Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined by Matthew Castle. Hello. How’s it going, Matthew? It’s going good, it’s going good. I’m looking forward to this one today. This is an interesting topic, something quite close to my heart, something I’ve always used to feel quite nervous about, so I’m looking forward to chatting. Yes, indeed. This is a kind of sequel episode of sorts to our review scores, We Got Wrong episode. In this episode, we want to talk about covers of magazines, of games magazines that we worked on. I think me and Matthew are in quite a specific position when it comes to that sort of thing, where we’ve worked in different eras of magazines and worked on multiple games magazines. And I think that we recognize the subject, I guess, as slightly self-indulgent, but we thought we’d kind of make it fun. So in this episode, we’re going to talk about how you make a magazine cover, what kind of makes the right game to go on it. There won’t be any kind of trade secrety stuff. We’re kind of making it fun and talking about the game choices and looking back at some of our best and worst covers, that sort of thing. But yeah, we thought it would be a really kind of fun subject to basically have the kind of nostalgia flavour of some of our previous episodes. Would you say that’s right? Yeah, that sounds about right. Okay, so Matthew, to kick off then, what makes a great games magazine cover to you? Wow, see, this is the thing. I saw this question that you’ve noted down in our little show notes and I was thinking, do I actually know and do I have any evidence that I ever had an idea that I knew what made a great magazines cover? It’s kind of a trickle off me, as we’ll get on to later, like I don’t know if I ever particularly nailed this. This is definitely why I consider myself weakest as an editor, I’ll say upfront. But, you know, I know growing up I had, you know, what I really loved about magazines was A, games I knew about and wanted to read about, really awesome pieces of art to show those covers off, and cover lines and promises of what I’d get within, which sounds like a really rudimentary idea of what a cover is, but, you know, that’s kind of what I reacted to. Yeah, so when I was about 17 or 18, I would buy any cover that mentioned a Final Fantasy game, basically. That was my criteria when I was a reader, was looking for a magazine that has a game I’m interested in on the cover, basically, which is probably the case for loads of readers, right? Yeah, yeah, I imagine so. And it was, yeah, I used to just buy so many magazines based on the cover in a way that when I then later made magazines, I used to think, oh man, it’s such a shame that people will base their buying decision on the cover because there’s so much good stuff in here that isn’t on the cover, or I don’t feel the cover of this magazine truly represents the kind of quality of what’s inside. But when I was, yeah, a teenager, that’s exactly what I did, just buying things because it had like him from Shenmue on the front and thought, oh yeah, I’ll buy that. Here’s my five quid, so yeah. Yeah, I think the key thing for me kind of becoming an editor was to sort of recapture a bit of that, but there are loads of other considerations as well. So as an editor, I kind of made covers, or like worked on covers, I should say, for Play Magazine, PlayStation Magazine in 2012, Games TM in 2013, and then PC Gamer in 2013 to 2017. So quite a long time there. And Matthew, how about you? What was your kind of history in terms of like being an editor and overseeing that sort of process? Yeah, so I edited a couple of issues of Nintendo Gamer. I didn’t actually edit that many, but I think people forget that I became editor and then quickly vanished off to O&M, where I was working alongside Chandra. We kind of did some cover stuff together, but it wasn’t until I took over O&M properly, which was, I don’t know, 2015, 2014? I can’t remember my dates. I had a run of O&M covers, and then I did OXM, and obviously was sorting out all those covers. So a bit of a kind of stop start. My actual time making Nintendo covers is relatively short for how long I spent on Nintendo mags. Yeah. So I would say like, when it comes to what makes a great games magazine cover, I wrote some notes here. And so I think it comes down to a few factors combined. You want a game that your readers are gonna be excited about as the main cover game. You want good art for that game, which is often one of the biggest challenges when it comes to making a games magazine cover. And you want great access as well. It’s not actually a case of, I will put this game on my cover most of the time. It’s a case of like, what could the publisher or developer offer me that makes this cover kind of worthwhile in terms of like, you know, you’re the first people to play the game or the first people to see the game or whatever it might be. And so that’s part of it. And the other part of it is something that you feel like as an editor fits the brand. So yeah, good stuff. Would you say that kind of that fits though, Matthew? The other thing is that like, you know, when it comes to like that last part about something you think fits the brand, that’s the kind of thing of like, you feel excited about putting it on the cover. So when you get that magazine back from the printers, you look at it and you go, oh, wow, okay, this is a game that we’ll get our readers excited. The dads of PC Gamer, they’re gonna fucking love this. That was always my kind of aim. Do you think that’s correct? Yeah, that’s absolutely. I think what you’re talking about though, is like a perfect storm of things coming together. I mean, it’s quite rare, but I found a great deal of stress in balancing like access versus importance. That was always really huge. Great games that we knew people were hungry for, but they had terrible access. Or on the flip side, absolutely amazing access. A publisher that really kind of laid everything out for you, really put on a show for you, but the game was just weird or baffling or culty or something that you loved maybe, but you knew wasn’t widely popular. I felt a lot of that on XM. On Nintendo Mags, the big challenge, and I think this is a challenge quite specific to Nintendo Mags in 2013, 2014, was just the lack of games. Kind of forced your hand, and in a lot of cases, I felt like my cover decisions were almost made for me by what was the big Nintendo game at the moment, because it was basically first party or bust on a Nintendo Mag. And the dropping quality from Nintendo covers to everything else was always pretty severe. So a lot of the craft of O&M, for example, felt like trying to kind of stretch the same Nintendo art for months on end, or just try and squeeze some kind of fresh first party take out of what was available. Yeah, but which, you know, I am very, very in this because of, you know, I think on PC gaming, you got to like make a lot of choices, which I didn’t always think I did. Yeah, I think that some years, yes, but other years there were still some games that weren’t as much of a slam dunk. 2016, I was looking at the back issues of PC gamer that I worked on. And 2016, I remember being a year that we did like Gwent on the cover, for example. And that was partly because, you know, you could get Geralt on the cover. And I don’t think I was necessarily excited about standalone Gwent, even though they did talk about that Thronebreaker game, or what would become Thronebreaker. So it was a good, it wasn’t bad, but like it was still hard. And then there is the other thing of like some PC games that become massive don’t necessarily have like killer artwork, like most major publishers. You’ll see for an Assassin’s Creed game, whenever they announce it, there’s some lovely key art floating around of like the main character, stood in the kind of historical, you know, context of wherever the game’s set. And it’s a bit easier to figure out how it fits on a magazine cover. Let’s say you put on a game that like, you know, got backed on Kickstarter, for example, then you might find that the artwork isn’t quite as easy to pick out. So yeah, like there were plenty of great games on PC and remain plenty of great games, but often the challenge was just finding one where there’s going to be like a key hero character that makes a cover very simple to do, you know? Yeah, yeah. The other thing that Assassin’s Creed, that always reminds me was the kind of the, not the politicking as such, but the fact that other mags were also going out with like similar art. And we didn’t really know what other people were necessarily doing at the same time. You could get a feel for it when you’d go on, maybe go on like, you know, go on the cover story trip and there’d be like five other print outlets and you’d be like, oh shit, you know, we’re all doing Assassin’s Creed. You know, that was kind of kept from me. But you know, within future, it was relatively like friendly between mags. Like I didn’t feel like there was Uber competition or people kind of like screwing each other over. But that was like another factor. It wasn’t just like what you were doing. You had to think, will I exist, you know, on a magazine shelf with all these other rival brands? And in time, you know, did someone just do this last month? You know, did someone do this two months ago? Is this art? Has it already been on the shelf? Might people mistake it for an issue that came out two months ago? And there are a lot of weird factors to kind of take into consideration. Mm, yeah, for sure. It’s a complicated thing, definitely. It was more of a problem when I was working on Play, because that was a PlayStation magazine, and there was also an Xbox magazine and a multi-format magazine. So it was like, you know, how do we coordinate, especially when there are fewer games around, so. Yeah, I remember, like, you know, when we’d be working long into the night when you were on PC Gamer and I was on OXM, and, you know, we’d often, you know, be discussing our covers with each other or whatever. And you would often say, like, this is a real PC Gamer game, or this is such a PC… And it was always right, you were always right. You know, the things you had felt like they kind of belonged to a PC audience. And I was always very envious, because I felt like we were just in this big, multi-format kind of mash where everyone was kind of competing for the same kind of stuff. But, you know, I often felt, oh, yeah, you’re right. You do have, like, you had access to these kind of, like, absolute kind of kit. I guess, like, the equivalent of, you know, the first party Nintendo game for PC gamers. You know, you’re kind of Total Wars or whatever. Yeah, but in console land, it’s, especially in Xbox and PlayStation, it’s a lot of blurring of the lines. Yeah, I would say that definitely. Rob, calling those exact situations, you kind of really took me back there to what it was like being in a key house at like eight o’clock on deadline. But like, I think you were a bit unlucky where obviously Xbox has had a pretty dire generation for exclusive games. Whereas I think it would have been a bit of a different deal if you were the editor of an Xbox magazine in say 2008, where it’s like, oh, you know, there’s Gears of War 2 is coming out and there’s Lost Odyssey and Banjo-Kazooie and all this stuff they’re making and like three different Halo games. So Matthew, what did you enjoy about making magazine covers as an editor? The very few times where you just got a piece of art in and you looked at it and you knew like, we don’t really have to do anything with this. Like, this is just, you know, it’s like dynamic. I’ve not seen it. It’s got the characters. It’s a game I love. And because as we’ll get into like, trying to make a cover out of a bad art is so hard. Trying to manipulate an image, especially if you’re not allowed to manipulate it, which is sometimes the case, but like getting like, I remember things like Final Fantasy 15, 15. Yes, when we did that on OXM, they are for that with the boys, you know, the four of them was always quite striking, I thought, you know, very kind of cinematic. They looked amazing. I mean, it was always the Final Fantasy covers, like as a teenager, I was incredibly sort of wowed by on the shop stands just because they, you know, it just looked like mega graphics on the cover. And I got a bit of that from like Final Fantasy 15. It had probably been used by other people, but I hadn’t seen it. Some of the Nintendo art, occasionally we get some amazing Nintendo art, like when they bought it, like Nintendo sometimes absolutely delivered, like the Mario Galaxy, you know, some of the Mario Galaxy art was absolutely superb. The Mario Kart 8 art was just, it just looked like this is going to be a good game. Like you looked at the art and it really captured the fun of it. But they were quite rare occasions. What about you? What did you enjoy? Well, you know, like I remembered the first cover line I ever worked on, there was an issue of Play Magazine in 2008, I think it was, where my editor was away for the week and we had like a bag back then that the magazine is presented in with a DVD and all that stuff. And the bag, I wrote the main cover line for it. It was the game Infamous, one of the like five or six good PS3 games that were exclusively available for that system. And I remember my first cover line I came up with was a city on the edge of destruction. Save it or watch it burn. And I thought that was so cool that I got that onto this bag when I was like 20 or whatever. I thought this is… Yeah, I was very impressed with myself even though it’s a really cheesy line. No, it’s exciting. It’s dynamic. And I think that feeling continued when I became an editor and I got the magazine back. And like, obviously being an editor, you have the most responsibility of anyone on the team. But you also, I think, stand to feel the most proud when the magazine comes back because it’s a thing that you truly, you made the key decisions on. So you can look at it and go, oh, wow, look at this cool thing I make. And I never lost that when I was working in print. I always felt that right till my last issue of PC Gamer, just the feeling of it coming back. I was just like, this is a cool thing I made. And I know that the people who read this will enjoy it. And that was a nice feeling. Yeah, it’s weird the cover lines thing, because I always saw it as this like, it’s like this mad linguistic puzzle where you’re trying to get like the punchiest thing in this very minimum space. You’ve got this tiny little box and you’re pushing your art editor for more and they’re fighting back because, you know, they don’t want your stupid words getting in the way of their lovely pictures. And, you know, occasionally you’d absolutely nail it or you’d think of like a sentence structure that had like a real energy or thump to it. I mean, a lot of them had been done, so you’re kind of repeating things. I had quite a bad habit of… You could tell the ones that I was pleased with because I basically recycled them again and again, like in different positions on the wallet to the next time. But I was terrible for like, it’s like this exciting game, which you are interested in, even though it wasn’t, just so I could put the name of the exciting game you are interested in. So like lots of things were like GTA in some way, or lots of things were like Uncharted. I think I said Lego Batman was Batman meets GTA. Which one? Lego Batman 2? Lego Batman 2, because it had an open world city. I mean, it’s not like, I don’t think you’ll be sued for it. No, but it’s also like, I think if you got that one, oh, and then you looked at it and you went, it’s like Lego bullshit, that’s fine. But there was, what I was laughing about today, which was described Sonic Boom, a Sonic action adventure game, which I think got a Metacritic of like 40 or something, described it as Sonic meets Uncharted, which purely came from the fact that the guy who made it was the lead artist on Uncharted 1, and then basically, he’d been at Naughty Dog for all of like, since the beginning, he did Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted 1, then left, founded his own studio to make this Sonic Boom, and they’re still going, I think, but you haven’t heard much on them. But I was looking at that and like, that is shady. That game has nothing to do with Uncharted at all. That’s just a terrible line. I think it’s a bit of the kind of starvation of working on a Nintendo magazine at a certain period where nothing is coming out. So, I mean, just from you telling me that Sonic Boom had to even be mentioned on the cover, tells the whole story of what Nintendo was up to at that point. Is that fair? Yeah, that’s absolutely fair. But those lines do not reflect the quality of the writing inside that mag. Yeah, well, to give you a kind of like little analogy for how I saw myself as an editor. At my best, I think I was like… So just before we started recording this, I was watching Citizen Kane actually on BBC iPlayer. You’ve had to describe yourself as Orson Welles. That’s a huge power play. But wait. At my best, I was like Charles Foster Kane in that film where he takes over the New York Enquirer and he’s like, we’re going to do this. We’re going to put this on the cover. It’s going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen before. And then at my worst, I was like Orson Welles when he was like alcoholic and overweight in that advert where he was going, oh, and right now you can buy Paul Mason champagne and all this stuff. And I was like, that was me at my worst where I was like so tired and like, oh my God, what cover line can I put with this DLC for, I don’t know, Forza Horizon 3 or whatever? Like that sort of, those were the two Samuel Robertses that operated in print media throughout the last two decades. Yeah, I actually felt very torn between like how I learnt magazine craft. The insides was just from working on Mags as a staff writer and I learnt under some really great editors. But I never really got taught the covers. Like I wasn’t really involved in covers much until I was in charge of them, weirdly. I had a bit of crossover period on O&M, I guess with Bachandra’s there as well and I was contributing to them. But it kind of felt like, to use my own film analogy, you know how in Platoon, Charlie Sheen, he has like two mentors and they’ve got, there’s like Willem Dafoe in there, is it Tom Berringer maybe? Yeah, Tom Berringer. And they’ve got very different views of war. I kind of had that with covers I felt. Like when I took over as editor, I suddenly had a lot of senior editors who were imparting advice. And some of them had very different mags. You know, some of them were on, you know, basically big, you know, other big official mags who could kind of command any cover they wanted. And they were dealing with very sexy materials. And then in the other half, you know, I had all the kind of weird nonsense from NGamer where our cover lines were very reflective of the mag’s personality. They didn’t really sell it hard. They were just like daft. You know, when you read that cover, it sounded like NGamer on the outside too. Is it kind of whimsical and fun? You know, what’s the kind of middle ground? Particularly on the Nintendo mags. Which of those editors did you kill at the end? Like Charlie Sheen in Platoon? Who was Tom Berger? Well, all the Nintendo editors were like long gone by that. They died out. I don’t know. Is there a scene where just like a helicopter full of good guys crashes in a forest and explodes? That might be a different Vietnam film. Maybe Apocalypse Now? Yeah. I don’t know who my Willem Dafoe dying slow motion to that nice music is. But I don’t know. Mark Green on NGamer maybe? Very rich analogy. Very rich there. Cultural text applied to your career. So yeah, two clunky film analogies in Matthew. I wanted to ask you what you remember of Games Magazine Covers when you were reading them as a younger man. Which covers stand out to you when you remember what you were reading at that time? I remember certain N64 covers better than probably any others because they were magazines that stayed with me. I had them to hand from ages because I was re-reading them. I was obsessing over games that I couldn’t get access to. Sometimes they had huge guides or whatever. So I literally just had them as a… I needed to keep them. I remember particularly very tatty copies of N64’s Big Golden Eye 64 cover and N64’s Perfect Dark cover. Because of all the Nintendo mags, N64 seemed to have this incredible relationship with Rare. They just seemed to get better access than anyone else. And world-exclusive access. Even official Nintendo didn’t. Which was kind of wild, given that Rare were a Nintendo thing at the time. And yeah, they’re kind of great looking for their time. Again, they reflect the mag. They’re so busy. They had this quite striking art, sometimes drawn by Will Overton, was still doing them at the beginning of the mag. And they were absolutely packed with just cover lines of so much excitement. They really reflected what was inside. They weren’t trying to be cool. The N64 brand was manic, and their covers were manic too. By modern standards, you might not frame them, but they felt like artifacts of their time. And I just can see them now. I can see the colour of it. I can see that perfect dot. It’s really white. I can see the words. I can see the character on it. Which I don’t know if you could say for, like, you know… I can’t think of as many NGamer covers, for example. They just reflected the mag, which I really loved. And then I also used to read a lot of Games Master, and there it was more about… The art that jumped out was things like Shenmue, Metal Gear Solid. I think it’s… I mean, A, they did do… You know, they did nice solid covers. They were very, like, good with colour. Like, I can remember the colour of… You know, when I was looking over old Games Master issues, you know, I looked at them and was instantly, like, taken back to my bedroom reading them. And I remembered, like, that particular art on that particular colour background. For definitely things like Metal Gear Solid. Like, it was that kind of time where I had an N64 and I didn’t have a PlayStation 1, where, you know, I never had a Dreamcast. So it was, like, mags that were, like, a window to something I didn’t have. I don’t know if that’s me reacting to, like, the games rather than the cover designs, but the choice of games, I think, speaks to that. Games Master were very good at, like, they always had what seemed cutting edge and incredibly sexy on the front, which is why I kept buying it. Yeah, I think that if, when you look at Games Magazine Covers now, they are, like, the best portal back in time to a certain era for games. Just browsing them on the various, kind of, wikis that collect them. And, yeah, I, I don’t know, I think that, like you say, it’s a bit of both. Like, it’s the kind of editorial mindset that goes into picking it. So, a couple I’ve noted here, like, my favorites, when I was reading Games Magazine Younger Man. So, I specifically remember my first issue of PC Gamer was the Half-Life Review cover. And my dad had brought it home from the fire station where he worked. Obviously, some mate had bought it. And I remember just reading that, like, cover to cover and absorbing so much information, because I was, like, 11. So, you know, you have nothing but the capacity to just, like, you know, take everything that’s written down and, like, push it into your brain because it’s more interesting than anything else you know at that time. So I remember reading about Baldur’s Gate for the first time. That was in the preview section. And, yeah, I had no idea what Half-Life was. I was kind of aware of what games were big on N64 and PlayStation, but then Half-Life seemed like this whole other thing. It seemed a lot more mature. I was very baffled by the fact that the lead characters were wearing glasses. I thought, that’s a bit odd. Not that people with glasses can’t be heroes, too, Matthew. But, yeah, that was one. And then another one was the official PlayStation magazine review cover for Metal Gear Solid, which came with a demo disc that me and a friend over the road just played over and over again. That first room you go into in Metal Gear Solid when you swim out and then there’s like two guards and a third one turns up and you get on the elevator. I remember us doing that like seven times until we beat it and working out for the first time. Oh my god, you can choke a guy from behind and kill him. And all that stuff. I think that’s like… Isn’t that like the legendary issue of official PlayStation that sold like half a million copies? Oh really? Wow, that’s like… There’s one issue of official PlayStation and it’s attached to a demo and it must be Metal Gear, I think. Where like, it’s like, you know, it’s the mega… There’s a number attached to it. It’s either like record breaking or for games of a type, you know, just like… I mean, that’s a million, half a million copies of one mag. I mean, that’s more than like all in-game are sold together. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that I remember the cover image very specifically. It was Grey Fox, the Yoshi Shinkawa art for the Grey Fox. It was very simple, but very beautiful. And again, like I felt like I hadn’t seen another game that looked like that before. So it was kind of mind blowing. And another one that comes to mind is there was an X-Wing Alliance cover for PC Gamer. I was big into Star Wars and it had multiple Star Wars games in this issue, which I’m sure made my head explode at the time. It had the two Episode One games that were coming out. One would be good, one would be terrible. And X-Wing Alliance was reviewed inside and it had basically the Millennium Falcon flying towards the second Death Star. And there’s no way to, even now, you can guarantee I will buy any magazine that has an image of that on the cover. So yeah. And yes, I remember as well, just when I bought a PS2, I bought the issue of Official PlayStation 2 magazine that had Devil May Cry on the cover. I thought, who’s this cool dude with the silver hair and the two guns? And it was Dante, obviously. But again, that was like, I hadn’t been paying attention to games for a couple of years. And then the PS2 seemed very exciting at that point as a kind of way back into games. So yeah, those ones stand out, Matthew. Any others come to mind for you? No, I know, you know, there’s, I mean, there’s too many. I read so many games, Mags. But it’s the ones that I think the ones that I remember are mainly the issues I kept of, you know, of certain things. I wrote a couple of letters to Games Master and got them printed in issues. And I remember them, like one had a Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 cover. Not a great cover, but I remember it just because it had my letter in. So I kept it and was always opening it to look at it, just to remind myself that I’d written a letter into Games Master because I had no life. And kind of like, you know, it was sort of a good prelude to what would follow in your career. So, yeah. I believe one of those letters, actually got another one in and I’m pretty sure one of them is signed by Basil Pesto rather than Matthew Castle. So I was embarrassed about putting my name on it. Whereas Basil Pesto is far less embarrassing. Yeah, I know. But it’s like my brand. It’s been going for a long time. Yeah, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t dunk on it. OK, so Matthew, we’re going to take a short break. Then we’ll come back and discuss a whole host of covers that we worked on and the challenges we faced in making them. I think it’s going to be really fun to just examine some of these. So yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Yeah, it’ll be good. Welcome back, Matthew, how are you feeling? Still great, thank you. Okay, good. So in this section, we’re going to discuss like a five to seven, I think, covers that we worked on where there was a challenge that we faced in making them, that we think will generate kind of a good story and give you a good insight as to how a Games Magazine cover is sort of crafted. Again, it’s quite lighthearted stuff. There’s no like salacious details in here, but they’re, it’ll give you quite a good idea of like, for me and Matthew, what we thought was valuable editorially, and then like the kind of challenges you face sometimes in bringing these sort of covers to life. So Matthew, should we go with one of yours first? Yeah, so I’m slightly cheating with a couple of these because they are NGamer covers that I didn’t edit, but I was on the mag at the time and I remember us discussing them. I want to start with our famous WWE cover, which is mainly remembered for the legendary strap line, which is the line under the name of the game. Biceps the size of big cows in the first ever shots of wrestling on Wii. What I like about… I like this line. It’s a very NGamery line. That green came up with. But I think it also shows why we maybe shouldn’t have done a wrestling cover. It’s because it’s so dismissive and daft, and it’s so clear that we had no idea what we were talking about. This was the first game… This was relatively on in my time on the mag. I think this was issue 12 or something. And up until this point, like, I hadn’t really had any opinions on covers. You know, I’d just been doing my staff writer thing and just liking the covers and being happy being there. But this was one where I think everyone was thinking, it just doesn’t really work. It doesn’t really fit. Like we kind of agreed to the trip. We did a trip for this. It was a great trip. They took me to WrestleMania in Detroit. I’m sure you really appreciated that, right? Well, as I was there, like, it’s sort of funny. So when I was on the trip, I was thinking, man, I really don’t know anything about wrestling, wrestling games. And you know, everything I was asking them was just really not working. Like we did this interview and they the guys from Ux’s just weren’t interested in what I was saying. And we went to this event where we basically got to interview loads of wrestlers. They basically had us in rooms, then they brought loads of wrestlers on like a kind of a sort of cycle. So we each, you know, in the room, we each we had each wrestler for like five minutes. And it was a mix of like wrestling press and games press who were there to cover the game. And obviously all the wrestling press wanted to say like, you know, who are you going to deck at WrestleMania tomorrow? And you know, important questions for wrestling fans. And then I kept butting in with like, what’s your favorite Wii sport? And it was just a nightmare because I could see everyone in the room being like, shut the fuck up, you stupid time wasting bastard. And so I was thinking like, oh man, we really don’t like, like we really shouldn’t be here. We really shouldn’t be doing this. And then back home, I think they were having the same discussions because they’d got the cover art, which was just a picture of this chap, The Undertaker, the famous wrestler. I was about to guess The Undertaker. But he’s just looking like he’s smelt a horrible fart. He looks like he’s been photographed in some kind of nightclub. I should also say actually, to the listeners, if you want to see these covers that we’re discussing, I’m putting them in to a Google Drive or something like that and there’ll be a link in the description so you can have a reference point for what we’re discussing. But it was just this weird bit of art, the wrestling games, they famously came with quite strict instructions of what you could do with the wrestlers because WWE is very controlling of brands, as lots of people are, but as they were real people I guess, you couldn’t use Photoshop to put a smile on The Undertaker or something. And yeah, so we were just dealing with this quite clumsy art. We didn’t really know much about the game. Like, as we went out there we found out that the Wii game was still in the process of being formed as to what it actually was, and they didn’t really show it to us, they talked about it in a really vague way, which is why I think it’s just called WWE on the cover. I don’t think we actually knew what the name of it was, which is like, it doesn’t make any sense. WWE is not the name of the game. And now every time I see it, I think, oh yeah, that looks as unfinished as the thing I experienced on the trip, but it’s made up for by the fact that one of the side things is a Super Paper Mario review, and the little flash above it is just, him again! That’s a great hit. Yeah, just like, oh, it’s Mario, of course, but yeah, that was a tricky one, you know, that was the first time I sort of felt a little bit like, you know, disappointed in that I hadn’t been able to kind of explain it, because that’s the other thing, is the, you know, when someone’s trying to make a cover, and you’re the person on the trip, and they’re like pumping you for angles, and you’re like, uh… Kurt Angles. There you go, Kurt Angles. Kurt Angles, yeah. It’s a wrestler reference. That’s what I should have said. They were all wrestlers I’ve never heard of, and never heard of since. There was a wrestler we talked to, and his whole gimmick was he either bit tomatoes or apples and then spit them at people, which is just disgusting. Do you not remember which of the two that he did? Or was it like he did both and he alternated? I think it was apples, because you don’t want to carry a tomato around the whole time, because it’s quite a fragile fruit. It will splatter much easier. But like an apple, you could hide in your wrestling pants or whatever it is you wear. But a tomato, you couldn’t. They’d throw you, you’d splat on the mat, and then with tomato juice, you’d spray out your shorts and everyone would think something had gone horribly wrong. Well, yeah, I mean, first of all, using the term wrestling pants. Clearly, you know the terminology of wrestling extremely well. You learned a lot from this trip, I see. But also, this cover, I think, also features a really, really good hit, but an extremely long one, which is the 20 Nintendo moments life was invented for. I feel like if I’d have suggested that to my designer on Piece of Gamer, he’d have been like, that’s way too long. Can you make it three words? Yeah, it was just a wordy, silly mag. But that sidebar, I thought, reflected the kind of character of the mag well in that it was quite crammed, it had some goofy wordplay in it. I like that they were always coming up with stupid terms for like the kind of… you often have a hit which has got like a lot of games you’ve got reviewed. So it would be like, inside this game, this game, this game, this game. And it was always reviews, something daft, I don’t remember another one was reviews suitcase. But I like reviews platter. And it doesn’t even name the games, spiders, combat, big faced dogs, fighting afros, god knows what any of those were. But it makes you want to read it. It does, it sure does. I mean, combat, I feel like I can guess. The rest, I might struggle with. So Matthew, my first one is PlayStation All Stars on the cover of Play Magazine in 2012. So Play was my first editor gig. I was deputy editor at the time, technically, but it was my first time being responsible for the covers of a magazine. And we did this sort of split run of like four covers where you had basically Kratos, Nathan Drake, Sackboy and Raiden from Melchus on it to represent this, I think, very much forgotten Sony fighting game that was actually pretty good of like its own version of Smash Bros. that felt very cut price by comparison and basically had no chance against them. Even though I think if they made this game now, it would probably be very popular because people actually quite like some of the PlayStation characters. Yeah, there’s a bit more of a retro PlayStation movement, I think. Yeah, for sure. They were just a bit early to it here. So a couple of the game characters had nice artwork. So Drake looked all right, Raiden looked all right, Sackboy had a massive head. And I remember my designer at the time complaining, why is his head so big we can’t fit any cover lines on the cover? And obviously, since it’s like a split run, you want them to look kind of similar. And yeah, and the Kratos artwork, which I’ve supplied an image for you here, looks terrible. And yeah, I think this just sort of sums up the sort of like, slightly miserable period that PlayStation was in at this point. So it just been quite a rough generation. And obviously, the PS4 would be a massive resurgence for Sony. But at the time, I remember like feeling very pessimistic about PlayStation generally and just not very excited by it. And yeah, what do you make of this cover, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, your eyes just drawn in this particular one to the Kratos. It looks like a screenshot a bit. Yeah, it does. I think, yeah, I can’t tell, but he looks very sort of pale as well. Yeah, I mean, Future of PlayStation, I mean, that’s a classic. It’s funny, like, I can see covers now where I’m like, that’s a magazine that doesn’t have access and they’re coupling together, like, 15 things they know, little things they know into like a big feature, because I did this a lot, which is like, which is where you have your like, Xbox Fights Back, your Future of PlayStation, your 20 Nintendo games. So that means 20 Nintendo games in not much detail, I’m afraid. Yeah that’s, yeah, and it’s, there’s some nice games on there, I guess you couldn’t just put Uncharted 4 on it. No, I mean, it was like too early basically, it was 2012, so Uncharted 4 didn’t exist yet, it was very much a speculative… Yeah, you see where this is going, and one of the hits is PS4 in 2013, question mark. So it’s very speculative, I think just because there was nothing more to think about at that time with PlayStation, other than what was coming up. So that was part of the thinking there, but yeah, we also had the exclusive review of PlayStation All-Stars, which I think got like 80 something or 70 something. But yeah, so history has forgotten it, I would say. I don’t think it’s on anyone’s list for a HD remaster or whatever. But yeah, tell me about your next one, Matthew. This is the absolutely honking Professor Layton cover. This is a bit of a cheat, I think, actually, because this was definitely in a wallet, which I can’t find the image of. But I remember this because we were doing Professor Layton in the lost future. We love Professor Layton. Professor Layton was actually reasonably big, so it wasn’t a disaster of a cover idea. Whether it was big with people who bought mags, I don’t know, but it was, you know, it was big enough. But the problem is that Professor Layton is, like, just a terrible, terrible character to work with on a cover because he’s basically a beige tube. He is, yeah, he definitely is. He’s a tube with dots on it for eyes. And he’s not iconic, like, he’s so long, he’s so tall that, you know, maybe if you see him his whole body, you’d be like, oh, that’s like the iconic Professor Layton look. But his face alone doesn’t look like anything. He looks like fucking Mr. Ben or something. And he’s got this hat, which is really tall. And it’s so that’s iconic. But if you put the hat on, you’re literally going to have his face down off the bottom of the page. And it was just a character cutout. That’s what we had to work with on this one. So you’ve just got a picture of Professor Layton that’s disguised the fact that there’s nothing else going on in the art. They cast him in shadows, which just… he’s sort of emerging there. And then I think the logo is a funny shape, so we couldn’t even put the logo on for a bit of exciting brand recognition. So we had to write the words Professor Layton and the Lost Future, which is quite a long game title. And then we seemingly did it in Times New Roman, or something akin to it. And it’s just one of the most baffling things ever. I’d actually had forgotten about this until we went back and was like, oh man, like, trust me we laughed about this on the mag, like how kind of mad this art was and trying to make it work. But this is this is the only cover I’ve ever of a mag I’ve worked on where I thought I could have maybe have made this as an art person, which isn’t to put down Andy, who was brilliant art editor, but this was just a nightmare. Is it meant to be Time magazine? I think that’s what it’s going for. It’s like a time man of the year thing, right? Because then it says time to read our exclusive review. Because it’s the lost future, I guess. And it’s about time travel. But I don’t think we actually said that at the time. I think that’s entirely accidental. Yeah, I mean, it does look like a cover you’d see saying like, you know, Elon Musk has a plan to save the world with electric cars or something like that. Except it’s Professor Layton. Except it’s a beige tube with an enigmatic smile. It does also look like a sort of Sopranos DVD cover. Where it looks like he’s going to break your kneecaps. Yeah, it’s mad. It’s such a mad cover. What are we doing with that? The wallet can’t… that isn’t the wallet. I know that much. When there’s a wallet, anything goes, I think. It’s just a very different deal. Yeah, but as a thing I’d want to keep around and cherish for years to come. Like, Professor Layton was a knight. Like, I love Professor Layton. He is so hard to make look good. He’s just like a sausage in a hat. So, yeah, count yourself lucky. Well, good stuff. I mean, I don’t think it’s sort of like… I don’t know. It’s not quite as bad as you say it is, I don’t think. And if you pulled it out of a wallet, I don’t think you’d even think about it that much. Surely, the font, you’d be like, that’s odd. Okay, it was the funniest of the ones that you sent over to me. I was like, okay, that has amused me in several ways. So my next one, Matthew, is a DayZ cover for PC Gamer. So this was my first issue of PC Gamer, and that’s why I picked this one, because it was like a uniquely sort of interesting one to do, because DayZ was a game that was out, so people could play it. So I’ve never done a cover like this before, where you were kind of like… There was no bigger game at the time. It was the best-selling game on Steam every day, one of the most played games on Steam. I think a lot of what DayZ did really well would later be bottled up by PUBG, and kind of reformatted into these quick matches. But the kind of rough, but kind of amazing-when-it-works sort of vibe of DayZ made it a perfect candidate for a cover. It was quite a hard one to make the artwork. So the art is like a dude in a baseball hat with a gun, and there’s some zombies behind him, and it was made bespoke for us by an artist at Bohemia, and I was very grateful for their hard work. And we’d actually given it to a Photoshop artist to give it this kind of like Walking Dead style, kind of grimy texture. And you know, when I look at it now, like I think I kind of nailed this in the first one. Like it’s not like the best cover art ever in terms of like, it’s not super glossy, like an Assassin’s Creed cover art piece would be, but I like the different hits I’ve got. So we had an interview with Dean Hall about the future of the game, and he was the great games creator, and is working on something else now these days. And we also did an amazing diary feature where we were on the front page of Twitch, and we were basically, basically just played DayZ to see what would happen. And then because we were on the front page of Twitch, loads of people worked out which server we were on and started coming to like basically hunt us down live for sports. And it was so entertaining. And yeah, we made this cool diary feature. We did like a kind of photo shoot to go with it. But yes, I just remember panicking when I saw this artwork because I thought that doesn’t look like a cover or the kind of cover I am used to. And this very much was like a recurring theme on PCGamer of like taking this unconventional artwork and make it work. What do you think of this cover, Matthew? Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. I like all the hits on it. And you know, the steam machines, that’s decent. You know, everyone knows what that is, it’s nice and recognisable. You’ve channelled the old Left 4 Dead excitement on there. That’s what X did next. I like that. Yeah, you’re right about the slightly pasty looking nervous bloke. He looks like just a bloke who’s wandered into a magazine cover. And you’re like, what? Who’s this guy? How did you feel about games which were like phenomenon games and proven successes in terms of whether there was a mag audience for them? Because I was often struggling with this. In theory, Minecraft was the biggest game in the world, but I never put Minecraft on the cover because I felt like it just didn’t belong to mags or belong to us or anyone who was interested in it was playing it and we didn’t really know how to punch our way into that audience. Did that ever give you the fear? Yeah, a little bit because you have to ask the question of what is new for the reader that makes this exciting. In the case of DayZ, we had this really good beefy interview with Dean Hall. It was very blue sky. I’m not even sure a lot of the stuff is even in the game now, seven years after we did the cover, but nonetheless, it was just kind of like capturing the lightning in a bottle and that was good. There’s like one other cover on here in my list that I think will kind of… is a similar situation, but I agree it was tricky to make right. You think, oh, Fortnite on the cover, but then, you know, do… what’s going to change in Fortnite before you go on sale? Probably everything, because that’s how Fortnite works, so yeah, tricky for sure. Yeah, I’m kind of glad in a way that I kind of left Mags before that kind of games as service thing had really kicked in properly on console, because I know there’d be like a lot of pressure to have a stance and have an opinion on those things, which I don’t really, you know, like we just never covered them on any of the YouTube channels I’ve worked on because I just felt like they were so oversaturated, I couldn’t… I didn’t really have anything to say. But yeah, trying to make a cover out of them, yeah, tricky. Was this the feature, the DayZ session, where one of your staff, Ben Griffin, murdered someone and covered it up? Yes, he kind of like… there was this like, this nice girl who joined us on the server just randomly. She didn’t know we were streaming. And then, yeah, I think he just killed her privately and then found out later. It’s like a notorious BBC gamer anecdote, that story, that one. I think I did something similar, though, which was some of the Bohemia developers very nicely joined us on the stream. And one of them said, Oh, I’m logging off now, but I’ve got loads of stuff in my backpack. Does anyone want it? And I went, Yes, me. And I swung at him with an axe straight away. And it was so spontaneous that everyone just burst out laughing. You know, here’s this new editor to put his kind of psycho mark on the PC gamer team. It’s like, yeah, don’t mess with me. So Matthew, hit me with your next one. Yeah, so this one, this one was this one when I edited. This is Nintendo Gamer, Wii U in crisis, question mark, and it kind of goes in hand, hand in hand with the next issue, which was 10 games that will save Nintendo. And this is this is the result of I think it was this even the first issue I worked on. I can’t remember if this was the first one or not, but it’s I had like major issues with Wii U in crisis because we were waiting for the Wii U to come out. We didn’t really know a lot about it. We wanted to get it on there. And for some reason, there was like at the time the way we made this mag, I should probably explain, Nintendo Gamer, I was sort of part of a sort of editing hub. So I had guidance from some other editors and there were a lot of other voices who weren’t on Nintendo mags who were like, you know, let’s really sex this up. Let’s, you know, let’s kind of challenge it. Let’s challenge Wii U in some way. Where I was like, the last thing I want from a Nintendo mag, if I’m a Nintendo fan, is for it to tell me the thing which is coming out is shit. And so there was just, I remember, like, it was just a, it was quite a big, big fight over Wii U in crisis. And like, whether to try and put a better spin on it. So I didn’t think it was in crisis. We just didn’t know anything about it. The other thing was, we were, and this, this, this was, this increasingly became a problem over the years, I think, with covers. It’s, it’s, we felt like we were chasing online stories. You know, like, it had rumoured. Someone on, like, NeoGaff had said, like, oh, I heard it’s, there’s big problems, there’s big problems with Wii U. And I didn’t want our cool Nintendo mag to be basing its cover choices on some, like, bullshit rumour. But it was just so much appetite for it that it felt like that was the story and people wanted it. So this was just a case of trying to kind of, like, I don’t know, make a story out of nothing, which I don’t really think worked. But we then did the 10 Nintendo games to save Nintendo. And I still hate, I hate the save, you know, because this idea that Nintendo is in some kind of, you know, that wasn’t the line of the mag at all. We were very, like, positive and excited about it. And I kind of wish I’d put my foot down a bit more about it. But at least there it was a bit more proactive because it was like, there’s this exciting stuff to look forward to. Where I think Wii U and Crysis is just a really confusing cover line. And every time I look at it now, I’m like, ah, that’s just not, that isn’t, that isn’t like, that isn’t what I thought. So I don’t know why it’s there. My first question is, why is the Wii U controller the wrong way around? It’s kind of like turned on its side and then Link sort of looking at you. Was that just to make it fit on the cover? That’s probably just to make it fit on the cover. It’s probably so we can get, like, a slight dodgy picture of Link on there. I think there was some, like, I think there was some confusion about actually, I think Nintendo in their actual official artwork, which I believe this Wii U was taken from, had shown it. I think these hands, there may have been, like, it may have been a photo shoot which had these hands, which we replaced with shadow hands, I want to say, is my memory of it. So like they were showing it off in this calibration, but I think it was just to sort of show, like, this was, I don’t think anyone had played it yet. So it was, yeah, it was just before that E3 where they first let people play it. And there was just so much sort of rumour and so this was just sort of like, oh, deal with this mad thing, you know, can you kind of get your head around it? And this thing, the truth, and the truth, which this mag definitely didn’t have, and then offers, and why it might not even be called Wii U at all. And it was, it just was. Yeah, I’ve kind of experienced similar sort of, I think we might have done a Games TM cover or two that were like, the Xbox one, obviously, the announcement of that was a true disaster. And I think we might have alluded to that in a couple of, a couple of different covers. And yeah, you do feel like you’re chasing some kind of like, oh, if this is spicy, someone will see it on the shelves and it will jump out of them, which might be true. But at the same time, this harkens back to that thing we talked about in a previous episode, where when you’re working on a single format manq, you are kind of a cheerleader for that format as well. So yeah, you say you don’t necessarily want to write off the thing that your readers are excited about, you know? You know, especially like as the other big hit is Mario Party 9, Mario Party, which I’m not a fan of, you know, so it’s quite galling that the two big things I think on like an early issue that I was looking after was this thing you’re excited about is shit. And we’re definitely RSVP-ing with a yes to Mario Party, which are two things I would never hold to be true. I would never RSVP yes, even if that game comes out and everyone says it’s 10 out of 10, I will not go to Mario Party, because I’ve had such a bad time at a previous Mario Party. Yeah, no way, that’s mad, that’s a mad cover. Oh, and actually, the 10 games that will save Nintendo does have the classic Lego Batman GTA meets Batman in the Kickass Epic. It’s also got my virtual girlfriend, Shame, which I think shows that we were for some reason going quite heavy on the tabloidy kind of shoutiness. But some cover lines feel like website clickbait to me, rather than cover lines. Like, I don’t think clickbait necessarily works on a cover, because it’s not like no-one’s going to gamble five pounds on one hit like that, but I don’t know. I think it’s, I think, where you want to sort of, yeah, you want to feel like you’re living in your own sort of bubble. Because now when I pick up a magazine, I want to be out of the internet bubble of like, you know, people discussing stuff. Yeah. And that’s why… I think this was a bit of a transition period where, like, we were just undergoing big changes. You know, we’d relaunched NGamer as Nintendo Gamer, and there were just some changes with like how the mag teams were structured and things, and it felt like, you know, we have to be proactive and try something different. And for some reason, the flavour was, yeah, this slightly kind of more tabloid-y, shouty style. I’m also a big fan of Aliens, Colonial Marines shock, Wii U version will blow away PS3 and 360. And it never came out. It never came out. And also, it didn’t matter what version was best for that game, because it was ass. So… I’ve got a couple more questions about this cover, Matthew, which I do think is a nice cover, actually. Like, I really like the sort of, what do they call it? When it’s words. What’s that called again? I’ve forgotten all the magazine terminology. Uh… Yes, the typography, yes. It’s really nice for the ten games that will save Nintendo. Yeah, that was nice, actually. What is my virtual girlfriend, Shame? Uh… I think there was that… What was the name of it? There was a 3DS Konami dating game. Did that get localised? I think it was either that, or it was… No, it wasn’t. It didn’t get localised, but we did a lot of import stuff. And I think we got a Japanese journalist, or a freelancer out in Japan who read Japanese, to basically play whatever the Konami one was. Oh, it wasn’t called Love Life. Love… The only thing I remember of this game is that a bloke in Japan married his copy of the game because he fell in love with his 3DS girlfriend. And it was basically just a, here’s what virtual girlfriend games are about, but disguised as a sort of my virtual girlfriend shame. That’s quite fun. Yeah, that’s good. My other one is All New Pokemon. Pikachu fights feudal warlords in the Maddest DS game yet. I don’t remember this game. Do you remember which one that was? Yeah, this was a crossover between Pokemon and Dynasty Warriors. I don’t remember this game. But I think it wasn’t like a Dynasty Warriors game. I think it was a, I think it might have been made by like Koei, but it was a static, like 2D, I think it was a bit like Advance Wars. Man, that is, that is absolutely like vanished from my head, but I remember it, I remember it being a thing. Basically, if there was anything Pokemon, you always stuck Pikachu on there. All the time. Like that was just a golden, you know, any, any excuse to stick a Pokemon on there, even that was always quite cynical because there weren’t really any Pokemon fans on the mag ever when I worked on it. So we were always sticking it on there. What’s interesting is that I think that this is another side note, but I’ll keep it brief. Pokemon is one of those things where when I joined games media, no one really understood it or talked about it all that much. There were a couple of writers who liked it. But nowadays, you can find loads of great writing about Pokemon online from people who were like about five years younger than me, who grew up with it and like can talk about it in a kind of intellectually interesting way. And I think every phenomenon you can think of now, that will happen within the future. There will be like, I mean, there already are people who write about Minecraft in a serious way. But there’ll be people who do the same with Fortnite and with Genshin Impact. It will happen where, yeah, eventually, the people who enter the sort of games media space do take it seriously. But yeah, you’re right. There was a certain generation that just did not get Pokemon. They were just about, they were just too old for it when it broke. Yeah, that was me all over it, for sure. Okay, so Matthew, my next one is a Pillars of Eternity cover on PC Gamer. So this was an interesting one because I think the game was spot on. It was, you know, a kind of Kickstarter, I think it was Kickstarter led game by Obsidian. They were essentially making a spiritual successor to classic RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Ice Wind Dale and Neverwinter Nights, all that stuff. Mostly Baldur’s Gate. But yeah, so I think this was a great choice for a cover, but I highlighted this one because I think it speaks to the kind of challenges of doing a game that broke on in an unconventional way. So Kickstarter was still relatively new in 2014 when I did this cover. And even though I think it was the right game, it’s that thing of like, oh, I don’t know if like everyone knows what Pillars of Eternity is, you know, I don’t know if it’s as widely known as like Baldur’s Gate was back in its day. So there was a slight gamble aspect to it. But also the cover art was not great. It’s like this beardy guy, there’s quite story bookish art, I would say, of like a beardy guy with a with a sword and a shield. I don’t think it was all that good. But it’s funny because years later, PC Gamer would do a Pillars of Eternity 2 cover when I wasn’t editing the magazine. And it looked amazing. It was like a giant like Titan guy in a sea attacking a pirate ship. And I was like, that’s way better. But here we’ve got some vague dragons in the background and it was just more like concept art than cover art. What do you make of this one? Yeah, I had lots of things like this. Yeah, it’s kind of a nightmare because like you say, this is the perfect example of like everything’s good about the access in the game, but like the key thing, the fundamental thing of how it looks on the cover just doesn’t quite work. But you have to take that kind of hit because it’s what you’ve got and the story is too good to not do it. You know, gamble on it. I think you’ve got some good supporting stuff though, like the 25 best adventure games. That’s big and sexy. Next to it. I’m into that. As I like, you know, if you like this, you will also like this. That’s one thing I’d say for a lot of my covers is that they don’t like, very few of them tell a kind of coherent story between like the main hits and the other hits of like, oh, if you like this, you’ll probably also like this thing where that does, I think. Well, thank you very much. Yeah, yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I always like PC gamers covers. You know, I always thought they felt, you know, they sort of reflective reflective of the mag you got inside your big extra life hit gave you some nice sort of chewy hits of like, you know, a better idea of what you were going to get. Yeah, I have a vivid memory of this particular cover. Being in contention with another game. I think it was Assassin’s Creed Unity I was thinking about and then it ultimately came down to like, I think I was on holiday for a week with my ex girlfriend in a Costa and Worcester looking at my phone frantically with like two weeks to go trying to pick a cover. And I’m so glad we did this one in retrospect. But yeah, I just go ahead. Yeah, it just reminds me of that feeling of like, when you’re having the discussions with people about getting cover art and they’re like, you haven’t seen it. And it literally the whole thing hinges on that. And you’re always going ahead because you’re like, this is too good. Like we have to do this. Like I really want this game. And it’s like, how bad can it be? You know, I’ll kind of agree, you know, I don’t think we ever agreed to something entirely without seeing cover art, but close to at times. And you’ll promise like, oh, mate, you’re going to love it when you see it. It’s really amazing. They’ve made something really nice for you. And your art editor would like download like some massive folder from an FDB site. And then you’d have that like intake of breath as you unzipped it on the desktop and then you’d click on it and be like, oh, no, that’s too real, Matthew. Also having to use a fucking like weird program to download it from an FTP. And yeah, you’re like bringing an IT going none of our things work with their weird site and you get it there and you’re like, oh, maybe we clicked on the wrong thing. Maybe there’s another piece of art hidden on the weird FTP site. Yeah, Filezilla. I remember trying to figure out how the fuck Filezilla works to get like cover up from like Square Enix or whatever. And it’s like, oh my God, I’m so out of my depth. I don’t understand this. That’s what this image brings to mind for me is just that sense of just the stress. It’s such a stressful process getting a piece of cover up, you know, the whole negotiating the practicality of it, and then when you get it, it’s just such a roll of the dice really. Yeah. I think this led to one of our worst back pages there from PC Gamer 2, which was like the dragon in the background, which is kind of like laughing. It was like a kind of riff on the joke husky meme. And it was so hated by one of the Rock Paper Shotgun co-founders that he tweeted about it. And I was like, I remember that was a low point of like, that seems unnecessary. But like, you’re right, the access was good, obviously we were really good to work with on this cover. We were the first ones to see it in action, I think. So yeah, no regrets on this one. Just that if the artwork was better, I’d look back on it as a slam dunk, you know. Yeah, for sure. What’s the next one, Matthew? Well, this is a pair of Nintendo O&M covers, which I think is more just a demonstration of something I was talking about earlier, where two issues, they ran next to each other and they had the same cover art, which I think is pretty bold in magazine land. Admittedly, one of them’s got Mario in a Mario Kart 8 kart, kind of driving tight around a corner, and the other one is him, like, in the piece of art it was taken from. But it’s fundamentally the same, like, eye line, it’s the same Mario face. To me, it was just so screamingly obvious that we’d put the same cover on. And I think it was the same access for both issues as well. And it was literally just, you know, except one we tried to spice up by making it about Nintendo blockbusters, because we also threw in the blockbusters that are, let me check my notes, Kirby Triple Deluxe and Mario Golf World Tour. The face on Luigi, which I hope, if you’re listening to this, you will look at these covers is my face looking at this issue thinking, good god, but then the next issue, we ran it again, and the art was just great. I actually loved the Mario Kart 8 cover, you know, it’s got this mad upside down course, the big Mario Kart 8 here I think is quite fun, you know, ignore the Sonic Boom bit, and the absolutely unsexy as it comes promise of Skylanders 4 vs Disney Infinity 2, which is, I mean, I believe in the famous words of Aliens vs Predator, whoever wins, we lose. It’s different if it’s like Uncharted vs GTA, you’re like, wow, what a slog, that’s gonna be a real fucking slugfest that. But like Skylanders 4 vs Disney, I mean, that’s like, I don’t know, my local hometown village football team kind of playing. It was just the stress of having to do it again and put the same art on there. We liked the games and the logic was, I mean, they were all, not to go into sales figures and whatnot, but there are always these statistics of like, X number of your readers have never picked up an issue before. No one really knows, you know, there’s a lot of talk when you make magazines about like, arcane rules that don’t really make any sense. You can disprove something easily. Sometimes you have a magazine cover that just explodes and like, sometimes you put your hand up and say, I don’t really know why it did that. It felt like a bit of a dark art to me. So I wasn’t too worried about that, but just two, I don’t know, two Mario karts in a row. So I personally think these covers are pretty good. So looking them back to back, I would not assume there was like a software drought necessarily. And I think that Mario Kart was the right game to go all in on. So yeah, I don’t think you should… Yeah, it was either that or Mario Golf World Tour and I just couldn’t really bring myself to do that. I really like this hit that’s 30 Tomodachi life’s funniest bits. You will lol. Oh, you will lol. I’m not going to put lol on the cover. Hello, fellow kids. The year is 2014. I think you’re a bit harsh on yourself there. Like also getting Kirby on a Nintendo cover alongside Mario? Nah, nothing wrong with that. I think as much as you speak about how PC Gamer covers were good for the cover matching the insides, I think that I never had to work on a Nintendo magazine during a period as fallow as this, and that is his own challenge for sure, right? Yeah, just on the mag, it felt like we were doing this, and I remember as well, because I think this is the time we just hired Kate Gray, our staff writer, and internally working on that mag, I felt terrible. Your big introduction to Nintendo mags is that I’m basically going to make you write this cover feature twice, which is something I had to do eventually, but not until many years into it. So I don’t know, maybe I saw her as a proxy for the readers and felt a bit guilty that we were kind of… I don’t know, I felt bad that we couldn’t offer people a more varied thing in general, and it was kind of maybe heightened by the staff trying to keep the job exciting and fun and everything. That was always the challenge with when it’s dry periods, just keeping everyone kind of motivated and pumped so we actually make something fun. I think we did do some fun features. I think one of the Mario Kart 8s was just a big round table with me, Kate and Joe talking about playing the levels, which we’d written about the month before, and it just had some really silly, bizarro jokes which are as funny as anything we ever did in NGamer, I think. So I’m proud of the mag’s insight, I just wish it was, basically what a lot of my Nintendo mag experience is now, is thinking, man, the mag I could have made with the Switch lineup. So I kind of, I don’t know, would have liked to have had a shot at that, I guess. Yeah, I wanted to ask you a bit about that. What do you think the modern experience of running Nintendo magazine would be like if such a thing still existed? I mean, actually right now, this year, I wouldn’t really know, and the tail end of last year would have been stressful, but there was a period where they just had so many first party games coming out, or on the horizon, or they were talking about them more openly, I would think it would be a lot easier. I think the games have been gorgeous, like the actual art for them has been great. There’s no competition, like no one else is putting this stuff on magazine. There is no Nintendo magazine, so you’d have first pick of it. I mean, yeah, I feel like the Switch fever could have carried a mag now. Yeah, it’s just a shake, like, you know, God, I’d love to have made an Odyssey cover, and just had fun with it in terms of like, you think they had these really, they weren’t just great games, but they had like, concepts that were just ripe for, you know, weird, interesting kind of approaches and things, you know. I always think with Odyssey, you know, you had this idea of like, the kind of interplay of the hat and things, you could have done something cool with a wallet, where you’re like, sliding the wallet out of the hat, and it’s like one of his transformations and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, instead, it’s Luigi looking really unhappy at a golf hole that he has to do. I don’t know, what’s that called? Oh, the putt. He’s like, it’s a picture of Luigi going, oh, I don’t know if I can do this putt. That’s what he’s thinking. Yeah, I like that you’re, oh well, I can’t even dissect your Luigi impression there. It’s too twisted. It’s certainly different to how Charles Martin would put his. It’s more of a Hannibal Lecter take. That’s what I, yeah. Hannibal Lecter. Luigi playing golf. It’s me, Mario. Okay, right. So, Matthew, my next one is, I had to find my notes there, it’s Fable Legends on PC Gamer. So, this was 2015, and this was an example of like, I need to put a cover together at the last minute because something I’ve been chasing for months has fell through, which happens loads on magazines. It just does. Because publishers change their plans, or access comes in too late, or whatever it might be. It’s like, it’s not always the end of the world, even though I remember it feeling like it at the time. So, I actually think this artwork is really nice, and I actually picked this one out because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this cover, I just think it’s interesting sometimes you do end up doing covers for games that don’t actually come out, and never release, and that’s happened to me twice. And I remember it happening on the cover of Games TM back in like, I think 2007 or 2008, they had Tiberium, which was a cancelled third person shooter set in the Warhammer, Command and Conquer universe, and yeah, it happened sometimes, right? Did that ever happen to you? Like a game getting outright cancelled after you put on the cover? Outright cancelled? I don’t think so. We had the infamous Man Hunt 2 cover, where we actually had the world exclusive review of Man Hunt 2, and Kitsy went and reviewed it, loved it, he really liked it, he put out this review, he had this big cover, and then the game got pulled because of… it kicked up a huge stink, in the sense that it was rated… it was the American side of things, I think it was going to be rated like an M or something, which is the serious one, A? Adults? I think it’s… I actually can’t remember. I can’t remember the game, whatever, it was going to be the only game on Wii which was rated this highly by the American certification system, and it got pulled, and they literally remade chunks of it, and they changed the game to hit the certification on it. So we actually reviewed a game which did come out, but it didn’t ever exist in the format we reviewed it. And when he did review it, he didn’t like it as much, because they’d watered it down and changed it. And so, as far as I know, Kitsy’s the only person who played and reviewed that game as it was originally meant to be seen. That’s fascinating. Yeah. He should write a book about that, you know? Yeah, and it sounded great. The only detail I actually remember from it was that there’s something called the… there was this mad scientist in it called Dr. Pickman, and he always thought it was talking about Pikmin. There was all these tannoy systems talking about Pikmin Institute, and he was like, this is weird. Why is it talking about Pikmin? But that’s a bit of colour, I remember. But yeah, the cover itself was disgusting, it was this like bloodshot, horrible eye, which just… it looked gross and maybe like a rude piece of anatomy. It’s… yeah, it’s pretty unpleasant. Yeah, but Rockstar made some good Wii games, if I recall. Well, they did put in an effort, and actually we had a pretty good relationship, and we did some good covers. We did a really nice Bully scholarship edition when that came to Wii. Did we do Table Tennis as well? But yeah, they did do a good push. They did that Chinatown Wars DS game, which was excellent, but I don’t think we ever put that on the cover. Which is madness, I think. That’s a forgotten GTA game. I feel like no one ever talks about that. But it was… It’s properly good. It’s better than the other traditional top-down 2D GTA games. It’s actually pretty great. It had a proper mad drug economy in it, where you could lower the price of stuff by overselling and it was all about supply and demand. It was pretty full-on. Yeah, I remember it a little bit. It looked really nice for a DS game as well. Yeah. Okay, cool. Going back to my cover very briefly. Yeah, sorry. No, it’s fine. It was a good little anecdote. So, yeah, Fable Legends. So, this was the last game that Lionhead worked on before they were closed down. I think a lot of people at the time were like, why didn’t Lionhead make a full Fable RPG? And I’m pretty sure, this is not like 100%, but I’m pretty sure that Phil Spencer said something like, turnover was the reason they couldn’t make a game like Fable 4 at the time, because it requires a kind of consistent team. Obviously, a lot of the senior people had left to go work on Goddess, that kind of forgotten God sim game, but I really love this artwork and I remember that Microsoft got us access to Lionhead very late in the day and I was really grateful. This is a nice looking cover for a game that never ever came out, a MOBA I think it was, set in the Fable universe, which was always going to be a struggle I think. And GTA, which is obviously the hit everyone wants. Yeah, so it’s GTA V on PC, so we already knew what the game was, so we could write about it basically, based on nothing at the time. So yeah, they did that, and then a Dota 2 diary feature where Rock Paper Shotgun absolutely cained us in a competitive game, which is still a sore subject at the pub for some former PC gamer people. But yeah, take me through your next one, Matthew. So this is one of my OXM covers, this is Call of Duty Black Ops 3. This one was like… I think there was a bit of a drought and I just wanted something massive, but this is what happens… I just didn’t have a feel for it, I think is what I feel about this cover. I didn’t really have a feel for Call of Duty Black Ops 3, why it was interesting and who it was interesting for. I actually think it’s… sort of what I alluded to earlier when I was asking you about making picking covers for games which were like big and popular online, is that I felt with Black Ops 3 all the people who were interested in it were kind of consuming it on streams already and things like that. I just didn’t really think… like the person who’s interested in Black Ops 3, I didn’t know if they’d actually pick Biomag, which isn’t a very sturdy foundation to try and build a cover on. And I was never very happy. We did quite a lot of Call of Duty covers while I was editing at OXM. And I never felt very confident with any of my cover lines, like I never really felt like I found the right hook, the right angle. This one was an extra nightmare because the only art we had was the box art of this man really man-spreading himself out, which is just not very handy for a cover. It’s obnoxious in real life and it’s obnoxious if you’re trying to make an Xbox cover because you basically have just like a vast crotch to deal with. And you know, I tried my best, I stuck a little Star Wars battlefront on there because I think we’d done battlefront the issue before and it’d done quite well because, wow, you’re just freaking Star Wars, you know, it flies. That seemed to be one of the magic things that really did work. So I was always sticking them Star Wars little Star Wars characters wherever I could. The Rise of the Tomb Raider hit has got, I think I was talking to someone about this the other week, this terrible format of move over something which I was really big on. So move over Uncharted, Lara shows us what real adventure looks like, whatever. But I was always telling games to move over on these bags to the point where I’d tell something to move over and then like a bit later I’d be telling the thing that itself to move over. Sometimes for the thing it nudged out the way to begin with. So it’s like this constant idea of two games that are just like, get out of my way. It’s my turn. No, it’s my turn. I just, it just made me look really indecisive that I just wanted everything to move out the way for whatever I currently had. It’s a cover line. I see a lot when I go back on my past issues. Yeah, Uncharted seems to figure heavily in your cover lines. I had it hooked because I really liked Uncharted. So I thought I’ll just keep mentioning it and saying that we’ve got like something that’s as good as Uncharted. I had a real chip on my shoulder and it really manifests as all my cover lines. Move over Rise of the Tomb Raider. It’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I think this is quite a good cover. I think that for me, Call of Duty is something I just, my interest in it fell off the cliff after Modern Warfare 3 and at a certain point, it stopped feeling like a game that belongs to a specialist gaming space and became so mainstream that it was almost impossible to get a grasp on it because people were so tuned into it. I remember working on a Play Magazine cover. I wrote the cover feature. I didn’t work on the cover for Call of Duty World at War and that was the first one that followed Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare. So, this was 2008 and that did feel like a perfect kind of cover because it was like, right, they’ve just made COD 4. It’s a completely game changing FPS. Everyone played it and everyone loved it and they’re making another World War 2 one, but it’s not even the same developers. So, it’s quite a good story to tell there whereas now it just… Call of Duty obviously has never been more successful in terms of the number of players it reaches thanks to Warzone but I don’t really give a damn about it. And it feels like the… I hear the story stuff in Modern Warfare, the last one, is quite ghoulish but actually quite interesting and worth playing but I can’t say I’ve been that tuned into them. But they just feel like they’re very much on a production line to me now. Well, that’s… yeah, I think that’s the problem I had as an editor was like I felt the same way and it just… I think you can just sense my sort of general disinterest from the lack of like not just being able to ever land a kind of killer blow with it. It’s a shame because actually I think the feature in this was Alex Dale wrote this one was really good. Dale was great at talking to like Call of Duty devs and Rainbow Six Devs and getting really like juicy kind of just just talking about it in a really exciting interesting way. He was someone who was or you know had had enough of an interest to really deliver on them and I just didn’t I didn’t really feel like I had that. And so yeah I was I don’t know never never quite happy with these these covers. Actually I felt I haven’t included it here but I sort of felt similarly when we did Rainbow Six Siege which was like you know I trusted it was great but I just didn’t have a like a natural feel for it. You know it’s the curse of having to make a cover without often having seen or played the thing because you aren’t going out on all these press trips yourself as an editor. So you just have to kind of like I don’t know style it out a bit. Yeah so we did Siege on PC Gamer and I think it was a better maybe a better fit for PC Gamer because you could say look Ubisoft has made its own version of CS GO. Yeah you have an audience that it was tapping into kind of already into the mag yeah that’s smart. Oh it’s you know still got the Tom Clancy thing but yeah I agree that sometimes it’s hard to get a grasp on them. So Matthew the last one I wanted to highlight was a cover I did in 2016 on PC Gamer for Ark Survival Evolved. This was really amazing in terms of access I think we were the first people in the world to see this like entire kind of sci-fi layer they added to Ark Survival Evolved. Got really good access really good artwork and screenshots like it’s a bit the cover art is a bit odd looking like the it’s a it’s not quite like up to you know like a kind of like a mainstream publisher standard I guess in terms of how glossy it is but you know it’s got like robot dinosaurs in the background and gives you a taste of what it is. This is one I kind of picked because I remember feeling like I don’t know if this is like as Heartland as some of the other covers that I’ve done on PC Gamer and I didn’t personally have much interest in Ark. I think I was kind of tracing it chasing a trend a little bit here but also I had amazing access so it was worth doing I think but it’s not one of my favourites when I look back on it simply because I just didn’t have that interest in Ark and it always struck me as just part of that generation of very janky survival games that ran really badly on PC. No matter which PC you had it just ran badly. That is a very handy piece of art for that review special hit. Yeah, you just got nothing there, you got a nice bit of cloud just sticking some stuff in. Yeah, it was easy to read the text in that background. In fact, I think we might have even removed a layer of the artwork to create that space. Okay, right. Yeah, and that’s the other thing, like getting the art and going, oh man, how are we going to squeeze stuff around this bad boy? I like the T-Rex thing that looks like it’s just bellowing at the woman in the middle. Yeah, it’s like that meme of that guy talking to that girl at the nightclub, but it’s a T-Rex. Yeah, so I’m not super down on this one, but I remember this one just being like, well, I don’t think it… I outlined those four criteria at the start of the episode, but I don’t think this one quite fulfilled the one where I felt like it was, you know, the kind of cover I really wanted to see on PC Gamer. But yeah, I very much appreciated the hard work of the developers who helped us make that. So yeah, what’s your final one, Matthew? Well, so my very last one is my Mass Effect Andromeda. This one, this was really tricky. So this was just after E3. And while I was at E3, I basically secured an interview with Bioware, which was like super valuable, like not many people had. Like I saw purely by accident by hanging around. I think something else had fallen through. Maybe even like Star Wars Battlefront or something. And I think the PR to make it up was like, oh, well, we’ve got some of the Bioware guys here. They’re not really doing like formal interviews because they hadn’t really shown much of Andromeda at this point. They said you can sort of, you know, you can grab 20 minutes with them or whatever. So I felt like I had this really precious asset, which was people talking quite generally, I’ll admit, but talking at least about Mass Effect Andromeda, which at the time there was just massive appetite for. And I knew, I was just like, I want to do this. This is too like good a thing. You know, we can just build our own cover out of this because EA were like, no, there’s no art for it. There’s no, you know, we kind of had their blessing, like if you want to put it on the mag, whatever. But here’s the art you’ve got. And it wasn’t cover art. It was just like the screenshots they’d announced. So this is a screenshot, a high res screenshot of that. But it just, you can just tell it isn’t cover art. You can tell it’s a screenshot character, I think, because it’s just not posed in any kind of dynamic way. There’s no face. There’s no eyes looking out. It’s a terrible piece of art about a game which everyone wanted to read about. And I actually had something on it. So I just took that hit. The issue did pretty well in the end, actually. So I think there might have been a bag which disguised it. No, that was something else. No, I tell you, this was kind of how it kind of looked on the shelf. I quite like the three exclusives here. I like the logos on it because I felt like the logos, the Titanfall, the Halo Wars and the Horizon, Forza Horizon logos, kind of they were identifiable as their respective games. You know, they felt like quite kind of iconic logos in their own way, like the Halo font, the Horizon font. So I was pleased to get that on there. But I just this stinking character and I think it really broke our editor’s heart to have to try and get this screenshot. I think we had like a… there was like a service internally, I can’t remember what it was called, it may have just been called Art Studio, which like magazines could basically tap into and you could like get a kind of… they had like sort of art wizards there and you could get them to like work on particular layouts or whatever, almost like internal freelancers. And I remember us giving them this screenshot and we were like, we need this screenshot like cleaned up and buffeted up and just made so we can put it on the cover and it looks less like a screenshot. And I think they hid some of it, but it’s all I can see. I don’t know. I really love this cover. I think it’s great. And I can’t think of a better game for the time than this because, like you say, I don’t think the access was flimsy at all. Like you say, you had one of the only interviews for this game where I feel like for a long time, Bioware avoided talking about what this game was. And I would say that the end result sort of suggests that there was a reason why that was the case. And yeah, I am having done… I did a Mass Effect Andromeda cover later on as well. And we got interviews then and they were very woolly. And like I actually just found one of the quotes that they gave me at the time, which was, we are approaching the completionist aspect very differently this time, because we’ve done and learned a lot from Inquisition, but we’ve also observed what other games have been doing, like The Witcher, and talked about meaningful quest design. And I don’t think Andromeda had any of that. So like, it was a complete fluff kind of marketing interview. So I think you picked the right time and I really like those top left hits. So yeah, I don’t know. I wouldn’t be down on this. I would not have guessed it was a screenshot, you know. Yeah, it just bugged me that like, I mean, to be fair, I think after I left, they actually did another sort of swing at this with a piece of art, which was even worse for it. It was there was that picture of the spacesuit sort of doing like an aerial punch or something. Right. And I think they put that on a wallet once as well. And it just, I don’t know, I just never felt easy putting like non cover art on a cover, because I could just see the difference. But you know, we got I think we got away with it. And like I said, I think it did all right this issue. So that was nice. Well, good stuff, Matthew. Well, those were the covers we wanted to go through. That was my much touted from last week, Games Magazine Covers From Hell. And I think it was more kind of, I don’t know, reflective on some quite interesting little moments in gaming history. Do you agree? Yeah, no, absolutely. I’m like I said, I just, it’s definitely the bit of madcraft I’m least confident in. There’s some I’m really pleased with and some I’m really proud of and but I… yeah. I always felt like the job, I just wanted to get it out of the way. I hated having covers hanging over me, like it used to put me in a really foul mood. And I’d feel like I almost felt a bigger sense of relief from sending a cover than I did from sending the mag on deadline, because once I had the cover I was just like, great, that’s that done. That’s the important bit. That’s the only bit anyone sees before they buy it. That’s the thing done. I don’t have to worry about that for another month, when I should probably have just been straight on the phone to all the PRs to try and set up next month’s cover, which I never did. Oh, there you go. Nice and candid there to see out this section. I must say that I did enjoy the process of doing it. And I actually really, when I was on PC Game, I really enjoyed working with Tony Ellis, who was our production editor, and basically the reason that PC Gamer had so many great writers over the years, because he helped train them, including some of the highest profile writers who went on to do some other cool stuff. And so, yeah, I really loved bouncing ideas off of him and then coming up with a great cover line. So even in that ARC cover, we still came up with a quite good line for it, which was, I think it was, PC’s Power Fantasy Goes Full Sci-Fi. I thought it was a really good hit for something I didn’t really care about. So yeah, I did like the process of it. And I think that, like, I think I’m a bit too in my own head about kind of like covers at certain points. So I think that I’m a bit like this with editorial generally, where I overthink it and overthink it and overthink it. And then I spend too much time thinking about it. And then inevitably, I’ve just driven myself a bit mad with the end result. But yeah, I think it definitely yielded a lot of covers I was kind of proud of. So even when I was going through this, with the exception of the PlayStation All-Stars one, which is ropey, and I didn’t really like PlayStation at the time. So it kind of reflects that a little bit. I kind of enjoyed working on all of these. So yeah, and I appreciate you sharing your insights, Matthew. Oh, well, good for you. Well then. So we’ll take one more short break, Matthew. But then we’re going to talk a little bit about a couple of our like highlights of magazines we worked on in a kind of short final part. Sounds great. Hello, Matthew, welcome to the final part. How are you feeling? Oh, thanks for having me. Dawn of the final section. 20 minutes remain, probably. There you go. I know, Zelda. So Matthew, for this final part, I just thought we’d turn things on their head a bit. We had a lot of, I don’t know, I don’t want to say self-loathing, but careful critiquing of our past work. And I wanted to talk about some of the highlights of covers that we worked on, because we both worked on many great covers, I would say. And so, yeah, what were your kind of highlights of your time editing magazines? So, there were, there were, I’m really two, two jump out. One on official Nintendo, when we did Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright, the kind of catcom level five mashup. That one was, A, this is the art. It’s the one time Professor Layton didn’t look like ass, because it was Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright. And they were standing side by side, and they were both pointing out. And you were like, that is as dynamic as you could possibly get for a cover, is a man pointing at you. And it was two men, I thought were brilliant, two of my favorite games. It’s like not a very complicated cover at all. But I was just, I just really pleased that I got to do a Ace Attorney related cover, you know, in terms of like a Nintendo mag that truly reflects my interests. I mean, that whole issue was like a dream because it really had the features inside to back it up. It was a real sort of celebration of all of them as well. I had a big Shootacoumi interview and some stuff on level five as well. And that’s just a very happy memory of like, it’s such a, it’s such a me, like magazine, if that makes sense, you know? It’s so like my interests. No one challenged it because it was a first party Nintendo game. Nintendo were obviously keen. So like internally, no one could really put up too much of a fight. Yeah, just a very, that was just a happy time, a happy thing that I, you know, when I see that cover, I’m like, yeah, it was good. It’s good that we got to do that. Oh, that’s cool. I am. Yeah. I’m happy for you to get to, you get to do something like that. Such a clear, like sort of like Venn diagram of your interests that so rare for it to come to be. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, so you’ve got another one listed here too, Matthew. And yeah, so this is, yeah, this is, this is Beat the Beat Rhythm Paradise, which is one of the Rhythm Tengoku games, which you’ll remember from our 2006 episode where that delightful jaunty tune played us out. This was the Wii version of Rhythm Paradise, a game which, like, I am amazed anyone let us put this on the cover. I still can’t really remember this, how we got our publisher to sign off on it. But it wasn’t just that, I mean, a game I loved, it was, it’s like crazy Nintendo, it’s, it’s, it’s super, like, Japanese, bright anime colours, big cartoonish characters, really, like, um, no one iconic. It doesn’t have a Mario or a Wario or anything, but it has always, like, zany looking characters, and the whole thing you can play it with just the A button on the Wii remote. Maybe the B button, maybe the trigger was involved anyway, but basically the, the, the, the kind of concept of the cover was we went big on this, you can press this A, so we actually, we put the A button right in the middle, and we had an extra layer on the outside cover with a hole cut through it where the A sat, and then when you opened up that cover, the inside of it was just like rhythm, erm, well it was, it was rhythm paradise. It was all these characters, super neon, and the idea was like you press the A button to kind of unleash the fun, which was open the cover, and then, so it was like a concept cover, a bit of a gimmick cover, had this physical cut out where you had to, it was a nightmare cover to make for our editor, Milf, who is a genius, erm, and it broke it. I have never seen a man more frustrated than him, because, you know, you send off cover as these proofs, you send off these things, you know, with various layers, when you’ve got different printing processes and things, there’s quite a, you know, you have to be very precise, you send off your base cover and then you send out, like, layers of gloss that go over the top and it all has to align perfectly or it’ll look like ass, but this was not only that, it was a cutout, it had to line up so that when you opened it all this stuff happened. It was so complex, the instructions for the printers to make this, and we just had no idea if it was going to come back broken, like, we didn’t know until we got the issues, and I can just remember when we got it and it was just so perfect, it was just 100% what we wanted it to be, and it was a sense of relief, and also, like, that is the best possible cover we could have done for that game, captures the spirit of it, the ethos of it, I mean, it’s, you know, I was only editor on Nintendo Gamer for a few issues, but that is, like, that’s all I wanted to do, as, like, as NGamer and Move as we could possibly have done, and I’m so, like, proud of the execution of it. When I left Nintendo Gamer, that was the cover they turned into my leaving cover, and I’d just like to think I’d be associated with that one. Like, that is genuinely, like, we made a nice thing, yeah, which is kind of all, you know, all you can really hope for in this piece is to maybe make one or two truly nice things, and this was one. It’s lovely. It’s a really lovely cover, and like you say, like, really captures what I kind of perceive as the sort of endgamer spirit. Yeah, better than anything else could. Yeah, yeah, we got like, we got, you know, Mark Green, who’d obviously left endgaming years ago, came back to do the review, because I loved his writing about rhythm, rhythm Tengoku, like in the first issue of Endgamer. So, you know, to me, it was a really like, just an important issue and a sort of celebration of of that history. And, you know, all the people who’d kind of, you know, I’d worked with and, yeah, I don’t know, it’s a bit sentimental for it, but it’s, yeah, that’s a good cut. I think it sold like eight copies. And most importantly, Matthew, it’s gone Aliens, Cloning, Marines hit. Right at the bottom there. Well, it wouldn’t be a true endgamer cover if there wasn’t like at least one piece of total shit on it. Oh, good stuff. So, Matthew, I’ve got a few that I realised I didn’t stick in our drive to, you know, kind of examine before this podcast, but I thought I’d just run through them anyway. I’ve dropped a couple into the into our Discord for you to look at for reference while we’re discussing this. But yeah, so on Games TM, I was really happy with all the covers I did. I was only editor of Games TM for about eight issues, but I think we did lots of like really nice covers, including the obligatory PS4 One cover off the back of E3 2013. So that was fun. But like the really nice looking ones I did, we did like an Arkham Origins cover on Games TM that had… this was one where the artwork was amazing and it was like the Joker’s head turning into bats and like Arkham Origins is like everyone’s least favorite Arkham game because it’s basically like a kind of it feels like a sort of like an enhanced version of Arkham City in a lot of ways. But yeah, it was this artwork was just so, so nice. Just like as good a piece of artwork of the Joker as you can get a very iconic, you know, like I can’t the most iconic villain there is on the cover of the most like it could be a comic cover. Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t I couldn’t believe how good it was when I saw it. I think the PR at the time is even like you wait till you see this artwork. It will just blow you away. And yeah, even though some of the lines in it are a bit dodgy because I think I was trying to get next gen in every single hit at the time. Yeah, I reflect on that one fondly. Another one is I did a Zelda cover of Games TM. It was just very simple. It was just for Wind Waker HD coming out and I think the 3DS one was coming out at the time as well. The Link Between Worlds. That was it. And so it was pretty simple, but it was like a kind of like series retrospective interview and we actually got like an interview, an email interview with Aonuma, which was a really cool… Oh, nice. Yeah, exactly. So it’s a cool get and we had a nice gold foil cover. So that one was cool. I reflect on that quite fondly too. And yeah, on PC Gamer, I had a bunch of them that I loved. I saw a really funny one that I actually thought about talking about earlier, which was Mark Hamill in the Star Citizen single player mode that still hasn’t come out five years after we ran that cover. So the one with Gary Oldman as well. Yeah, Gary Oldman and I think Gillian Anderson as well. Oh my god. I think about how like I almost met Mark Hamill because I was going to go do that. There was like we actually went on to the set where they were like doing the motion capture and I think I went to a really fucking boring meeting that day instead and I remember just like it was a very disappointing meeting by comparison while Chris Thurston, my deputy editor was meeting Mark Hamill. Like the year The Force Awakens came out and I definitely made an error that day. But I was very happy for Chris to get his nice photo with Star Wars dad. But yeah, the ones I picked here from PC Gamer, there was a Total War Warhammer cover. But we were like, I think the first in the world to see it. And then I think it was like announced like the day that our cover was revealed to the world. And then the issue went on sale like a few days later and it was just a really cool moment. Yeah, like felt like a real event. And it doesn’t get more Heartland PC Gamer than the intersection of Warhammer and Total War. That’s like, you know, pure dad territory. It’s safe dadlands there. And yeah, and then the other one was did a Dragon Age Inquisition cover, which you can look at now, Matthew. And that was like, I remember that one being notable because we actually went to Bioware, which was very rare to see the game. I think Evan in the US went to see it at the time. And the artwork was nice. And it also defied one of those bits of like, received wisdom about covers. I’ve never, I don’t know what the source is, but everyone kind of thinks green covers sell badly. That’s like, that’s what I was talking about, like one of these weird rules of covers that gets thrown around. Yeah. Also like, if you’re an Xbox magazine, you’ve got to put Master Chief on the covers. It’s going to be green no matter what. Our logo’s green. I mean, it’s as green as that, as you get. We did loads of green. We did lots of fluorescent, like a slight fluoro neon green. We used that a lot. And I actually thought they used to really stand out, those covers. We did a nice one with Fallout actually, which was that green with just a big, whatever his name is, vault, not Vault Boy. What’s the boy called? I think it was Vault Boy, wasn’t it? And that did well, and it was just him doing his big thumbs up. That was cool. That’s what everyone wanted to see in 2015, and now everyone’s going to hate Fallout. So the only other one which I’ll put in the drive for people to look at was a really nice PC Gamer XCOM 2 cover, where it was a giant alien head made out of skulls. Oh, I remember that. And that looked amazing. I remember being like, wow, that is the nicest thing that’s ever been on a shelf that has like, you know, my name in it. And yeah, that was that was really cool when XCOM 2 was again Heartland PC Gamer, you know, it doesn’t get more PC Gamer than that. So Matthew, that was the episode. Did you enjoy that trip down memory lane? I did. I did. I came out. I think I ended up on such a happy note that I’ve instantly forgotten all my terrible covers and all the stress of making them. And I should also shout out… what I failed to do through this was shouting out the names of the absolutely amazing art editors I worked with. Will on O&M was brilliant. Dale Prattley on O&M as well. Milf on Nintendo Gamer and Mark Wynn on OXM and Rob Crossland on OXM as well. Just great, like, you know, masters of aircraft who kind of took whatever shit I said and turned it into something usable, so… Yeah, and for me, shout out as well to John Strike, who was still the art editor of PC Gamer and was phenomenal to work with and designed the logo for this podcast. That’s how much I value. Oh yes, he did. What a talented man John Strike is. Yeah, that’s how much I value his input all these years later. And yeah, shout out to all the great print magazines still coming out every month and, you know, putting like… It’s really great to walk into Smiths and still see like so many great games mags on the shelves like OPM and Retro Gamer and Edge of course. And so yeah, I just wanted to give them a shout out. Edge this month with their Hollow Knight Silksong cover which, you know, has done that rarest of things which is like a magazine that kind of sets the internet aflame which is the kind of holy grail I think these days of you have something the internet doesn’t have and everyone goes and subscribes and it sells out on online stores and things. Yeah, for sure. That’s just really cool when something like that becomes an event. So yeah, I get nostalgic thinking about this stuff. But would I do it again? Nah. I’m too tired. What a great note to end on. I’m just far too tired to do all that again. If I just that’s that’s kind of like by sort of take out. I like working online where I’ve got instant metrics and I can write about the Mandalorian and people will read it. That’s that’s fine with me. So, Matthew, where can we find you on Twitter right now? I am MrBazzle underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W Roberts on Twitter. You can also follow the podcast on Twitter at Back Page Pod. We will tweet on there whenever a new episode comes out. We’ll also share assorted gubbins, as we might say in the old magazine parlance. And also at the same time, you can email us. We’ve had a couple of emails through really nice ones from people who like the podcast. So we appreciate that. That’s backpagegames.gmail.com. You can just let us know what you think of the podcast. Also if you have any questions, we’ll read them out and try to answer them as best we can. So, thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now!