Spready machines, stinking carpets and crazy press trips: How it was to work on video game magazines in the 1980s | Gaming

IIn the summer of 1985 I made the long pilgrimage from my house in Cheadle Hulme to London's glamorous Hammersmith Novotel for the Commodore Computer Show. As a 14-year-old player, this was a chance to play the latest titles and see some cool new joysticks, but I really wanted to visit a certain exhibitor: The Publisher Newsfield, home of the wildly popular games magazines and zzap! 64. When I arrived, there was already a long queue of children at the small stand and most of them were waiting to sign their show programs through the incumbent Arcade game champion and Zzap reviewer, Julian Rignall. As a passionate subscriber, I can still remember the thrill of standing in this line, the latest copy of the magazine, which is clamped in my sweaty hands. I would not feel this star again until I hit Sigourney Weaver a quarter of a century later.

It turns out that I am not the only one who remembers this day. In his wonderful new book, The Games of a Lifetime, Rignall remembers the shock of being flooded by fans. “We just didn't expect something like that,” he writes. “I had no idea that the readers would be interested in us in this way. But I loved it. “

However, I am not sure whether he should be so surprised. Already in the mid-1980s, the boom era of the C64 and ZX Spectrum home computers, magazines such as crash, zzap and computer & video games were the only sources of news and opinions on new games. At that time, the information about game developers was scarce, so that Magazin reviewers with their photos in each issue were the stars of the industry, the social media influencers of the era.

What is most interesting about Rignall's book that his career is pursuing from the winning of arcade tournaments of the coast to the processing of magazines, working in game development and co-founding Mammut video game IGN, gives the insight into what happens behind the scenes of 80s game magazys. As a child, I introduced myself to lush high-tech publishing companies in cool modernist buildings. But zzap! 64 started in a tiny rented office in Yeovil. “We were all in a room with a few C64 in the broom cabinet,” says Rignall. “Video game publisher was always low, but in these early days it was really Dickensian.”

It turns out that things were not much better in the big magazine companies. When Rignall got a job at C&VG in 1988, he changed from the relatively small Newsfield for publishing Riese EMAP, which was housed in a huge building in Farringdon in London, which also made the Commodore format and Sinclair user, every magazine, on a separate floor. As he remembers: “It was a dusty shit hole with typewriters, stinking carpets and shabby interior designs that have not been updated since the 1970s. Oh, and ashtrays were filled with dog ends everywhere. “

Matt Bielby, who started legendary games Mags SuperPlay and PC Gamer, was a junior author at C&VG before moving to Dennis Publishing to join her Sinclair. “Dennis was actually smudge -making and smokier than emap,” he says. “There was in several smaller buildings on the streets north of the Oxford Street at the end of the Tottenham Court Road, and [we] First, a room with a computer buyer divided with everyone over each other and kit hidden in dangerous bunches. I first had to share a desk so that one of us hovered around, completely in the way, while the other sat down and triggered a few hours or so. “”

In the mid -1980s, her Sinclair was one of the most important supporters of a new style of disrespectful and personal game journalism. While early home computer magazines contained programming tips and articles about printers and text processing software, these new publications were unconsciously geared towards games. “My inspiration came from Smash hits and only seventeen,” recalls the founding editor of her Sinclair, Teresa Maughan. “They had a strong tone for voice and made their authors visible – so we deliberately had cartoons of our reviewers in the magazine and everyone could express their personality so that the readers felt like they had a connection to us.”

This connection could sometimes go a little far. “I remember that I got all sorts of strange things through the mail,” says Maughan. “Someone once sent her toenails to me.”

Like Smash Hits, her Sinclair developed his own complicated language and in-joke, the stupid photo stories created in the style of Jackie and Blue Jeans magazine for girls and a lawnmower simulator, which was programmed by the author of the MAGS author Duncan Maccdonald. The readers were active participants and their letters and art became an essential element of the editorial. “When I launched common machines in the early 90s, it may be absolutely 100% designed for interactivity,” says Rignall. “We had letters, Q+A Pages, an editorial page that basically existed proto requirements before the term was invented, and we encouraged readers, crazy images, photos, drawings, whatever to send. We tried to create something that felt like a club that was led by her friends. “

Working against them was an Archaic Magazine production process. This was the era shortly before Desktop Publishing software, so the entire system was analogous. “We have entered our things in an apricot proto PC, save it on the hard disk and bring it to the specener,” says Rignall. “You would print out the galleys (the text in print quality), which would then be cut with scissors and captured with adhesive together with pictures and all other design elements on layout sites.”

Making screenshots was an art in itself. When I started in the Edge Magazine in 1995, the process was already digital: We had a program with which screenshots could be recorded by a console that we connect via a specially created graphics card. But that wasn't the case in the 80s. “We would do screenshots by positioning a film camera in front of a freshly cleaned television screen and taking pictures directly,” says Rignall. “Basically, we put blackout curtains over the windows in the playroom so that we can switch off the lights and create a dark room. It was difficult how to run the camera with

In short, the magic production of the games was a time-consuming slog and with small young teams that produced dozens of ratings per month every month, also chaotic. “You can understand why magazines were absolutely faulty in the middle of the 1980s,” says Rignall. “Typing errors, false information, text in the wrong spots, missing things, broken elements … they call it. The process was absolutely shambolically. “

But in a way the chaos was part of it. Games Magazine brought the publication technology to its limits and when the digital era arrived, they were often the publications that made the most innovative use of programs such as Pagemaker and Quark Xpress. Maughan remembers when he started Zero in 1989: “I wanted to be more demanding than the average game with games. It was brilliant, it was very design – we awarded the European magazine of the year for two years. “

There were magazines in the oven of video game culture and gave an insight into a burgeoning new world. “It was a very tight industry – everyone, new,” says Maughan. “There was a healthy rivalry. We made a lot of telephone calls with developers, or we went to their houses and interviewed them in their bedrooms. “

By the end of the 1980s, however, the focus was from home computers to consoles, and readers wanted information directly from the source: Japan. “The first person who really started about Japanese things for British people (1987) was Tony Takoushi, who started in CVG the Mean Machines -Kolumn in CVG, which I inherited a year later,” says Rignall. “In 1988 I discovered a Japanese bookstore near the EMAP office where game magazines were sold, and that was massive. I had little idea what they said until we found a translator a few months later, but I could see the screenshots and find out what the games were about. “

Rignall's book is effectively a memoir through the lens of the games and examines how titles from Battlezone to Horizon banned ideas for interactive entertainment for players and journalists. When I came to the industry, it felt more stable and more professional. Future Publishing was in beautiful buildings in Bath – Edge Shared Beaufort House, a Georgian building that was once a pub with titles like Super Play and Gamesmaster. It was a wild time with beautiful magazines, but we owed our entire ethos, our working methods and our humor to the anarchic magazines who previously arrived, which set the sound and forged relationships with readers and players.

Maughan likes to remember. “I once did a press trip with a micropolitanist,” she says. “It was for a Tom Clancy flight simulator. They invited 10 magazines and we were all absorbed in a light aircraft from [MicroProse co-founder and ex fighter pilot] Wild Bill Steleyy to make grinding. We went up one with a sickbag. There were many champagne breakfasts on boats … and God, there were so much camaraderie in the YSS team. We played games in the early morning. I've never laughed so much. It felt like the beginning of something. “