Trivia / Electronic Gaming Monthly

• Creator Backlash: They've had quite a few bad covers they've gone through, but the most maligned of them is probably the time they highlighted Bubsy on the front cover.
  • Their July 1997 issue featured three cover variants: Fighting Force, Gex 2: Enter the Gecko, and Apocalypse. This was due to the magazine being pressured by multiple publishers to hype up their games, with Activision's hard push of Apocalypse being the worst they had to endure. Dan Hsu has gone on to say that this was the lowest point of the magazine in retrospect, and this moment ended up causing the editors to reconsider how they dealt with publishers in the future.
  • EGM began to peel away from cover stories that were also exclusive first reviews after 2002's State of Emergency, which received middling scores from the reviewers in the same issue that had a blowout main story about it. The magazine had planned to cover it months in advance, once it was revealed to be publisher Rockstar's follow-up to the previous fall's Grand Theft Auto III, only to find out it was no GTA III.
  • Crispin Boyer once recalled being made to rewrite a preview article about Contra: Legacy of War after the editors felt it came across too negatively, and has gone on to say that he would "surrender himself to a warcrimes tribunal" to apologize for it.
• Creator's Favorite Game: Mortal Kombat was a big hit with the magazine's crew in the early 90's, and the series got a lot of love and coverage. In 1995, the year Mortal Kombat 3 was released, only five of the twelve covers that year did NOT have at least one Mortal Kombat character on the cover^note Kano would win for most appearances, appearing on 4 out of 7 covers that year, a feat that would never be duplicated again by a single game in a single year.

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