ENHANCE! Every cover of EGM, all at once, because why not
ENHANCE! Back in 2008 I was inspired by Pezchasers.net — remember them!? Oh no, sadly their site is gone and the archives are blank — and made up my first collage of EGM covers. Over the next year I expanded the image a few times but in January of 2009 the project took on a different tone. Publisher Ziff Davis Media announced that they had sold off 1UP.com and shut down their print magazine division which at the time meant EGM was as dead as could be. It seemed final at that point so I thought my image was pretty much finished.
Little could I know that EGM founder Steve Harris would purchase the property back from Ziff Davis in May of 2009 and finally relaunch the EGM brand nearly a year later in April of 2010. Long before that point though, I had lost interest in print magazines and was on a steady daily diet of RSS feeds, Twitter, podcasts, and the ever-expanding world of YouTube. Needless to say, I lost complete track of EGM.
So it’s a surprise even to myself why I decided to update the project here in 2023, but I did, and so for the person who wanted to see every cover without having to load up individual wiki pages: I present a zoomable 8000×4000 pixel image only slightly squashed by WordPress compression.
Click that fullscreen button below and start zooming! I left a few notes on specific covers that especially jogged my memory, otherwise just click the marker icon to turn them off. Thanks of course to Retromags for their chronological collection of issues, and the long-lost Pezchasers.net for the original inspiration.
Leave a comment with some favorite covers, bewildering headlines, or EGM memories of your own!
Side Note: Somewhere around 2009 or 2010 I had the idea to print out my collage as a giant poster and admire the lineage of games coverage as it was stuck to my living room wall. But what I hadn’t anticipated was how expensive a really big print from Kinko’s would be so I wound up with a much more meager 11″x14″ size. It was neat but each cover was too tiny to appreciate and so it just got filed into a box somewhere.
- Not bragging, I'm legit amazed that I remember picking up issue No.1 way back in '89
- Most gaming magazines came in plastic bags to keep kids from reading them at the shops without buying. I remember carrying this one around Bigg's, desperate for my folks to finish grocery shopping so I could tear into it in the car
- It was amazing to see a glossy full-size screenshot (scanlines and all) as the cover of a magazine. Somehow this really blew my mind as a kid
- The 90's was all about hologrphics. Need a flashy cover? Stick a hologram on it!
- This cover has given me nightmares
- I was at E3 2001 and I remember seeing this cover a lot around the show
- You think you got it bad, 2002? Wait until Steam takes off
- The first and last time a Gizmondo or Tapwave Zodiac appeared on a magazine cover in a positive light?
- Ok 2007, now it's fair to complain about too many games
- On my original poster this was the last issue in print and EGM's future was in question. I still have this one on-hand somewhere
P.S. I took the original image above and made a 10-minute, loopable video out of it with a chill underwater soundscape that jumps around and zooms in for close-ups on 39 different covers. Pop it on fullscreen if you’re tired of zooming around yourself or chill out with the audio.
