping the project open to those who are still finding the campaign during the Late Pledges phase.
However, we’ll be ending the "Special Collector’s Ed. (Late Pledge)" tier at the end of this month. At the same time, we will open up voting for the sections of the book requiring community input to start that process.
We’ll still be leaving late pledges for the Digital and Physical editions of the book itself live until we’re closer to shipping, but we’ll need to turn those off eventually too. We’ll be sure to provide advance notice before we do.
We continue to receive a lot of emails from first-time Kickstarter users who have questions about how to provide the address of where to send their rewards, how they’ll be able to add their name or input into the book, and similar requests.
The answer to all of these questions is that we’ll collect this information via a Backer Survey, which will go out directly to the email address you used when you signed up for your Kickstarter account. That’s when you’ll be able to provide us with a mailing address, let us know what name you want in the book and how you want it shown (whether it is your own or someone else’s), and to provide additional feedback on other content that will be in the book or the new issue of EGM.
Today, we can also announce that we’ll be working with BackerKit for our post-launch support, including our Backer Surveys. While many of you may be familiar with BackerKit, if you’re a first-time Kickstarter backer, we’d like to share a little bit about what this means for you.
First, you don’t need to do anything. BackerKit ties into Kickstarter directly, so you don’t need to register a dedicated BackerKit account. When the Backer Survey goes out, it’ll go to the email attached to the Kickstarter account you used to back the Compendium—the same one that received this update. Instead of getting that email from Kickstarter, however, the notice will come from BackerKit. We plan on sending these surveys out in the first week of February and will provide another update before that process begins.
Second, BackerKit offers much greater flexibility. With BackerKit, you can update your responses as needed instead of responses being locked in the way the native Kickstarter backer surveys work. If your address changes after you fill out the survey, but before we ship your book, for instance, you can go in and update it yourself with BackerKit without having to contact us directly.
Third, BackerKit will allow you to modify your pledges. Whether you backed during the original campaign and have decided you want to upgrade to a higher tier, or if you’re a Late Pledge who missed out on the chance to purchase an additional add-on, BackerKit will allow you to be able to fix that. We’ll be offering at least some add-ons as BackerKit upgrades to address the most common requests we’ve seen and will share more details soon. We may even be able to offer new campaign rewards for interested backers to purchase.
Keep in mind, you have zero obligation to upgrade your order. If you’re happy with what you’ve already pledged for, you don’t need to modify anything and your current order will be fulfilled as you have presently pledged it. But if you do want to add something from the available add-ons, that will now be possible.
Finally, BackerKit will amplify our ability to provide customer support. While communicating with all of you has been one of the highlights of running the campaign, it’s also quite a lot of work to tackle every incoming request and concern. BackerKit’s data management tools and support team will make it much easier for our team to answer your questions.
We also wanted to update you on our progress on the Compendium.
To date, we’ve completed almost all of the roundtables and interviews with past editors and contributors, and we’ve also added a few more as surprises. At present, we’ve spoke with nearly three dozen past contributors from throughout EGM’s editorial history (not counting any of the industry figures or influencers) and have amassed almost 17 and a half hours of total interview audio. It’s been truly amazing to witness the reunions of each era of EGM, and we’re excited to bring you in on the fun when the book launches.
During the course of our interviews, we’ve also collected some great material on behind-the-scenes stories of how specific issues came together that we can’t wait to share in the pages of the Compendium.
We’re considering releasing a preview chapter of the book to backers in PDF form to offer a sense of how the final book will look and read. Let us know in the comments if this is something you’d like to see, and we’ll put it together!
The initial version of the Digital Archive is nearly ready for prime time. Searching past issues of EGM is super easy and the platform grants an incredible amount of control over what and how you search. You will also be able to download entire issues for your own personal archive or simply read them issue by issue. You can see some early examples of how the Archive works in the images above.
At the moment, we’re finishing up our final step in indexing all 264 issues of EGM so you can discover every piece of coverage in a modern, interconnected way. We’re also putting some final polish on our tech solutions for navigating and displaying the issue content, to ensure you’ll have a better user experience when you get a chance to log on for yourself.
We’ll continue to add features and functionality after launch, including a few of the more time-intensive stretch goals (such as the full text conversion and the EGM² index). These updates will roll out in the weeks and months that follow the initial introduction of the Archive.
We’re happy to announce that one of our stretch goals, the new Review Index, is finished and will let you easily view and sort through every review score in EGM history, and best of all it’ll be open to all our backers—even those who didn’t pledge for Digital Archive access.
We’re thrilled to report that we’re working with the Video Game History Foundation to add even more content to the EGM Digital Archive. Frank Cifaldi, who runs the Foundation, has been super helpful in providing immaculate scans of certain EGM content, including an archived and indexed collection of inserts that were packaged with EGM, that will now be incorporated into the Archive. These inserts are an amazing addition to the Archive and were the only place certain games—on display at industry shows like E3—were ever seen or reported on. We encourage everyone to check out the amazing work Frank and his team are doing to help preserve gaming history.
That’s all for today. We’ve already got additional updates in the works for the weeks ahead, as we start sending out the Backer Survey, solicit your input for the community-driven aspects of the book, and gear up to launch the Digital Archive. Expect to hear from us again soon.
Until then, we want to invite you to respond to this update or send us a message if you have any questions. You have helped create a wonderful community of fans, and we appreciate your support of EGM and this campaign.