Polygon Exit Interview: Toussaint Egan, Curation Editor
"I truly do believe that the winds are changing, and that worker-owned publications are the future for culture writing"
Welcome to Polygon Exit Interviews, a series of chats with my excellent former Polygon employees who were laid off (along with me) when Valnet purchased the website from Vox Media May 1. We’re going to talk about how these talented people got to Polygon, what they did in their time there, and what they hope is next. I’m going to be publishing quite a few of these in the next few weeks, which will likely result in a higher-than-usual cadence for this newsletter moving forward.
Next up: Toussaint Egan, who worked with me on Polygon’s curation team, consistently recommending interesting titles to our readers. When I first joined Polygon, Toussaint had already gotten the curation section up and running, and working with him over the past few years was a delight. He is one of the most passionate people I know, and any meeting where Toussaint was sharing what he was excited about was always a treat. While Toussaint’s interests span across mediums and genres, he’s well known as an anime expert, and served as a judge for the 2023 and 2024 Crunchyroll Anime Awards.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your pre-Polygon background.
I worked as a freelancer for about six years prior to working at Polygon. I love telling the story about how I first started working at Polygon. It was November 4, 2020, the week of the election, and I got an email from [entertainment editor] Tasha Robinson. She was like, Hey, Would you be interested in applying for this position? And I thought to myself, Well, yes, I would love to have health insurance and money to buy food so I can eat. I was working at a humanities organization part-time doing social media and content stuff. I went through three or four rounds of interviews [at Polygon], and the last one was very, very low key, very chill. I got off that call and was like, Man, that was the best interview I’ve ever had. I feel really, really good about that. And then I turned to my Twitter feed, and it's January 6, it's the day of the Capitol riot. I was just like, what the hell, I'm not getting any work done today. And then that same day, I got my verbal job offer. I thought I don’t know how anything’s gonna go right now. I might as well go for the thing I wanted. Let’s see how long we last.
What did you primarily cover as a freelancer before coming to Polygon?
I started out as a “games journalist.” But I wasn’t satisfied staying in one lane. It took me a while to finally get the gears in motion, but I wrote about games, I wrote about movies, I wrote about television. I wrote about anime for Paste, which was at the time my sort of home base. For them I put together a list of the 100 best anime movies with Toonami founder Jason DeMarco. That was a really big break for me. I did music interviews as well. I just did whatever I was interested in. That naturally dovetailed into my work as a curation editor at Polygon. It was taking my broad umbrella of interests and finding a place for them to fit.
What do you remember about first joining Polygon?
When I came on as an associate curation editor, there wasn't really a curation program proper. That first year was me building the car while driving it. If you can imagine a Ford Jalopy with no chassis on it, it's puttering, and I'm switching out things while I'm turning the gears and driving around. It was learning the ropes of being staff at a daily publication, while also learning how to do the long view planning. It was nerve-wracking at times, but it was exciting, and I really wanted to put my own stamp on the site. And I feel like I did that early on. The first big team pitch-in story I did was because I came from a humanities organization. I got everybody together for National Poetry Month to share their favorite poems, and that was something they had never done before. There was nothing even comparable to that on any other site within Polygon’s orbit.
Looking back, that was indicative of what I wanted to bring to the site. I wanted to bring these unconventional ideas that celebrated underappreciated or underseen quadrants of art that I felt were concentric with video games or with television or with movies, because these are mediums that are essentially combinations of other mediums. They exist in concert with one another, and that's really the mentality that I wanted to bring. Whenever I'm focusing on one thing, I'm also in conversation with other things that are also within its orbit.
Can you run me through your history at Polygon – what roles you had, and what each entailed?
As an associate curation editor, which was more an entry-level editorial position, I was in charge of fleshing out Polygon’s curation program. Rather than reviewing games or movies or television, curation was about tracing those throughlines between the things that might be coming out that week and bringing that in conversation with other work that also might be of interest to our readership. I was always looking for ways to deepen and broaden our coverage, to elicit a deeper appreciation of the things that we cover. That's really what my aim was. If I had to describe what being an associate curation editor or even a curation editor [a promotion Toussaint earned a few years back] was, it's sort of a trifecta between entertainment journalism, arts criticism, and service journalism. Because curation was sort of a roving desk – we crossed across all sections of the site – I was able to dip and dabble in a lot of different things and bring a lot of different perspectives to our coverage in order to bring value to our readership.
Brag about yourself: what’s one thing you’re proud of from your time at Polygon?
I really, really loved the annual Halloween Countdown Calendar. It was a day-by-day countdown of movies, television, and assorted horror media we would run in the lead up to Halloween, starting on October 1. I put a lot of thought and a lot of heart into it. It was started by Chris Plante, who was the editor-in-chief of Polygon. He did it the year prior to when I came on. From there, I took the baton, and iterated on it. You can chart the evolution of my career and my development as both a writer and an editor alongside each yearly iteration of the Halloween Countdown Calendar. Personally, my favorite is the 2023 Halloween Countdown Calendar, just because the 2024 one, while I love it, was scuttled by forces that were outside of my control.
Did you have a favorite interview you conducted during your time at Polygon?
During my last months at Polygon, I did some of the biggest interviews of my career up to this point. I interviewed Flying Lotus for the third time. I interviewed Kazuya Tsurumaki, who was the director of FLCL and the new Mobile Suit Gundam anime. I interviewed Bonobo, who is one of my all-time favorite electronic musicians. I interviewed Eiza González and Aaron Paul. I interviewed Shinichirō Watanabe.
But a few stand out. I’m proud of my Michael B. Jordan interview. I’m proud of my interview with Megan Thee Stallion. I’m very, very proud of my Joaquim dos Santos interview from the Crunchyroll Anime Awards. Just a wonderful person to talk to about animation. And another one I am very proud of, I got to interview Martin Emborg, who is currently a game director at IO Interactive working on the upcoming James Bond game. He was the director of one of my all-time favorite games, Echo. He’s also a production artist who redesigned the puzzle box from the newest Hellraiser movie. It was wonderful to not only pick his brain about the process of redesigning one of the most iconic horror props of all time, but also seeing the story about how Echo directly led to him being hired for that job.
Everyone pitched in across sections at Polygon. What’s a time where you did something outside of your core job responsibilities that you enjoyed?
I’m really proud of my game reviews. I came up as a games critic, and I’ve always taken that to heart. I’m very proud of my Forever Winter review. That was one of the last that I did, and I’m glad I was able to get that game on that site, because I really believe in it. I reviewed Alan Wake 2, which was just a huge lodestone moment for me, because I love that franchise. To not only be able to play it, but to write about it, was a terrific time. I reviewed Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, which I loved. Another game I really enjoyed writing about was Hyper Demon, which was the spiritual successor from the makers of Devil Daggers. To me, that exemplified what I tried to do with games on Polygon, write about ones that normally would not get that type of coverage from a mainstream games publication, and to go beyond Oh, check out this weird thing and engage with the text in a meaningful way.
Do you have a favorite Polygon story or video by someone else?
I will shout from the hills how much I loved Ana Diaz’s Cool WIP series, about games in-progress. I believe there’s still utility, there’s still value in that sort of curation of games that may not have a name, may not have a Steam page, may not have anything other than these small slices of what we see. I bookmarked a lot of those, and I pay attention to these developers.
What do you think is the biggest misconception held by people outside the industry?
I say this as somebody who worked as a freelance game critic and journalist for six years prior to my four years at Polygon. I have never, once in my entire career, come across a payola situation – taking money from a publisher for a positive review. I have never been approached for payola, and I have never encountered somebody else who has been in a payola situation.
Some people just like video games. I know that it could feel like a groupthink at times, where you sort of feel like you're on the outside looking in at all these different publications that are vibing with a particular game when it's just not doing it for you. I totally get that. I vibe with that. Truly, I do, but I do not think that speaks to this insidious mind share, this sort of conspiratorial corruption. I think that it speaks more to our need to have a conversation about what games are and what games can be. And I'm not saying that from this effusive, bubbly games are art! sort of thing, and that's just the end of the conversation. If games are art, then games have uses and gratifications that exist outside of the strict linearity between fun and not fun. They speak to other experiences outside of that. Being able to grasp that, to be able to engage with that in good faith and understand that, I feel like publications nowadays would benefit from that, but more so, people who play games would benefit from that. It can only deepen our appreciation and deepen the kind of experiences that we're able to have when we afford the space of having differences of opinion and to really invest and give faith into publications to be able to go out on a limb and plumb those depths.
What’s your wish for the future of the industry?
No more private equity. Barring that, I truly do believe that the winds are changing, and that worker-owned publications are the future for culture writing. I think there will always be these big enduring pillars, your Vanity Fairs or what have you. But it’s not a guarantee they’ll last forever, because it’s not about quality writing, but the capricious whims of myopic C-suite traffic gremlins. These are the type of people who would rebuild the Library of Alexandria brick by brick and scroll by scroll just to burn it down and pillage it again if they thought they could take a tax write-off on it. The future is worker-owned, and as a union man who intends to continue to be a part of the WGAE, solidarity forever.
What’s next for you?
I'm back on the freelance beat. I have a lot of irons in the fire. I am moving confidently into my Luthen Rael-, Cayce Pollard-era of freelance writing. I am the elder itinerant Ronin wandering the countryside being beset by bandits. When they try to steal my stuff, I say I have no enemies, but what I mean by that is I have no enemies that are still alive. So that’s what I have planned for the near term.
But who knows? I open my heart to all opportunities that come my way, so long as I still have the ability to do what I do best, and doing what I do best right now means finding art and sharing it with others. Truly, in my heart of hearts, that means so much to me, and I want to continue doing that from wherever I can do that.
How about a quick rec, for old times’ sake?
Oh man, okay, I want to do one book, one movie, and one album.
For a book, I’m going to recommend Void Corporation by Blake Butler. It’s a psychological horror thriller book that is basically about a lonely heiress whose artwork is stolen from her house vault by a global conspiracy that destroys art for performance art’s sake. But it actually goes a lot deeper than that. It’s very, very strange. If you like William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, I think you will definitely vibe with it, and towards the end, it really does get into some like episode 24-25 Neon Genesis Evangelion mindfuck sort of territory.
The last movie I saw that really knocked my socks off was David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. I thought that was a really beautiful, strange, perversely hilarious take on grief and the grieving process.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately. I like a lot of abrasive, minimalist EDM, so I’m going to recommend Sd Laika’s That’s Harakiri. It’s the only album he ever released before he passed away, sadly. When this album came out back in 2014, it was praised by Aphex Twin and Björk, so if you don’t take my opinion, at least take theirs.
Where can people follow you and your work?
People can find me on Bluesky and on Letterboxd.