I’m going to hit the rewind button back to roughly 15 years ago.

OK. We’re there. There I am, sitting in my room in front of my PlayStation and Nintendo 64. A magazine rests on my lap. It’s decorated with colorful maps, edgy designs, and contains multiple in-depth strategy guides.

The name looks familiar on the cover. It says EGM, but it has a “2” on the top right corner of it; like a square root of a number. Yup, it’s Electronic Gaming Monthly’s spin-off magazine, EGM².

Fast forward to today.

While EGM is a phenomenal monthly gaming magazine that covers the latest news, previews, and reviews, its sister mag was lovable too. It encompassed the opposite. Its focus was to help their readers master games with numerous walkthroughs, detailed maps, and thousands of codes. (Note: Prior to my subscription, they did do previews, but also covered heavily on imported games – which eventually they brought back later).

The best thing about these books is that they inspired me to write about games. It’s where I began writing my own walkthroughs because I wanted to be just like editors. I wanted to beat games so I could help other people get through them with ease.

I know what you’re going to ask. Why was EGM² so special to me, besides pressuring me to write?

Well, if you take a look back to the time frame of these moments, magazines were a boomin’ business. Print was far more alive than it is currently. GameFAQs didn’t really kick off yet (though it was starting to), and people still considered magazines the number one source for anything games related. Even better, EGM² did multiple guides each month and was more affordable than purchasing an official strategy guide for each title.

When I wrote my first walkthrough, I found out how much effort was needed to create one. It was then I fully recognized that these guys (and gals) put a lot of hard-earned work into their product. Writing a review is one thing, but writing a guide requires a one-hundred percent completion of a game while searching every last inch of its secrets. It’s a step-by-step process in order to get the gamer from the beginning to the end. This includes every puzzle, every weapon, every attribute, every class, every spell, every dungeon, every boss, every…You you get the idea. (Note: If you do enjoy writing walkthroughs or have an itch to begin the habit, I have written some tips for constructing a walkthrough a couple years ago on here).

Each mag had their traditional April Fools’ joke, and EGM²’s 1998 hoax got me good. The staff illustrated a fake screenshot of Akuma (from Street Fighter) as a playable character in Resident Evil 2. It looked so real. The warrior shot fireballs through his hands around the Raccoon City Police Department. To me, no one has ever topped the fiddle to this day.

Click page two for EGM²'s transition into Expert Gamer.