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This is fantastic news, please support this project. Any members who back this project at the $50 level or higher, send me a PM of the reciept and I will promote you to Lifetime Member over here at Retromags Edit: The project is funded, so I am going to stop the promotions over here. Thank you to everyone who stepped forward. 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. Read More! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egmbook/egmcompendium/description

Speculation markets are the f***ing pits. I have similar feelings about Limited Run Games and Analogue. Adding: To what Kit said about a publisher owning the rights to a magazine but do they own the right to benefit from the work of others? Well, let's say I owned a really nice old car but I decided to leave it outside. Kit sees the car and says that's a shame to let it go dirty like that. So he cleans it every week changes the oil etc. I see him do this but let him do it. People come by to marvel at the car. So then I decide to charge people money to see it, and I don't compensate Kit for his work. I think it would be easy for me as the car owner to say well, thanks for the effort, but I don't owe you anything. Now ME as a person, I would definitely have been paying him the entire time for that service and thanking him for it. But legally I would owe him nothing if I chose to be a jerk.

It's a great idea for all magazine publishers to sell their back catalog digitally. As Phillyman said before, in an ideal world, Retromags shouldn't even need to exist because the publishers would be doing this work themselves. The possible snags: if the official scans are lower quality than our scans, it's going to make it frustrating if we're also forced to remove ours, leaving only the low-quality versions available if the official scans actually ARE our scans, it's going to call all sorts of ethics into question. Is it OK for a publisher to sell their own copyrighted material? Yes, of course. Is it OK for them to sell scans created by other people without asking or compensating them? Dunno if there's legal precedent for that or not. We put a lot of work into creating scans to be shared freely without any benefit to ourselves whatsoever. And any publisher is of course free to tell us to stop sharing scans of their mags. But if any publisher is also free to come along and tell us that we need to stop sharing our scans so that they can take our work and sell it, it's going to make any sensible person question if they should ever bother scanning anything ever again. I don't mind volunteering my time and effort for a non-profit cause. But if I'm working for free and someone else is selling my work for $$$, that makes me a chump and might not even be legal.

Could be. Or could be like the official digital archives of other mags which only reprint the editorial content and are missing all of the advertising or certain other pages. There's only one thing I know for sure: despite some imperfections like you mention, there are a lot of people here who have a genuine passion for preserving mags and have spent untold unpaid hours of their lives doing so to the best of their abilites. Let's hope that whoever is being paid to put the archives together on EGM's side of things shares that passion.

Maybe the PDF scans will include the pages that the scans from RM were missing on issues like 109 and 163.

What is 1 million to the NFL? That is like 5 minutes of profit for them. Also isn't the NFL technically classified as a non profit? Which opens a whole other set of questions.

Fascinating stuff. Something as important as Super Bowl I belongs in the Library of Congress. I guess the legacy of the NFL means very little to the NFL itself, and that's the sad part.

This convo reminds me of this..... Tale of the Tape: the NFL’s Copyright Claim to the Only Known Super Bowl I Recording https://www.kentuckylawjournal.org/blog/tale-of-the-tape-the-nfls-copyright-claim-to-the-only-known-super-bowl-i-recording

That makes sense, and in the end, with so many local copies, none of this stuff will really ever be lost. Also, I need to remember we are talking about video game magazines and not life-saving EpiPens here, and calm down a bit, haha.

John "I'll shill anything" Riggs is attached? Ugh. Oh well. I contributed for the digital version.

It is a two edged sword. Retromags can ask that people do not resell our scans, or provide them as though they did the work. But in the end, once downloaded our files are unencrypted, no DRM, etc....we have no control. But on the same token, the EGM collection is out there. You guys are seeding those torrents. If I am asked to no longer provide EGM, the torrents lose 1 seeder for each torrent, its not like they would stop working.

I think I see what you mean. Since these are free to download, it is kind of like when people uploaded these mags to Internet Archive. It is hard for RM, even the actual scanners, to say hey don't do that, because the rights aren't held here, and it was by the grace of these magazine companies to not send C&D legal threats to RM. So to say "Hey don't use these scans for monetary gain" is hard, because whoever owns the right to EGM would have that final say so. So if they saw original scans, it is like hey we didn't yell at RetroMags to take these down, so we feel ok utilizing them for our own project. I guess looking at it from that perspective -- what EGM would gain from using the scans was already paid in the past by not requesting RM to take the mags down, which they easily could have. I do hope though that they credit the scanners. I think that's a reasonable middle ground. I also want to apologize for assuming the compensation; a tiny amount of the people attached to this project (John Riggs for example) are very slippery folks so I thought oh no, not Philly too, haha.

To be honest, I am not sure one way or another. I do not know if any of our scans are actually being used. But I can assure you I am not getting any funds from the Kickstarter. Here is the thing, in a perfect world, Retromags should not need to exist at all. Publishers should grant access to their past collections of magazines. Unfortunately we know that unless there is a big $$$ behind doing so, that it wont happen.

Ok, since you did not answer my main question, it is obvious that they are using the existing RetroMags scans. Will you be financially or otherwise compensated for giving them these scans?

What I can say at this moment is Retromags has not officially been asked to take down the EGM/EGM2 collection. Until we get that email from EGM, the EGM collection will be up. And just to clear any confusion they are aware of our project.

I feel very conflicted about this. I think about the amount of time, money, and effort the scanners and editors here have put into archiving magazines here on RetroMags without any compensation. Phillyman, can you please clarify if they are using RetroMags scans for this project? If they are, and the original scanners are not being compensated, I do not feel comfortable supporting this endeavor. Even if the scanners themselves are ok with not being compensated, I would obviously respect their decision, but for me personally I still feel it is crummy. Also, can we get clarification if this means you foresee taking EGM off of here, and if so, if in the future if someone does a GamePro Kickstarter will it mean removing GamePro from here too, and so on... Addendum: I wanted to add something based on what Kit said up above here. I agree with what Kit said and want to add to this -- so we take down all the EGMs here. They put out the PDFs. And the PDFs aren't as high quality as the scans here. So now in order for a future fella to read EGM, he has to pay for inferior versions of what was previously freely available in better versions? Addendum 2: " It's the first preservation effort of its kind for any video game magazine."

I have been playing through Final Fight 2 and 3 for a book I am working on.

Looks like they've hit the stretch goal for a new print issue!

Everyone is so helpful, but I can't help but ask. Why @seldan700 do you need a high resolution scan of this particular advertisement. Are you the guy standing on that GameCube in the ad?

Many Code Vaults have those ads too. Also different versions of it.

Welcome to Retromags, @seldan700! The ad you're looking for came from GamePro magazine in 2003. I found the first instance of it in Issue 175, which you can download from the link. It takes up the entire side of page 64, and about 1/4th of page 65, so you would need to do a little digital cut-and-paste to put them together if you wanted the final poster to look exactly like the image you linked. That particular issue was scanned at a resolution of 1661x2200 at 300dpi here, so hopefully that will work well for blowing it up. If you do make it into a poster, be sure to stop back by and show it off for us! *huggles* Areala