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GAMES OF MY YEARS: THE MAGAZINES - Part Two by Mr Biffo

11/1/2016

19 Comments

 
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I remember that first issue of Mean Machines. I was genuinely excited to pick it up, with its promise of covering the new generation of dedicated games consoles.

A spin-off from Computer & Video Games, the magazine's design was as bold and bright as the games industry was becoming. Its excessive use of exclamation marks, and review scores that rarely dropped below 80%, seemed to be a reflection of how exciting the times were.

It's fair to say I bought a Mega Drive off the back of Mean Machines - ordered from one of the Special Reserve mail order ads that were a feature of every games mag of the day. 

I was still a teenager, though I was already a dad. We were still living with my parents, and I hadn't told anyone I was buying it.

My parents were keen that I be saving money towards a place of our own, so I was working long anti-social hours to accrue enough overtime. Spending nearly £200 on some toy wasn't going to go down well. And, indeed, it didn't go down well; I'd taken money out of the savings account my parents had opened for me as a kid. 

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I was in a weird place; old enough to be a father, yet young enough to still feel the sting of my parents' disapproval.

Alas, such was the power of the enthusiasm that bled from the pages of Mean Machines that buying the Mega Drive was a no-brainer.

I bought into the hype, even at the expense of my infant daughter's future, and at the risk of the ear-bending that invariably bore down upon me.


CHOICES
There wasn't much choice in the way of games mags in the early-90s. At least, not for me.

Those that did exist were either achingly dry, shackled to a dead format that I didn't own, or sort of seemed to be excited about everything, like they were being written by a bunch of kids who couldn't believe they were getting paid to play games.

Which is pretty much the case, I should think.

I'd picked up Sega Power, while it was still known as S: The Sega Magazine, but pretty much anybody who played games in the early 90s read C&VG and its sister publication.


There was a distinctive house style to the magazines published by EMAP. Computer & Video Games, Mean Machines, and the later Nintendo Official Magazine, had a boldness about them that was different to the magazines that Future Publishing would go on to put out. I hesitate to say that EMAP's mags were less sophisticated than those published by Future - as they were, undeniably, phenomenally popular - but they certainly seemed to skew a bit younger.

And, certainly, they were the first games magazines to put their writers front-and-centre.

I'd been aware of some of the Your Sinclair team, but EMAP would print caricatures of their writers next to their reviews; everything was attributed to an individual. Julian "Jaz" Rignall, Gary Harrod, Richard Leadbetter, Oz Clarke, "Radion Automatic"... They were, to a whole generation of young gamer, bona-fide celebrities. 

PAST IT
I read those magazines because they were bold and colourful, and reviewed console games, but as I got older I sort of started to grow past that style. However, I never consciously thought "I could do that too" until I accidentally got stuck writing Digitiser.

My first few reviews for Digi were written in a sort of sub-C&VG style - because those were the games magazines I was reading. I thought that was how it was done. I thought that was how you wrote about games.


I wasn't long into the job before I realised it could be done however I wanted to do it. Back then I doubt I could've adequately explained why, but I knew I wanted Digitiser to be the antithesis of all that Mean Machines and C&VG did.

We weren't going to write as individuals; Digi would have a single voice. Later, we jokingly gave ourselves stupid names - Biffo, Hairs et al - not realising that they'd be taken as gospel. It stoked the fires of curiosity among our readers.


Clearly, games mags knew something we didn't; that their readers wanted to know who was writing them. Games magazine journalists being celebrities always seemed wrong to us. Growing up, I knew the names of the people making the games - Matthew Smith, Dino Dini, Bell and Braben et al. That seemed fair: they were the ones at the coalface.

​Maybe we were underselling ourselves with Digi, but it felt like any old scrote could get a job writing about games. 

It's different now, of course. Once Edge came on the scene, people realised that it was possible to write about gaming in a way that took it seriously. Sometimes too seriously, but still...

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EMBARRASSING JOB
Back in the 90s, there was always something slightly embarrassing about admitting I was a games journalist.

Being a critic comes easily; you just have to convey your opinions about a thing, in a way that doesn't bore whomever's reading. There's no real artistic merit to it.

Consequently, I would edit my job description depending on who I was talking to.


Fortunately, I still had dual roles at Teletext, and was able to fall back on saying I was a "graphic designer". Unfortunately, any impressed noises they made only lasted as long as it took for them to ask who I designed graphics for.

Even in the 1990s, being a teletext artist was a bit like saying you were a sculptor who made things out of baby vomit. Adding that you reviewed games for Teletext was like admitting you spent your spare time artificially-inseminating cows.


At Teletext, we developed a good relationship with Future Publishing. At some point in our first year or so, they approached us with the offer of giving away magazine subscriptions with our winning Hot Topic letter, and it was a relationship that was to outlast my time writing Digitiser.

If any fellow journos came up to us at events to say they liked Digi, nine times out of ten they worked for Future. Indeed, Future's Andy Lowe gave me my first ever freelance writing gig (oddly, years later he moved from Bath and now lives just up the road from me; you can thank him for providing the initial spark of inspiration which kickstarted the Games of my Years series). I even got given a copy of Edge's dummy issue, which I still have somewhere.

Maverick Magazines' Super Control also got in touch early on, and we had some mutual backslapping going on for a few months, running a Man With a Long Chin cartoon in their pages. And Charlie Brooker at PC Zone outed himself as a fan at one point. 

Whatever happened to him?


RESENTMENTAL
Over time, we started to resent the relationship between the industry's PR people and the big celebrity journos.

We had a readership far in excess of every games mag of the day, but without screenshots, we were just considered a bit of a joke by most PRs. We'd get wind of events, and trips, that we never got to invited to. Promo items that we'd never receive. Exclusives that we never, ever, got.

And it was hard not to get irritated. Sometimes it felt like the PRs and some magazine staff were a cliquey old boys club, and we were never allowed access (p
erversely, had we ever been invited into the industry's inner circle, we'd have probably run a mile).

Admittedly, we weren't entitled to be allowed access to all of the above, of course. The PRs could ignore who they wanted to ignore, but it did mean that we could - through Fat Sow or Gossi the Dog - occasionally cause a bit of trouble, and raise questions about (shudder) ethics in games journalism.

I'm sorry to say, but that whole suspicion probably started with Digi.

We were never directly offered anything in return for a good review, but we had a couple of weird experiences with PR people where it was heavily implied that they's scratch our backs in return for a scratching of their own.

Plus, we certainly heard whispers about high review scores that were promised over boozy lunches, or the threat of pulled advertising being used as PR leverage. Not often, admittedly, but often enough that our paranoia would question whether every high-scoring review was the result of something dubious.


OUTSIDERS
Truth is, while we may have felt apart from most of the industry, most of the games journalists we met were never less than pleasant. 

​Things got strangely ugly and personal between us and some of the EMAP boys, who didn't seem to realise that our well-intentioned jibes were done in the spirit of healthy competition.

Not all of them had it in for us, though. I briefly spoke to Radion Automatic once, during the height of the Digi/Mean Machines wars, and he clearly got where we were coming from. Plus I always found Paul Davies to be a very likeable chap. 


Julian "Jaz" Rignall I met only once, in Los Angeles of all places. Tim and I we were on one of our few all-expenses trips as part of Digi, and had flown out there with Violet Berlin, courtesy of Virgin Interactive. Julian was working for Virgin at the time, and knew Violet. He'd lost the iconic mullet by that point.

He stopped her in the corridor of Virgin's LA HQ for a chat, while we shuffled around a bit, wondering whether he hated us. He probably did. We wouldn't have blamed him. 

It's only now, looking back with some perspective, that I can see how strange it was that I became a games journalist. Piecing this story together, it makes sense, but none of it was planned. In the 80s, I loved reading about games almost as much as I loved playing them. It was sheer fate that gave me the opportunity to make a living out of doing it for a decade.

And to think... they had a go at me for buying a Mega Drive. Ha-hah!
FROM THE ARCHIVE:
THE COMPLETE GAMES OF MY YEARS
19 Comments
Retro Resolution link
11/1/2016 08:47:58 pm

I'm really hoping you're able to realise a book from your Digi reminiscences. Happy to forego a few meals to buy a copy!

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Larry Bundy Jr link
11/1/2016 09:52:10 pm

We had the exact same experience when we were on TV, we were getting in 50,000 - 100,000 viewers an episode (not inc. repeats) and they wouldn't send us anything to review. So all we could get hold of was shovelware for the Wii.

Which ironically made us even more popular as we'd spend the show making fun of these terrible games!

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Mr Biffo
12/1/2016 08:20:38 pm

Well, yeah - if they hadn't treated us like that, we couldn't have gained our reputation for being independent and honest. It gave us something to kick against!

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MrDrinks
11/1/2016 11:04:11 pm

I'd say some of the cover art of Mean Machines invoke more memories for me than the games themselves, I can remember specifically what holiday I was on or age I was whilst reading those issues. The screenshots of Ghouls 'n Ghosts early on and then finally getting a glimpse of Street Fighter 2 on the Megadrive are the parts I remember most vividly. Nintendo Magazine System was still the stupidest name for anything ever though.

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Admiral Spiney O'Sullivan
12/1/2016 05:31:41 pm

Second stupidest, purely because Nintendo Cereal System also existed.

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Gaming Mill link
12/1/2016 06:28:46 am

Strangely, I've been given quite a few games over the years by publishers' PR people for me to 'review' on my forever struggling-and-never-really-made-it channel. I've always told them that I'll be impartial and the response has usually been "say whatever you want!" or suchlike. I don't think they must have ever seen my channel or, if they have, they just know I give every game 9.5 / 10. Jesus, one game I played (can't remember which one now) I didn't even mention the name of the game's name, let alone talk about the stuff I was playing but the same publisher gave me other copies of games after that.

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Apollo Creed
12/1/2016 09:10:22 am

Ahhh the glory days of PC Zone... the only actual magazine that held a candle to Digi in my eyes, in terms of humour and irreverence.

I was always a PC boy so never bothered with any of the other magazines apart from the occasional gamesmaster when I could slip it in the trolley when shopping with my mum. I read Digi religiously despite alot of the game related content not being entirely relevant to me.

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Wicked Eric
12/1/2016 10:34:09 am

I used to love reading Sega Power around the time it was edited by Dean Mortlock. It was basically a sub-Viz collection of in-jokes as much as it was a gaming mag and it was a much more fun read than the comparatively dry official sega mag edited by Rich Leadbetter.

I always got both though, right up until the end when the Saturn's disastrous performance killed off the market for dedicated sega magazines.

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Admiral Spiney O'Sullivan
13/1/2016 08:34:00 am

Its short-lived successor Saturn Power was good too. That soundtrack CD that came with it was great. Official Saturn Magazine was okay and had some good demos (Christmas Nights was a standout), but I didn't really appreciate their jabs at Saturn Power, and the back-page "phwoar" articles about videogame girls are fairly tacky.

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Craig Grannell link
12/1/2016 11:20:46 am

For me, there were always two sets of games mags: human and ROBOT. When I first started reading, C&VG was very much in the latter camp, mostly full of dry features and listings. Commodore User was also trying very hard to make videogames boring. And then Newsfield happened and everything changed. C&VG's best years came directly from Newsfield (almost literally, given that EMAP nicked most of Zzap!64's staff), and that kind of thinking infused many games mags of the time.

What gets me these days is how much of that has been lost. Personality seems to be almost a dirty word. Indeed, I've been told more than once to 'stick to the facts' in mag work, which is one thing when you're writing news, but another when you're penning something on games. Surely, the reading should be entertaining in and of itself?

This is one of the reasons I always liked Digi. There was an understanding that in writing about an entertainment medium, being entertaining while doing so was entirely appropriate. I look at the earnestness of many modern videogame websites and wonder just why people are being so serious. I suspect they spend 24/7 doing impressions of Judge Dredd. Even the women.

(As for Jaz Rignall, I've only had contact with him once, quite recently while penning a Defender feature. I've no idea what he was like back in the day, but he was a superb interviewee — full of enthusiasm and with some excellent anecdotes. In the magical future when I manage to get my classic gaming website live, it'll make for a nice online piece.)

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Admiral Spiney O'Sullivan
12/1/2016 07:38:10 pm

For me, the "human" category divided into two further categories: "a good laugh" and "stupid zealot child". Or as it happened, the divide was basically the same lines as "unofficial" and "official".

Basically Nintendo Official Magazine and Official PlayStation Magazine were unapologetically crappy and juvenile in the late 1990s and early 2000s. NOM made The Beano look like Private Eye, while OPSM became bizarrely convinced it was a lads' mag. N64 Magazine, on the other hand, was a great read. Irrereverent to the point of vicious, seemingly honest, and laugh-out-loud funny.

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sam link
12/1/2016 04:47:22 pm

I have one question Mr Biffo. Is the picture on the front of ur book 'Confessions of an Internet freak' you? I really need to know. Please respond :'(

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Mr Biffo
12/1/2016 06:55:33 pm

Sadly... yes.

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Sam link
12/1/2016 09:34:36 pm

you utter legend you :D Fantastic book by the way, keep up the great work!

Dr Kank
12/1/2016 11:12:03 pm

All the good games magazines had Format at the end of the name.

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Leigh
14/1/2016 12:19:36 am

Nice article, Biffs. Andy Lowe! What a ledge. His palpable anger over people demanding to know how to 'be' Goro was endlessly entertaining.

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Mr Biffo
14/1/2016 08:57:42 am

Go here for more of what he's up to these days: http://www.andrewlowewriter.com

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Leigh
15/1/2016 06:01:18 pm

Another Future journo turned proper writer! Well, if it was going to be anyone, I'm not surprised it was the boy Lowe. Cheers Mr. B, I'll check it out. Although I will be disappointed if the protagonist is anyone other than Goro.

lordmitz
17/1/2016 06:32:18 pm

julian rignall told me about your chat. he said

"it's good, but it's not as good as street fighter II"

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