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The Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium
Over its 25-year print run, Electronic Gaming Monthly captivated tens of millions of readers around the globe with its opinionated, fearless, and often irreverent coverage of the world of video games. The Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium is an ambitious new book that honors that legacy, combining meticulously curated excerpts from the magazine with new insights and never-before-told stories to explore gaming's evolution, from its earliest frontiers to today's modern landscape.
The EGM Compendium is more than just a book; it's a journey through time, spanning over 320 pages of rich video game history, from the well known to the largely forgotten to the downright bizarre. The Compendium charts the development of the most noteworthy games, franchises, cultural shifts, and industry trends from throughout EGM’s quarter-century of publication. New insights from the editors who worked on the magazine offer a behind-the-scenes look at the magazine’s creation, while contributions from gaming industry veterans and modern influencers add richer context.
The EGM Compendium is more than just a book; it's a journey through time, spanning over 320 pages of rich video game history, from the well known to the largely forgotten to the downright bizarre. The Compendium charts the development of the most noteworthy games, franchises, cultural shifts, and industry trends from throughout EGM’s quarter-century of publication. New insights from the editors who worked on the magazine offer a behind-the-scenes look at the magazine’s creation, while contributions from gaming industry veterans and modern influencers add richer context.
368 pages, ebook
Published December 1, 2025
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 17, 2026
THE ELECTRONIC GAMING MONTHLY COMPENDIUM is more than a history of EGM the magazine. It’s a history of the industry. Twenty-five years, 264 issues, several console generations, countless game releases—all documented across this 350-some-page book.
The book’s flow is perfect. Each page—except those dedicated to special features, which I’ll get into later—is dedicated to a single issue of the magazine. Each issue’s page provides a snapshot of that issue’s contents: its game of the month, its interviews, and its news. Taken together, the 264 pages dedicated to the 264 issues of EGM chronicle immense amounts of history. The rise and fall of Sega. The rise, fall, and rise again of Nintendo. Sony’s entry into and subsequent dominance of the console space, and the big slipup that almost cost them the PS3/Xbox 360 generation. The rumors that became reality.
In essence, you won’t find a more concise, yet more detailed, overview of the video game industry from the late 1980s through 2014. That’s the best part of the book, but certainly not the only part.
There are special features such as overviews of popular Ips that have made their mark on video games, and games that took multiple hardware generations to either release or be canceled, and more. There’s an ongoing, roundtable-style discussion with past editors of Electronic Gaming Monthly that recounts not just various epochs in the industry, but of magazine publishing—of how EGM went from one of the most respected periodicals of its heyday to, like so many magazines, a book that had to find a new identity more than once as the internet became a bigger and faster source of gaming information.
As someone who documents video game history, I feel THE EGM COMPENDIUM is one of the best chronicles of that history around. Whether you read the physical or digital edition (I read the digital edition on my iPad, since the physical edition hasn’t shipped as of writing this review), it deserves a place on your shelf.
The book’s flow is perfect. Each page—except those dedicated to special features, which I’ll get into later—is dedicated to a single issue of the magazine. Each issue’s page provides a snapshot of that issue’s contents: its game of the month, its interviews, and its news. Taken together, the 264 pages dedicated to the 264 issues of EGM chronicle immense amounts of history. The rise and fall of Sega. The rise, fall, and rise again of Nintendo. Sony’s entry into and subsequent dominance of the console space, and the big slipup that almost cost them the PS3/Xbox 360 generation. The rumors that became reality.
In essence, you won’t find a more concise, yet more detailed, overview of the video game industry from the late 1980s through 2014. That’s the best part of the book, but certainly not the only part.
There are special features such as overviews of popular Ips that have made their mark on video games, and games that took multiple hardware generations to either release or be canceled, and more. There’s an ongoing, roundtable-style discussion with past editors of Electronic Gaming Monthly that recounts not just various epochs in the industry, but of magazine publishing—of how EGM went from one of the most respected periodicals of its heyday to, like so many magazines, a book that had to find a new identity more than once as the internet became a bigger and faster source of gaming information.
As someone who documents video game history, I feel THE EGM COMPENDIUM is one of the best chronicles of that history around. Whether you read the physical or digital edition (I read the digital edition on my iPad, since the physical edition hasn’t shipped as of writing this review), it deserves a place on your shelf.
Displaying 1 of 1 review