As most of you probably heard, EGM has been shuttered as a side-consequence of 1up.cop joining UGO.com. It's hard even now to write it, and actually believe it.

EGM.. has been... shuttered?

To be honest, I was surprised at how much of a loss it felt like when I got the news. EGM was the magazine I looked forward to getting in the mail when I was young. It always had the coolest first looks at Japanese games, which always came out months and years before their American counterparts (Capcom included.) EGM probably also ran about 58 Street Fighter covers..

It became a goal, a dream, of mine to work for that magazine one day. Right when the internet and web started to become a usable place to get information, I wrote tons of web articles, pestered lots of people on #irc and at CES, and finally I got my break. I began working for then Sendai Media in 1996.

EGM was completely different back then, but many things remained the same. It was a fantastic experience, and an honor to work for a magazine I grew up loving as a kid. I finally left Ziff Davis and my Senior Editor spot in 2002 to try my hand at genuine game development. (Shane Bettenhausen took my open spot, and he did an awesome job with it!) 7 years later, just shy of EGM's 20th anniversary, the magazine is gone, without so much dignity of an official good bye issue.

James Mielke, the last EGM Editor-in-Chief is someone I've known for a very long time. He'll go on to bigger and better things, as will the rest of the staff, I'm sure. But what won't change is that an instutition, an era, has uncerimoniously ended.