Hello and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, what have you been playing slash doing recently? Well, I’ve been playing lots of secretive things that I can’t really talk about. Ooh, that’s exciting. It’s awkward, isn’t it? Yeah, some games for review, a game that let’s just say I’m very excited for, and people who know this podcast can probably reverse engineer what that might be. You say that, but there’s like a few that tick that box. Oh, yeah. Well, I’m playing a couple, so it probably fits. Yeah, so rather unhelpfully, that I can’t really talk about them. What a tease I am. That’s right. Matthew’s been given early access to the Sonic Origins collection. Yes, I’m now a Sonic head after last week’s amazing episode. Yeah, to those who are still listening after our Sonic episode, well done. Thank you for continuing along the ride with us. This episode is about something quite sort of specific. So we’ve done episodes about reviews before. We’ve done two episodes focusing specifically on reviews. We get asked about that whenever we do a mailbag. People are really interested to know about the process of doing that. And corruption. They always want us to basically say everyone’s corrupt. Yeah, exactly. And so when I’m reading this in my three mansions, I think I reflect on my better days. But no, basically, I thought it would be really cool to talk about games before they’re actually released and the process of covering that. Because I think that’s arguably just as interesting as the review process. So not entirely sure what I’m naming this episode, but it might have something like cover features or upcoming games or something like that in the title. But we’ve got a very firm plan where we’re gonna talk about basically like in three different parts. We’ve got three sections. One’s on cover features for games magazines and writing those and what that’s like. And also what it’s like from an editor’s perspective. And then we’ve got something more broadly about the weirdness of covering games that don’t exist yet or in the process of being made. And then we’ve got a little section on press trips at the end, which has actually just come up on a Kotaku piece by John Walker this week. And is not the reason we’re discussing it. We actually had this down before that, but did make me think about some of them in interesting ways. So yeah, I think that basically we’re gonna talk about all the different parts of covering games before they’re actually out. E3 demos, all that sort of thing. Hopefully people will find it interesting. If that sounds super vague, I think it’ll be a good time. So Matthew, are you pumped about discussing some of this stuff? Yeah, I’m pumped. I’m always interested to hear your perspective on this stuff as well. So I think we had quite a different experience. Like covering Nintendo games is quite different when it comes to like cover opportunities and upcoming games. So yeah, it should be good. Yeah, what you’re basically saying is covering bad Wii versions of mainline console games that were made by like other developers, that sort of thing. Yeah, that and we’ll also, going back over NGamer, like a lot of our cover games were just reviews or quite basic previews. Like it was quite rare that we got something genuinely juicy. So I feel like you’ve got a bit more experience in navigating these waters. Maybe, yeah. But also the thing that will kind of come up when we’re discussing cover features is that there’s a big gap there where in the sort of like prime of my, working as a section editor sort of career, I work at a film and TV magazine. So I actually miss out on some good years of covering big games. So I think we’ll probably have an equal number of experiences to draw upon. Hopefully. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So before we get into that Matthew, I did want to ask you a bit more about what you’ve been up to lately. We’ve had like a run of quite dense, serious episodes. So have you been like watching anything that sort of caught your eye or that you’ve been enjoying? Well, I’ve been rewinding the clock 20 years and we’ve been rewatching The Sopranos, which, you know, not very game relevant. It was a Sopranos game, wasn’t it? Oh yeah, like a disaster one. There was a game based on The Shield too, right? This all happened around the same time. Yeah. On paper, that should be excellent. The kind of risk reward of trying to kind of be a bent cop and not getting caught. That could be exciting. Probably not in this day and age, but I think people would go for it. Yeah, so yeah, I’ve been watching that and just playing hours upon hours of my mystery games. Yeah, I know what the mystery game is, and yeah, I look forward to discussing it in an upcoming episode, so that should be good. But yeah, so The Sopranos, where are you up to currently in your run? Just started series two, which, so yeah, Catherine hasn’t seen any of it, so it’s all kind of new and fresh, which is exciting. It’s weird, I haven’t seen it for a long time, and actually going back to, we just rewatched The Wire as well, and both shows are often in the conversation for like the best show of all time. And generally, I feel like a lot of people come down with Sopranos. Like I think whenever there are articles about the greatest TV show of all time, The Sopranos is more often than not at number one, but I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that. There are other shows I enjoy more, or it feels a little dated, that kind of age of TV it ushers in, like maybe does that formula in a bit more sophisticated way or a bit slicker. It’s kind of important not to underestimate kind of how important it was, I guess, but I don’t know if it’s still necessarily the best. I’m completely on the same page with you on that. I’ve actually only seen the first three seasons of The Sopranos, but I think that, like you say, it’s dated in some ways, and I think that just comes from the fact that it’s basically bridging the gap between like old TV, the more sort of serialized TV shows you’re getting on network TV back in the day, particularly sort of like, you know, sort of cop dramas and stuff with, you know, what would become prestige TV. It’s kind of figuring out the blueprint of that basically. And I think it means it can’t help but feel dated in some ways. Yeah, it’s kind of interesting kind of putting it in context, and just knowing that so many of the Sopranos writers go on to create like amazing other shows. You know, The Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire are both ex-Sopranos guys, I think. Yeah, I think it’s a good time to be watching, re-watching something like that as well, because it’s super fallow for new TV shows at the moment. Yeah, watch a bit of Loki as well, which I have been enjoying. First of all, good theme tune, which is, you know, my major complaint of all Marvel stuff is they don’t have a theme tune that suits the hero. The Loki theme tune, very good. Owen Wilson, surprise superstar, I think. Yeah, I feel like if ever there’s gonna be like a sort of top five Matthew Castle beefs article, Marvel theme tunes will be at the top. Eugene Acker will be in there somewhere, of course. Have you still just seen the first two episodes? Yeah, we haven’t watched three yet. Yeah, the third one’s pretty bad, but other people seem to like it, actually. I’m kind of wondering if I’m actually in the minority. It’s just me and three people I follow on Twitter who don’t like it, but it’s a bit like Doctor Who, and I think Doctor Who is terrible, so that’s maybe where we sort of differ a little bit. But hey, yeah, other than that, I’ve just been watching sort of like I finished Mirror of East Hand a little while back, and I’m sort of between things. I basically obsessively watch King of the Hill at the moment, an animated show that I didn’t really watch at the time. I don’t think I was like, I think you have to be a certain age to actually kind of get it. It’s a bit more textured than stuff like The Simpsons. But it’s quite comforting. It’s a 90s time capsule, and also the characters are so well drawn in it. It’s actually like, I think it is one of the very best animated series. It’s been a fun watch. So that was our brief diversion. Matthew, I hope you enjoyed it. It was good. Thank you. Yeah. Good. Three minutes of pop culture chat. So, yeah, I know that people when they listen to games podcasts don’t necessarily always like it when podcast hosts talk about baseball or what they eat for breakfast for 20 minutes. So we do try to avoid that. But every now and then you’ll just have to indulge us. We have to catch up. We don’t see each other as much these days. That’s true. So it ends up being a bit like a job, doesn’t it? We log in, do the podcast, log out and then just chat about the podcast in between. What did you eat for breakfast, Matthew? I’m not actually a big breakfast eater. Okay, cool. We’ll litigate that another time. So yeah, let’s kick off then. So section one, we’re going to talk about cover features and writing those for Games Magazine. So Matthew, the first thing I really wanted to ask you was, what do you think a great Games Magazine cover feature does? What do you think its kind of purposes? I think it’s, I kind of tie it in with a certain level of access and it’s the ability to tell a kind of complete story that you maybe don’t get to tell with normal games coverage. I feel like normally you have a piece of the puzzle. Maybe you have a demo, maybe you have an interview. And for my money, a great cover feature gives you everything you need to tell the full picture and you can take all those individual elements and make them work in tandem and come out with something sort of extra special feeling, I would say is broadly it. Yeah, when I was looking at the best ones today, I got the same sort of feeling, which is that if the publisher controls, let’s say like there’s something like, this is a really tortured analogy actually, before I’ve even started, I’m kind of worried about it, where it’s going. But let’s say the publisher guards what’s behind the door, right? There’s something cool behind the door. The cover feature is there to kind of like crack the door open and explain to you what’s behind it. And it’s like doing so in a way that is more enriching than what the official announcement could do for you. It’s like this is, you’re telling the story of this is what the game is. Normally it’s like one game. Sometimes it’s like hardware. But generally speaking, it’s like there is this game, it’s coming out, it’s important. This is the story of that game, ideally from the people, from the people who are making it, filtered through someone who’s discerning about what they’re seeing and, you know, excited to learn about what they’re seeing. So, yeah, yeah, that’s kind of how I see it. I would agree with that. I think part of it comes down to space just because this tends to be the biggest bit of writing in a magazine. And so you have a bit more room to sort of tell that story. I mean, all previews and reviews are stories in a way, but this feels a lot more comprehensive. Absolutely. So I was wondering, like, obviously, you know, you and I have read all kinds of different magazines over the years. How do you think games magazine cover features differ to other types of magazine cover features? I personally think they’re quite influenced by other magazine cover stories. You’ve got a generation of people who grew up reading magazines and they’ve learned how to tell those stories from other magazines. So what you actually get is kind of a weird hybrid. On paper, you know, they’re kind of serving the same purpose. Say if you’ve got a film magazine and they’ve got the kind of human access and they’ve got the set access. I guess where it differs is if you can play the game, you have impressions as well. You know, you don’t tend to get that with film. I keep coming back to films because the only other magazines I really read are film magazines. So I’ve got limited experience outside of this. But in other pop culture, I feel like they go there. They don’t see the finished product where you get a better hint of it in games. So this is a very roundabout way of saying I think where games cover stories differ is that they can tell a more complete story or have a better idea of where the thing is going than maybe film magazines or pop culture or other magazines do. Does that make sense? Absolutely, yeah. So I think that the reason I think that games magazine cover features can like reach a higher bar than some other types of cover features is because, like you say, you have access to the thing while it’s being made. And if you can play it, you know, which you can’t necessarily with all cover features, but on the occasion that you can or you can see a really detailed demo, you can form impressions of it in a way that you can’t if you’re, you know, let’s say going to the set of a film where you kind of have to take, you have to kind of have to give the film the room to like either disappoint or be good. Like, it’s a hard thing to like be on the set of a Zack Snyder film and go, well, you know, his last couple of films were shit. So this looks like it’s going to be dog shit as well. Like, it’s not necessarily that is not a nuanced example. But you know, what I’m saying is that the there’s less to kind of draw an opinion on from that kind of picture. Yeah, it’s weird, actually, because there have been occasional moments in the last few years where it felt like film studios tried doing a version of this where, you know, they go, they do a set visit, the film magazines would get an interview, and then they’d maybe get to watch like a 10 minute scene, which they could like relate. And the idea of like a film preview has always seemed baffling to me, because I don’t think a 10 minute section of a game can tell you a lot more about the complete thing than a game, because I don’t think a 10 minute section of a game can tell you a lot more about the complete thing than than a scene from a Star Trek film can, for example, it’s, I don’t think you can kind of equate the two. And it always strikes me odd when they do try to do a, like a hands on film watching preview. It’s the concept of that is baffling. There’s a fine line you have to walk between like hype and being discerning. It’s a really tough thing to do. And you kind of like walk that line. On this then, I was curious about what you think makes a good cover feature. I think there’s a really clear, clear way to know what a good cover feature is. But I was curious to hear your perspective on it. I’d say it changes massively game to game, like what I actually want and what I’m actually trying to achieve. I’d say there’s like a hard and fast rule. Or I couldn’t say that there is a hard, hard and fast rule that I have. One of the one of the big distinctions can be made whether it’s like genuinely exclusive or not. I feel like if you’re the only person seeing something, you have a lot of space to kind of interpret it and, and do what you want. I feel the the remit of the piece changes if you know it’s going to be part of a big wave. You know, if you know lots of other outlets are seeing it or it’s coming from an E3 session or something, then I feel like the pressure is on to have a bit more of a unique angle or a unique slant. When you’re the only person in the room, like whatever you have is naturally kind of interesting and unknown. Otherwise, you have to be you have to be a lot more kind of careful and it comes down to quite minute questions of how you use interview time and the level of detail you go into demos, like what you actually extract from it. Like I find myself, and I don’t know if you have ever done this, but I often find myself sort of second guessing what I think the obvious line is and the obvious stuff which other people are going to focus on. And then I’m trying to almost get around that and get to the next layer of something or something that I don’t feel like competitors are going to have. Maybe that feels more present in my mind because I’ve just come from, you know, doing a big stint of making videos for YouTube where the timeliness and the competitive nature of the work is so much more aggressive than it felt when I was doing magazines. So there I had to really be on top of like having something different, saying something new. But in my head, that’s a general rule. It feels kind of sound. Yeah, I think sometimes the question of like, what’s your angle on it is determined by the publication you’re from. And I really felt this on PC Gamer, where it’s like, let’s say you’re covering a Deus Ex game that another outlet has a cover on, like an Xbox or PlayStation magazine. Then you can sort of draw upon the lineage of Deus Ex in a way that those magazines can’t, because, you know, there is no console where you can play every Deus Ex game, it doesn’t exist. But obviously, they all have such a rich PC heritage. So in that way, you’re kind of like you can frame it from, you know, the immersive sim angle. And you can kind of know that the systemic stuff, or like the sort of level design is what the people reading will be excited about. So sometimes I think that answers the question, but trickier when maybe you’re on like a single format console Mac, maybe where the angle isn’t quite as apparent. I will also put my hand up and say a lot of the magazines I’ve worked for, the challenge of what goes into the cover feature rarely arose just because the actual access we had was so sort of limited or that what we were dealing with was so limited. I mean, there’s like a dream world where you have, you know, the choice of multiple cover features a month and multiple ways of tackling them. The reality in my career anyway was I felt like a lot of the decisions were kind of made for me by there was such an obvious choice and then the access to it was so kind of sort of garbage that the art of the cover feature became more about bandaging up the opportunity rather than having an exciting opportunity and working out what to do with it. Yeah, I totally, totally feel you on that. I know that’s a bit bleak, but it is true. It’s the reality of being a Nintendo magazine, I guess. Yeah, that was more of an, yeah, if anything, like my time on Official Xbox Magazine got into the craft of cover features a bit more. And of all the things I’ve worked on, while I’m not as invested in the games we covered on Official Xbox Magazine, I felt like the writing craft of the cover features kicked in a bit more and I actually got to stretch those muscles. On Nintendo I just didn’t, you know, very rarely, maybe a couple of times. Yeah. So like we said on our cover features episode, I think like the first cover episode was what makes a great cover. And it is a mixture of obviously great artwork, great access, ideally playing the game or seeing some bit of the game. I read a bunch of cover features before we did this. I read two edge features actually, like 21 years apart. So one of the only edge issues on archive.org, one that has Phantasy Star Online on the cover. And it’s got an interview with our friend Yuzhi Naka in it actually. I forgot that they were the developer of the game Sonic Team. He was the producer of the game. And it’s a really good feature. And the Ed’s intro, the editor’s intro, the first page is really good because it says, right, the PS2 just launched in North America, like it’s sold all these units. So you might be wondering why we’ve got a Dreamcast game on the cover. And it’s because, you know, if this succeeds, this is the start of something new. It’s a four player online co-op game. It’s something people have never seen before. And the piece basically suggests that it could be like, you know, a sign of the future. And of course it was because, you know, the likes of Monster Hunter can be traced back to it. It’s a very influential game. Phantasy Star Online just happened to be released on the wrong format. The cover features really revealing. Naka sounds really harried in it. Like, really, like, the kind of walls are collapsing around him with the sort of final days of the Dreamcast. But he’s trying to push out this thing that could potentially save it. And that’s kind of how he sees it. It’s like, this is a revolutionary game. He’s really frustrated by the fact that he can’t release the game worldwide simultaneously, which he thinks it needs to succeed. He was probably right. But he was a bit ahead of his time on that, I think. He talks about how hard it was to make a sort of, like, dialogue system between players that could kind of cross nationalities where it doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, playing in Japan or the UK. And he’s thinking about all this stuff that games would eventually solve. And it’s a really interesting piece that just blows that game wide open. And then has a little bit of a demo in there as well where they kind of go into a dungeon and stuff. That was really cool. And then, to kind of as a contrast, I read Edge’s most recent issue, which has Jet the Far Shore on the cover, with a feature by Chris Schilling, who I think listens to this. And it did exactly the same thing where it was like, we’re telling the story of this game. It took years to make. It’s these Super Brothers, the game they made before that, I think. So, a long time in the works, they talk about what happened when No Man’s Sky came out and they were making this game that sort of had a bit of crossover in terms of what it is, and talked about how this engine cooling system that was inspired by MotorStorm Pacific Rift. And they got the same thing of, this game has been blown wide open by this cover feature. And when it hits like that, it feels really good. But so often, I found it wasn’t the case. It was like maybe a third to half the time, there was a bit of bandaging going on, like you say. Yeah, so I was curious, Matthew, what are some cover features you remember being happy with for whatever reason? So for my Nintendo years, weirdly, I think the best cover feature I ever wrote wasn’t actually for NGamer. I wrote official Nintendo’s Dragon Quest IX feature. I talked about the interview before with the Yuji Horii and the composer smoking away in the room with their giant pile of cigarettes. But the feature that came of that interview I was super, super proud with because I felt like, you know, Dragon Quest was like unknown about thing, but also needed some introducing to the readers. It was already a phenomenon in Japan. You know, it had this, you know, when we went on the trip, we kind of went to see all the people meeting up for the kind of the wireless kind of cross, not the cross play. There was like a dungeon sharing feature on DS and basically crowds of people would gather outside this big electronics store. And we went to see that in person. We interviewed some of them. And, you know, the trip was actually perfectly designed to give us this kind of context or a snapshot of how big Dragon Quest was in Japan, like the cultural element before we went to interview them. So I actually went into that interview with just lots of stuff to talk about in terms of, you know, I played the game, I had some questions about the game, but I also had this sort of wider cultural thing. And it felt like I was trying to sort of introduce what was exciting or what I thought was exciting, you know, to sort of… I imagined a reader who didn’t really know Dragon Quest very well at all. And that felt like, you know, I played the game, I had this extra layer of like weird anecdotal stuff from the trip and then I had this killer interview where they really, really delivered and everything I said, they had very thoughtful questions. And that was probably the only time I’ve had a feature where I had so much more than I could possibly use that it felt like, you know, I was making big decisions in the writing to kind of direct the story. And, you know, I could really choose my angle to kind of weave it all together. And, you know, even if I say so myself, I think it’s a fine, kind of all-encompassing look at the kind of craze around that game. It’s just annoying that I wrote it for official Nintendo. Well, in retrospect, I suppose, you know, it’s still something you can say, you know, I did this, which is cool. But, yeah, I think that’s funny because I feel like I’ve lived through three or four attempts of Square Enix to be like, this is the Dragon Quest game that introduces it to the West. And, like, each time it’s kind of a similar story of, you know, this series is massive in Japan, probably like a bit more sort of, you know, cultural penetration now from the fact that it’s been on Game Pass and stuff. And, like, those Builders games seem to be quite successful. But, yeah, it’s funny. I feel like I’ve seen that story play out several times. But being able to be there firsthand and see what a big deal it was, that is really cool. Yeah, it was great. And, like, just being able to talk to, you know, the creators of this thing about stuff I’d talked with, you know, a Japanese fan outside this store about just felt like quite a… I had a lot of unique stuff that I’m not used to sort of dealing with. And, you know, the only thing missing from that was that we interviewed them in, like, quite a bleak office. And, you know, if we’d just been able to see, like, where it was made, you know, just to have a bit more colour, just to put it into that context, there is something exciting about going to a studio that gives you some fun stuff to work with. But I think, you know, I’ve only been to a couple of, you know, studios for press trips ever in 14 years. It felt quite rare to me that you had that chance. But that’s the only thing. I mean, it’s probably just a really boring, bleak office with lots of office dividers, is how a lot of Japanese studios seem to look whenever you see behind-the-scenes videos. But it would have been interesting. Like, when I did a cover feature about Pokémon Black and White and we went to Game Freak, and their offices have some quirks. Like, all their meeting rooms are quite heavily themed around almost like the gyms. They weren’t based on gyms, but they were almost like the gyms in Pokémon. There was like a room which was all kind of like an aquarium-like, and there was another room which was like a sort of martial arts dojo. So that was quite quirky. But what I thought was striking about that is when you looked out the window of Game Freak, you know, they’re right in the middle of Tokyo, and all you see is the urban sprawl of Tokyo, and literally there’s no greenery for miles and miles. The only hint of nature is the mountain on the horizon. And you get a bit of perspective about the mindset of making this natural game, and this game about embracing nature, and the joys of romping around the countryside, and you think, well, the escapism of it makes total sense, which is something you wouldn’t get if you hadn’t been there, and seen that bleak view. Oh, that’s awesome. That’s great. And then did you turn around and go, but why do your games look so shit? And then you march into the martial arts room, and a guy kicks the shit out of you. Yeah, the problem with that trip is they are so honed at talking about Pokémon that they don’t really answer anything they don’t want to talk about. So you throw in some quirky little observations like that, and they kind of fell on deaf ears a bit, which was a shame. They didn’t really go for it. I don’t know if something was just lost in translation, but I made that observation at the time of like, where do you get this? Where do you take your natural inspirations from? Where are you going? Because it ain’t that. And yeah, just like… Please look forward to playing the next instalment in the Pokémon franchise. Pikachu is cute. There aren’t… Oh man. That’s for another time. I really do not like interviewing the Pokémon people because they… Whatever publication you’re from, I feel like they’re talking to you as if your reader is going to be 10. Like, it’s very, you know, you ask them about character design and they really boil it down to like, cool Pokémon for the boys, cute Pokémon for the girls, which is probably where some of my slight unenthusiasm for Pokémon comes from because I, you know, I have a lot of like people my age telling me how sophisticated they are, but then I feel like I’ve met the people who’ve made them and they’re quite open about it being aimed at 10 year olds. So I sometimes wonder if some of that sophisticated stuff is actually just a total misreading of it because they’re like, no, no, it’s not about that at all. It genuinely is a thing that is targeted purely at children. But maybe I’m just hearing what I want to hear. I don’t know. I think you’re probably right. I think that every time I’ve tried to play Pokémon as an adult, and this is probably for straight people listening who like Pokémon, there isn’t that next layer of something to really get your teeth into, either thematically or whatever. And as it goes on, they soften off all of the hard edges of it. And even the rival who was a dick in the first game is now just really friendly in the newer ones. Yeah, but if you say this, people are like, oh, no, no, there’s all this stuff. You know, I’ve even, like, you know, I’m pretty sure I’m not misrepresenting his views here. I’ve even had the mighty Rich Stanton, friend of the show, tell me, like, how clever he thinks the Pokémon writing is, like, I don’t know, steeped in, like, wry humour. And if it is, it’s too wry for me, I don’t get it, because I just hear, you know, yay, we’re going on adventure. I hope I had to find a best friend. And it’s like, hmm, OK. I mean, fair enough. Well, I mean, for anyone playing the drinking game at home, we’ve had Yushinaka and Rich Santa now, so you’re probably already slightly drunk going into the next bit. Now, it’s happened something really interesting there, though, which is that going on a trip can sometimes add colour to the sort of copy. I think, like, I don’t think I ever quite integrated that in a way that was, like, that sort of exciting or interesting. And I was really wary of doing, like, an experiential feature where it’s like, you know, I stand looking at the horizon on market in San Francisco, and I’m about to see… You know what I mean? Like, yeah, that kind of wanking… I think that’s the thing I was talking about, about, like, an inherited style, because that is how a lot of film magazines and interview writers write about their subjects. And I think we read that and absorb that. So you get a lot, you know, Jeff Goldblum strides across the lobby towards me, you know, six foot of charisma and a beaming smile, all that kind of stuff. And actually, when you try and apply that to game stuff, it’s, you know, a slightly nervous man sits at his desk and doesn’t make great eye contact. And you’re like, oh, well, it’s kind of the truth of it. Yeah. Did you mention the Yuzhiori smoking cigarettes in the piece that you wrote? Did I? I did. So I also did a smaller piece, a sort of wrap up piece for NGamer. And I definitely talked about it in NGamer because it felt like more of a detail. I don’t think I did because I don’t think official Nintendo magazine would have wanted a big thing about cigarettes. I think the feature opened with a big thing about the composer. When he heard I was British, he started banging on about Yorkshire puddings. He was like, Ah, yes, Yorkshire puddings, he said. And unless he thought I looked like a Yorkshire pudding, I don’t know, it could be true. So, yeah, that kind of broke the ice. And then we started talking about how much he loved a roast dinner. And that was kind of my in. Because, you know, I felt like, oh, here’s something you don’t expect to see at the start of this Dragon Quest kind of feature. And it just felt like a fun, sort of surreal beat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. References to cigarettes aren’t appropriate for the Sonic Unleashed loving audience of O&M. But in NGamer, it’s like, you know, after Nintendo, after Dark, it’s a bit more… If any mascot smokes, it’s Sonic. Yeah. Sometimes I kind of regret not being able to use some of those details. Like, I went on a trip to the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey developers, whichever year that came out. Was it 2018, I think it was? Yeah. So, yeah, I went to Quebec for that. And, you know, it’s not like a massive city, Quebec, but it’s really beautiful. And I went, apparently, one of the few months a year, it’s not covered in snow, which is quite fortuitous. But I spent quite a lot of time around the, like, some of the level designers and the writers. And I got to see them interact and, like, hang out as sort of friends. And I was so tired, I couldn’t even make conversation. Like, I was just like, I couldn’t even really open my mouth. I’d had, like, two hours sleep, because I’d arrive at 4am the day before. But it was actually really kind of illuminating to see people who make games interacting as friends. Like, in a way that, like, I realized doing that, how often I don’t, I’ve never really had proper access. It’s been like a guy in a room, in a hotel, like an event or wherever. And, yeah, I sometimes think that the kind of value of that is a little bit underrated. I was thinking, it’s kind of a shame that I wrote a straight preview of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. There was no need to write anything else. It wasn’t a cover feature. But it was a shame that we couldn’t just, um, a shame there was nowhere to tell that story. I suppose it was this podcast, but I just kind of, like, I just remember vividly what it was like hearing them interact. Or talk about, um, talking about, like, the meeting room that was themed after the red room from Twin Peaks in their office. Like, it looked exactly like that with the red curtains and the zigzag floor. Like, you know, there was nowhere to really talk about this stuff. But I thought it was, I guess I felt like it was important as someone who was there. But it didn’t necessarily have a place in a kind of straight preview. But maybe a cover feature is where that stuff can live a little bit more. Yeah, I mean, you know, you asked about, like, features I was happy with. I mean, the other one I was going to say as well as The Dragon Quest IX was, um, for official Xbox. I did, uh, like, the Rise of the Tomb Raider kind of reveal feature. And we went over to Crystal Dynamics. And they’d recently moved offices to this new studio. So it had this kind of, um, sort of sheen of newness. You know, everything looked very kind of trendy. But in their building, it had these, in their office space, it had these massive windows, which didn’t have, like, proper blinds. Or, like, the blinds hadn’t been installed. Maybe they hadn’t been there that long. And because of this, there was this horrendous sun glare, like, everywhere in the studio. Like, no one could see their screens. So what they had to do was, um, every desk basically had a huge parasol above it. So it was this floor of, you know, relatively open plan, but just a sea of umbrellas with all these people working under it, so their computers could be in the shade. And, like, that felt like that was the kind of in for that cover feature, because, you know, Lara Croft is this adventurer who goes and deals with these, you know, bleak, or not bleak, these exotic climates that are really challenging. And here were a load of game developers who were, like, bested just by the sun and had to kind of hide in the shade. And it just felt like, oh, this is perfect. You know, like, this detail kind of gives me my total in to what this studio is about and the kind of worlds they’re inhabiting. And it just felt like, you know, gold that, you know, it’s just a shame you don’t have that so much of the time. Yeah, absolutely. On that kind of subject then, Matthew, I was curious if you could talk about some times that you’ve done cover features where it went less well or when you found it a bit of a struggle. You alluded earlier there to a bit of what kind of like occasions where access was harder to get, probably most likely for Nintendo games where they don’t generally do many interviews anyway. But yeah, how about that side of things? Yeah, I mean, my least favourite cover feature to write is no game access, as in you don’t get to play it, you don’t even get to see it because it’s either such early days or, you know, the games don’t trust you to see it, you know, and that bugs me because I think you can trust us to see it and understand the idea without being like, oh, it’s all broken and so fucked. You know, I’d be able to understand, you know, just to understand like how it moves or, you know, because until you can see a game, they’re so abstract to try and even guess at. And I had to do a couple of cover features very early on in NGamer. Like, probably the cover features I cut my teeth on were the most unsatisfying to write. I did one on Scarface and one on Knight’s Journey of Dreams. In both cases, I didn’t see the game. I was… I had an interview and a fact sheet about the game, and it was kind of like, here’s the fact sheet, which you can base your questions on for the interview. So I was really reaching around the door, and then you had screenshots, and you were trying to match what they were saying to what was going on in the screenshots. And also, Scarface, I’d played a bit of it on PS2, so I sort of knew what the deal was. It wasn’t, you know, someone can say, like, imagine that, except you shoot with the pointer, you aim with the pointer, and you’re like, okay, I’ve kind of got the extent of this game. But, like, Knight wasn’t something I was massively familiar with anyway. It’s quite an abstract game to begin with, so it was like an abstract preview of an abstract game with these interviews from, it was like, Izuca, the now head of the Sonic team, and that was just, like, such a mess. Like, I was flicking back over that, and it’s just me guessing at stuff. Like, you know, you end up asking questions, like, in black and white, can you just tell me what you do in the game? So I have some idea, because I literally don’t know what I’m talking about here. It’s a complete reach, and they were very unsatisfying to write, very unsatisfying to read. So, yeah, I’m kind of glad I got that out of my system early on. Yeah, it’s funny, when I was looking over a lot of issues of Edge this morning, I think something I really like about Edge is they, I think they only basically do a cover feature unless they’ve got the best access for it. And that shapes the type of stuff they do. Sometimes it’s blockbusters. But even when they do console reveal covers, or a console launch cover, I read their PS5 issue, they had an interview with Jim Ryan and stuff. So I had an interview with Insomniac about Spider-Man, Miles Morales. And yeah, I kind of like that approach. And I sort of think about parallel world where if I could have just picked games based on the access, probably half of the magazines I’ve worked on would look completely different. Oh yeah. I mean, I was going to say earlier on when you were talking about what makes a game cover feature different from other magazines. And I don’t know if this is true of other magazines, but I feel like, you know, weirdly it’s the biggest piece of writing in the issue, but it also feels like in a way the one you have like the least control over. Like often it’s the bit of the mag you’re least happy with in terms of concept, because it has to be a game that sells and that isn’t necessarily the game that’s interesting or the game that you have good access to. And there’s so many, so many attempts to stitch together something from nothing just because you wanted to get the word battlefield on the cover or something. You know, it kind of bummed me out a bit, you know, as a staff writer, because, you know, in that position you have no control whatsoever, you have literally no say over the cover. But often I was writing these cover features, so it was just like being dealt. Oh, right, this is the bollocks I’m covering this month then, where all the stuff I was actually into was in the mag. It was just, you never went near the cover because it was like, you know, you weren’t going to do a Hotel Dust cover, for example. Yeah, yeah, unless, you know, Matthew Castle Productions launches its own magazine. Which it would do. Yeah, so I was thinking about the covers I was happiest with as an editor, and the first one I came to was a Mountain Blade 2 Bannerlord cover we did on PC Gamer. So it was that thing where it was a game that no one else would do. So that itself is exciting. It’s, you know, Mountain Blade is a very PC gaming centric thing. It’s like kind of janky, but creates interesting stories. Classic, you know, PC gamers game. And Phil Savage, obviously, has been on this podcast, who was my deputy editor at the time. He saw a demo and just told the story. Basically, the whole cover feature was like a diary feature of what happens if you take this one character through the game. And it starts with them basically being by themselves. They raise an army, they get into battles and all this stuff, and then it ends with that character being detained and put in prison, and that’s the end of the demo. And it’s a really riveting read. And I remember that feeling like a punt, because I had no idea what the cover art would look like, because there was no key art for that game. And when it’s not like a major publisher doing a game, cover art is such a roll of the dice as an editor. And I really liked it. It was a dude on a horse, but it was a really nice looking picture of a dude on a horse. And I think that was one of the issues I was happiest with. And I was thinking, I wish I’d just done this every issue, where I’ll just pick something that I think is cool or appealing to PC gamers, and not do stuff like… Yeah, Mass Effect Andromeda, I remember being one of the cover features I was least happy with, because it was just an interview. And the game was such an unknown quantity that I felt like I couldn’t tell the story of what the game was, because EA was trying its best not to say what the game actually was. Then it arrives, it’s kind of a dud, and then, you know, that’s that, really. So, Bannerlord was the opposite of that. It was world-exclusive access, it was literally the game running in front of us, and we got to tell that story in a way that was exciting to the readership. That’s like the magic formula, I think. Definitely. So yeah, I was curious if you, as an editor yourself, Matthew, if you had any cover features that you ran when you were in charge of the mags, where you were particularly delighted with what was going on? Yeah, like I say, most of my cover feature experience, where more interesting stuff is happening, comes from official Xbox, and that also coincides with an era of less interest in magazines, so it was quite rare that we got anything really juicy. I mean, we did a couple of absolutely rock-solid features on OXM. I really, really like Joe Scribble’s Deus Ex Mankind Divided feature that he did. That was just a great example of playing the game, good interviews, wise use of interviews as well, so not just asking anything which you can work out for yourself just by playing the game, which happens a lot. I feel like people often bodge interviews and just ask stuff which you could naturally figure out for yourself. So he asked some interesting Mankind Divided adjacent questions in a way, which made for some fun box-outs. He did a really good breakdown of one mission and all the different ways it could play out, which was just a nice representation of how that game plays and works. Just really solid feature craft. There’s a couple more I wanted to mention. I talked about the Daisy cover that we did in one of our cover episodes. The cover itself was dodgy, but the actual feature was so good, because it was just the confidence of having a diary feature be the main event, really. You take a gamble on it being like, it’s going to be five of us playing the game together and streaming it on Twitch and hoping that something interesting happens. Obviously, when you have the entirety of Twitch trying to stream snipe you and come after you, and you’re on the run making a last stand, that was kind of what the story was. It ended up being this really exciting narrative that was fun to tell. I think it got people excited about the magazine. It felt like my first slam dunk as an editor. That was good. Obviously, the cover art, not so much. Dude in a hat, very mundane dude in a hat. There was no fixing that. I have to mention Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 3 as well, which was the only game that was ever revealed by a magazine I worked on. So that’s obviously more of a 90s and noughties phenomenon where a game could literally be revealed in a magazine. It still happens every now and then. But, yeah, we actually, like, you know, we basically, the second it was announced, we had our cover feature out and a feature on the website. It felt exciting to be part of that. Again, that kind of gets weird where it’s like you are sort of part of this hype cycle in a lot of ways. This is how a lot of these cover features come together. They coincide with an embargo. You kind of walk a fine line, but there’s no denying that in screenshots it looked really good. It ended up being a game that that audience hated. But at the time it seemed really exciting and it was revealing this new entry in a very sort of like beloved PC series. So that felt really exciting even if the end game ended up being quite disappointing for the fans of the series. I don’t know, Matthew, the last thing I want to ask you in this section was the way that publishers roll out these waves of coverage. So I don’t know if you noticed this, but when I was a senior staff writer on Play Magazine, like I remember being incredibly jealous that Games TM got to go on the first trip for Bioshock 2. And they saw like the big sister in the game and like learned, you know, that it was set in Rapture again and had all this stuff going on. And then you played as the big daddy. And that was like the most jealous I ever was of like someone else’s access. But then later on, when I covered Bioshock 2 myself for a cover feature, I got to actually play the game and like the multiplayer was revealed. We played that interview, a bunch of the developers. The game was blown wide open. So I was curious if you could talk a little bit about the idea that like sometimes if you come later, you get better access, but it isn’t as new or sort of shiny as an editor. How much do you think about the sort of like what place you were in the hype cycle of the game and what that means to your readership, you know, in terms of enjoying the feature? Yeah, again, on Nintendo games didn’t really work like that. You know, Nintendo is quite kind of everyone got everything at once. You know, the whole world was dealing with the same thing. So you were never ahead. You were always slightly behind the curve, which was, you know, obviously difficult. So I really got sampled this on on OXM. Like, again, I just I always thought like access was king. I mean, we would very rarely. There were things we turned down, you know, which on paper are sexy just because they felt like super, super hard work or they were going to be like mad restrictions or not mad restrictions or like just mad limitations on what they could actually tell and show you. And you thought, you know what, this just isn’t going to be like valuable or something, you know, if we had to, you know, two similar things on the go, access would probably trump the other. All right, Matthew. So we’ve covered cover features quite comprehensively there. So let’s take a short break and come back. And we’re going to talk about announcements and the weirdness of game demos. Back to computer games. So we’ve had a bunch of questions through from people, and one question that seemed relevant to this episode was from Theo, which arrived just a couple of days when we started recording this. So, hi chaps, what are the telltale signs that a game in development is in big trouble? How does it feel to attend a preview or hands-on event for a forthcoming high-profile release when both you and the person sitting opposite you are completely aware that you’re looking a complete stinker in the face? So, to this question, Matthew, I actually struggle to think of something where it was an out-and-out disaster. So, this one game I was shown an early demo of, it’s like years ago, I won’t say what the game is because the demo was shown on the premise that it’s not quite ready to have impressions based on it, and it was so shit, it was such a boring looking game. Is it out now? Yes, it is, and it was tepidly received, but it was a really, really poor demo and made the game look really boring. That was one where I thought, ah, jeez. But I was curious if you had any experiences like this where you were looking at a game and thought, you know what, this is not convincing and we kind of all know it. It’s odd, because I feel like anything which is severely broken in this day and age just wouldn’t make it that far. You know, like, it’s quite rare that the demo itself, for me, the thing that tends to give away games and that sets off alarm bells in my head is how they talk about the game. There are a few, like, talking points that if they reach for early on when they’re telling you about it, if that, I think, well, if that’s the most interesting thing or if that’s the most exciting thing, this is gonna suck. Again, I haven’t got a specific reference here, but there was a time where if someone starts talking quite early on in the presentation about how accurate a building looks, like, we worked with these people and we got the blueprints to make this thing. I always think, oh man, really? Like, we were already at that. That’s a super specific thing, but that’s happened a few times where I’ve thought, oh god. More generally, I feel like by the time you see a game, it is so far along, they should have a really good idea of what it is and how to talk about it. And if they don’t know how to talk about their own game, that’s what worries me. I just think if there’s a really clear vision for the game inside the studio, that will translate to quite a clear pitch when they’re talking to you in the session. And the one that this was really bad for was Battleborn, which is every time I saw Battleborn, they talked about it in a different way and they never had a line on that game. And you were like, what the fuck is this thing? I mean, everyone always jokes about that infamous Randy Pitchford tweet, where he was like, Battleborn is, and then just a load of nonsense, just like a load of buzzwords. And that’s what it was like being in demo sessions for that as well. I had times where people were like, it shares the same qualities as Street Fighter. I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? This is insane, this is out in six months. And everything about that was just, the messaging on this game internally is so messed up, I don’t really think they know what they’ve made or why they’re making it. And lo and behold, that’s what it was like to play. Yeah, I think that, I agree that basically all of those are sort of like red flags. Like a classic example of like an on the box feature that who gives a fuck is the tier one operators for Medal of Honor. Right, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Yeah, it’s like, we’ve basically made a NAF version of Call of Duty, but we’re gonna sell it by saying, we’ve talked to these guys who like, you can’t even find out their names, but oh, isn’t this exciting? And it’s like, well, all that is well and good, but you’ve made a campaign that’s not even as good as like the worst Treyarch Call of Duty. So it’s like, it doesn’t really amount to anything. Being completely transparent, I didn’t see that in demo form, but I’m more talking about that as an idea of like, here’s an on-the-box feature to try and get people excited about the game, a USP, a kind of brand pillar or whatever it is. And it just, yeah, it just doesn’t do anything for me. Everyone talks about pillars of game design, what they’re going for in the brand vision or whatever. And if you’ve got that stuff like nailed early on and you at least have something you’re working towards, and then that’s often the pillars they parrot at you in the presentation. But when they don’t even have that, you think, what were you doing this whole time? Yeah, I’ve got a few examples here to kind of answer Theo’s question. So, I mean, it’s never been a situation where I’m there with the developer where both thinking this is bad. Like that’s, it’s not quite got to that, but I’ve seen loads of demos that I wasn’t like inspired by or I thought, who is this for? So one example was the Batman Telltale game. So we saw that quite shortly before it came out actually, E3. They built this demo to look like the demo booth to look like the Batcave. All that was very impressive. And I thought, well, how can a Batman Telltale game be bad? Like it’s, you know, they’d made The Walking Dead. They made The Wolf Among Us. They were really hot, obviously, for a little while there. Burned bright and very shortly and, you know, used up their goodwill and then now they’re gone. And it was, it’s quite a sad story, I think. But this game, I was completely unconvinced by this game as like, oh, choose what kind of Batman you want to be. And it’s like, well, Batman’s fucking Batman. Like you got to have a better pitch than this. And the second game does have a better pitch, which is like, there are two jokers that can, you know, manifest in the story. That’s a really strong pitch. I’ve not played it, I’ll confess, but everyone’s told me that that’s like, yeah, get on through the first game, it’s just okay. But then the second one’s got this like really, you know, interesting joker thing in it. And I was like, oh, that’s kind of cool. But this demo, I was thinking, I don’t think you have an angle on Batman. I don’t think there’s a reason for this game to exist other than you got the license. And that’s one example of like being unconvinced during a demo. And another was, I remember vividly Mini Ninjas, the game from IO Interactive. I didn’t know who that game was for when I saw it. I was there thinking, I think they said like, oh, we want to make a game for our kids to enjoy or something like that. And I remember just thinking, but it’s now to do this very, very vanilla looking family game with lots of characters screaming Mini Ninjas. And I just, I absolutely hated it. I was like, I don’t think I’ve ever been more switched off by the elevator pitch for a game. But luckily I was seeing it the same day. I saw Batman Arkham Asylum for the first time. So could kind of ignore it and move on. But yeah, so that kind of comes to mind. So demos that don’t convince generally Matthew. I actually flagged one here. So do you remember when we played that dying like multiplayer game at Gamescom? And like a Battle Royale type thing. Yeah. And it was perfectly like fine. But I was there thinking it had no place in the market. It was like yet another multiplayer game. It felt like it would have been a multiplayer mode in a game like 10 years before. Yeah. But I remember seeing it thinking, okay, this is doomed. Like this is a fun little thing, but it’s doomed. I remember that’s what I was thinking in my head as I was playing it. I wonder if you had anything like that where I’m like, you kind of see a demo, whether you think it’s good or bad, you don’t necessarily think there’s like a place for it. Yeah, at Gamescom one year, there was a Bandai Namco stand where they basically had a demo station and it had all their games on it. You could play like whatever you wanted at the six. And it had that Man of Medan, which I thought was just terrible, the horror game. Didn’t work for me in the demo. Everything that didn’t work in the demo then translated to the full game. It was just very, very flat. Didn’t work for me. And another game by Dontnod, I think, was it Twin Mirror? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That other, yeah. Like a Twin Peaks-y thing. I mean, they were more, I’d say they’re more examples of just like not very good demos of not very good games rather than, this is completely pointless, like the Dying Light example. Weirdly, I’ll tell you a demo I was completely wrong about, but actually I thought was really underwhelming, is I saw a very early demo of Arkham Asylum. It was basically the beginning of the game, but absent the bit where Batman’s walking through the asylum with the Joker. At that point, it just looked like a super linear brawling game. Like all the demos seemed to be was Batman moving from room to room, punching some guys. It looked like pressing button cues just to rope people up. It looked very automated. The thing that really stands out was Batman throwing his batarang at the chattering Joker teeth. I was just like, what is this? He’s just throwing his batarang at his teeth everywhere. There’s always teeth in this asylum. This is really weird because what they didn’t give you was any kind of context of how it was a bit Metroid-y and how it was going to open up and lead you around. And there was going to be this layer of like, riddler stuff on top, which made the environment kind of super interesting and interactive. They were holding that stuff back, but without that context, I thought, oh, this is going to blow. Like, I really thought that game was like, I thought it was going to be like, just a six out of 10 tie-in game. Because at the time, superhero games had basically all been shit. Don’t think I even thought on it again until people started reviewing it and the chat in the office was like, wow, this fucking Batman game is amazing. I was like, it can’t be that thing we saw, where he was hitting all the teeth with batarangs. That looked insane. But yeah, when I played that section again, that’s a game that you have to feel it. You have to get into the combat and get the feel of the thing and see how slick it all is. That was more of a bad demo of a great game, I thought. That’s interesting. I wasn’t convinced by that game for a little while. I think when they first announced it, I saw the Game Informer cover and they were like, well, it’s not the Christian Bale Batman. I was like, it feels like I could get a cheap knockoff. To be honest with you, the teeth thing was kind of dumb. Even just taken by itself, it was like you have to destroy these. I mean, they were collectibles basically, weren’t they? But it looked really linear. It looked like Batman and he does in that section, he’s got a very fixed route through the thing. You were just walking down these corridors smashing plastic teeth, which is a really weird pitch for a game. I mean, yeah, show me the Batman comic where he goes around destroying plastic teeth. I’ve not read it, I’ll be honest. The only other thing I was going to, like a little shout out is for games which have a very specific learning curve and then they give you a level from the middle of it out of context can really miss sell or undersell that game. I played a demo of Devil May Cry 5 at Gamescom or E3 and I was like, oh, this is rubbish because I was rubbish at it but actually when I played that game from the start, I absolutely loved it. I thought it was amazing because it kind of introduced its ideas one by one but if you dump someone into the middle of Devil May Cry 5 and go like, work out these controls, you’ve only got 10 minutes with this demo, you can only come away with having a really negative experience but that’s more like, I guess the context of like demo craft, you know, rather than the game itself. Well, I think that that’s an interesting thing to discuss because, you know, demos are a weird thing, so we talked earlier about film magazines and how they, you know, have to like sort of like make calls on, well, they just have to talk about the kind of set and where they think the film is going but you can’t form really detailed calls on what it is because it doesn’t exist yet. With games, we know that this is even more the case than anything else. When you read about big studios making E3 demos, it’s like nightmarish to build into the process for many of them. My theory on why the Forza Horizon demos, Matthew, are always like the little samples of the game is because it’s kind of the tutorial of the game. So they build something that basically has a purpose in the game and can also act as a demo. Yeah. And I think that’s just quite an interesting approach to it. It’s like these are all the kind of basics of the game and how it works. And like it’s not completely like useless as a thing they’ve created. I think. Yeah, it’s true. It’s like it’s the ultimate vertical slice. It’s the thing that gets you excited about the game, it’s the thing that educates you about the game. I mean, really, it is the perfect demo. So many games stumble. Even something like Assassin’s Creed, which if you’re familiar with them, you have a basic idea of how they work. But there’s enough nuance between each game, different gadgets or little weird mechanics they’ve tweaked that just dumping someone in a middle of one of those games. There was one for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, I remember playing at Gamescom, where it was like infiltrate the Tower of London, assassinate this person. I had this grappling hook and I didn’t really know how it worked and they basically paired you up with a developer who was kind of guiding you on the headset or whatever. But it felt, it can’t help but feel like super messy. And then it’s funny because when you get back to those moments when you’re playing it for a review or in your own time, you’re like, oh yeah, I remember really struggling with this but now it makes perfect sense. That’s always a fun moment of realisation. Yeah, it’s interesting because when I went on that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey trip, they did the very interesting thing of basically giving you two islands to explore. So in that game, there’s obviously a whole bunch of islands you can sort of sail to and they have their own self-contained quest lines and stuff. So that works quite well as a demo. When we previewed Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the content they used for it was like end game content before it came out. It was like fighting Medusa. Oh, yeah, that Gamescom demo. Yeah, absolutely kicked my ass. I mean, you were really kitted up and you had all these kind of gadgets and stuff. But I mean, they literally took something you’d do at like the 100 hour mark to show it off, which I thought was super weird. I mean, I never really understood that decision. Yeah, that was bizarre. So yeah, it’s always a tricky thing for people to figure out how to demo a game properly. Did you ever read that feature? I can’t remember which, I think it was one of the LA Times or something like that did a feature on Uncharted and how they got the demo for that ready before E3 and how a massive part of it broke and they basically had to work 24-7 to fix it before E3. And it was like illustrating what a fucking nightmare it is for developers to make them. And yeah, it’s weird. You’ve also got the, I mean, it’s slightly different from what we’re talking about. The kind of the stagecraft of the staged demo is really interesting thing, which has come up in recent years, where you have your big conference and someone does an onstage live demo, but it’s actually choreographed with an inch of its life. And there was, when Halo 5 came out, there was like a big documentary series about Halo 5 that Xbox made. And a couple of episodes of that covered, like the path to E3 or the road to E3, talking about the art of making, you know, trying to get one level to the kind of polished state it needed to be for E3, and all the… because it was a co-op mission. All the people in it, like, practising the level, practising playing together, so they were all in exactly the right time for it to look as sexy as possible. And it’s quite an open and honest depiction of basically like the bullshit that goes into an E3 demo, of like, we need this game to look abnormally good, but within the confines of being like… it also honestly represents what you can do in the game, but it’s kind of the game, like the optimal version of that game, you will never play it as slickly as those people play it in that one demo. Yeah. The E3 demo now that when I see it I’m like, oh absolutely fucking not, is when people are doing like voice chat for a cult game, and they’re like, you know, SE Bravo, I’m going in and all this stuff, and it’s like, people don’t talk like that, don’t do those demos. And like, you know, even more offensive where it’s like, bro, I can’t believe you just blew up this building and stuff. In the ads, it’s like, should I go through the door? Andy, should he go through the door? Andy, Andy. No? Anyone? Is Andy on light? Oh, he’s gone to get a cup of tea. Yeah, he just puts kids to bed. Well, we’ll see him in 10 minutes. And then it goes wrong, and someone goes mental at everyone else in the group. You fucking idiots! Yeah, exactly. It’s like, why the fuck did you fly off? We’ve only got one fucking, like, a Banshee to finish the mission, what the fuck are you playing at, mate? I’d love to have an E3 demo that was like that. That would be amazing. E3 demos as well, like, always do this thing where the developers, if it’s like a first-person or third-person game, they’ll walk very slowly and methodically and, like, hover over some environmental design for you to look at and be like, oh, look at these levels. I actually watched what I think is one of the greatest E3 demos ever the other day, which was the Uncharted 2 hotel destroyed by the helicopter. Right. Bit like, and it’s like just Drake on the kind of rooftop with Chloe and he sort of goes, holy shit. And the audience is so into it. They’re just like, oh my god, this game looks so fucking good. That was, like, just a phenomenal bit of, like, it’s actually just a part of the game. Like, it’s a legit part of the game. They didn’t fudge it, really. But even that is a bit where, like, the developer stops and, like, looks over the side and shows you the entire city, like, slow kind of pan. And it’s there thinking, yeah, that’s not how people play the game, but there’s very much, like, a lot of thought has gone into, like, how these things are presented. Do you know about the weird backup demo players? No, I don’t know about us. At E3 and Gamescom and stuff, where they have one of those demos where someone’s walking through it, sometimes the builds are unsteady, so they have two other people repeating the exact same steps at the same time, off stage, so they can cut to their feed if they need to. So, I remember someone telling me this about, I think it was the Mathia 3 demo. They were like, we have this route through the level, but we know that it sometimes crashes at this particular point, so we have two other dudes sitting backstage, basically playing along exactly the same choreographed movements, so if it does crash, they can just hop into their feed and carry on playing with their screen, if that makes sense. It’s just like, how choreographed it all is, it’s kind of mad. I was really curious, Matthew, to talk about hype, generally, and the games media relationship with hype. So, do you think that games media processes games announcements and hype in a way that’s healthy and good for the reader, and do you think it always was when we were doing it? I think the tone of it has changed over the years. I think there’s a lot more room now for just getting on board the hype train, no question. I don’t know if that’s shaped by the rise of influencers and they’ve changed the tone of the conversation so much, or the loudest part or the most popular part is just absolutely unabashed joy and support, whether genuine or not. And so into that climate, journalists have to work out, what am I doing here? Am I going to be part of this hugely popular movement, which is just sheer enthusiasm, or am I going to maybe do my job and be a bit more reserved and question this? I think fundamentally we work on, or at least all the things I have worked on, set out from a position that we like games, we support games and we celebrate games, but because of that, we also hold games to a high standard and we want them to hit that standard and it’s okay to say when they don’t or to have your doubts. If your baseline was I expect this to be shit, you probably shouldn’t be doing it as a job, like I don’t know if this is still a hobby for you and it’s not a very healthy environment and there are people like that, you occasionally meet them where they’re just sort of like their vibe in the demo is, well, impress me, where I’m actually kind of, I’m open to everything being good but I’m not surprised and I’m not worried when it isn’t and I’m happy to talk about that. If you were starting now as a journalist, that’s where you basically have to decide are you going to do that? Are you going to question what you see or are you going to just try and ride the hype wave? Are you basically going to be a professional fan? I think in some ways it’s tougher than ever right now because obviously events have sort of gone away in the last year and I was thinking about how, when Sony did demos for Ratchet and Clank and Returnal for the press, I think they did them super close to release, like a few weeks from release, and it was almost like, I don’t know, it was so kind of close that it was like no impressions had been formed on anything before that other than the stuff that they show publicly. As far as I know, I don’t think that Sony did any demos for those games before that. And like the pandemic, I think, allowed publishers to turn these things into a tunnel of hype to a large degree because we were all just sat at home waiting for Sony to talk about the PS5 when it wanted to talk about it. And for a long time, the only resource on the PS5 was like two Wired articles, which explained how it worked, which was a really bizarre way to kind of talk about the console. And then I sort of like I felt like the absence of it, if there was like an E3 in the middle of last year, I mean, Sony wouldn’t have been there. But you might have seen more in the way of game demos where people could form early impressions. And I think it’s like the sort of absence of that culture means there’s less pressure to going to create this stuff. And it means that I know it’s a bit it’s probably a bit harder from the outside looking into to actually like make calls on what these games are like at an early stage in the process, whereas it felt like that was part and parcel of being on print mags in our day. It was like, you might see a game a year before it’s out and be able to form impressions on a demo that the public won’t see. But now, like you say, I think influencers blur that line a bit. I have been, for a few years, I wasn’t going to press events. I was going to influencer events instead. And they are completely different. They’re quite strange things. Because the press event, you go there as a journalist, they show you it, and then they understand that that’s what you’ll do. Where the influence events, it’s a lot more instructional. They don’t say you’re going to love this, but they’re very kind of like, you’ll want to talk about X, Y and Z, which they would never say to a fucking journalist. That would just never happen. But at the influencer events it is a lot more like, here’s a PowerPoint presentation or this, that and the other. And some of that stems from the fact that they’re getting to record video and there’s quite strict instructions about what you can and can’t show and all that stuff. But it’s laid out for them that the journey through that game is simplified and over explained to influencers, which is probably a bit condescending when these aren’t stupid people. But I always used to find it really entertaining of like, I just wouldn’t put up with any of that shit if I was still on magazines. But that’s the nature of the beast, unfortunately. There’s also a weird thing where some of the influencers might be paid to be there and to put sponsors in there. Yeah, that’s the unspoken thing. It’s completely transactional. It’s like, you’re here, here’s what we want you to talk about. Where with journalists it’s you’re here, here’s what we want to talk about, what you do with that, it’s kind of up to you. Yeah, it kind of gets spread out where I think influencers, if you’re on a smaller channel, you’re kind of there to get the access and to help grow your channel. I’ve noticed that a couple of times. So like, yeah, influencer is a completely different thing. We also mentioned the completely separate thing, but like, we’ve talked about the Division 2 trip we went on where the influencers went and did some kind of like video friendly obstacle course thing while we sat in a garage and complained for three hours, which was like… I sat in there suffering terrible onion pie related heartburn. Yeah, you didn’t bring enough Renny’s for the trip. It was a good time. Have you ever studded that onion pie with Renny’s? Yeah, I sort of, I thought about these sort of like a bit more about this recently because I am listening to Jason Schreyer’s book. He talks a lot about the making of Bioshock Infinite and early on, I think it’s E3 2011, there is a quote unquote gameplay demo of Bioshock Infinite that shows like Elizabeth and Booker running through Columbia, the songbird turns up at the end. It’s quite a famous demo. The voice actors are wrong, like it’s not Troy Baker and the other actress, I’m afraid I don’t remember her name. It looks like Bioshock Infinite, but it doesn’t. It’s obviously a kind of like a fudge or like a vertical slice or something like that. But obviously, as press, everyone covered it because everyone was excited. It had been four years, so it was plausible that a build of Bioshock Infinite would exist. People had no reason to question it wasn’t the real thing. But when listening to the audio book, it basically the game didn’t really exist properly until Rod Ferguson came aboard to pull it together at the very end. Without him, there wouldn’t have been a game. It’s largely the consensus of that book. That happens really late on. So I was curious what you make of this where, is there almost like a collective lie you have to buy into when you’re seeing preview content or do you think it’s understood by the reader that these things just change and that’s the reality of it? The intention and messaging of the thing is probably more important. I just think over time you learn how to interpret what you’re shown and you see the telltale signs of something which isn’t quite right or something that isn’t there. You can see when someone’s showing you something which is like a super polished vertical slice or an idea of what it could be or what they want it to be. It helps just when they tell you. When it’s coming out is a big indicator. I mean these days it’s quite rare that you see stuff so early in advance that it’s questionable. When you see something which is like six months away you’re like, well it’d be a pretty risky move showing me something fake now. So I don’t know if there’s just a natural savviness that comes with time to how these things work. And also Nintendo don’t do scripted demos of things. You play, you know, the games they take to E3, you then play at E3 generally across the board is the vibe. I haven’t had to have been as careful as you and other peers. Well, let’s talk about Cyberpunk. So this game comes out, right? It’s obviously very broken and has been like a kind of widely documented disaster. Now, there were two E3 demos of this game. The one that was shown in 2018, the one that was shown in 2019. In the 2019 one, when I saw it, I did note that the one in 2018 did feel like too good to be true, but the 2019 one felt more like what a real game looks like. Obviously, the game still ended up being sort of like disappointing in a bunch of ways. But on the flip side, in E3 2013, I saw the first gameplay demo for The Witcher 3. And it was possibly the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen. It was running on PC and there were a lot of accusations of downgrading afterwards. It did look a bit too good to be true to be running on current-gen consoles, to be honest. But they showed us Skellig for the first time, and Geralt sailing, and the detail of weather and grass effects was just unbelievable. And that was an example where I don’t think it mattered as much that the demo was a bit bullshit, because the finished game ends up being good. But with Cyberpunk, because the release date moves so many times, and there are those two grand demos that they make this huge event out of, it becomes… I think it leaves a slightly sour taste. Like, when I reflect on that first Cyberpunk demo, that game didn’t even really exist. So was it right that the demo was promising all this stuff? I don’t know. What do you make of all that? The whole Cyberpunk thing felt like a huge shit show, because there was such passion around that game, that if you weren’t on board with it, people were super cynical. I have some beef with Cyberpunk, but mainly because the people who were excited for Cyberpunk were so ghastly to anyone to… Rock Paper Shotgun kind of wasn’t necessarily as on board with it as other people were, and because of that, we were just hounded constantly, which kind of soured the whole Cyberpunk experience. That first demo, I thought was absolute horseshit in terms of… I never thought for a second it was going to be that. And I had a really bad interview afterwards where I was trying to basically say, I don’t really see how you can make a game to that level of, like, bespoke detail with the scale you’re saying to. Like, I just don’t… I don’t actually think it’s possible in this day and age. And the guy was like, well, you know, you’ll have to wait and see. And lo and behold, it wasn’t, you know. It’s hugely flawed. It’s a game which is very detailed in specific moments. And outside of those moments, the quality just plummets. So yeah, that’s such an extreme case, though, at the same time. It’s quite rare, I think. And I think because when it does happen, there are huge bust ups. I think it feels like it’s happening less and less. I feel like people are genuinely a bit more honest. Because they live in fear of the outrage merchants kind of coming after them and doing graphics comparison videos. Like everyone gets burnt that way. And maybe because of that, you often see demos now where I think, yeah, that looks about right. You know, it lacks the wow factor of bullshit, but it’s probably better that way. Yeah. I think we’re living through the age of more of a short burst kind of marketing campaign for a game. We’ve all lived through ages of Final Fantasy XIII taking four years to come out or Metal Gear Solid 4 that took, you know, Kazuma showed it off super early when it wasn’t ready. It’s like that was so a part of like covering games on magazines was like, you know that these are these, that there are these big games that will define the console’s lifespan, but you still don’t know when they’re coming out and they might still be years away. And I feel like even publishers like Square Enix don’t have games like that necessarily. Like I think they’ve, I suppose they showed off Final Fantasy XVI super early, but they showed off that Forspoken game and I think there’s even like a release date year for that. And it’s a bit less of a kind of like, we’ll show a Kingdom Hearts 3 trailer at E3 2013 and the game will come out five years later. I feel like we’re out of that age and it probably is a bit healthier. I think people have to be a lot more honest in like what you see and what they show you. I still, it always amuses me hearing kind of like the little white lies that kind of get told around the edges and upsell on certain features in the game and how people make them sound a lot more exotic. And I feel like I’ve got quite a good ear for it in an interview now where I can see a quote and I can see through it and I can see the mundane reality of it. So for example, when they were talking about Resident Evil Village, when I think Game Informer did a cover on it or a big story, someone a couple of weeks before release had loads of access, maybe it was an IGN first or something, and there was this thing about Ethan will be able to hunt animals in the world to upgrade his character. I remember reading that and thinking, hunt animals in the world, like it’s a quote that’s designed to make this sound a bit open-worldy, a bit ecosystem-y, a bit organic, a bit alive, when really it’s you go and knife a chicken in a very set location and you get a bit more health and there’s five upgrades in the whole game and it’s pretty linear scripted sequence in which you unlock them based on the sequence in which you find the animals. I feel like I’m much better at seeing that stuff because I remember saying to someone beforehand like I guaranteed that hunting animals thing is basically going to be tantamount to opening a crate and it was. The time I got really stung by that was actually on that Rise of the Tomb Raider preview trip where there was this thing about Lara learns languages through the games to decipher ancient riddles which will reveal secret treasures in the world. And I was like, wow, that sounds great. I love riddles and she’s going to learn and develop and she’s going to like, oh, what are we possibly going to unlock? That could be really interesting. And what it actually was was you pressed X next to a book to learn a language. You then pressed X next to a pillar, which was the ancient riddle. And then it put like a coin chest on the map. It was so underwhelming that that was like the last time I was like, never and again am I getting excited for this bullshit. It’s sort of, it’s technically true, but it also isn’t true. But yeah, I’m sort of a fan of that art of the upsell. Yeah, it’s just a funny old thing. I think people’s memories are fairly short, ultimately, but it’s definitely like, yeah, like you say, a part of the craft of making these things. Yeah, because it’s like, they’re sort of true, but they make it sound so much more exciting than it actually is. They’re like, you’re going to do this, and you’re like, you know, you feel like now saying, every time you hear one of those statements, you have to ask, and mechanically, how does that translate? Tell me right now. I’ll confess to falling for as many of them as anyone else, really. I kind of admire it, in a way. I think it’s quite a fun kind of grift. It’s a game you’re playing, it’s kind of, let’s try and get around the bullshit. So Matthew, I feel like we’ve covered the art of demos there quite comprehensively. So let’s take a quick break, and we’ll come back with some thoughts on press trips and a few reading questions. Welcome back to the podcast. This is the final part of this episode. And because Matthew mentioned Devil May Cry 5 earlier, I’ve probably used Devil Trigger from that soundtrack in this episode. So enjoy this audio I can use. That’ll get sued by Capcom. So yes, Press Trips Matthew wanted to cover last of all. So I’m sure a lot of people know this, but sometimes when games are revealed, there is a trip element involved where you’re flown at a publisher’s expense to a city, often in a different country, and you are shown a demo of the game for the first time, and there’s a big splashy event that goes along with the actual coverage side of things. So obviously on the press-facing side, you don’t get that much of an impression of that sort of thing. But I felt like this came into a head a few years back when people started disclosing when they’ve been on trips paid for by publishers. And Kotaku, for example, I don’t think will take trips that are paid for by publishers. They’ll pay for them themselves. So that was quite interesting. But I thought we could talk about this a little bit, Matthew, the press trips and the mechanics of them. Do you think press trips are needed and do you think they’re justifiable? I’d say they’re needed only from the perspective of getting you in the room and getting you to those people. If there’s a place you can go to which gives you better access or there’s an access that can only happen somewhere, then it makes perfect sense. It’s a little harder to justify when it’s like, we’re going to fly you to this place and they’re going to fly these developers to this place. The developers aren’t there. I kind of get going to a studio. That kind of makes sense to me, but it maybe becomes a little harder to justify when it’s just like, there’s going to be a party in San Francisco and there’s going to be loads of journalists and there’s going to be loads of developers and no one naturally exists in San Francisco. We’re just there because it’s fun. The actual trips… A lot of it’s down to logistics. You see them as a bit of a jolly, or they can be seen as a bit of a jolly. But also if you’re flying halfway around the world, to do some work, interview someone super important, or get one shot at seeing something, it is nice to have a little bit of time to acclimatise and not be a total state so you can do the job better. I honestly think that’s where a lot of the press trip design comes from. You know, it’s to get people over there and then just get you refreshed before you can actually do the job. But I think to an outsider that may seem a little bit like you go and spend a week in Tokyo and you do like one hour interview in the middle of it, and that seems a bit shaky. But at the other end of the scale there is like we’re going to fly you into this grim ass place, you’re going to get up at like 3 in the morning, you’re going to be in a terrible mood, and then you’re going to probably not do your best work. I would rather the baggier version and get good work out of it. Yeah, it’s interesting because when I think about it, there’s a portion of them, the ones that I did in my career, where they feel like they could be borderline holidays in terms of the location and like the amount of time you’re there. So I think the longest one I ever did was like Santa Monica for 4 days for Call of Duty World at War. And it was obviously a really fun trip, but at the same time probably didn’t need to be there that long. That’s probably about, in all honesty, that’s probably about 20% of the trips though. Like the other ones are much more sort of like tight. You get there, you basically land like late evening and then the next day you’re seeing a game and then the day after that you’re flying home. That’s what most of the press trips are like. The actual time for sightseeing is probably the four or so hours in the morning before you have to go to the airport on that final day. Yeah, the two chunkier trips I’ve done were both Japan with Nintendo and both times there was quite a thick schedule of events tied to the game. So like I was saying, the Dragon Quest thing. You know, we had the interview quite late into the trip, but we went to the Dragon Quest cafe and we went and interviewed these people around here. There was sort of stuff that, you know, I won’t lie, there was nice restaurants and some fun stuff as well. But they tried to make more of it, which is something I always quite liked about the Nintendo trips, is that they were quite kind of cleverly kind of sculpted to give you like a better story and just more material to work with, you know, compared to like, you know, there are a lot of wrestling trips where you go and see a game, a wrestling game, and it’s tied to a wrestling event of some kind, like WrestleMania or one of the other big ones. And they’re also quite chunky. And arguably seeing the wrestling is part of the, it gives you some colour for the story, but it’s really nothing to do with the game. I mean, when I went to WrestleMania, it was maybe like a five day trip. I think like an hour of it was spent doing WWE Wii. But then I didn’t find the WrestleMania bit of it, like particularly useful to what I was writing. But other people may have done more with it. Yeah, it was like, so it’s like an hour seeing the game and then two hours working on your sign that said Trump will be bald by day’s end or whatever. Yeah, making my my amazing placard. Trump will be bald by night’s end. What an amazing prediction. Yeah, that was, yeah, it was jolly. I felt kind of bad on that trip because there were so many people back in the office who were super into wrestling, who didn’t get to go on that. Not an NGamer, but generally. And I was such a fraud, like not into the wrestling at all. Grabuhoo, you know, like they did those trips every single year. Yeah, but you did feel like, it feels kind of wrong to be in the room at certain times. And I certainly felt that from the other journalists when we were interviewing all the wrestlers and I was asking them like, do you like weed boxing? And you could hear everyone in the room being like, oh god, this guy asking me weed boxing questions. That’s basically all I asked every wrestler, do you like weed boxing? When everyone else is like, you know, what do you want to say to The Undertaker? I’m like, I don’t care, I don’t know. Yeah, it was an odd mix of journalists. Yeah, so my thoughts on press trips, right, are that when I reflect on them, have I had a lot of fun on press trips? Absolutely. And have they enhanced my life in a way that like, where I’ve genuinely sort of benefited culturally from being able to go to these places that, to be honest, my family could never afford to go to? Absolutely. There is no doubt that there is a net gain in terms of like, I don’t know, me as a person, from being able to go to these places, even if they’re not strictly like, you know, they’re not holidays, they’re not sightseeing trips. But even just like I mentioned Quebec earlier, that was an incredibly tight turnaround. But I’m still really glad I saw Quebec, do you know what I mean? Even though all I really saw it was like, it was like an hour tour on a bus. And that was basically all I saw of the city. But I still, the actual feeling of going there and being in that space was, you know, still enriching. So all of that is like absolutely true. I’ll completely own up to that. There is like a net benefit to going for sure. Do I think you need it to do like good games coverage? No, I don’t. Not unless it’s kind of tied to a studio visit or there is some, like you say, some other kind of cultural element that feeds into the trip. So I would say that basically means that 50% of the trips I’ve been on probably could have just been in like, you know, a sort of like basement of a bar in London, which is where most trips sort of take place. But I was curious, Matthew, if by going to these places, do you feel like you’ve had the same thing where it’s like, I would never have been to these places off my own dime, but by going I felt… Oh yeah, I mean, yeah. Basically, I think I have exactly the same thoughts as you. Like, I wouldn’t have got this opportunity. You know, I can remember going on that Japan trip and we were in quite a swanky hotel and it was like a skyscraper. It was super high up. I remember getting there, I was very tired from the flight. But looking down out the window and the building next to us had like, it was another, it was a smaller skyscraper, but on top of it was like some kind of like park for dogs. And so there were just all these dogs running around on top of this skyscraper. I remember looking at it and thinking like, wow, it’s like, what a thing that I’ve seen. Like, I can’t believe that this is my job. And, you know, especially back then as a staff writer, where I was basically paid zero pounds, I felt like this, this, you know, this feels like compensation in a way that I get to see this surreal dog building. That is true, I think. There is like, even though it’s not strictly one to one, there is like an element of, well, at least I have this perk. Yeah, I mean, yeah. And I didn’t get the perk as much as some of my peers because, you know, there were fewer trips on Nintendo, but the couple of the Nintendo ones landed big. Yeah, I do believe in going to the studios, though, if they can make that happen. Like, my best works come out that way. I love meeting developers, I love talking to developers outside of the kind of high pressure environment of E3 and Gamescom where you’ve got such limited time. One of the best press trips I’ve ever done was actually beginning of last year for Borders Gate 3, where we went over to Paris for basically just 24 hours. And they played an early access demo for about three hours. We watched a three hour demo. It was like a whole afternoon of them just live playing, talking through it and it kept breaking. And then it was super honest about like the state it was in. And then afterwards it was in this like weird kind of underground kind of cavern. And then we had dinner there with the team as well. And you were just sitting there chatting and it was, you know, it wasn’t a formal interview, but we had had formal interview slots, but you could just talk quite freely about the game. Like they’re all smart. They all knew what they could and couldn’t say. And it was just, it felt, it just felt very close to it. And you’ve got a good idea of who they are as people. And that gives you a better idea of what is they’re trying to achieve or the place they’re coming from with the game. I find that, I find that very valuable. Like I don’t need, you know, I’m grown up enough to be able to deal with like real people. I don’t need the slick presentation thing. If anything, I react badly to that. You know, I like to believe this is a flesh and blood person making the game and stuff like that really helps. So, yeah, you know, I’m an advocate for Trips on that basis. Yeah, I think I agree with that. And the other thing that the other kind of weird thing that happens is you become, I don’t know if you found this, but I became slightly tired after a while of like the different sort of repeated beats of Trips where you land, your jet lagged and then you sort of like go again. And sometimes you do trips like that Division 2 one, which was quite a fun sort of like, it’s quite a fun little micro trip that mostly I think you enjoyed it most because I just complained the whole time. And you enjoyed hearing me complain, which was fun for you. It was like, perfectly enjoyable. And I really like the Division 2. But like, I think on the last day, we almost got stranded in Paris because of the snow. And I think at that point, I was just like, oh, my God, I just want to go home. And like, yeah, they’re not always fun, are they? Press trips. Sometimes they are just like, you know, after a while, it does just become sort of work. There’s a novelty that there is when you start out in writing about games, but then that wears off over time, right? Yeah. And, you know, it’s all on an individual basis. Sometimes it’s a long trip for something terrible. Or sometimes, like, the actual game content is disappointing. And then you feel like it was all a bit of a bust. I had quite a notorious trip to see the Wii survival horror game Cursed Mountain, which is set in, like, Tibet, up a mountain with these, like, devil monks. And they showed the game off in the Austrian Alps. But the press event was, like, up a mountain. We had to take a chairlift up a mountain and then walk around this mountain. They went into a cave and they were basically projecting all the assets and gameplay onto this, like, rocky wall of this very cold alpine cave. And you’re looking at this stuff and you’re like, is it? Like, you can’t really tell what’s the game and what’s the weird cave wall. So you don’t know how rough it looks. It was quite hard from a practical point of view. Also, and this is a common theme in a lot of my press trips, we then stayed up all night at this, like, alpine lodge eating cheese until five in the morning and I had some of the worst heartburn I’ve ever had. And no one had a Renny. I didn’t have any Renny’s. This was in my younger days when I wasn’t as reliant on them. I remember trying to, like, ask if anyone had anything for this thing and they gave me this really strong spirit that was, like, made out of cloves. And they were like, oh, drink this, drink this. It tastes absolutely disgusting to try and suppress this heartburn. So that was really my lasting memory of that trip. Yeah, that’s, um, wow, that’s quite a trip. I mean, first of all, like, why on earth would you project a Wii game? It runs at fucking 480i. Like, it’s not going to look good blown up, is it? It’s like… Yeah, and not onto, like, rock, uneven rock. Cursed Mountain. Wow, I’m kind of almost fascinated to play it. It might come up in a future Gamescore episode. Oh, yeah, it’s very 6 out of 10. Amazing. Cursed Mountain, wow. Yeah, I am… Cursed Press Trip. The thing is that working in games, there are all kinds of stories you hear about trips, that, like, you know, many of which you don’t tell because they’re other people’s stories, and some of which probably don’t need to be public anyway. But, like, what I heard about… I won’t say the game, but, like, someone went on a press trip to, like, a medieval castle for a demo, and afterwards there was, like, a kind of banquet thing, and there was, like, one toilet between about 60 people. And I was there thinking, if, like, if… So, what if everyone got food poisoning at the same time? Would it be, like, American Vandal Season 2, where it’s just people, like, shitting all over the place? Like, that could end in complete disaster. So, as a man who’s very conscious of toilets, you know? It’s very stressed out about, like… It’s probably just more about me than anything. About going to the toilets in game studios. Because you think, like… What happens if I run into someone, like, really famous just after I’ve taken a shit? It’ll be, like, super awkward. I don’t want my, like, one interaction with Warren Spector to be, like, I’ve just had a shit. Yeah, just imagine it’s, like, irrational, circa 2012, and, like, you’re sort of, like, shitting while Ken Levine’s talking about, like, oh, maybe we should add this bit to Columbia. Having a quick meeting, it’s like, what the hell? And then they just have to get out of there. Yeah, that’s, um, yeah, I’ll be honest, it has probably crossed my mind as someone who gets quite anxious about toilets. Probably not. It’s probably not surprising to the listeners of this podcast that we both get anxious about toilet situations. That’s, like, probably not a surprise to them. Have I ever told the thing on this podcast about the hot chocolate in the Eurostar? No, I don’t think so. This is where I went to, when I was at Paris, about to get the Eurostar home after a press trip, and I bought this hot chocolate from the sandwich shop in the train station. It was really rich. I was like, oh, yuck, I hate this. I wanted to throw it away. And the only… because it’s a train station, all the bins have, like, super translucent bags to make sure you’re not putting any bombs in them, I guess. And I didn’t want to put the hot chocolate in there because I was worried it would spill out and, like, leak everywhere, and everyone would be like, look at this guy throwing away, like, a whole cup of hot chocolate. So I thought I’d go and flush it down the toilets in the train station. So I went in to a cubicle, poured it down the toilet, and then the flush was sort of a bit broken on the toilet. And I pressed it, and it wouldn’t flush properly. And obviously, there’s all this now, like, curdling hot chocolate, and it just looked like I’d devastated it. I was like, oh, no. Like, I can’t leave, because if there’s someone waiting to come in, because there were queues, they’re going to see all this, and they’re going to think, like, what the hell did you eat? And like, why does it smell so sweet? And chocolate? Like, about as curb your enthusiasm moment as I’ve ever had. And just hiding in this toilet, trying to listen through the door for when I thought the room was empty so we could scurry out and leave the scene of the crime. I feel like I need to tell my own embarrassing press trip story here because I probably made myself sound too professional on this podcast. And I’ve got a couple of involving me that have become legend. And then they get retold by PRs to embarrass me when I become editor of a PC game or whatever to level the playing field, I guess. It’s like, oh, did you know Samuel did this when he was a staff writer? So I won’t say the game, but there’s a trip where it ends with me we’re on our way to JFK Airport and I’m basically urinating on like the side of a freeway outside of Manhattan as the sun is setting. And that’s like pretty because I just drank too much before I got I think I just, oh, we have to get a cab now and go. And then I was like in the in the car panicking and like doing sort of deep breathing exercises and thinking I’m not going to make it. Oh, JFK is like 30 minutes away. I’m not going to make it. You have a flop sweat. Yeah, like and I was like I was like panicking and someone else who was in the car said that I was trying to climb out of the car like that was kind of what that was kind of what happened. This was like really early on and I know it was like super embarrassing and unprofessional. So, yes. And then like being beaked at by loads of like, you know, like 5 p.m. Manhattan traffic while I was while I did that did that at the side of the road. I know it’s not glamorous, but it’s like quite a funny story that kind of gets told and retold. And I feel like I need to share my own embarrassing story to balance it out. But I’m a good I’m a good boy these days. So don’t cancel me. I don’t think I don’t think it’s I don’t think it’s bad or like morally wrong for someone to need to piss. No, it’s not. But like I think it’s allowed. Yeah, I just underestimated how long the journey was. But don’t cancel me because my body needed to wee. It was kind of I think it was like I could have like just thought ahead a little bit more. But yeah, a good story. I probably shouldn’t have tried flushing a point of quite thick hot chocolate down the toilet. Oh dear. Well, you know, all these things sound very exciting now. As since I haven’t left bath in a year and a half, you know. But yeah, cool. So I think we’ve kind of covered press trips off there, Matthew. Shall we just fire through these reader questions and call it a day? Yeah, absolutely. That seems like a good call. Yeah, it’s been fun. I didn’t want to end on a super serious note. I think the stories are quite a fun sort of like capper to press trip chat. So I suppose like on balance, press trips good or bad, we’re not sure. So moving on. So the questions. Hello, gentlemen. I wondered if I could interest you in one of the following Devil’s Bargains. Matthew’s Bargain. Very shortly, you will be the first to receive a new Ace Attorney game created in secret by Shootakumi. Take another drink at home if you’re listening. You will believe it is the best game you have ever played. It will not only be a clear 10 out of 10, but also one of the main characters will be based on yourself, forever cementing your place in Ace Attorney lore. In exchange, at your current salary, you must spend a whole year writing Sonic the Hedgehog game guides and fan fiction under the close scrutiny of Yuji Naka. Take another drink. How the fuck did he come up twice in this episode? Jesus Christ. Okay, so my bargain. With immediate effect, JC’s Kitchen will be under new management. They will guarantee opening hours and as a number one customer, all your meals will be free forever. In exchange, at your current salary, you must spend a whole year working as Wario’s PR representative, helping him promote the need for better ethics and games journalism. Do you take the bargain? That’s from Benji. Thank you very much for that question, Benji. So just a little bit context for readers. JC’s Kitchen is a meat stand-in bath that only opens when it’s not raining. Please, a meat tent. It’s a meat tent in the middle of a road, basically, that opens sometimes depending on what the weather is like. Even when it’s sunny, you can’t guarantee he’ll be there. You have to go there literally yourself and see if he’s actually there. It’s a ludicrous business model, but the man makes great meat, so he’s got me over a barrel, and that’s the kind of context there. Let’s start with your bargain, Matthew. Do you take that bargain? I mean, I get to be a part of Ace Attorney history. Very appealing. I get to play a secret game before anyone else. Also, what an exclusive. The thing is, at my current salary, I’m a freelancer and it fluctuates. I mean, yikes. I don’t know. A whole year writing Sonic the Hedgehog game guides. At least I get to play some games. The fan fiction thing, that’s a bit bad. Under the close scrutiny of Yuji Naka. I mean, the thing is, I’ve met Yuji Naka and I know him to be a relatively, in my experience, sour chap. Well, for that one game demo, let’s be fair. I mean, that was like one game demo. My one interaction with him was him being cross that I was in front of him in a queue. Like, I’d worry that if I was working for him, he’d recognize me on day one and be like, you from Luigi’s Mansion 3 or 2, it’s you again. And that would be a sour thing. So we’d have a really rough time. I don’t know. It’s tough. It’s a tough. It’s not a fun job and it’s a tough boss. But my love for Shootakumi, I think I’d probably do it. Won’t he just naturally make games that you like, even if you’re not in them? He’ll just keep doing that anyway, right? Yeah. Will he get to make another Ace of Tome? I don’t know. You are kind of like a couple of Phoenix Wright characters combined anyway, though, right? Which ones? I think you’re sort of halfway between Phoenix and Gumshoe. I think that’s where I sort of see it. Really? Yeah. That’s your read. I mean, do you think that’s harsh? Am I being cruel there? No, I’m surprised. I mean, Gumshoe is quite sort of… I don’t know, he likes eating, but he’s an idiot. But what I mean is he can be quite goofy. And then Phoenix is sort of switched on, but also a bit hapless. I don’t know. It’s not an exact science, Matthew. I personally think I have the cold, hard competence of an Edgeworth, but combined with the goofiness of one of the other characters. I’m not like Edgeworth. I’m goofy. But Phoenix Wright is like an idiot who muddles through, and that’s not really my deal. I’m reasonably with it. Yeah, I take the deal. Okay, cool. Well, there you go. Matthew now works for Yujin Aka. I wish him the best of luck with his new career. So, yeah, I look forward to your… What about you? Well, I personally think that it shouldn’t take me working for Wario for JC’s Kitchen to just be fucking open five days a week. So, it’s funny, though, the free thing there that Benji mentioned. So, I actually went to JC’s Kitchen yesterday as we record this. And despite there being clouds, Matthew, and a bit overcast, he was there. But he didn’t have enough change. It was lunchtime. And I gave him a tenner for, like, a seven-pound wrap. And he said, oh, you got any change, mate? And I went, well, no, I don’t, because it’s a pandemic and your card machine never works. So, you know, this is the money I’ve got. And he just let me have it for a fiver. And I was just there thinking, just go to the bank. I felt so bad taking money off of him. I thought, oh, come on, man. I could take you about five minutes to make me this wrap. Like, I can’t, I don’t feel good taking your money. And, like… Will you give him the two pounds at another time? Yeah, I think I will. That’s the only way I think I can kind of, like, balance out morally. Or then bad karma shit will start happening to me. You know, like, I’ll get, I’ll get sort of, like, chat on and, you know, get into, like, a brawl or whatever. Also, it feels really smug walking up to a food stand and giving them their money, extra money back. Like, you get major smug points in the face of everyone else on the stand. Yeah. They’re like, what a saint. That’s like, in fable, that would be like, plus 20 saint points above your head. But there were like, there were like, I don’t know, about five or six people behind me who were ready to buy at the stand, all with ten pound notes. You would have to do the same thing, like, it’s chaos. Just send someone to the bank. I’d just, I’d just say, throw in three cans of Fanta. Let’s get it to ten. My suggestion is he runs it like a real business. And like, I shouldn’t have to work for Wario for that to happen. So I don’t take the bargain. But I just, but I dream of a future where JC’s Kitchen has a fixed location that’s not a tent, that is open seven days a week. And where the man has the change. I imagine that’s his dream too. Well, I guess so, but there’s loads of empty storefronts and baths. I feel like you can make a real go of it. Like, there are loads of like, places that have fixed locations that have way worse food than him. He does some of the legit best food in bath. I should count that out for criticizing his business practices. I’d say the problem with this devil’s bargain is to say JC’s kitchen will be under new management. Which is what you don’t actually want because he is the chef. He is the manager. If you get rid of him, you get rid of what makes JC’s kitchen JC’s kitchen. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, he’s a really nice chill guy. Like, I want to make that very clear that I’m just like the ludicrous angry man who’s sort of like, you know, yeah. He’s not like some contrarian meat peddler trying to annoy people. No, I’m Steve Martin in this. That’s my character. You know, I’m like the sort of like very angry sort of like straight man sort of character. He’s the Mocker Joe to your Larry David. Yeah, that’s quite a good comparison. Yeah. And, you know, if Kirby Theism tells us anything, it’s that he’ll eventually destroy me based on that trajectory. Okay, cool. I feel like we’ve answered that. It was funny. J.C.’s Kitchen seemed to really resonate with people. I had like four or five tweets about it from people like interested in the idea of this, like, finite opening meat restaurant. Well, yeah, I think the Venn diagram of people who like this podcast and people who would be attracted to meat tents is probably pretty vast crossover. Yeah, that’s, yeah, that should be how we’re sort of tagged on an Apple podcast, like video games, meat tents. All right, so next question. So this one’s from Nick in Colorado. Thank you very much. He sent me a bunch of questions. I might read out a few more down the line, but we’ll start with this one. What’s the most memorable or useful advice you’ve received for surviving in the games journalism industry? Matthew, what about you? It’s a bit of a cliche and people say it all the time, but it’s just like not being a dick, knowing that you’re going to be working in quite a small pool of people. You’re likely to see the same people down the line, even if they’re not working with you anymore. And upholding and having a good reputation with them makes sense. It’s a small industry in the UK anyway, games media, and you don’t want people to know, people talk. But I’d say that, I mean, don’t be a dick is kind of like a rule to live by in most jobs, but you know, cynically, it’s even more important in a small biz. I agree with that. I think that a big mistake that people make is getting pulled into like feuds and like slacking people off and stuff. Every now and then I’ll see people criticizing a certain person who’s got a big following and then they’ll send their big following after them. And it’s like, well, you know, if you just didn’t pick a fight, then you’d be left alone. And like, you know, it’s better to be kind of neutral. Like this podcast, we’re fairly honest about how we operate in games media. We don’t slag people off because we’re like, you know, I sort of respect the people who work in the industry and I also don’t like, I don’t like creating drama. I don’t want people to ever like kind of take a bit of the podcast out of context and it to go to blow up or whatever. It’s like honesty but without it ever being personal basically. I think some people mistake people’s personal brands on Twitter with who they are like professionally and they try to like mimic it or they try to like take learnings from that to somehow impact their jobs. And I think people have to realize that what people are like in real life, again, this is super obvious stuff, but it seems quite true in games journalism, particularly people trying to like break in. You see people making mistakes where they just try and power up someone who’s already in there and it doesn’t always work out that well. Yeah, I think a lot of people in my era of games media were sort of like very inspired by Charlie Brooker, for example, who was like, you know, more pervasive as a media writer then than he is now. Now he just kind of makes TV shows. So, you know, he’s not really in journalism at all. But, you know, he had this very like withering sort of style, but very articulate. I think a lot of people aspire to sort of be that and probably including myself, you know. But these days I’ve kind of accumulated more of a I’ll play Sekiro and then like talk about stuff I eat sort of persona with occasional breakdowns where I play Sonic games. And that’s kind of like, you know, I’m sort of build up your own personality eventually. And like I think like the more obnoxious you are on social media, the harder you are to sort of like for most people to just sort of, I don’t know, to be able to like read your tweets and not sort of be annoyed. So I keep that in mind and try not to piss off too many people. I’d say the only other thing, and this is something from like, I’ve recruited, you know, quite a few staff writers over the years, and major sticking pot. The thing which often pushes some people over the line is like an openness and a willingness to try anything games wise and to put in the time to learn something new. I think there’s a preciousness you get with some people where they’re like, well, this is the thing I like. And if you give them something else, they’d say, well, I’m not really into, you know, I don’t really know about that. Like, I don’t know about something isn’t an excuse. That should be the invitation to learn about it or try and get your head around it is something I’ve always been quite big on, on my magazine stuff. I don’t want to hear like, I never want to hear, I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that. Like the art of a big part of this job is fake it till you make it. Yeah, I think better described as like bluffing, like the art of like being able to bluffing or just. But the thing is, you know, you bluff a little bit and eventually you find you actually know what you’re talking about. That’s the mad thing. And then you can do anything. Yeah, I think it’s like I’ll let you say that willingness is the important thing. I think that this is something that magazines really instilling you where like, you know, there’s a finite number of people, there’s a freelance budget. And you will have to write about things that you, you know, aren’t used to playing. Like I’ve written about football games, I’ve written about racing games, you know, it’s just part of the reality of covering the stuff, even if you’re not personally invested. And I think that it’s a really valuable trait to have that willingness to like, dive in and, you know, and to kind of make it happen. And so eventually, like you say, you know, you might not have to cover those games forever, but certainly at some point you will. That’s I think that’s a that’s a much more well rounded take on it. Yeah, thank you for clarifying. No, no problem, buddy. Yeah, other than that, like it’d be basic writing advice. Like don’t make your sentences too long. Don’t use too many fucking semicolons. Don’t use loads of flowery language that you would never use in real life. Whenever I read that, I’m just really turned off by it. Yeah, those are kind of like some real basic pointers that to be fair, it took me years to learn. So don’t worry if you’re making rookie mistakes basically. But yeah, anything else to add, Matthew? Just, yeah, just try and be, try and have a sense of humour about it. Yep, indeed. That’s basically it. There we go. The podcast is over. So thank you very much for listening. It’s been fun talking about covering games in a pre-release capacity. Hopefully you enjoyed the very dense chat. It’s like nice to have a little break from sort of list features. But after this episode, we’re going right back to list features. We have two in a row. So next week, best games of 2009. Been a long time coming. Looking forward to doing that one. And after that, we’ve got the best Zelda games where Matthew will read out his ten best games in the series and we’ll talk a bit about Skyward Sword now that it’s re-releasing in HD. So, you excited about those episodes, Matthew? Yeah, I’m really looking forward to the year breakdown. I think the Zelda one could be contentious, spicy. Let’s see. I’m excited. It’s going to be good. So, if you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m Samuel W Roberts on Twitter. Matthew, where can people find you? MrBazzle underscore Pesto. If you’d like to follow the podcast, we’ll tweet when new episodes are available. Funny previews. Quote tweets of praise and criticism we get. That’s sort of like gubbins. That’s Back Page Pod on Twitter. If you’d like to send us a question to read out on this podcast, it’s BackPageGames at gmail.com. You can also tweet us your questions too. That’s absolutely fine. And thank you very much for listening, and we’ll be back next week. Bye-bye. Out.