Series Finale - The Real Way to End a Magazine

Electronic Gaming Monthly (1988 - 2009)

It featured cool artwork and Street Fighter, that's all you can ask for from a surprise final issue!

Brief Synopsis: Electronic Gaming Monthly (or EGM, if you're lazy) is one of the most influential game magazines of all time. It introduced the industry to proper game reviews, featured a gossip column long before anybody else and had an uncanny knack of getting the scoop months before anybody else. EGM is best known for their colorful cast of characters, including Quartermann, Sushi-X, Seanbaby and the always contrarian, Shane Bettenhausen. And while it was rarely perfect, game journalists the world over will always have a soft spot for Electronic Gaming Monthly.

How It Ended: After mentioning Street Fighter II on 17 different covers (see: When Street Fighter II Met EGM), it felt fitting that Electronic Gaming Monthly finished its run with a Street Fighter IV cover story. Because of the times, this final EGM was small and frail. It

Shane Bettenhausen, before leaving EGM for Ignition!

only reviewed a handful of games and definitely looked like it was knocking on heaven's door. While it was nice to see Street Fighter grace the cover one last time, there are millions of fans who want one last issue to give them a feeling of closure.

Brand New Series Finale: In what can only be considered an epic finish to one of the longest running game magazines, the final episode discloses how each of the magazine's editors dies. We see Shane Bettenhausen get in his car, shed a tear, put Sia on the CD player and then drive off, imagining how each and every one of his friends passes on. It starts with a flash-forward to the year 2012, where a confused Microsoft fanboy kills Greg Ford thinking that he was actually Shane. Three years later James "Milkman" Mielke is beheaded by a flying chicken while standing in line to buy the next iteration of the iPhone. David Ellis trips and falls doubt the Grand Canyon, but keeps himself alive until five days later when a coyote finds him paralyzed and finishes the job. Jeremy Parish dies in his sixties, after he confuses his import SwanCrystal for a bar of soap and electrocutes himself. And then there's Shane, who drives off into the sunset knowing that he'll never die. For Shane isn't actually human, instead he's a Highlander, and there can only be one.

NEXT Generation (1995 - 2002)

By this issue, NEXT Generation had become a shell of its former glory!

Brief Synopsis: At one time NEXT Generation was known as the industry magazine, a publication that wasn't afraid to look at the real issues facing game development. Sure there were previews and reviews, but the magazine's main focus was centered on looking at how games were made, who made them and why we buy them. It was an incredibly deep magazine, perhaps too deep for the average game consumer who just wants pictures of whatever's hot. The magazine had a script rule against posting cheat codes and would rarely run fluff pieces about celebrities. Unfortunately the magazine ended up morphing into an almost unrecognizable beast, but not before publishing some of the greatest video game articles ever written.

How It Ended: After seven years and 85 issues, NEXT Generation (known at that time as Next Gen) ended the same way they started: by giving its readers questionable reviews. While Next Gen had no problem praising the derivative fighter Dead or Alive 3 a five star rating, they finished out their run just in time to give the genre-creating Grand Theft Auto III a mere four star score. Four stars? This from the magazine that said that

Grand Theft Auto III > Dead or Alive 3

NFL Fever 2002 was one of the Xbox's best games. With its gripping piece on movie games and the 100 word review of Windows XP, it's no wonder NEXT Generation had its cord pulled in 2002.

Brand New Series Finale: After finally striking a deal with NBC over their NEXT Generation sitcom pilot, the magazine editors decide to celebrate in Paris, France. Unfortunately Matt Casamassina was too excited and damaged the plane by jumping up and down. They touch down in Latham, Massachusetts, which is where they witness a carjacking. Unfortunately, instead of taking the time to help the poor motorist, the NEXT Generation editors decide to review what they just witnessed, giving it only three stars. The victim notices the group of editors and decides to sue them for inactivity. A lengthy court case ensues where every person NEXT Generation had ever wronged had a chance to get up and speak their mind. We had Sega's Tom Kalinske claiming that they took him out of context, a bunch of battered Nintendo fanboys that claimed the magazine was pro-Sony and this one guy who wouldn't shut up about how the magazine changed their format for a year and a half. It all ends with the editors losing their case and forced to live in the same jail cell. Jennifer Tsao starts to review this situation, but everybody else tells her to shut up and they go on grumbling about how unfair the Massachusetts laws are.

Hardcore Gamer Magazine (2005 - 2008)

Like Electronic Gaming Monthly, Hardcore Gamer Magazine's final issue featured Street Fighter IV!

Brief Synopsis: Born out of the ashes of Die Hard Game Fan, Hardcore Gamer Magazine reunited Tim Lindquist, Terry Wolfinger and Greg Off. These three editors created a somewhat similar magazine that focused on the admittedly geekier side of the games industry. Such topics would include hard to find arcades around the world, local game tournaments and more than a few pages devoted to obscure anime releases. They also featured standard news and reviews, but the real draw was the freeform approach to what was always meant to be a hardcore gamers' rag.

How It Ended: You could see the death of Hardcore Gamer Magazine a mile away. For starters, the magazine switched from shipping monthly to a quarterly. It also started to get smaller and smaller, often only reviewing one or two games. The focus was places squarely on the online side, where the editors would post reviews and blog entries. With almost no fanfare, HGM decided to abandon the magazine and focus

Don't worry kids, the Monitaur will never die!

exclusively on strategy guides, including one for Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?

Brand New Series Finale: Happy with their Street Fighter IV-themed issue, the entire Hardcore Gamer Magazine staff gets a keg, orders pizza and drinks the night away. It was the wildest party you've ever seen, with loony animated characters hanging from the ceiling and this guy who managed to get a TV stuck on his head. By 3 AM everybody had passed out. There was a silence in the office as everybody slept through the night drunk as can be. In the very next scene editor Greg Off wakes up to discover that he's not in the same office. He wonders where everybody went. Where is the alcohol? Where is the Monitaur? And that's when E. Storm, Nick Rox and The Enquirer walk in. It's at that very moment that Greg realizes that he's not in the Hardcore Gamer Magazine offices; he's still working on Die Hard Game Fan. It's the 1990s and those 34 issues of HGM were nothing but a bad dream. Of course Nintendo isn't going to call their motion-based console the Wii, that's just stupid. That should have been a tip-off right there. And Sony would never launch a console at $600; that just defies all logic. It was all a dream. Greg can get back to working on his true love, Die Hard Game Fan.

Incite Video Gaming (1999 - 2000)

This is the typical Incite cover - when it's not a hot chick on the cover, it's a WWE wrestler!

Brief Synopsis: Do you like video game magazines but hate all of the pesky video game coverage? Do you want to hear about celebrities and their video game habits? Would you rather see women in bikinis than screenshots of video games? Then Incite is the perfect magazine for you. Back in the early 2000s, Incite was the only video game magazine whose second focus was video games. This was a magazine about celebrities, plain and simple. There were articles about game systems celebrities owned, features where celebrities competed against each other in video games and interviews with celebrities that had some loose connection to something game related. And then there were the interviews with celebrities that didn't play games, weren't in video games and had nothing to do with video games. In other words, it was the soft core version of Maxim (which is already the soft core version of Playboy).

Without Incite Video Gaming, who will Fred Durst play Chu Chu Rocket against?

How It Ended: When Incite Video Gaming folded it left a lot of eager D-list celebrities unsure of what to do. What would all of those no-name wrestlers do now? And if Fuel and Limp Bizkit went head to head at Power Stone 2, would anybody care? Without Incite there to report on it we'll never know. And so it ended - not with a band, but with a whimper.

Brand New Series Finale: It's a celebrity filled episode of Incite Video Gaming. In this star-studded finale, the editors are visited by a steady flow of WWE wrestlers and D-list starlets. Later the Foo Fighters show up to rock the office, and then Hugh Hefner comes out with a fresh batch of nude (albeit skin-painted) Playmates. And then they all sit down and play Halo. Around the half way mark, Jar Jar Binks (of Star Wars fame) jumps through the window and makes a real scene. Moments later he's thrown back out the window by David Hasselhoff, Fred Durst and that guy that plays Mini Me in all of those Austin Powers movies. The editorial staff continues to celebrate, then sobers up and realizes that they can go on without Incite Video Games. In a final stirring speech editor Greg Rau wonders if their magazine changed anybody's life. It didn't, Greg. It really didn't.

Official Dreamcast Magazine (1999 - 2001)

It's always best to lead off your Sega magazine with a picture of Sonic, unless you're a Saturn magazine that is!

Brief Synopsis: Like Mega Play, The Super NES Buyers Guide and Turbo Play before it, the Official Dreamcast Magazine was a system-specific magazine. This time around they were focused on the Dreamcast, Sega's ill-fated final stab at the hardware market. Like many magazines of its day, the Official Dreamcast Magazine featured demos and videos burned to a GD-ROM. For twelve short months, the Official Dreamcast Magazine was the thing to read if you couldn't get enough information about your beloved Chu Chu Rocket-playing machine.

How It Ended: Unfortunately the publishers of the Official Dreamcast Magazine didn't have much of a choice in how they ended their twelve issue run. You don't argue with Sega when they decide to call it a day and get out of the hardware business. And so the magazine was canceled, along with dozens of high quality Dreamcast games. I hate to lump the Official Dreamcast Magazine in with the likes of Incite and

If you were the "ultimate," then why didn't you make it out of the 1990s?

NEXT Generation, but when you hook your wagon up to somebody else's star, you have to suffer the consequences if things go wrong.

Brand New Series Finale: With third party support abandoning ship and two more consoles (GameCube and Xbox) ready to jump into the battle at any time, it looked like everything was doomed. But not if the Official Dreamcast Magazine has anything to say about it. Battered and bruised, the staff gets a sudden burst of energy and starts calling all of their contacts. After several hours of negotiations, the Official Dreamcast Magazine was ready to confirm that Sega and Electronic Arts were teaming up for an exclusive line of football games. This would be the one thing that would save the Sega Dreamcast and keep the Official Dreamcast Magazine's hopes alive. Unfortunately this news came a little too late and Sega was still forced to bow out of the system war. Because of their heroic acts in the final hours, the staff of Official Dreamcast Magazine were able to find allegiance with other system-specific magazines, like OXM and the Official PlayStation Magazine. In the final moments, we see the Dreamcast's light power-up and hear that all familiar sound of the console turning on. The Dreamcast is alive ... and then it all cuts to black.

Video Games & Computer Entertainment (1988 - 1996)

That is definitely not the actual size of the Lynx!

Brief Synopsis: This subdued alternative to EGM and GamePro was published by Larry Flynt Publications (no joke) and featured some of the most questionable reviews around. For example, can you think of any other magazine that didn't immediately fall in love with Street Fighter II? It took Video Games & Computer Entertainment the better part of a year to warm up to this Capcom classic. Five years after launching the magazine, the magazine dropped their computer coverage and renamed the magazine Video Games. It's good to see that they decided to stick with the generic magazine name theme.

How It Ended: After having mild success with the renamed Video Games magazine, the editors decided to call it quits and move on to greener pastures. But they had reason to keep

The reboot may have been more attractive, but it was still the same terrible magazine!

their head up high. The magazine managed to have two different spin-offs (the short-lived Turbo Play and the generically titled, Tips & Tricks) and even got the scoop about Reptile long before EGM or GamePro. Okay, so they aren't exactly Woodward and Berstein, but you take the small victories when you can.

Brand New Series Finale: Surprising everybody, the finale of Video Games & Computer Entertainment featured a half-drunk Andy Eddy retelling the story about what led him to lead this magazine's staff. He then explains that the last few years (the "Video Games" years, as they would come to be known) were all fiction; they were nothing more than idealized figments of his imagination where the magazine had won the lottery and became superstars. Unfortunately that's not what happened. Instead, the magazine continued to lose money and suck the will to live out of everybody that came close. Unfortunately the second in command, Michael Davila, died of heart failure, which devistated the staff and pushed them into an emotionally fragile state. We also learn that Catherine Ann Rundell is a lesbian, which is why she was having such a hard time meeting the right guy.

GameNOW (1994 - 2004)

I was hard pressed to find a GameNOW magazine that didn't have some sort of anime or licensed cartoon on the cover (this is the best I could do)!

Brief Synopsis: Talk about a storied history. Once upon a time there was a magazine called Electronic Gaming Monthly. In the early part of the 1990s, EGM's publishers decided that they could make twice as much money if they switched to a bi-weekly schedule. To do this they created EGM2, a preview-only publication that would eventually become Expert Gamer. Expert gamer would rule the roost between 1998 and 2001, when it would become, you guessed it, GameNOW (as opposed to GameLATER, which is my plan). GameNOW lasted 27 issues, about half of what Expert Gamer and EGM2 were capable of doing.

How It Ended: It all ended in January 2004 with a blow-out of ... Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective? Okay, so a Game Boy Advance game

The dude from BlackThorne isn't the only one that hates the name GameNOW!

doesn't make for the most gripping cover story, but at least it wasn't issue 25, which featured the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The best you could have hoped for was the penultimate issue, billed as a very special Final Fantasy issue. Outside of the crummy cover story, there was no obvious clues the GameNOW staff was about to be UnemployedNOW.

Brand New Series Finale: In a surprisingly emotional finale, Dan Leahy is diagnosed with an incurable disease. Editors new and old band together for the first time to give support and help Dan overcome this affliction. This is the first time that staffers from EGM2 and Expert Gamer have worked together towards a common interest, giving fans around the country a chance to see their favorite editors doing what they do best. Thankfully Dan overcomes is ailment and lives happily ever after. They don't really explain how he was cured of his incurable disease, but this is a finale, does logic really matter?

Games for Windows: The Official Magazine (1981 - 2008)

Just as long as Jeff Green is there ...

Brief Synopsis: It started its life as Computer Gaming World, a magazine founded all the way back in 1981. A quarter century later Ziff Davis decided to change the name to a more Microsoft-friendly, Games for Windows: The Official Magazine. While the loyal readers stayed put, the editors would regularly lament that many new readers were worried that they would no longer be impartial. The good news was that GFW did stay impartial, unfortunately that came at the cost of a canceled computer game magazine.

How It Ended: It didn't end with a final issue or much of an explanation, instead Ziff Davis decided to close down Games for Windows: The Official Magazine and move everybody to the online side of

The next big game, just not necessarily the next big COMPUTER game!

things. This announcement came via a news post on 1up and a podcast, where each of the staffers took turns consoling each other. Soon after re-launching the official Games for Windows magazine website, Jeff Green and Shawn Elliot left 1up and Ziff Davis was bought by UGO. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Brand New Series Finale: Who can turn the world on with his smile? Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? Well it's you Jeff, and you should know it. With each glance and every little movement you show it. That was the story of Jeff Green, the geezer gamer who ping-ponged his way around the 1up network. Jeff was the man behind Games for Windows: The Official Magazine, which, at one point, was known as Computer Gaming World. In this finale issue of GFW, Jeff is told that the magazine is about to be canceled and that most of his staff would be fired. He is given the option to relocate to the online 1up Network, but knows in his heart that it will never be as much fun as his old job. In the final moments he says goodbye to his favorite magazine and leaves the office one last time. He walks away with his head held high, confused at why everybody but Ted Baxter was let go.