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In the summer of 1985, I made the long pilgrimage from my home in Cheadle Hulme to London’s glamorous Hammersmith Novotel for the Commodore computer show. As a 14-year-old gamer, this was a chance to play the latest titles and see some cool new joysticks, but I was also desperate to visit one particular exhibitor: the publisher Newsfield, home of the wildly popular games mags Crash and Zzap!64. By the time I arrived there was already a long queue of kids at the small stand and most of them were waiting to have their show programmes signed by reigning arcade game champion and Zzap reviewer, Julian Rignall. As an ardent subscriber, I can still remember the thrill of standing in that line, the latest copy of the mag clutched in my sweaty hands. I wouldn’t feel this starstruck again until I met Sigourney Weaver a quarter of a century later.
It turns out I’m not the only one who remembers that day. In his wonderful new book, The Games of a Lifetime, Rignall himself recalls the shock of being swamped by fans. “We just didn’t expect anything like that,” he writes. “I had no idea readers would be so interested in us. But I loved it.”
I’m not sure he should have been so surprised, though. Back in the mid-80s, 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 opinion about new games. At the time, information about game developers was scarce, so magazine reviewers, with their photos plastered in every issue, were the stars of the industry, the social media influencers of the era.
For me, what’s most interesting about Rignall’s book, which tracks his career from winning seaside arcade tournaments to editing magazines, working in game development and co-founding mammoth video game site IGN, is the insight it gives into what went on behind the scenes of 80s games mags. As a kid, I imagined lush, hi-tech publishing companies in cool modernist buildings. But Zzap!64 began in a tiny rented office in Yeovil. “We were all in one room, with a couple of C64s in the broom cupboard,” says Rignall. “Video game publishing was always low rent, but in those early days it really was Dickensian.”
It turns out things weren’t much better at the major magazine companies. When Rignall got a job on C&VG in 1988, he moved from the relatively small Newsfield to publishing giant Emap, housed in a vast building in Farringdon in London that also accommodated Commodore Format and Sinclair User, each mag on a separate floor. As he recalls, “it was a dusty shithole with typewriters, stinky carpets and shabby interior fittings that hadn’t been updated since the 1970s. Oh, and ashtrays filled with dog ends were everywhere.”
Matt Bielby, who would go on to launch legendary games mags SuperPlay and PC Gamer, was a junior writer on C&VG before moving to Dennis Publishing to join Your Sinclair. “Dennis was actually more dingy and smoky than Emap,” he says. “It was in multiple smaller buildings in the roads north of Oxford Street at the Tottenham Court Road end, and [we] initially shared a room with Computer Shopper, with everyone on top of each other, and kit stashed all over in dangerous teetering piles … I initially had to share a desk, so one of us hovered awkwardly around, totally in the way, while the other sat down and did some writing, and every hour or so we swapped.”
In the mid-80s, Your Sinclair was one of the key proponents of a new style of irreverent and personality-led games journalism. While early home computer mags featured programming tips and articles about printers and word processing software, these new publications were unselfconsciously games-focused. “My inspiration came from Smash Hits and Just Seventeen,” recalls Your Sinclair’s founding editor Teresa Maughan. “They had a strong tone of voice and made their writers visible – so very deliberately we had cartoons of our reviewers in the mag and everyone could express their personality so readers would feel they had a connection with us.”
That connection could sometimes go a little far. “I remember getting all sorts of weird stuff through the mail,” says Maughan. “Someone once sent me their toenails.”
Like Smash Hits, Your Sinclair developed its own intricate language and in-jokes, creating daft photo stories in the style of the Jackie and Blue Jeans girls’ mags, and famously cover-mounting a lawn-mowing simulator programmed by the mag’s writer Duncan Macdonald. Readers were active participants and their letters and art became a vital element of the editorial. “By the time I launched Mean Machines in the very early 90s, that mag was absolutely 100% designed around interactivity,” says Rignall. “We had letters pages, Q+A pages, an editorial page that was basically proto-memes before the term was invented, and we encouraged readers to send in crazy pics, photos, drawings, whatever. We were trying to create something that felt like a club run by your mates.”
Working against them however was an archaic magazine production process. This was the era just before desktop publishing software, so the whole system was analogue. “We’d type our stuff into an Apricot proto-PC, save it to disk and take it down to the typesetters,” says Rignall. “They would print out the galleys (the print-quality text), which would then be cut up with scissors and stuck to layout pages with glue along with pics and all the other design elements.”
Taking screenshots was an art in itself. When I started at Edge magazine in 1995 the process was already digital: we had a program that could capture screenshots from a console which we’d connect to a Mac via a purpose built video card. But that wasn’t the case in the 80s. “We’d take screenshots by positioning a film camera in front of a freshly cleaned TV screen and shooting pics directly off that,” says Rignall. “We basically put blackout curtains over the windows in the games room so we could turn out the lights and create a dark room. It was tricky as you had to run the camera at <1/25 of a second to avoid a refresh bar across the screenshot. That slow shutter speed was OK when a game had a pause mode, otherwise you’d get horrible screen blur.”
Games mag production was, in short, a time-consuming slog, and with small, young teams producing dozens of reviews a month, chaotic too. “You can understand why mid to late 80s magazines were absolutely rife with errors,” says Rignall. “Typos, wrong information, text in the wrong places, stuff missing, miscoloured items … you name it. The process was absolutely shambolic.”
But in some ways, the chaos was part of it. Games mags pushed publishing tech 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 recalls launching Zero in 1989: “I wanted to to be more sophisticated than the average games mag. It was more glossy, it was very design – we won European magazine of the year award two years running.”
Magazines were there at the furnace of video game culture, providing a glimpse into a burgeoning new world. “It was a very tight industry - everyone new everyone,” says Maughan. “There was a healthy rivalry. We did a lot of telephone calls with developers, or we’d go round to their houses and end up interviewing them in their bedrooms.”
By the end of the 1980s, however, the focus was shifting from home computers to consoles, and readers wanted info directly from the source: Japan. “The first person to really start writing about Japanese stuff for UK folks (in 1987) was Tony Takoushi, who kicked off the Mean Machines column in CVG that I inherited a year later,” says Rignall. “I discovered a Japanese bookshop near the Emap office in 1988 that sold games mags, and that was massive. I had little idea what they were saying until we found a translator a month or two later, but I could see the screenshots and work out what the games were about.”
Rignall’s book is effectively a memoir through the lens of games, looking at how titles from Battlezone to Horizon Forbidden West shaped ideas of what interactive entertainment could be, for both players and journalists. By the time I joined the industry, it felt more stable, more professional. Future Publishing was based in beautiful buildings in Bath – Edge shared Beaufort House, a Georgian building that had once been a pub, with titles such as Super Play and GamesMaster. It was a wild time, with lovely magazines, but we owed our whole ethos, our working methods and our humour to the anarchic mags that came before, which set the tone and forged relationships with readers and game makers.
Maughan remembers it fondly. “I once went on a press trip with MicroProse,” she says. “It was for a Tom Clancy flight simulator. They invited 10 journos and we all got taken up in a light aircraft by [MicroProse co-founder and ex fighter pilot] Wild Bill Stealey to do loop-the-loops. We went up one at a time each carrying a sick bag. There were lots of champagne breakfast launches on boats … And, God, there was so much camaraderie on the YS team. We used to play games into the early hours. I’ve never laughed so much. It felt like the beginning of something.”
