If you’ve been following the saga of the new EGM (the long-loved videogame magazine that was shuttered last January, only to be resurrected), here’s a nice new tidbit for you. Humor columnist Sean Reilly (Seanbaby himself) will join the new project. The best part? The old column “The Rest of the Crap” will again grace the print and digital pages of EGM.

Here’s a bit of fantastic news for fans of the long-loved (but shuttered) gaming mag Electronic Gaming Monthly. The magazine is slated for a resurrection, and the good folks at Bitmob (which is run by ex-EGM personalities like Dan Hsu and Demian Linn) are going to join forces with the new/old project.

Let’s take a quick break away from all the E3 2009 headlines for an uplifting story about death and resurrection. Last January (2008) the final issue of EGM magazine graced store shelves after 1UP was acquired by the Hearst Corporation. We all had a moment of silence to remember the legacy of the 20 year publication and marked it as another victim of a failing economy coupled with a growing irrelevance of print media.

Our weeping would be sort lived as almost five months later we learn EGM would be making its glorious return in the second half of 2009.

The magazine industry is notoriously tough to keep a publication afloat in, as evidenced by the end of Electronic Gaming Monthly. Magazines able to stay in print will have face another economic issue as two major distributors begin raising rates.

Folio reports that the distributor responsible for 20 percent of mass market magazine distribution has announced a 7 cents-per-copy increase on all copies distributed. In addition…

With the demise of Electronic Gaming Monthly earlier this month, and the continuing decline of print magazines in general, a lot of industry folks are wondering whether print has much of a future in this tech and news oriented business. Joystiq has a very interesting post up about the state of gaming mags, predicting that the only print magazines that will still be around in a few years are the ones with the support of a large (and lucrative) publisher – like Nintendo Power.

Here’s one piece of news I never could’ve predicted: the ever-so-opinionated 1Up/EGM editor Shane Bettenhausen has joined developer Ignition Entertainment after leaving 1Up. The super-knowledgeable (and uber-competitive) ex-journo will now be the Director of Business Development for the small developer/publisher (best known for the fairly awesome Mercury Meltdown titles). He’ll be making all sorts of high level decisions, including what games the company will publish, according to Go Nintendo.

Ah, the bittersweetness and sadness surrounding the death of Electronic Gaming Monthly (as was my – and so many gamers’ – favorite print magazine). Ex EGM editor-in-chief Dan Hsu (Shoe) and ex senior editor Crispin Boyer recently put up a long, hilarious reflection of the magazine’s ups and downs, from each of their 12-year tenures with the publication. Each of them left last year (perhaps they saw the writing on the wall…), and they’ve been commenting on the industry from their fantastic, no-holds-barred Sore Thumbs blog.

Man, what a week to go on vacation. I returned back to the states yesterday, all rested from a nice little tropical getaway, and what do I find – that my favorite magazine of all time has been abruptly canned, along with a huge portion of the network that it was part of. I know that everyone has heard about the demise of Electronic Gaming Monthly, and about the massive firing of 1Up Network staff (among them, most of the people responsible for the phenomenal podcasts and video content on the site), a result of the network being bought by UGO (part of the Hearst company).

We are sorry to interrupt (or at least emotionally hijack) CES coverage but our earlier report about UGO acquiring the 1UP network has been officially confirmed.

Properties sold include: 1UP.com, Mycheats.com, Gametab.com and GameVideos.com. Filefront will reportedly become part of the PCMag Digital Network.

Unfortunately, however, things won’t be going over as smoothly as we first thought. Gamasutra got a hold of an internal email in which Ziff Davis CEO Jason Young says that “more scale is necessary to effectively compete in this market segment”.

To start with, Electronic Gaming Monthly, better known as EGM, will officially cease printing…

We know that Ziff Davis, the company that owns sites including 1UP, MyCheats and Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine fell on some hard times recently. Speculation around the web says that UGO is planning to buy the 1UP Network along with most of its properties.

The fate of EGM is still uncertain but it doesn’t help ease our minds to find out that the December 2008 issue of EGM in Spanish, which features The Watchmen: The End is Nigh, will be the last issue.

Adrián Carbajal, the soon-to-be former editorial director of EGM en Español cited reasons for the magazine’s cancellation…