Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined today by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re joined by yet another special guest, Keza. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hello, I’m Keza. I’m Keza MacDonald. I do video games for money. I’m the video games editor at The Guardian right now, and I’ve been a video games journalist since I was 16 professionally. So a very, very, I won’t give away how old I am, but that’s quite a long time now, unfortunately. That’s impressive going. Our last guest was Andy Kelly, who started when he was 17. So you’ve gone one up on him. That’s good. Now we just have to find a 15-year-old games guest. To be fair, it was two weeks before my 17th birthday that I got my first job in games. That’s pretty amazing. In fact, when I joined the industry at 18, everyone said to me, well, Samuel, you’re not that young because a person who was here shortly before you was even younger. And it’s like, okay, wow. So how younger they get here? Are they like urchins in the editorial minds, like writing preview content from the age of 11? Well, they’re all YouTubing now. It’s all the eight-year-old YouTubers. They’ve definitely got us beat. The eight-year-old billionaires. Yeah, that’s the thing. I’ve missed several boats in my career in that I started out on print just as print was dying. And then I moved into websites just as YouTube was taking off. And now I work for a newspaper. So overall, really keeping on the pulse of the media. I bet your folks are impressed, though. Yeah, to be honest, my parents finally understand my job after 15 years now that I work for the Guardians. That’s something. They tell people. They’re very proud. It’s very sweet. I had a whole bunch of questions I want to ask about your career, but you seem to have covered it all in two sentences, Keza. Well, I have to work to really strict word count. So let’s just have it at this point to be concise. So this episode is all about E3. So we’re joined by Keza because Keza has been to E3 a whole bunch of times. So the Electronic Entertainment Expo, it’s largely been considered the biggest event on the gaming calendar, at least traditionally. And so yes, it’ll be great to talk about it a little bit as the digital version of the event is coming up for 2021. It’s seemingly got the back of major publishers. And yeah, basically I thought it’d be fun to talk a bit about our E3 memories on this podcast. We try and go deep into, you know, sort of industry stuff or games journalism career stuff that people might find interesting. But I suppose then, Keza, before I ask a little bit about you, what’s your sort of overall read on E3? Do you miss it this year? Are you sad you’re not going? I love E3 very selfishly, just because it’s a really exciting thing to do as a journalist. Like, you’re running around actually seeing things, actually talking to people. A lot of the time, games journalism can be quite a… it’s quite a couch-based activity. It’s quite a couch-based version of journalism. You’re not really looking on the ground very often. And I love that. I love the energy of the place. You’re basically just running from game demo to game demo with very, very hungover Californians. But it’s still more exciting than it can be when you’re just sitting at your desk a lot of the time. And I really enjoy the buzz. And I like that you get so much fun news all at once. You know, it’s just it feels… People call E3 Video Game Christmas. And that is how I feel about it. I really love it. Even the years where I’ve not actually been and I’ve been covering it pregnant on my couch, I’ve really enjoyed E3. Staying up at 3 in the morning and watching Shenmue 3 get announced was just really, really fun. I am going to miss it this year. I’ve not been for a while now due to a combination of pandemics and small children entering my life. And I was really, really hoping it was going to be on this year. And now I’m worried it’s never going to come back, which would be gutting. I’ve got a good feeling about it coming back. We’ll get into this a little bit later when we talk more specifically about E3 related kind of gubbins. But I feel like the backing from the publishers this year suggests that people are still into it. But yeah, I hope it comes back just for the, you know, the kind of like, like you say, the spectacle of it. It really does. I think, you know, Games News Christmas kind of sums it up. It’s just this big kind of shot of exciting industry energy, I guess, and lots of stuff going on at once. And it is super corporate, right? Obviously. But that can be fun too, you know, it’s a bit of a huge corporate dick-waving exercise, but that’s sometimes really funny, as I’m sure we’ll get into when we start talking about our conference. Yeah, for sure. Matthew, what’s your kind of like, when I say E3 to you, what’s the, what’s your sort of reaction? I always think back to like reading Games Master when I was like 12 and when you get to the E3 issue, you know, I didn’t really know, like I could actually don’t think I could have told you what E3 stood for, but you know, I knew that there was a issue a year where something called E3 happened and it just made loads of games happen in a magazine. And I think for a lot of people who read magazines, like they were always the best issue of the year. That one was like the big exciting thing. And I think, I think a lot of people who kind of grew up on that coverage have kind of carried a special place for it. And I guess that’s still my relationship with it. You know, like when I went for my first year, it was like, oh shit, like I’m at the thing. I’m at the thing from Games Master. Like I remember reading that issue, like in a holiday camp, you know, sitting in a tent and just looking at pictures of, weirdly, the video game tie-in of like Dragon Heart and going, wow, this is the stuff. I remember reading N64 magazine’s issue about Space World. That was a long, it’s long dead now, but that was a thing that Nintendo used to do just previous to Tokyo Game Show. And I remember sitting, pouring over these tiny photographs of this Japanese Nintendo Fest and thinking, this is the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I think that was the first time I remember reading about one of the big games industry events and being excited about it. The E3 issues were always just, they were exciting, because I was trying to explain this to my 15-year-old stepson the other night, because that was the only way we had to know about games. We had to go and buy a magazine and look at little pictures of the video games. We didn’t get the live stream. We didn’t really even get, there was no way to get the information you had. And everyone was always on a deadline battle, weren’t they, to get their E3 issue out fastest. There was, I remember an issue of N64, there were pictures of, it must have been the E3 where Conker’s Bad Fur Day was there. And Conker’s Bad Fur Day was, stand, was just basically a bar giving all the journalists, like, pints of beer. And there’s just all these sort of like, sort of middle-aged dudes drinking pints of beer in these photos and thinking, like, that just would never happen. Like, it’s such a different time. If I could go back in time, I’d love to do one of those earlier, kind of, Roarer E3s. Mate, late 90s E3. I bet that was a good time. I mean, the games would have been shit and there would have been booth babes everywhere and it would have been incredibly sexist and I’d probably have been dragged to one of those awful strip clubs on the Sunset Strip. But nonetheless, it probably would have been a good time. For the games, anyway. Well, as you’re kind of speaking from experience there, then, Keza, let’s jump a bit into your background. So what was it like for you getting started in games media and working in print from such a young age? It was my dream job. And I grew up on games magazines, Nintendo ones particularly. And when I was 16, I did some work experience at Games TM, which at the time was still quite new. I think I joined when it was about a year old. And that was at the time supposed to be a kind of edgy competitor to Edge, the kind of the most kind of academic and serious games magazine thought it was very important. And Games TM was like a slightly scrappier version of Edge. And of course, I wanted to work for Edge, but I got Games TM because I was 16. And I found it a very, at the time, at that age, I didn’t really see it this way. But looking back now, it was very challenging because everyone was incredibly sceptical of me, firstly because I was so young, but then also because I was a girl. And I was the only girl in the entire office. There was literally one other woman who wasn’t, who was working in editorial in the whole of Paragon publishing. Everybody else was a kind of scruffy dude in their early 20s, and they were all very sceptical. And I had to do a lot of proving myself that I think, looking back, was probably quite unnecessary. But, you know, that was the deal. And I really enjoyed it, though. I enjoyed the work a lot more than I thought I would. It was very, very badly paid. And a lot of fun. But then, of course, because I was so young, I was too young to actually drink or go to any of the any of the events or to E3. My first E3, I was still 18. I was still too young to drink in America. So and I was staying. I remember staying. I stayed on a older American Games Journalists’ hotel floor. That was my E3 experience the first time when I was 18 in a sleeping bag. But that’s what I got. So it was all like incredibly scrappy for me in the in the early years because I in order to. So I left school. I got a high school dropout. I left school to go and to go and be a games journalist, which is surely what every parent’s dream is for their little girl. And the one like condition that my parents gave me, they were like, look, we’ll support you, obviously. But please, please come back and do university, please, please. So I agreed to that. So I spent this one year on Games TM, which I very much enjoyed. And then from there, I went back to uni and had a slightly more normal time. But I kept I kept freelancing. I kept my foot in the door. I did write for Edge eventually when I was in university. And then, yes, so by the time I graduated uni, I already had like four or five years experience as a games journalist. So that was very fortunate because I graduated straight into the recession, like most millennials. And so where everybody else had kind of done a clever and sensible thing, like study to be a lawyer, and there were just no jobs. I’d done the idiot thing and dropped out of school and gone to be a games journalist and thankfully had a bunch of experience and managed to get to get, you know, a job pretty quickly. My first one was at IGN where I was UK Games Editor. So it was, I would say it was very fortunate that I did what I did and got in very young, even though it was very challenging being so young at that time. And also the games industry was very different back then, like much, much less diverse, even than it is now. And quite a lot of stuff that I kind of put up with when I was a teenager, I would not put up with now. And I would not suggest that, you know, young women now probably don’t, I mean, they do, young women do now have to put up with the same stuff, the same kind of gross, creepy older men in whatever capacity, whether they’re developers or publishers, they still exist. They’re being exposed everywhere every few months at this point. But I do think things have gotten better for women. And I think that now that there’s more of us around in the games industry, there’s more people to look up to, like there’s more kind of, like I had no one. There was literally nobody else. The only other woman that I knew of in the whole of games journalism was the editor of Edge, Margaret Robertson, who I never actually met. And then there was Ellie Gibson, who used to work at Eurogamer, who was awesome and is still a great friend of mine, but she really took me under her wing. And now the thing is, if you’re a younger woman in the games industry, there are actually quite a lot of people like me around now. And so I think it’s better and easier now, I think, than it was when I joined. If you don’t mind me asking, I guess, a bit more about that, Keza, do people kind of see you as a mentor now? Do you get younger women coming into games talking to you about their experiences? Absolutely. And I love that. That’s great. It’s one of the things I enjoy about having stuck around. I mean, you know what it’s like in the games media? People tend to stick around for five years, and then they either need to start earning some actual money or there’s cuts at the publisher or whatever, and they tend to move on to something else. They’ll go into PR or they’ll go into narrative. Everybody seems to be going into writing actual video games now. That’s like the next step. Or they just leave the games industry entirely. So there aren’t that many people who stick around in the games media for 10 years or I’m on 16 years now, which is, I mean, can’t do anything else now, clearly mad. So it’s definitely good to be able to be around when people come looking for advice or the people are new in the industry. I’ve had lots of people come up to me at events and stuff and say, you know, they read my work when they were teenagers and they’ve now graduated university, which makes me feel 4,000 years old. But yeah, I think it’s very important, especially for young women, I think it’s important to have older mentor figures around the place that you can know that it’s approachable. Also very useful at parties, if there’s a creep at the parties, you can come up and ask me to go and tell them to fuck off and I will do that. That’s useful. If you don’t mind me asking, how many times has that happened? I thought you were going to say, who are the creeps? Maybe not the place for this podcast. I wonder if we name names on this podcast. Countless, guys. This is the creep special. It’s no longer the E3 special. It’s the creep special. Yeah, I remember being taken out for a drink, aged 17, by someone who worked, he must have been about 35, who worked as a publisher-level guy at Paragon Publishing. He took me out for a drink and tried it on in my third week working there, which was just very unacceptable. At the time, I was like, oh, well, I guess that’s the thing that’s going to happen that I have to just deal with. Parties are always a thing. Video game industry parties involve a lot of drinking. And although that’s fun, it can also be not great for young women, because it means that you get a lot of drunk dudes who can be really inappropriate. That happens all the time, like literally all the time. The thing that’s funny is that I remember talking about this a few years ago, and it was me and a couple of other women and two young men. And the men were just shocked. Like they were like, oh my God, I never see this. It’s like, well, of course you don’t see it. It doesn’t happen to you and you’re nice. So you don’t do it. So it’s like literally invisible to you. But this is one of the things about kind of cultural, the cultural pervasiveness of sexism is it is kind of invisible to men a lot of the time. So it’s something that you only see if it happens to you or if you’re doing it. So hopefully that’s not the case for either of you. You both seem very nice. No, I can confirm that. It’s not my deal. Not creeps. Not creeps. I’m willing to put my seal of approval that you’re not creeps. Well, I promise this isn’t the only thing I brought you on here to talk about, Keza. But I appreciate your honesty. So I would love to ask more about your experience in games journalism. But what was that period studying like? Because I just read a Wireframe magazine article with, I think, written by you that talks about your experiences living in Japan. So what was that period of your life like? Oh, Matt, that was great. So when I went back to uni, I studied languages. So I did German and Japanese. And I did Japanese purely and explicitly just so that I could go to Japan for my year abroad. Like, Japanese is incredibly hard. Don’t study Japanese. It’s really, really difficult. It’s like the hardest language you can do, except for maybe Chinese or Finnish. But you do get to go to Japan for your year abroad. So when I was 20, I flew to Nagoya, which is a city in the middle of Tokyo and Kyoto. And that’s where I spent that year. I spent it studying. I really wasn’t doing much studying, to be honest. I mostly spent it in arcades or bars, learning Japanese. And it was absolutely brilliant because I felt like it was very weird. It was almost like deja vu. I really felt like I’d been to Japan because I’d experienced Japan through video games for my whole life. Like all of the games I grew up with from Nintendo through to like weird ass PlayStation 2 games that I played when I was a teenager. Like most of them, I was super into rhythm action. All of the games I loved were Japanese. And I remember walking around my Aichi prefecture suburb and it just looked so much like Shenmue. And I was like very weirded out by it almost because I felt like I’d been there before, but I hadn’t. And this was like 2008, right? So this is the tail end of the arcade era. But I still got to experience like the real arcades. Most of my favorite ones are now shut, but they were still hanging on in there in 2008. And also it was the tail end of like Japan’s dominance of the games industry. You know, there was that time when, you know, Capcom Square Enix, Nintendo, Sony, Sega, like it was just basically most of the games industry was dominated by Japanese Konami. And a lot of them are like, if not gone now, then they’re shadows of their former selves, which is really sad. But yeah, I feel like I got to experience like just the end of like that version of Japan that I grew up with as the kind of home of gaming, the center of the gaming world. And it was so cool. I loved it. And I also, I spent, oh, one of the coolest things about Japan, I don’t know if this is still the case, but when you go to a game shop, instead of just all the, instead of it being this kind of horrible shell with FIFA in it, they have video games from all eras. Like, they have all the old stuff on the wall next to the new stuff. So you’ll have NES games and SNES games and weird old cartridges that you’ve, and lots of bizarre PlayStation 1 games. I found a whole bunch of Dreamcast stuff that never came out in the UK. And when I was a kid, I was obsessed with these games that never came out in the UK because they were like forbidden and exciting. And, you know, I remember poring over N64 magazine and reading all the import reviews that Will Overton used to do. And I bought all of, I bought all these stupid games, like the Derby Racing game and a bass fishing simulator. And Osumo 64 and all these just random ass, not very good N64 games, but they were exciting to me because I remembered them from the magazines and they were like 100 yen in the bargain bucket. So I came back from Japan with a Japanese N64 and about 50 just random games. I’m like, I just really enjoyed the, you know, gaming culture wasn’t just, it wasn’t just here’s the latest products. It was like, here is the whole history of video games. And it was like they in the arcades as well, like the arcades, you’d have Street Fighter 2, like original Street Fighter 2 next to, you know, U-Beat or the next Guitar Freaks or whatever. And it was, it felt, it felt like gaming was kind of how I’d always seen it over there, like part of life, part of culture, as opposed to just like shiny products. And I really loved that. It was great. Oh, and I also discovered Demon’s Souls over there, which was probably the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole career. Oh, yeah, you were an early adopter, pioneer, right? Yeah, it was, I found it in a, I found it in a, the week it came out, I just saw From Software’s logo on it. And I thought From Software were interesting because they’d done a bunch of random PS2 era stuff that was just very offbeat, like Cookies and Cream, which was a strange platformer about rabbits, and Kingsfield, which were miserable survival fantasy games. And they did Armored Core, which I like because I like big robots. And so I just literally saw From Software’s logo on it and thought, might give that a go. And it turned out to be this, it turned out to be Demon’s Souls, guys. It was so unexpected. I was trying to navigate that game in my fourth language as well. So I was sitting there with my little dictionary trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Obviously, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help knowing what the words say in Demon’s Souls. That’s not really what you need to know. But yeah, I think I was the first person to review that game in English. And that started a bit of a, it was part of like the word of mouth snowball effect that got it released. Did you play the remake on PS5? I did. It was great. So you wouldn’t want something with a special meaning to shit the bed. Exactly. It is always a bit of a risk, isn’t it, when they remake something that’s really special to you. But no, the PS5 Demon’s Souls was just Demon’s Souls, but as it obviously was kind of in my imagination, like in my head. And the haptics on that were great as well. Like it was the first game I played on PS5 and having the swords clash against your shield and stuff. It made it even more kind of tense and exciting. I really, I really loved that game. The problem was it came out at a time when I was so busy, I didn’t get a chance to to actually write about it again. I didn’t get a chance to review it. So I basically spent three months playing it and then was like, well, probably too late to write about this game now. I still enjoyed it. Now you’re just waiting for the old Sumo 64 remaster with the haptics. It’s coming, man. It’s coming. Well, I feel like just from the kind of idyllic way you described your life in Japan there, I feel like they should make a Studio Ghibli film about you, Keza. The tall, blonde, handsome, white girl. If Miyazaki didn’t hate video games anyway. But I was curious then. So from there, how do you kind of end up with IGN? What’s that experience like? I had a broadly very positive experience at IGN. So I came back and I graduated. And I was looking around for a job and IGN’s UK Games Editor job came up. And it was very, it was weird because IGN at the time was not, it wasn’t very joined up internationally. Like it was very much the Americans did their thing. And then there were just some Brits doing their other thing in London. And so when I joined, I made an effort to try and like make us more of a global team. So I was trying to get us to sync up properly on news and to instead of doing UK reviews of stuff, which was dumb, just doing some of the reviews in the UK. And we were kind of really ramping up on video stuff at that time as well. It was when YouTube was really taking off and IGN was ahead of the game on video. So that was my first time doing kind of broadcast style video stuff. And I’ll tell you what, E3 with IGN is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. It was like a giant live news situation. It was amazing. Like we had like a studio and you would land at E3 and go to your terrible accommodation. But then on the days of the show, you would be on a… If you were presenting, you’d be on like this really exciting, really kind of energetic rotor where you had to… I remember hosting one of the Ubisoft conferences and you know, you had to be like really on your game and responding in real time to what was going on. You’re in the studio with everyone else. It was so flashy and fun. I really, really enjoyed E3 with IGN. It was great. Because they’re like the kings of E3, right? When they’re there. It’s the biggest, most American games outlet that there is. And you know, although that got you shit on the internet, it certainly worked when you were at E3 because you got just this really fun production experience. And I got on pretty well with all the people that I worked with in the States. I got on really well. Greg Miller was at IGN at that time. And he and I were pals. We got on great. And, you know, I had a really good time going to San Francisco and working at kind of such a big flashy media company. However, IGN is also like extremely mainstream. And, you know, it was basically a lot of the women who were on IGN were like presenters, right? They were literally models. So the IGN audience did not know what to do with me at all. They did not know how to respond. But I quite enjoyed that. I enjoyed kind of writing stuff about, you know, queer stories in video games or writing about, you know, or sneaking a bit of feminism into the reviews and stuff and just seeing them freak out. 14 year old American boys from Minnesota being like, I don’t understand what’s happening. I always really enjoyed that actually. It felt quite subversive. But there did come a point with IGN where I got a bit fed up with the constant… They didn’t use to moderate the comments. And there came a point where… And it wasn’t just me, it was everyone at IGN that struggled with this. But there came a point where I was like, I am so sick of being continually abused professionally all the time on the internet. This was pre-Gamergate. After Gamergate, people started taking moderation more seriously and taking comments and stuff more seriously. But at that time, I remember at one point on the IGN Facebook, they used the cover photo and they were doing… Like every week there’d be a different member of staff. And on my week, the comments on this cover photo were disgusting. Like they were really bad. And my mum saw them because my mum’s on Facebook. And my mum called me up and was like really upset. That’s the point at which I ended up calling the boss of IGN’s parent company and being like, I’m just going to send you some screenshots of some of the stuff that’s appearing on our public Facebook page. If you’d like to do anything about this, that would be great. That was the bad side of working for somewhere so big and so visible. But from what I hear, they’re much better at actually moderating their stuff now, both on YouTube and on the site. I think there has been this realization since, this is 10 years ago, that there’s been this realization that it actually is important to moderate stuff on the internet. Which, you know, if you’d ever listen to any women or people of color in the past, the entire history of the internet you would already know, but at least they’re catching up now. I did think it was really cool, at least, that you emerged as a central voice in IGN. Like, when I remember that period of IGN, I did feel like you were surfaced very well in terms of the stuff you were writing about. Did you feel like you had that kind of outlet and support to write about whatever you wanted? Totally. And I fought for it. Don’t get me wrong. Like, I definitely put myself out there. I was like, hello, I’m here. I want to do this. And generally, the response from within IGN was really good. Like, I had very supportive people working with me and people who actually wanted IGN to run stuff that was a little bit more challenging. Then, you know, here’s a list of Marvel movies that are coming out and so on. And, you know, this is only a couple of years after they shut IGN Babes. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was definitely a period of change in the games industry. Was that a thing? It totally was a thing in the 90s, all the way up to like the… IGN Babes? IGN Babes was absolutely a thing, man. I don’t remember that. It was hilarious. It was, yeah, I remember very much in the early 2000s when I was first on the internet. Like, it would be IGN, it would be like Games, Movies, Comics, Babes. That was it. But they kind of left the Babes content just kind of there for ages. And it was in about… I think it was only in about 2009 that they kind of went, OK, we should probably get rid of all this little Babes stuff. It’s really embarrassing. Imagine having Babes editor on your CV. IGN Babes editor. I love it. I wonder who that guy was. I think I’d rather not know. Yeah, babe in chief. This was definitely a time when there weren’t that many prominent female voices around in games. And so that’s one of the reasons I took the job at IGN, because I thought that’s a huge platform and it would probably be really cool to be able to… I mean, I’ve mentioned the downside of being so visible. One of the nice things about my current job is that people who read newspapers really don’t care enough to abuse me in the comments, which is nice. Whereas obviously when you’re working for a website that’s largely targeted at sort of teen boys and that has millions and millions of readers, it was certainly more challenging on that front. But the plus side is that loads of people were really cool as well. And I ended up doing some of IGN’s biggest reviews. I did Grand Theft Auto 5, 4, 5, 5, must have been 5. And I did Dark Souls for IGN, which was like, it was an exclusive back when exclusive reviews were a thing. And I stayed up for like three weeks trying to play a broken pre-release version of Dark Souls. And then we did IGN’s first ever live stream, which was 24 hours straight of me playing Dark Souls. And I actually nearly died. It was awful. But it was also really, really fun. And that was the first ever live stream that IGN ever did. And I got to be a part of that, which was cool. I did enjoy, I enjoyed, I really enjoyed that job. Like it was, it was, it was so different from working on a magazine. Like my previous experience was working on Games TM and Edge, right? And then suddenly going and being part of such a kind of big company, and such a mainstream one was, it was certainly new and exciting. I did enjoy it. So from there, you go on to be the launch editor and editor-in-chief of Kataka UK? Is that right? That’s correct, yeah. So I left IGN basically because I, there was two options for me really. I was either going to essentially become a children’s TV presenter, which let’s be honest, is kind of what YouTube is, or I could start looking for a just slightly different job that was a bit more journalism-y. So I kind of thought about what I wanted, and I didn’t really want to end up as an influencer, you know? Like I got into the games media to write, essentially. You know, I’m a born writer. I love it. And I also love, I love actual journalism. I love talking to people and finding stories. And there wasn’t as much room for that on IGN, really, as I wanted. So I ended up, it was when Kotaku were opening a UK franchise, they were kind of looking around for an editor. And I was like, that would be, that would be my ideal job. Like, because Kotaku didn’t give a shit. Like, it was just, it was such a really ballsy blog, you know? And it was, it was quite variable in quality over the years. But like, it really had this core of like, just not giving a toss, which I really enjoyed. It was very anti-corporate and like the opposite of IGN in terms of how it covered games. And it also had at the time quite an unusual, quite an innovative approach to games journalism, where instead of doing preview, review, cycle, product-oriented journalism, they were very much looking at, you know, a game’s story only starting when it comes out and looking for how people were playing and what communities were doing with games, which is common now, you know, that’s kind of the playbook for Polygon. And, you know, most, I mean, PC Gamer as well, like most, I would say most online games journalism is now that way, but Kotaku was there earlier. And I found that very exciting. And it was like, I did kind of get sick of writing big game reviews, you know, like I spent three years at IGN stressing out over embargoes and, you know, playing games for like 18 hours of the day to then write these kind of massive reviews. And like I did enjoy it. But after about three years that I was like, I kind of wanted to do something different. So yeah, it was cool to be able to like launch Kotaku in the UK as well, because I got to decide what it was and I got to decide what we covered. And I got to not run any of the kind of slightly dodgy anime stuff that I didn’t particularly enjoy on the UK site. So I got to kind of run my own version of Kotaku. I got to kind of pick and choose what I liked about the American Kotaku and run all of that stuff. And then I got to sort out our own reporting and our own kind of UK voice, which I really liked. It was such a good job. It was honestly brilliant. I loved running Kotaku UK. RIP, Kotaku UK. It lasted much longer than I thought it would because it was rocky. Kotaku was owned by Gawker Media, which was a company that just was never out of controversy ever, ever. And there was just one crisis after another for Gawker Media in New York when I was working there, like, culminating, of course, in Hulk Hogan suing it out of existence with the financial backing of Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. There is a documentary about this. You know, that’s how exciting that was. But yeah, it’s literally every year that I was running Kotaku UK, some kind of massive drama would be happening. I’d be thinking, this isn’t going to last. This job is not going to last. So I was really pleased it lasted as long as it did, which I think was six years. It was rad then as well seeing like your UK articles end up on the US Kotaku too. It seemed like they had a lot of respect for you over there. Yeah, it was cool because the… Yeah, when I started at IGN, right, UK and US games journalism were quite siloed. And then by the time I was working for Kotaku, I’d sort of forced the Americans to pay attention to us at IGN. And then at Kotaku, they already knew who I was, which was useful. And then that meant that, you know, the people I was running, the work that I was running from the UK, I was always trying to surface, like, really cool, good UK games journalism voices on Kotaku, because that would then put it in front of the Americans, which would then put it in front of a bigger audience. And I’d really like to think that, like, by the time I was done working for the big American games websites, they had a lot more knowledge and respect of, like, the talent that we have in the UK in the games media, because there’s a lot of it, and it’s drastically underappreciated. And it was really cool being able to, you know, put UK voices in front of these really giant audiences. And quite a lot of people who I worked with just loved it, were just really excited whenever something went up on the US site. And it also, I think it also, you know, I think the, I think we approach games journalism slightly differently in the UK. There’s a lot more kind of dry humour. And I think that we come from this, like, this magazine tradition, right? Whereas in the US, it’s very personality focused a lot of the time. And I think that, I think that when the UK stuff started appearing on USIGN and US Kotaku, it really kind of helped to balance out that coverage and give it a different voice. And I think it brought in a lot of readership as well, which was good. When I started in magazines, I think I had an idea of certain American sites being these just slightly giant, slightly, not to be too rude, but kind of like flavorless sort of behemoths. But definitely like them becoming more international, particularly folding in, like some really great UK writers, some really great Australian writers as well, actually, on both GameSpot and IGN. They feel kind of transformed to me as sites now, not to be condescending, but they feel like super legitimate in a way that I don’t think they did maybe 15 years ago. I totally agree with that. If you look at GameSpot’s US team, they’ve imported Temur and Lucy James from the UK to really, really great, great voices. They do have a habit of doing that, though. It’s a bit annoying in that they would sort of cherry pick from the UK and be like, come to us. I was offered a job in San Francisco with IGN that I didn’t take because I can’t bear San Francisco. And I didn’t really want to be earning, you know, I didn’t really want to be living in a studio apartment in San Francisco. You know, that was not my dream. If any US sites are listening, I am open to being imported and you can literally import me in a crate. You don’t even have to put me in a chair on a plane. I will come. It doesn’t need a studio apartment, just a crate, a crate and some water. Just a crate. I will live in the crate that you import me in. That is my pledge to you. Just put some food through a hole in it occasionally and you will get some moderately decent copy out the other end. So Keza, from there, how do you end up at The Guardian? That was a bit of a sideways, a bit of a curveball for me. So essentially, I had a baby. That’s what changed. I went and had my son, my first son, my eldest, when I was… I can’t believe I can’t remember what year he was born. It’s been quite a mindfuck of a year, to be fair. He was born in 2016, the end of 2016. So I spent 2017 just at home with my baby and just playing games like I used to without having to think about what they were like for work. So I spent the whole of 2017 basically just playing Zelda, Breath of the Wild, forever. I think I played for like 110 hours. I didn’t think about other games. I didn’t have to care about what Destiny updates were happening. I didn’t have to be on top of what controversy was going on where. I didn’t have to be pestering publishers to say things about things they never wanted to talk about or delays or in-game controversies or whatever. I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was just enjoying video games again for on that kind of really basic pure level of just I want to play this and therefore I will and I don’t have to think about an angle. And that break from the games industry kind of changed my, it changed what I wanted out of my career quite a lot because when I got back, the first thing I did was write on Kotaku about how Destiny is unplayable. If you are a parent, you know, it’s like an un-pausable constantly evolving fast paced, you know, and I was trying to play, I was trying to play, I think it must have been Destiny 2 had come out by that point, but I was trying to play it and I just, it just wasn’t, it was not possible for me to play it. So I wrote a kind of quite tongue in cheek article about this and I got like, because it was on Kotaku, it got in front of all the kind of Destiny streamers and I got like this kind of weird torrent of abuse from sort of like grown ass 23 year old Destiny streamers and their fans and I just thought, oh, this sucks. Like this, this is, I hate this aspect of the job. And I kind of felt like I didn’t really, I didn’t really want to be so involved in the kind of drama that you kind of thrive on if you’re working for a site like, you know, a specialist game site, you know, because you have to care about, you have to think about every game, you have to care about every big game and you have to be looking, you know, you have to be on top of everything all the time. And what I was kind of interested in was, was games on a kind of bigger, like a kind of more of a zoomed out level. You know, I was looking at, you know, where games were in culture at large, you know, rather than just games in relation to other games. I was thinking more about games in relation to life and TV and movies and books and everything else that we do with our lives. And so when, when The Guardian asked me if I was interested in writing about games for them, I thought that would really work for me, because the job of video games editor or publication at The Guardian is essentially ambassador. You’re kind of like an emissary from the nerd world. You’re like, hi, I’m the person who knows about this thing and I’m picking out the most interesting or relevant or, yeah, the most interesting or relevant stuff from my world. And I’m showing it to you. Like, that’s kind of what my job is now. I’m sort of overseeing games and just picking the things that are in some way interesting, you know. And I don’t have to cover every single game. I don’t have to cover every single big game even. I don’t have to run, you know, I’m not obligated to run, you know, stuff on patches for The Division 2 if I don’t want to, you know, whereas on Kotaku IGN, you know, you kind of had to cover every big game. You kind of had to, you had to be on top of everything. And now I don’t have to be on top of everything. I just have to pick the stuff that seems most interesting or relevant. And I find that more, it’s just a bit of a change, you know. And also it’s quite fun going from being, you know, frankly, a big fish in a small pond in games world, you know, once you get to a certain point in games, once you can’t really get any further, can you? Like once you’re the editor of a thing. You can’t really go anywhere with that. And it was like, I love the games industry. I love the games media. And I really, you know, enjoy working still with everybody who works in the UK games media. I’ve always found so many friends there and it’s great. But now I work for The Guardian and there are real journalists doing stuff about Gaza or doing like investigations into modern slavery or investigations into like, you know, prostitution in American prisons. And I’m like, hello, I do the video games and it’s a really good reality check. The first day at The Guardian, we have this like morning conference, which is really exciting. It’s when the editor-in-chief stands up and basically just kind of calls on everybody to talk about what they’re doing. And just like in the films, just like in the films, it was so exciting. I was beside myself. And you know, the news desk were talking about Brexit. And then this was the time when all of that stuff around the kind of dodgy money coming out the Panama Papers stuff was being reported on. And that was all great. Really exciting. And then they were like, and I believe there’s new higher culture and the culture and stuff and said, yeah, we’ve got a new video games editor. And they kind of pointed at me and I kind of stood up and went, hello, I write about video games. Email me if you have any questions about that. And then sat down again and everyone just went, all right. And then we moved on to Ai Weiwei. So, yeah, it’s definitely different and quite fun. And of course, I still like I battle a bit to get games kind of recognized, you know, that there’s still that kind of like push back from especially older newspaper editor types is like, is this what is this video games? Yeah, I hear they’re worth money now, you know, and trying to sort of push for video games being treated as part of the rest of culture and not come some kind of like weird cul-de-sac, some weird niche. So I do have to do quite a lot of like it’s kind of like talking to your parents when you’re 15 about video games around the dinner table. It’s that but now I’m 32 years old and I’m doing it with newspaper editors. Amazing. It sounds like you’re quite passionate about surfacing other writers’ voices, Keza. Does having a platform like The Guardian allow you to do that, to give people sort of cred with that sort of platform in a way that you maybe you don’t working in specialist games media? I mean, I would like to do more than I do because so I, The Guardian is a three day a week job, games editor. Everyone, you know, this is something I have to explain quite a lot. Like I work three days a week. It’s quite a lot to fit into a three day week. So I don’t get as much time as I would like to really work on editing and talent surfacing. Like I did loads of that at Kotaku. I was always looking for new voices, interesting new voices to talk about games. And I spent a lot of time on editing and working with writers to kind of make their stuff shine and, you know, giving them a platform. I don’t get to do as much of that as I’d like on The Guardian. Like you kind of have to already be pretty at the top of your game to be writing for The Guardian. So I would love to do more talent development if I had more time, I’d be super into it. But there is definitely a certain cache that comes, you know, you can work with somebody who’s been a games journalist for like 10 years and they get a review in The Guardian and they’re really excited about it, which, you know, I feel that, you know, I do get excited whenever, you know, my parents buy it. I mean, and it’s it is really, really cool. And it’s also for someone who grew up when games were this kind of weird nerdy thing to it does feel legitimizing, I think, to see it covered well in, you know, good mainstream journalistic outlets. I think The Washington Post is doing a really good job as well. And obviously Bloomberg hired Jason Schreier off Kotaku and also doing a super good job. And I do think that that is quite legitimizing and it’s quite heartening, I think, to see games covered in that way in the mainstream media. And I like I like being a part of that. You know, it’s cool. The thing is, though, like I’m because I’m old now, I’m just not I’m not I don’t know as much about about games as many younger writers. Like I fundamentally don’t because I don’t have the time to play them as much as you do when you’re 22 years old. So I do, you know, really enjoy finding and surfacing writers who know more than I do. You know, as an editor, like that’s basically your job is to find people who know more than you do about a thing. You know, like I write a lot myself, but there’s so much stuff that I’m basically no far less than than many, you know, talented writers who I just then go and find to write about it themselves. I think that’s one of the cooler parts of the job when you’re when you’re an editor rather than a, you know, rather than a writer is finding people who know more than you. I know that I did 200 words for you on Hitman 3 as a lockdown game, and that’s probably the most impressed my dad’s ever been in me. The start, the start, the start of something special. The other thing is, so I learned, I’m not going, I can’t, I can’t really say this. I can’t say numbers. I just learned how much money is spent at The Guardian on certain news investigations. And let’s just say it is many, many, many, many, many multiples more than I have to spend on video games. It would be so cool. Like, I’d really love to, you know, really do like a full time job of this and do like, you know, basically be running a mini games outlet under The Guardian banner. That would be so, so cool. I do hope that happens someday. But obviously they have, you know, games are such a tiny fraction of what The Guardian covers, you know. And although I think that there’s so much room for more, it would be really cool if they’d invest in it. I do understand why it’s kind of not their biggest priority in the world right now. I hope it is, you know, hope one day I do get to do more. It would be really cool. This is where The Guardian starts doing SEO articles about where to find Xur. That did start happening. There were quite a lot of UK tabloids that just suddenly started doing games coverage. And it turned out that makes me laugh so much to see certain names. You know, you search for a game and you end up with a newspaper that has no like gamer identity in my head. And I think what on earth is this doing on here? This is bizarre. This must be so weird for their actual reader base. This is it. The actual readers never get to the game stuff because it’s all designed for search engines. So the only people who ever read it are people who are searching for it. I get very upset about search engine optimization. It’s very nice. I’ve been so privileged that… I mean, IGN was quite search engine-y, but Kotaku didn’t give a shit. And obviously The Guardian doesn’t really need it because it has 200 million readers. So I don’t have to think about that at all. I don’t have to be like, you know, I don’t have to think about search keywords or like orient the coverage around what’s going to get Googled the most or, you know, dicking around with rankings. All of that is a skill, right? All of that is an amazing skill. And like, I’ve worked with people at previous jobs who are genuinely incredible at data and search engine stuff, but it’s not writing, is it? It’s not really journalism. It’s a completely different set of skills. Like, it’s quite nice not to have to worry about that. That’s nice. Reminds me of when NGamer had 200 million readers. We were exactly the same place, were you? I loved NGamer, though. I genuinely did. I read all of NGamer. You and seven of us. Yeah, all seven of us. We all loved it. So I guess, like Keza, before we get to E3, it really is awesome hearing you talk about your background. Do you have any other broader thoughts on how games media has changed in the time you’ve been doing this? Oh, man. It always makes me feel like an actual fossil. I’m so glad I’m talking to you guys, because sometimes I’m talking to people who have been in the games industry for four years, and I feel like Methuselah talking about the ancient times. We’re all fossils here, Keza. But I think the major thing that’s changed is that games journalism has gone from being a source of information about video games, which is still what it was when I started in 2006. It was you bought magazines to learn stuff about games, like we were the conduit of information between publishers and the public, basically. That’s what it used to be. And now games media has become a kind of very multifaceted thing where it’s entertainment, it’s reporting, it’s criticism, it’s loads and loads of video, it’s written, it’s loads and loads of different stuff. But what it’s not is here’s some basic information about a game because the publishers do that themselves now, right? They make trailers and do tweets and have their own blogs where they kind of give out the information. So it leaves more room to be interesting. It leaves more room to find interesting stuff to talk about, I think, rather than just being like, here’s the information about a video game. And I think that that’s kind of the biggest change that’s happened alongside the fact that there’s now no money. It’s a shame there’s no money now, isn’t it? There was a time when there was money. There was actual money. In the late 90s and early 2000s when official PlayStation was selling 500,000 copies, there was money. Not for us. No money for us. Poor millennials. That’s, yeah, very honest. So, yeah, I guess then, Keza, we’ll take a short break there and then we’ll come back and get into the subject of E3 some more. But thank you so much for telling us about your background. It’s really cool to hear about your very interesting journey, that globetrotting journey in Games Media. Welcome back to the podcast. In this section, we’re going to talk a bit about our own E3 memories. So Keza, we start with you. I’m really curious if you think that E3 still has a place these days. It’s something that’s discussed a lot. It’s hotly kind of contested whether this big, expensive Los Angeles-based event makes sense in a world of streamers and what have you. But what do you think the place of E3 is in 2021? I think that ultimately, let’s be honest, E3 doesn’t really make sense. It’s not necessary, but it’s so fun. It’s just such a lot of fun. And I think that everybody who actually works in the games industry appreciates that time where physically we’re all in the same place. I think for the purposes of giving out information about video games to people who might buy them, E3 is kind of pointless now. But in terms of an industry event, I think it still definitely has its place. And yeah, I honestly have a lot of fun at E3. I really enjoy it. The only thing I enjoy as much as E3 is GDC, which I enjoy for very different reasons because it’s much more unguarded and a bit less showy. But I find that apart from anything else, it’s useful to have all of the kind of big game stuff happening at the same place at the same time. I think whether you’re working in games or whether you’re just playing them, it’s cool to just have that kind of big drop of news, isn’t it? Otherwise, stuff just… I found this happened last year, like games get announced and I just didn’t notice because I wasn’t paying attention to Twitter that day or whatever. Whereas at E3, you know when to pay attention, don’t you? That was really it for me last year. I think it made me see that that’s actually what E3 has always been for me. It’s just sort of like, it’s like pay attention now. This is where it all happens. And it’s just super convenient. It’s such a convenient way of getting everything at once. And this sort of fractured, fragmented sort of show period we have now where, you know, everything splintered into basically 10 miniature E3s that take place online. I found it very, very hard to keep up with. And I don’t know, I feel like it underserved a lot of people. Yeah, I totally think that loads of people didn’t get the info, you know. And I mean, I didn’t get the info and it’s my job. So I imagine that loads and loads of people didn’t get the info. And also the idea of every single publisher trying to do their own mini E3 by themselves. There’s just not the clout. You need everybody together to get the attention. I also found that E3 was kind of stretched out, so it was like… I think there were two weeks where I was checking Jeff Keely’s Twitter feed to see has he tweeted that a new game’s been announced today. And the Jeff summer of games, Jeff seems like a really nice guy, but that was a kind of weird experience of being trapped indoors last year and just seeing has Jeff Keely tweeted out a new game today. That’s what the job then becomes, doesn’t it? When you don’t have shows, it’s just like looking at Twitter, basically, and then writing about what you see on Twitter. That’s not a fun job. No, it’s very true. I personally think just the existence of it and having stuff like Keanu Reeves come out on stage, just making a kind of big song and dance about games culturally in this very, like you say, corporate way, Keza, I think that’s just kind of got value in itself and just kind of getting the world to pay attention to games. Do you think that’s the case? Working at The Guardian, like E3 is one of the only times when I get asked by the news desk to do stuff, as opposed to me being like, hello, here’s some things that are interesting. And it is, I think that the way that the world at large works, like if you’re not paying attention to video games all the time, which most people aren’t, then having a big focal point in June, which is a time when not much else is happening generally, is really good and it helps to get, it helps to put the attention on the games industry. If you enjoy the drama of the games industry and you enjoy like the kind of narrative about the companies, it’s always felt like E3 is the, it’s like the, it’s the one time of the year where you can like really change, change the narrative, especially for the platform holders. Admittedly, like, I think the wind is out of, out of the sails a little bit in that regards, because everyone’s quite kind of sort of, sort of friendly and sort of sharing and it’s all about, we’re all just a big gaming community. But back when there was a bit more Venom, aka the good old days, where everyone was trying to like dick each other over, I liked the idea that a killer E3 conference could basically restore confidence and I’m not talking about like as a financial thing, you know, to sort of economists or shareholders, but like as a fan, see like Nintendo come and like blow you away one year or, or someone really pull out the stops or someone shit the bed. It was great fun for the kind of, I don’t know, like the meta of kind of being a games fan. It’s like, I don’t watch wrestling, but I imagine it’s like wrestling, like the kind of meta narratives and the drama of it. Exactly. It’s sort of dumb, but I did enjoy it. But like now it’s, I don’t know, everyone’s less interested in that. You know, ever since Nintendo stopped doing the conferences and basically Microsoft fell into second place and then suddenly became this very kind of chilled dude persona where it’s all like, hey, we’re happy. You know, we love being in second place. It’s just all about, it’s all about the gamers and feel is very warm and welcoming. And that’s all fine. But I kind of like, I do kind of like the showoffs at E3. Well, I really loved that year when it was Xbox One versus PS4. And it was when the Xbox One was like a total mess. And it was like, you can buy games, but then you don’t own them. And if you want to play them, then you have to be online. And then if you want to sell your game, you can’t. If you want to give it to a friend, you can’t, even if it’s on a disc. And, you know, and it was all just a complete mess. There was a good few weeks, like around E3 that year. That was one of the years I was working with IGN and it was great fun because it was such drama. And there were a few weeks where the Xbox One was just like a complete confusing mess. And then the PS4 conference, the E3 conference that year was just Sony being like just mic dropping on pretty much every aspect of the Xbox One that was annoying everybody. And they just had to say things like, you pay for a game and then you own it and everyone would cheer. Or like, here’s how you share games. Let the dunkings commence. Yeah, it was funny. There was a bit where it was like, here’s how you share games on a PS4. And it was like Shuhei Yoshida handing a game to like his American counterpart. It was like a three second video. Yeah. As opposed to like Microsoft’s like crazy. You can share rights with three to five. Yeah, three to five licensees you can share rights with. Yeah. And this was all pre Phil Spencer. But that year was really fun because it did feel like it felt like a wrestling match. It was just like a lot of melodrama and it was fun. You know, I do miss that kind of the kind of silly side of E3. And then there was all the kind of stuff in around the PS3 era when the whole legendary PlayStation 3 reveal conference with that awful PlayStation Home demo, the 599 US dollars, the giant enemy crab, you know, all that stuff that was the the memes of the day, which I really, really enjoyed. You don’t get that quite so much now, I don’t think. Although you always do get some nonsense at Ubisoft’s conference. That’s always fun. That’s true. You never know when like something that looks like it belongs in Cirque du Soleil will come out to promote like a Rabbids game. Oh, I missed that. That’s the fun bit. Absolutely. No, I love that side of it too. The first E3 I went to actually was that 2013 conference you mentioned, Keza, where it felt like Sony and Microsoft sat out there still for the next generation. It felt like the industry was sort of changing around you. I guess it’s kind of superficial, but that’s how I felt being at E3. There’s like a seismic shift, but you being on the ground covering it do feel that change. That’s what I found exciting about covering it as a professional. Is that how you felt doing your first E3? Totally. It’s just exciting being among it. I think my first E3 was, oh, God, I can’t remember. I really can’t remember. It was a long time ago. I remember one of my first E3s was the one where they announced the Wii U. That was 2011. That’s right. Yeah, that was probably my second one. And I remember that being so weird. Like, I was at that conference. Was that the last Nintendo conference? I think it was. The last one was the year after 2012. Because that was the one where the stage was like Nintendo land. Yeah. And that’s when you knew it was over. But then I was quite enjoying Nintendo’s livestreams just dropping in the middle of the day at E3. And everybody at E3 is just sitting down on a pavement trying to watch it on their phone or crying into a corner of the LACC just trying to find Wi-Fi so they could watch Nintendo’s conference. It really amuses me. But yeah, when the Wii U was announced, that was, I think, maybe my second E3 or third. And it was so weird because I was at that conference and I didn’t know whether it was a new console or not. I was like, is this a new controller for the Wii? What is this? What’s happening? It was such a strange conference. And yeah, I remember thinking this isn’t going to go well, you know. And then, of course, it didn’t go particularly well. And just those moments when you are there for the announcement of something is really exciting. I mean, that doesn’t really happen quite so much now because everybody has their own announcements for everything on their own terms. And E3 is kind of the supplement. But yeah, the few times I’ve been at E3 where something has been actually announced has been really cool. Because you think, oh, it’s like a moment of change, isn’t it? I don’t know if you guys sort of experienced this, but my lasting memories of E3 is that you tend to arrive a few days early, especially as there’s all these conferences before the show actually opens. And in those couple of days, everyone goes into rumour overdrive about what’s going to happen. And you get the impression that some people are in the know because there’s those sort of weird pre-E3 demo weeks, whatever they are. Judges Week. Is it Judges Week? Yeah, where you get to go to E3 and just do E3 a week early. Yeah. Yeah. I used to be so jealous of that. It used to spoil it a little bit. I used to think, well, all this stuff is a bit tainted because people have already seen it. Specifically, people who work with me. But I remember being there before the Wii U announcement. And there had been so many rumours about what the next Nintendo console was. And it just sort of went, you know, it was already described as the craziest thing ever. And then in those 24 hours before a conference, everyone had a wild take. You know, had some people seen it somehow, but early. And that happened every year. It was quite sort of, I don’t know, it was super exciting. And then everyone would be sort of inevitably a bit disappointed when the conference happened. Oh, yeah, because there’s always like that rumour that you want to believe, but that is never true. One thing I really miss is the ritual of arriving in Los Angeles and then like going and getting your press pass on like the Saturday or whatever. Like walking through the Los Angeles Convention Centre when it’s empty. So for people listening at home, there are two like massive halls in the LA Convention Centre. Then there’s like a big kind of long corridor that separates them. There’s got like a hidden hall buried in it, which is where you tend to find like, I don’t know, European RPGs and like mice and stuff like that. And like a takoyaki stand for no reason. Yeah, exactly. And then there’ll be like one confusing stand outside the halls. It’s just like a car with like, I don’t know, a woman stood next to it, like giving out leaflets, a little piece about something really baffling. But yeah, I just kind of missed the ritual of doing it, of being there. Like, it’s a real specific vibe to those, to that show that’s like, it doesn’t feel like you’re going to an EGX or a pact. It feels like something else. It’s the fact that when you’re all on the plane and everyone on the plane is either a journalist or a PR, it feels like everyone in your profession is going on holiday together. It’s got, it’s really strange energy in the airport and the plane. It is that the plane energy is really odd, especially when everybody starts pulling out the DSs or the switches and getting unnecessarily competitive. It’s a long plane ride. It’s a very long plane ride. Everyone’s in a weird space by the end of that plane ride. I remember on one E3 on the way there, everybody in, there was like three rows of people that all knew each other and everybody got like absurdly competitive on like the the in-seat entertainment version of Tetris. And so there was just this 12 hour long war going on between about nine or ten different people all trying to get the high score of the stupid Tetris. Because it had, you know, had a high score that obviously was like, you could see who the person on the plane with the highest score in Tetris was. The last time I went to E3, when we were leaving the airport, I realized that the person I was, I thought I was the last person getting on the plane. But then someone sneaked on behind me and it was Chris Pratt. And I said to someone else like, oh, so it’s Chris Pratt and thought, you know, he’s going to go up to first class. And then, like, obviously that rumour did the rounds and someone had the guts to ask like a hostess, can I go and see Chris Pratt? And they let him. I was already saw him. I would. I can’t believe that. I would never think to even ask. Now I will. Next time. I’m like, oh, I heard there’s a Chris Pratt on this plane. Can I go and see it? I’ll do it next time I fly dead. Remember, why not? I’ll just do it on every plane I ever get on from now on. This is before he started following right-wing accounts on Instagram. Yeah, this is when he was nice. Oh, no. Have I missed Chris Pratt being cancelled? Gutted. So obviously, Keza, that first time you attended, you were sleeping on someone’s floor. You were very young. So you’ve seen E3 change a lot over the years. What are the fundamental changes you’ve seen go down with the show, aside from the removal of booth babes? That was a good thing, I have to say. I think that it became a bit more fragmented in that every single publisher wanted its own special conference. It didn’t used to be that way. You used to get Sony would do theirs, PlayStation would do theirs, and then Microsoft came along and would do theirs. But you didn’t get this weird thing where you had like two straight days of constant conferences, which is exhausting, like really tiring. And everybody’s kind of competing for the same kind of limited oxygen, you know. And also, obviously, the biggest change that’s happened is that it’s all live streamed now. And so you’re in this strange position when you’re writing about E3 that you’re like, is there any point in me playing a demo that they’re then going to just put a 30 minute video of on YouTube? You know, like, do I need to be playing that and then rushing to write that up in the next half hour so that we’re the first with it? Like, is that even a thing anymore now? And, you know, pretty much every game that’s at E3 now you will get its own half hour to hour long presentation uploaded to YouTube within seconds of E3 opening. And so you start to, I mean, certainly when you’re working E3 now, you start to just look for different stuff. Like, instead of just play game, write up game, which was like my E3 experience for the vast majority of the times I’ve been is like play game, write up game, talk to dev, write up that. And you’re just in this constant kind of cycle of quite exciting, you know, deadlines. Whereas now I’m sort of looking for a story of the show. I’m looking for what’s the thing that’s like the narrative of this E3. Do you remember the E3 where just everybody had a bow? It was the one it was like, it was like all the big games. Oh, everyone in a game had a bow. No, not the attendee. No, just everyone in the game said that. And there was the E3 where it was like the reckoning of no female characters, the Assassin’s Creed Unity year. Right. And then there was like, there are these like little kind of these themes that emerge from E3. And like when I was working at Kotaku, that’s kind of what I was wanting from E3 was these like, what’s the kind of the temperature of the games industry you can take from all the stuff that’s happening rather than focusing on all the individual games and so on. You kind of look for the themes and the kind of what’s going on. That’s how I like to cover E3 now. Also because I can’t physically as one person cover every individual thing that’s actually happening E3. So it’s kind of by necessity. Yeah, it’s weird because I remember the first time I went to E3, I was on NGamer at the time. And one of the conditions of being able to go was that while we were out there, we’d write stories for official Nintendo online. And I’d never worked for a site. Like I’d never been expected to do that kind of turnaround before. Like I’m not a very fast writer. I’m not really built for like online. You know, it’s muscle memory and a skill you develop. And I remember being there and playing demos and then trying to like churn out these little 600 word previews. I remember being incredibly stressed about this. And it coincided with Peter Molyneux had left Lionhead. And he was kind of going through that slightly sort of divorced dad face that he had where he was just sort of around. And he was hired. I don’t know if you remember this. He was hired as a special correspondent for like game trailers or something. Or one of the video sites. And he was an E3 correspondent and he was just there doing the rounds. But obviously wherever Peter Molyneux is, there’s quite a lot of buzz and excitement because he’s kind of famous. He’s kind of a celebrity developer. And him being in the press room and motherfuckers trying to talk to him while I was trying to write, because he sat on this table while I was trying to write his preview. He just kept talking to people and he felt like saying, Pete, you’ve got to get the fuck out of the press room. Like you were completely breaking the sanctity of this room. I didn’t say that. I just, I think I took a picture of it. This is a room for total silence. Silence and stressing about your horrible deadline that you can’t possibly meet. That’s what this room is for, Peter. Yeah, like in there, just chomping away on the free croissants or whatever. Oh my god, the rush, honestly, that press room, they bring out sandwiches at kind of 12.30 on the dot. And the rush, the hungry hordes who descend upon those free sandwiches within seconds, it’s rather nauseating. I swear half the people in the press room are in the press room all day. They don’t actually go onto the show floor. No, they just watch the live streams. And then you’re like, why are you here? What have you actually done today? There are genuinely people who cover E3 by going to LA and then sitting and watching live streams in their hotel rooms and covering that. I had that E3 one year. It’s mad. Yeah, I had it one year because I, long story short, I had to live blog the conferences, which I love, by the way. That’s like my ultimate number one favourite thing to do is live blogging the E3 conferences because it’s so fast and so fun. And you get into a kind of manic state where you end up. I certainly end up writing some quite weird stuff because I’m just in like a stream of consciousness mode. I end up writing quite weird stuff and people seem to enjoy it. So I was live blogging the conferences, but I didn’t have reliable internet. I hadn’t had the foresight to deal with a 4G dongle or any of that bollocks. So I didn’t have reliable internet. So I was like, the only way I’m going to be able to live blog these conferences is if I watch them in my hotel room instead of going to them. So I did. I literally flew to LA and then I sat in my hotel room for two days watching conferences and live blogging them. And I was like, this is modern journalism in a nutshell, really, isn’t it? Yeah. I mean, the other benefit of that is that in 10 years time, you don’t develop tinnitus from the freaking sound systems they have in those conferences. So loud! So loud! Who’s laughing now? It’s like motorsports, isn’t it? It’s just like, it’s so, so loud. Oh, do you remember that? What year was it? It was PS4. It was a PS4 year. And instead of doing a conference, Sony basically hired a film set and made lots of different individual sets for all the different games they had coming out that year. It was like Dreams and Spider-Man and Ghost of Tsushima. And it was like a kind of immersive theatre experience and Last of Us 2. And it was like an immersive theatre experience. And I’m like, this is not an E3 conference. I’m enjoying myself, I guess. But like, this isn’t an E3. I can’t cover this. Like, what is there to cover? I’m just walking through a bunch of themed rooms and then, you know, having a mini burger at the end. That was a very strange year. Yeah, I think that was the year that featured like a slightly problematic Ghost of Tsushima music man, if I recall. I do recall that. Well, that’s the thing. Then it’s just down to Ubisoft to do the live theatre experiences with Cirque du Soleil, acting out Ghost Recon, Breaklands, whatever it’s called. Jesus. I’ve not been to E3 for such a long… it feels like ages. I think the last one I went to was 2018? 17? 18? Must have been 18. And it feels like now Nintendo doesn’t bother and Sony doesn’t bother. I’m just not sure what it’s going to be like next time. Yeah, it’s kind of a shame. Yeah, Sony were one of the few publishers that could really be relied upon to put out a good show every time. Apart from the weird immersive theatre. I mean, that was a good show, but it just wasn’t very coverable. But they could always be relied to do something interesting and fun and something big at E3. And frankly, without that, E3 is just Gamescom but in America, isn’t it? Yeah, more than ever with the last E3. I felt like I was seeing all of the big stuff. Like you say, I remember we saw a behind the scenes demo of Outer Worlds. And then before when I had the chance to write that up, as I was writing up, Geoff Keighley had like the footage that we saw behind closed doors, like on his show livestreamed. And I thought, why am I writing this up? Like you say, the place of it has just changed. It doesn’t feel like the world we’re in now really quite fits with what it is, you know. I mean, obviously it’s different for, like if I’m writing for the Guardians audience, like people aren’t going to be sitting watching three days worth of livestreams. But if you’re working for IGN, people are. Like your readers are going to be sitting there watching three days, ideally your livestream. They’re going to be watching three days of livestreams. They’re going to book time off work, you know, to watch E3. I agree with you about Sony as well. It feels like Sony has become so successful that they feel like they don’t need E3, and they’re probably right. But without them, it does feel like there’s a big missing piece. I’m not sure what the ESA can really do about that, because it doesn’t seem like they’re going to change their minds on it either. But yeah, I guess we’ll see what happens next year. The ESA, the organisation that runs E3 is… I have many issues with that organisation. And so does the games industry, you know, at large. E3 is incredibly expensive for publishers. The amount of money, the millions that are spent on E3. It’s basically a bit of a racket, really. And a lot of publishers and a lot of people have pretty negative feelings towards the ESA for the way they’ve run things, and also the fact that they just leaked thousands of journalist details the other year. That was fun. So I do wonder whether E3 will be saved, because there’s just not that much goodwill towards the organisation that runs it. It was funny because IGN always used to hire out a studio that was quite near the LACC for our live stream studio. And what are all of the studios in LA used for, guys? They’re all used for porn. So we would arrive at the studio, and there would be weird sofas in the corner, and lots of stills or action shots from the previous things that had been filmed there all over the walls that we all had to try and ignore while we were setting up our studio to live stream the video game show. It was hilarious. Oh, amazing. I wonder who makes the room smell worse. There’s something to ponder, anyway. Yeah, things I wish I hadn’t heard. Good stuff. Matthew, we’ll start with you on this, but what are your happier, exciting memories of attending E3? The first year I went, I had a pretty easy ride because I was there with the Nintendo magazine. If you go and do Nintendo at E3, that basically means the Nintendo stand and not a lot else, especially at this point. This was the tail end of the Wii. It was the year they announced the Wii U. I spent most of the show on the stand, just like mining the Skyward Sword demo, which I’ve talked about before, I think, on the podcast. They had this timed demo, so it timed out after a while, and I just kept replaying it, so I’d get a little bit further every time until I could play the whole demo. Again, we’ve talked about this on the podcast, our E3 coverage up until that point had always been based on covering the show from afar, but I felt like we did a really good job of digging deep and trying to bring together all the information. So actually having the opportunity to be there and going like, right, I’m going to get everything I need to write like the most amazing feature next month. That was really satisfying. Slightly counterbalanced by, I remember that was the E3 where they had Kid Icarus as well, Uprising on the 3DS, which I was really excited for, but I had one of the worst ever moments of my career, which was going to play that. It was just like a public stand and the 3DS had headphones attached to them. And like, obviously, you don’t really think about other people using those headphones before you. And when I put the headphones on my head, they were so wet from sweat from the last guy who wore them, that like literal his sweat ran down my face, like squeezed from it like a sponge. I remember thinking like, ahhhh! So that’s one of my E3 memories. Oh, that’s so grim! Sorry about that mental image. And then actually all my 3DS memories at E3 were disastrous because the year after that was the infamous playing Luigi’s Mansion and Eugene Acker getting really cross because he was standing behind me in the queue. He kept her rump thing going, looking at his watch and things. I was like, all right, man, Sonic Headshot was a long time ago. You’re not more important than me now, Eugene Acker. Matthew, what’s your theory on that, that he has got to go fast all the time because he created Sonic Headshot? Yeah, Sonic don’t queue for no one. How about you, Keza? What were the kind of like sort of exciting or mind-blowing experiences you had at E3 or like memorable demos and things like that? Watch Dogs. You remember that year that Watch Dogs just appeared out of nowhere? Oh, yeah. It was like right at the end of the Ubisoft conference and it looked really, really cool and interesting. And I was hosting IGN’s kind of live show and me and the other guy was hosting. We weren’t expecting at all. And so when it cut from the trailer, it was just me and this other guy with our mouths literally like hanging open. Like, what was that? And that was, it was really cool because it was just an interesting surprise. And then also we had to completely, you know, you always kind of know what’s going to happen in an E3 conference really. And then we had to completely riff on that for like 10 minutes on the live show, which was quite a fun experience. And then there was a time when I was, it was the year that VR was a thing. And I was playing Elijah Wood’s weird horror game. I can’t remember the name of. What was the name of that game? I can’t remember. And I was playing that and I’m a huge wuss, right? I can’t really deal with horror anything anyway, especially not in VR. So I was sitting there like squawking with terror at this silly horror game. And I could hear, you know, through the headphones, I’ve heard like quite a lot of people laughing. And I took off the VR headset and turned around and it was Hideo Kojima and his entire entourage and film crew laughing at me playing Elijah Wood’s horror game. That was fun. That was a good moment. And there was also a time when I was at the bar. And do you guys remember Jay Allard? Yeah. Jay Allard was like the Xbox kind of cozy, fluffy geek dude who was involved with the original Xbox. And then Microsoft kind of made him over into this like leather jacket wearing, one earring dude who said stuff like yeah, we took the Xbox and we like goosed it and we tricked it and we made it convex. And he always striked me as quite an interesting character, but I ran into him at a bar at E3 and literally he was just sitting. This was years after the 360. And I just went up to him at the bar and I was like, I’m sorry. Hello, JLR. Are you JLR? And he was JLR and he had so many excellent stories, like really, really good stories. He didn’t give a shit. He was just telling me all sorts of like brilliant stories about his days with Xbox. And I was just sitting there like absorbing this vibe. It was very, very fun. That was a really good encounter at E3. And then there was a less good encounter when I was supposed to interview. So I’m cursed when it comes to interviewing Shigeru Miyamoto, like literally cursed. I’ve never I never got the opportunity for years. And then every time I did get the opportunity, something would happen like to prevent me from doing it. Like the first time I was just in the wrong country. I was in I was in Berlin and I got a call from a magazine that was saying Shigeru Miyamoto is in town. Can you interview him tomorrow? And I was like, no, like I couldn’t. I couldn’t. There was no way I could get back. And then the second time I broke my arm and I couldn’t. I was in hospital and someone else had to do the interview. And then the third time he was in Paris and I was so, so ill that I was flown to Paris for this interview. But I could not leave my hotel room because I had like horrendous flu. And then one time at E3, I was scheduled to interview him. And I got there early and I was just hanging around outside. This was like the day before E3 started and I was like hanging around at Nintendo’s booth on the kind of half built E3 show floor and a security guard came up to me and said, what are you doing? I was like, I’m waiting for an interview. I’m press. And he was like, where’s your press ID? And I was like, here. He’s like, it’s not got the right color of strip. You need to come with me. And I was like, no, no, no, no. Seriously, I can’t come with you. I’m really sorry. I have to wait. It was a very important interview. And this guy started getting like really RG. And these guys are armed. Do you know what I mean? Like it’s America. And it got to the point where I was just like basically hands up, like, please, please don’t. OK, OK, fine. I’ll come with you. I’ll come with you. And so I was like marched off the show floor quite forcibly by this E3 security guard. And then like half of Nintendo’s PR came running out of this half built stand going, no, no. But like I got marched. They have a little prison. Do you know they have a little prison in the LACC? They have a little prison. I got marched there and put there. While they tried to establish why I was on the half built show floor without the right color of wristband. And anyway, by the time we shook it all out, I only had like six minutes left with Miyamoto. And I’d just been like through this quite alarming experience of being marched at gunpoint essentially off the E3 show floor. So I just kind of arrived and blurted about two questions. And then that was that. It was really gutting. That was definitely a very disappointing E3 experience. But you got to see the inside of E3 prison. What was that like? Did they still have the lunches at 12.30? Literally been to E3 prison. I don’t know how many journalists have. They should have put Peter Molyneux in E3 prison. And the same. Probably that’s where, you know, I would mention names. It’s probably where you’re put if you’re found with drugs. I’m guessing you get put in E3 prison. I mean, I’d understand if that was your only way to get through it. So I guess I was going to ask about your weird or sort of bad memories of E3. This is a personal one, but when they let the public in in 2017, I found that so unbearable in terms of the volume of people. It’s not that I think that they don’t deserve to be there. It’s nothing to do with that. It’s just that there’s no separation like there is with Gamescom. And it just, you were swarmed with people. I guess more on the negative side than Keza, start with you. What are your sort of like weird or sort of like bad memories of E3 aside from being put in prison? I was going to say more negative than E3 prison. I think that there was a time when I… I want to say it was Duke Nukem Forever. And I was in a demo for that. And it was at a time when I just, I was very hungover and quite tired. And this demo was just such sexist bullshit, you know? It was really, really, really sexist bullshit. And I know it’s Duke Nukem and I know that’s kind of the deal. But that day I was just like, I can’t be arsed with this. And so I like got up. I was just like, fuck this. I’m leaving. I’m like got up and like stormed out of this demo. Not making a scene. I just like, I just couldn’t be bothered with it. And I left and it became this, like, massive deal for the PR and I felt so bad. Like I just couldn’t be bothered. I just wanted to leave. So I did. And then this poor PR person basically got a hard time because I left and had to chase me up and try and sort of, you know, get out with me while I left this demo and stuff. And I was just like, oh, for God’s sake. You know, it was just, it was really just one of those situations where I wished I’d just sat down and stayed still for 10 more minutes instead of having enough of Jake Neak and forever. It was because, you know why it was? It’s because there was a bit where he went, the demo guy went into the, like the shower room and there was like some shampoo in the shower room that was just bitch and go. And I’m like, that’s not even a joke. That’s just, that’s not even, it’s just, that’s just the word bitch. It’s like, it’s not a joke. And that was the final straw for me about that game. It’s not even a pun. It’s just not a pun. That was my worst day 3 demo. It somehow sums up that game so well. I remember playing the Resident Evil 7 VR demo, and that was the year, but Resident Evil 7 was a big surprise, and I think they released the, there was like a demo you could play at home, and it was the one where the two guys with the video camera are kind of leading you through the house, and then you go down into a basement, and it all gets a bit Blair Witch. But I remember going to the Capcom stand to play it, and you could play it just on a TV, or you could play it on VR, and as that wasn’t available at home, I thought I’d better play it on VR. And I think it was the last thing I saw at E3 that year, and I was so frazzled at that point that like, I mean, I would have been scared of anything, and I remember just absolutely shitting myself in that demo, and the whole time hearing Laura, the Capcom PR, just cackling away in the background. Just a nightmare, sort of, you know, not demonic laughing, but just the perfect storm of like, oh no, I’m just not prepared for this. That year, the Resident Evil 7 VR year was the year that I was very heavily pregnant, and I skipped E3 that year, and I went to Gamescom instead at like seven months pregnant, and I walked into the demo, and everybody in the room just looked at me and then looked at my stomach and then went, don’t play this, please don’t play this. So I think they just didn’t want to terrify the pregnant lady into a spontaneous Gamescom birth, so I had to watch somebody else play it. That was my demo experience of Resident Evil 7 in VR, is that one of the dudes just played it for me and I had to sit and make notes. He seemed scared. Yeah, it seems terrifying, I’m not sure, I can’t really see what’s going on. Most of my weird or sort of negative E3 memories are to do with accommodation, so the worst year I can think of for accommodation for me was what we kind of, we dubbed it Murder House, we arrived on day one and had a gunshot in the neighbourhood where we were, as we kind of like opened the door, but when I think about E3 I can only think about the variable accommodation, like hotels that have sort of rats in them and stuff like that. It all depends on how early or sort of late you end up booking it. I suppose then, do you have any kind of weird experiences like that where you’re in accommodation where you’re like, it’s strange that people live here, or I feel like I should be reading about this in a James Earl Roy novel. What about you Keza? Yeah, so that’s mostly happened to me in San Francisco, to be honest, for GDC where I’ve stayed in hotels where I’ve been slightly fearful for my personal safety, or just really weird Airbnbs. You’re like, who lives here? Who owns this? What is this place? Nothing compares to the year that we were very, very late booking for Tokyo Game Show. And so Tokyo Game Show is actually an hour outside of Tokyo. So you either pay money to stay in Tokyo, like in actual Tokyo, in Shibuya or something, and then you do an hour’s commute to and from the show, or you go for one of the corporate hotels that’s near the show. And then you have to commute into actual Tokyo to do anything fun. IGN booked us so late that neither of those options are available. So we got given a hotel that was halfway between the two at Tokyo Disneyland. So we were literally staying in the Tokyo Disney Hotel at Tokyo Disneyland, which was neither useful for the conference nor useful for actual Tokyo, but was at Disneyland. So that was quite good. It was about my fourth Tokyo Game Show, and I’d lived in Japan by then. So I was like, I can do without going into Shibuya for the night. I’m just going to go to Tokyo Disneyland every night the whole time I’m here. And then E3 was very variable. I got everything from like the Standard or the Mondrian, which the kind of fancy LA hotels, I got those a few years. And then I also got like rat-infested Airbnb situation. Or one year, I got put in an accommodation with like five guys. And I was like, why do I have to share a bed, like a room with three other dudes? There was like four beds in this one room. I’m like, this is unacceptable. And then I got rescued by a friend of mine who worked for a big game publisher. And they’d like block booked half the rooms at one of the nice hotels downtown. And she’s just like, just have one of those, just have one. They’re probably half empty. So I got rescued. I got rescued from the dormitory by a kind friend who worked for a big game publisher. That was that would have been a really bad year otherwise, I think. I have very distinct memories of whenever we get out, got our hotel for E3, we’d all be on Trip Advisor to see like what a nightmare was in store for us. And one year, the kind of phrase that I recall was the review was headed, rusty bathroom, which was super sinister, big Silent Hill energy. And there was another year we stayed in a hotel, which I’m pretty sure like a year later, they discovered a woman in the water tank on the roof. Oh my God. So God, I think we’d all been showering in some kind of like murder juice. I’ve definitely been in a hotel that was essentially a halfway house, definitely in San Francisco. On that true crime documentary style note, I guess we’ll wrap up. Thank you so much for chatting to us Keza about E3. Do you have any closing thoughts on E3 before we say goodbye? I hope it comes back. I’m looking forward to gathering once again in LA while being very, very jet lagged and a bit fed up and drinking overpriced cocktails. How about you, Matthew? Yeah, but I don’t know if I ever will do E3 again, really. I’m a bit out of the loop, but I look forward to it. I enjoy watching it. Cool. Let’s hope the COVID variants are defeated so we can all go and play, I don’t know, a Banjo-Kazooie reboot in 2023. But thank you so much for joining us, Keza. So people can follow you at Keza MacDonald on Twitter. You did a podcast recently too, right, with Ellie Gibson? I did. It’s called Extra Life. And we interview comedians and TV people about their lives in video games. And there’s hopefully going to be a second series soon as well, which would be great because I love doing that. That’s why we’re punching above our weight getting you on here, really. You know like the cream of the crop of British light entertainment at this point. So yeah. But yeah, thank you so much for joining us, Keza. Is there anything else you kind of wanted to draw people’s attention to? I’m sure people know your work very well, but is there anything else that you kind of wanted to spotlight? You can read game stuff at The Guardian. I’m in charge of all that, but have a look at it. Some of it’s quite good. I’m quite pleased. We’re even going to have more Matthew Castle in the future. So look forward to that. Nice. My dad will be proud. Okay, awesome. Well, you can follow me at Samuel W Roberts on Twitter. Matthew, where can people follow you? MrBazzle underscore pesto. Cool. And you can follow the podcast, The Back Page pod on Twitter. You can also email us your questions at backpagegames.gmail.com. And thank you very much for listening. And we’ll be back next week. Bye-bye!