Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re joined by another special guest this week to talk about games magazine rivalries. So, Dan, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, hi there, I’m Dan Dawkins. I guess I’m technically a veteran games journalist. I’ve worked in the industry for like, literally over 20 years. And I began my career on a magazine called PSM2, the independent PlayStation magazine. Fantastic. Yeah, thank you so much for joining us, Dan. You obviously like the, I think you are the most storied veteran we’ve had on this podcast so far. And on here, we like to do episodes that are themed around magazine discussion. And I did kind of pick this topic of games magazine rivalries, because when I first met you, you were working on PSM and I was working on play. And I feel like games magazine rivalries are a very specific sort of like, well, they’re kind of like an, I guess like an old thing now, but like at the time it felt like a very different thing to say website rivalries. So let’s start with your background then, Dan. So you say you’ve been working in media for over 20 years. How did you get started? Well, it was weird. I guess in college, I did not media. I studied economics and marketing bizarrely, which felt nothing like what I wanted. Maybe I wanted to do journalism, but I was just not putting myself forward to do it. So after I’d left uni, I went to work for, and I think this was like a Freudian step towards journalism, is I went to work for WH Smith News, which is the distribution division of WH Smiths. Sexy stuff. It was in many ways brilliant, because I think like a lot of people, I left university with a delusion that at 21, I’d be the CEO of three businesses. Like you do when you’re a kid, you’re led to believe your degree is some passport, magical riches or something. And then the next thing you know, I’m working in this like tiny satellite industrial estate on the edges of Newport in South Wales. And I was working in the newspaper distribution group initially. And I’d have to go into like what they called the pack, which is where the guys would pack the newspapers and magazines overnight. And the guy who was like the leader of that group was six foot seven. Now, if you know me, I’m obviously not six foot seven. And I remember like one night where something had gone wrong with the pack. I felt that weird sort of post university need to over assert myself with this guy. So I was like, this can’t happen again. This is unacceptable. Like a complete moron. I was like 21, like a baby. And a fair play. The guy who was a giant just laughed in my face. And he said, yeah, don’t worry, it won’t happen again. And I just went off like rubbing his beard and laughing. So after like about a year of that, I went on to some weird graduate program at Smith’s where they sent me about the country, like a bit like Alan Partridge, where I went to work at like Lester’s WH Smith News, staying in the equivalent of like Linton Travel Lodge. It was absolutely, I mean, it was good in many ways. Like it was a good background. But you know, I was on like a 10 pound food budget a night. You know, if I was pushing the boat out, it put in an extra two quid for a Travel Lodge steak. Did it have to be food from WH Smith? Well, no, it’d be food at my Travel Lodge. And you know, let’s be clear, it was an abject misery. But what I was doing and what was part of it is something that got me through that time where I’d be sat on my own in Lester’s Linton Travel Lodge would be, I take my PlayStation with me. And it was like then when I played a lot of the PlayStation classics, like Resident Evil. I think Resident Evil 2 I played while I was working for W. H. Smiths. But you know, long story short, I got absolutely fed up of that. I quit, I went traveling for a year. And while I was traveling, I applied for a journalism degree at Cardiff University and didn’t get in. So I’d given up on it and was living a hedonistic life in Australia. But then as it turned out, someone dropped out of the course. They offered me the place. The next thing you know, I’m coming back to Cardiff to study a one-year journalism course. And at the end of the course, somebody from Future Publishing was there doing graduate recruitment. So I just fell over myself saying how much I’d love Future Mags and I was really excited about the PlayStation 2, that brand new technology. And from there, I got put onto the graduate scheme at Future and ended up placed on a magazine called PSM2. And I was actually at the time devastated about that because I was a massive Edge magazine fanboy. Yeah, I feel like this has happened more than once with people who secretly just love Edge and wanted to end up on Edge. But what was your relationship with Mags then before you got that job? Yeah, I mean, obsessive. I used to read all of the Future magazines. I was a fan of, well, this is not Future, but I used to have CVG, Mean Machines. I used to read Mega from Future. And I always remember that they put little faces to express what they thought of the game. So rather than one to 10, it would be really pleased face. I’m ecstatic face, sad face, like clown face. And then I remember when I went to see the people who’d worked on Mega, when I went to Future, it was amazing. You were like, oh my God, it’s Andy Dyer. And they were really dizzy times. But I was into all magazines. I just was really into magazine culture, the craft of it. I studied magazine journalism at uni. I just really loved the fusion of journalism and I guess artistic design. So those early days of PSM2 then, Dan, am I right in thinking that Jedi Starfighter was the first game you reviewed? I think I just found out on Twitter because your LinkedIn didn’t go back that far. So yeah, what was it like the early days of working that mag for you? I don’t know if my memory goes back that far. So that’s the more dangerous issue here. Yeah, actually. So I joined PSM technically on issue one and that for a lot of people is a very famous issue because it’s the one where we gave away the VHS cassette of the original MGS2 video, the one that did the rounds at E3 and people were like worshiping and it changed the way a lot of people looked at video games. But yeah, I was parachuted in right at the end of issue one. They’d clearly been through the hell mouth and I was introduced to my fellow staff writer Joel Snape and Joel hadn’t slept for quite honestly 36 hours and was wearing some, like he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a jacket that looked like he’d just been in a fight with the Highlander, his big leather jacket. I was like, oh my God, I really am. This is not Kansas anymore, I’m really somewhere else. So they didn’t let me do anything on issue one. They wouldn’t, they were so deep in, they were like, there’s no point you getting involved with anything. Just play some games, learn how to use our crappy word processor or whatever it was back then. And the very first thing they did was say, actually we have got a gig for you, there’s a press event on in two days, would you like to go? And I was like, hell to the yeah, where are you gonna send me? And they went, well, good news, it’s Newport. I was like, oh my God, so I’ve left Newport to go back to Newport, this is beyond belief. So yeah, so it was handy in a way, I got to stay with my mum and then we went to the nice hotel, the Celtic Manor and that was, you know, well, you know, Activision in very different days. Right. And I think on that trip, I’d seen Jedi Starfighter or Jedi Star Wars Starfighter and I think I previewed it and I think that was the first thing I’d ever written in PSM. Wow, yeah, great stuff. So what was the Games Magazine landscape like where you joined then? Were you kind of like keeping an eye on your competitors or did you just have a bit of tunnel vision as you were kind of like trying to learn the craft of working on PSM? I think initially it was very blinkers on because I think you’re finding your own feet and you’re intoxicated by the thrill of being in this environment. Future publishing back in the early 2000s was in a quite small building above a fajita shop. So it stunk like Mexican food all the time, but every magazine quite uniquely had its own identity. So, and again, Edge magazine quite literally, and I hope they forgive me for saying this, it was like a soft jazz cafe where they had the lights dimmed and would literally play soft jazz. And it was designed in a way that entering the zone was an intrusion, it was like, it was all walled off. And I’m pretty sure, and again, Tony, I love you, I’m so sorry, I’m pretty sure that Tony was sat there in the dark back end of the jazz cafe, wearing shades. I might be misremembering. That sounds legit, because even when we had the open office plan, they had their lights dimmed in their end of the office. Yeah, it was definitely legit. And you know, really, that was cool, right? I thought it added to the the affectation and mystique around Edge. Even though it was preposterous in many ways, also really cool. So yeah, sorry, Sam, to come back to the question itself. Yeah, I was focusing in on Minecraft, really, I think, to begin with. But I think pretty soon you could see through our editor, it was Marcus Hawkins at the time, you could see him, he was clearly eyes on the prize in terms of the wider market. I think that’s when we became exposed to what our rivals were doing, the exclusives they were getting, the craft and the things they were doing in the magazine. And before you know it, you know, the games industry is really small. And you end up going to these press trips and it just become ultra competitive. And there’s a lot of, you know, crazy stuff went on, I guess in service of rivalry, really. I’ll definitely circle back to that because I’ve got a bunch of stuff when I ask about when it comes to the mag rivalry side. But I suppose just talk a bit more about the PS2 itself. What was it like for you covering that era of games? Was it as exciting being in it as it seemed from the outside? Yeah, it was amazing. I’ve got to be completely clear about it. And I sometimes question myself that, is it just my age and nostalgia that makes me think PS2 was so good? But if you think of a console in terms of the sheer diversity and sort of thrilling unknown borders that that console had, it was amazing. When I joined, actually, most of the games were hands up not very good. We didn’t give out a 90% until I think issue three, where we had one of the classic orange beta discs of SSX come in. I played that with Joel and I think immediately we were like, holy wow, this is a completely different level to anything we’ve seen so far and literally anything we played. That was the very first PSM90 game. But we had some absolute crud up to that point. I think literally the best game until then was FantaVision, the fireworks game, the fireworks game. And then we had games like Sky Surfer and we had a review from Frank O’Connor who used to be on I think Ultimate Play the Game magazine and you know who Frank O’Connor is, right? It’s the Halo guy, right? Yeah, the Halo guy. Or as I know him, the guy who gave Sky Surfer 17%. So there was a lot of crap back then, but pretty soon PS2 hit its stride and yeah, just such an exciting time. I think it was also an exciting time for the UK development scene when a game like TimeSplitters broke through and when we had the first preview disc of that in the office, there’s a lot of video game apocryphal stories about games like Pro Evolution Soccer driving these incredibly competitive lunchtime playfests, which were absolutely true, but predating that was TimeSplitters. And we’d play that on, I guess what, like a 26-inch CRT, each staring at our tiny corner of the screen in blistering 480p. But you couldn’t blink. You couldn’t blink. If you blinked in that game, you died. And I remember afternoons after playing that at lunch, I was like crying all afternoon. And not because I was sad, but because it had been like clockwork orange. I didn’t blink. But you know, I look back now and go, good times. My god, my eyes were hurting. Was that like mainly, were you just playing with other people on the mag, or was there like intermag stuff? I think at that stage people on the mag, so you know, obviously mags were much bigger then, so you could raise a team of four people. So it would be like me and Joel Duncan, who was the production editor, you know, Marcus the editor would jump in. I remember Effie, our designer, I think still works with me at Future. Yeah, we just play it. And then, you know, occasionally we go over to OPM and play as well, you know, official PlayStation 2 as it was then, and we play. But I think the true cross-magazine game rivalries didn’t really, literally kick off until the football games. So, Dan, like, you definitely eluded to something interesting there, which is the PS2 has a slow start. Do you remember the point at which it really kind of accelerates? Because in my head, it’s like around 2001 when it’s Gran Turismo 3 and GTA 3, but for you on the max, was there a point where it just seemed to like take off and never stop? Yeah, and this is brilliant because it’s opening loads of memories for me. I remember SSX was the kickoff and then what felt like months and months passed. I remember my former flatmate who was the, I think then the deputy editor of PlayStation 2 magazine, we used to like room together and share a flat. He came home one night and said, I’ve got this game and it’s like the game used to be in 2D and they’ve reinvented it. Do you want to come and look at it? I went, oh yeah, yeah, let’s have a look. So you see the game, it’s a man gets out of a car, he drives the car and then there’s music on the radio. And we’re like, oh my God, there’s music that sounds like real music on the radio. And he’s like, I think that’s good. Look at this, swerves the car, runs a guy over. I’m like, oh my God, this is amazing. And of course, right, that’s GTA 3. That was the first proper open world 3D console game. And I remember being sat there seeing this preview version. And you know what, I’ve got a confession. The guy who was reviewing it for the Mag, he played quite a few hours of it, but it was one of these classic magazine deadline things where he played a lot of it, but didn’t feel he played quite enough, but he had to make the call because the Mag deadline was imminent. So he’d said, oh God, Dan, what do you think? Like, I think maybe it’s brilliant, but I’m not sure. And then I’d said, completely glibly, looks a bit repetitive for me, looks more like an 8 out of 10. And that’s what it got, 8 out of 10. I remember that 8 out of 10 and thinking, wow, that’s quite low for this game, this game changing game. I’m sorry, Rockstar, they might cut me off. Also, the idea of GTA 3 just being on a disc that is sent and someone can take it home to their house before it’s like properly out there, that’s a completely different age, right? No one could believe that Take-Two or Rockstar had made that game. The previous Take-Two game we’d reviewed was… In fact, this is a good story, was Oni. Do you remember Oni? Bungie game. A Bungie game. And again, we were like, this Oni by this No Mark Studio is surprisingly good, 73% or whatever we gave it. And then, you know, Bungie have done all right for themselves, went on to have quite a good career. But yeah, that was Take-Two’s other big game as I recall, unless my memory is playing tricks. We had no expectations. And GTA 3 was a real lights on moment, where I think people realized, you know, wow, this is actually legit. It feels like those moments of like surprise and realization are kind of quite hard to have now, because everything is so sort of stage managed and revealed at the same time to everyone. It doesn’t, you know, I feel like it would be impossible for something to truly turn up out of the blue now, like it probably could have back then. A hundred percent. You know, I know this from my work this week. Like everything is just, for probably correct reasons, obscenely stage managed and marketed and subject to embargo on pain of death. And it wasn’t like that then. I mean, I remember quite vividly, there was like one lunchtime I come in, had a sandwich, came in and I was like, where’s everyone gone? And I went over to one of the other offices and there was an enormous throng of people around PC Gamer and Kieran Gillan, you know, famous now comic book writer Kieran Gillan was sat at his desk on his PC and I was like trying to fight to get through to the crowd to say, what’s he playing? And everyone said, oh, it’s a follow up to Half-Life. They’ve completely reinvented it. And there it was, Half-Life 2. And the moment you saw the use of the gravity gun and throwing objects around the real physics, you know, people were like gasping. It was, I mean, you know, seriously, it was like, we’ve never seen this before. And the the electricity that creates in an office of like-minded people was amazing, right? And, you know, I guess there’s two sides to that. One is that when was the last time you felt the same way about a game as you did the first time you saw Half-Life 2, whether that’s because we’ve all worked in magazines and games for quite a long time and we’ve become a bit more cynical. But and then to be in the environment where that could be a genuine bolt from the blue. I’m so jealous. Just the maddest thing. I know it wasn’t me playing. I was just watching it. But like, wow, you know, what a game, what a game. So in the PS2 era, Dan, what was like the biggest moment for you professionally? What was the thing you you kind of got to do that really sort of blew your mind? It depends whether you mean in terms of the games we played or the press trips. I can’t talk about a lot. I can’t talk a lot about the press trips because I go to prison. It’s not because of anything I, not because of anything I did. But it was just a different era, a different era of decadence. You know, for a football game, I got quite literally taken in a private helicopter to the top of a glacier where the publisher in question had built a bar out of ice where they had a full service crew serving as champagne. And an even bigger joke, we were only there a half hour because then we had to go back down the mountain to do a bungee jump. A bungee jump. It was just, it was just incredible. And that, you know, other publishers had, you know, they put us in a hotel in Paris and I was, you know, I was fresh out of Newport. You know, I barely knew better than the beef eater. You know, I didn’t know what a quality hotel was. They put us in a hotel in Paris called the Plaza Athene, which, you know, as it turns out, is only one of the most high class restaurants in all of Paris. And then, you know, here come a load of scruff ball games journalists in their, you know, five pound Gap chinos and scruffy school bags. And then, you know, it was so posh. You know, we got, we went out one night, we’d all got drunk at the publishers’ expense, as was the way then. And the next day I just wanted a greasy fry up. But the closest they had to that was like a lightly beaten, raw truffle steak. So I ate the steak. And because I was still drunk and high on truffles, I remember that night, that afternoon, I had to go back to my room to sleep. And I thought I was communicating with my dead grandfather. That is not where I thought you were going with that. That’s just the press trips. Even in terms of the games, again, I remember being told by my editor, we need you to go to London today because for 24 hours, Konami have a playable version of Metal Gear Solid 2 in the country. So I was straight on a train up to London, not quite London, but to see Konami. And we got to spend four hours with that famous Metal Gear Solid 2 demo. That again was like an epochal shift moment in terms of what we expected from what video games could deliver. And I had to go back to the mad, my brain bursting full of things, like, oh my god, you hold your gun up and you can go into first person and you look up and the rain hits the screen. You can see the rain on the screen. You can shoot the glass and the glass breaks. You shoot a melon and it pops. You shoot a guard, you can punch him in the trousers and he holds his trousers. It was all this stuff. It was just, you know, it was intoxicating. And then I had to go back and write this. They preserved six pages at the front of the mag to talk about it. And then brilliantly, I don’t think we had a single screenshot. I had six pages of the mag to fill. So I believe what we did, and I think this is the absolute beauty of magazines, no website would ever do this, ever, was I hand drew from memory the map, like the tanker and various different things on the thing. And then using some ultra generic press shots, we annotated this map. And to make it more fun, we did a photo shoot of me wearing a bandana, pulling those mega star faces, I was saying, so like me going, oh, wow. Yeah, just something that wouldn’t happen, really, really fun. That’s amazing. So Metal Gear is a big obsession for you generally, Dan. Was MGS2 just a defining game for you in the early part of your career? Yeah, I think so. But initially, for not the reasons I would come to love it later on, I think initially it was more because technically it was unlike any game we’d ever seen. Like I was just saying, the rain on the screen, the 3D visuals, the cinematic sweep. It was pushing consoles in a direction we couldn’t believe. And even the Harry Gregson-Williams soundtrack just felt so cinematic. So I think that was the reason I loved it. And actually, you know, that game’s wild, right? There’s a lot of things in that game that utterly had stand. And I also remember the day that Konami came in with the review code and the PR had said, whoever reviews it has to sign this thing called an NDA. Which back then, you know, wasn’t really a thing for games. Because he said, something happens early in the game that’s going to make people explode. They will not believe what happens in this video game. And none of us knew. It was just the inside circle of people who’d played it, who’d reviewed it. And they couldn’t mention that in the reviews, as I recall. As you know, you know, one hour, two hours in, you play as Raiden. Who the hell is Raiden? What’s that all about? What a game, you know? And as time went on, and I think the gaming community began to understand how incredibly ahead of the curve that game was thematically. I definitely became obsessed because it was a wormhole. It was falling into these Reddit communities of people who were obsessing and pouring over the conversations in it. And you know, I won’t go down my full Metal Gear rabbit hole because this will be the longest Back Page pod, literally, ever. But the things that Metal Gear 2 did in terms of predicting the modern internet society and tribalism and the way information warfare works and more than that how people exploit information warfare. And years later, you know, I’ve written about this and done bookazines about Metal Gear. And a guy who’d written a piece for us about the enemies of that game or the notion of the enemies, the Patriots, talked about how they’re not really an enemy, but saying they are the system. He was saying the optimum tactic for any system of control is stealth, because the minute someone realizes they’re part of a system, they start to gamify it. And then it shone the light on how the Patriots really just created this ecosystem that people were part of, that we’re completely oblivious to. And, you know, now we are, we are aware of it, of course. But if you watch something on Netflix like The Social Dilemma, which, you know, you might have seen, talks about how social media has become utterly pervasive and changed the way we think. And maybe in ways that, you know, Facebook, Google, et cetera, didn’t even entirely expect. But by creating a system, gamified with algorithms that reward certain things, it manipulated and manipulates today human behaviour. That was literally in Metal Gear Solid 2, 20 years ago. It’s quite a lot to put in a box out there, isn’t it? It’s a hell of a lot. You know, the game is ridiculous, right? There’s loads of nonsense in it. But the core of what it predicted, unbelievable. Yeah, absolutely. So, Dan, I kind of want to drag you forward to the PS3 era a little bit, but I just wanted to ask, because your stories have been so good, is there any other stray observations about the PS2 or anything else you remember that you think is worth mentioning? Because obviously that’s a big chunk of time for you. No, it would just be lots more stories about press trips that would become even more incriminating for me or other people. Did you get to meet any of the big names from back in the day, like developer names? I know you’ve met Kojima a couple of times. Did you get to meet anyone else key or exciting? I think I’ve met some people who I just didn’t realise who they were. Like, oh, that’s that really important person. I think I was a bit older when I met people like Phil Harrison. We went to TGS and we did some big thing in Japan, so we met like Kazunori Yamauchi, Kazuhai, Phil Harrison, all that Sony set. And even things like, maybe he’s not the most famous developer in the world, but is one of the most interesting and actually in real life one of the most handsome and captivating and enigmatic, is Lorne Lanning, who does the Ultron series. He’s very good looking. Oh, he’s so handsome. He’s so handsome. And like, this is 20 years ago, he was really handsome. So I got put in by mistake by a not very good PR person in a one hour demo for the Odd World game. And Lorne was, he was amazing. He sold it to me, it looked brilliant. It was like loads of emergent, exciting things happening. And I said, this is brilliant. And what day does this come out on PS2? And Lorne said, oh, oh my god, this is an Xbox exclusive. I was like, oh, oh. So I just like rattled and I just left the room. I was like, what the hell have I done? I’ve just spent an hour looking at Odd World. But Lorne Lanning, this is amazing. Lorne Lanning ran out of the booth, 25 to 30 meters, shouting my name. And I thought, oh my god, I’ve done something, I’ve offended him. And he turned around and he went, thank you for your time, Dan. I just wanted to give you something. And he just popped in my hand a little Oddworld pin badge that I’ve got to this day. So I thought that was the most wonderful, generous thing. And irrespective of video games or anything, I thought that was a brilliant way to treat people. Yeah, sounds like a good dude. So, Dan, obviously you’ve become more senior. So by the time the PlayStation 3 rolls around, you’re editing PSM3, right? I think at the very start of PS3, no. I think I was deputy editor. And then it was like later in the console’s life cycle. Obviously, PS3 was a gift from heaven in many ways because Sony had utterly dominated the PS2 landscape and then followed it up by releasing to the world this just enormous silver American fridge freezer. Enormous console. And as you know, we’ve worked on magazines and everyone likes the last laugh page. What a gift that was. You could just put Kazuri holding a console the size of a small outboard building or something. That was enough. And then the pad, the boomerang pad. What an absurdity. I mean, it never saw the light of day, did it? I don’t think the boomerang pad. So I certainly never got to see one, I guess, as a proper release unit. But just an incredible machine. And I think it was around about that time. I might be getting confused with my consoles. Was PS3 the cell chip console? Yeah, that’s right, yeah. Yeah, I went to what I would describe as the most visionary and least intelligible press conference ever with Kaz Hirai. And it was at TGS. It was right before he, not Kaz Hirai, Kazunori Yamauchi. Gran Turismo guy. No, Ken Kutaragi. Third time’s a charm. God, I’m sorry, I’m getting Sony fever. So Ken Kutaragi had given this amazing visionary talk. It was through a translator. And I think the translator had no idea how to translate what he was saying because it was so out there. I was sat with some guys from like serious business publications like Forbes and Bloomberg. I was turning to them going, is it just me? I can’t understand a word he’s saying. And they were just like shrugging their shoulders. He was planning out this vision for the cell chip. The idea was the PS3 cell chip would live in every device in your house, including the fridge and the kettle. And the cell chips would speak to each other and form this grid of neural grid of processing intelligence. It was way ahead of its time in terms of the way he was looking at it, but it definitely wasn’t the PS3 that delivered it. And then he was also saying, what I’d like to do, look at Gran Turismo, using the emerging technology of the internet, we would like users to take photographs of the world and we’re going to rebuild the world in a computer on the internet. And when he said that, this is probably pre-Google Maps, it was incredible, but didn’t make any sense because it was so far out of left field from what we were expecting. And I think there was a big sense of PS3 just being a console. They let Ken Kutaragi have his say and it was wild. Yeah, for sure. It’s definitely defined everything that Sony’s done since then, that kind of error. But as someone covering the console, was it kind of like a tough transition going from PS2 to PS3 in terms of the types of games? Did it make a difference to you day to day that it was no longer the dominant force in the games industry? I don’t think really because we kind of hit the ground running where our magazine, PSM2, just became PSM3. A lot of the audience slept with us or we believe a lot of the audience slept with us. And I think what was nice, and this is the nice thing about magazines, isn’t it, is this sense of whether it’s true or not, you feel like you’re creating a club where there’s a shared narrative. So I think we create this sense of shared disbelief that Sony had created this thing. And it’s at the point where I can’t even remember the launch games. And it was quite a while. And I remember when at the same time Xbox had launched and Xbox was good. I mean, Xbox launched with Halo. Halo was amazing. And Halo was having the effect on people that Metal Gear Solid 2 was having before or Half-Life 2 was having on PC. Halo was blowing people away. And Sony absolutely didn’t have that at the early days of PS3. And as I say, I’m struggling to remember like a PS3 launch game. Yeah, Motor Storm and Resistance were the main ones, Dan. Oh, well, yeah, and actually, you know, quite decent, right? Motor Storm, brilliant mud effects. Resistance, a perfectly decent shooter. And by the end of the generation, Resistance had become an excellent shooter by, you know, stealing all the best bits from all of the games of the generation. Riddick, Half-Life, you know, it fused it all together to make a really great single-player experience. But it took a long time for PS3 to hit its stride. But, you know, when it did, again, another great console. So from there then, Dan, you kind of make a transition into video, right? So what sort of happens in your career then? PSM eventually closed, and I was put into the dreaded projects division. It was at the height of everyone believing that iPads were going to save magazines, which we can look back at now and laugh. And in fact, even then we looked at and laughed, because the mechanisms for creating and accessing iPad magazines were so byzantine and so awful. You just knew, and you think today about all the obsession about smooth UX and making the user journey easy. This was the absolute enemy of that. It was so hard. You had to download the host app and then download the host magazine and then post your issues into it. There were so many clicks and sign ups. It just wasn’t a good experience. We were making this iPad magazine. I knew it was going to fail. So what I’d started doing as a kind of desperate side project was I’d had this bet that you could take what had worked in print. In fact, at the tail end of PSM, I remember I wrote a 10-page piece on Metal Gear Solid 5 four years before its release, which is just, you know, hilariously cliched of me to do that. But I remember telling the guys on the team that was my plan. I remember people getting angry and standing up and saying to me, you can’t do this, you’re going to be a laughing stock. It’s going to be humiliating. I did it anyway. I guess I could. I was the editor. But what we did, or what I did, that’s when I sat and looked through years of Kojima tweets and did all this crazy deep dive assemblage piece of evidence. And made a really good stab at what Metal Gear was going to become. I said it was going to be open world, it’s going to be set in Africa, the hero is going to be Big Boss. Most of this stuff was right. Some things were really wrong. Of course you forget that stuff. But taking this approach to journalism and then trying to apply that to video, so the bet was can we do the same thing for GTA 5? So this was just at the point where Rockstar had said there will be a GTA 5. So I think we started the show GTA 5 O’clock as a YouTube series like dipping our toe in the water. And then after about two or three episodes the first trailer for GTA 5 dropped. And that was it. And we were just, you know, every week we’d do a show, we’d analyse the latest trailer, we’d pour over microscopic details on the cars, on the guns, make all these wild predictions. You’d be working with Reddit, you know, you’d be taking all these clues from all over the world. And I think my employer Future didn’t know we were doing it, but by the time they did it was too big to close down. And I think to this day I still think it’s the most successful video series in Future’s history, I think. It reached like 150 million people over two or three years. It felt like it kind of predated what is now a very common approach or trend of the deep dive or the kind of companion podcast, I guess, for like TV and film. You know, people just like to think about something. They don’t have to necessarily have the facts. They just want, you know, it’s fans talking with other fans, about what they want and hope and think. And that’s now so commonplace, but at the time it really didn’t. Yeah, you’re really right. There’s barely a big show that launches now where there isn’t some kind of off the record or expanded show. It’s so commonplace that the nerd, because the nerd market is now global, there’s enough of us to make this stuff work. Where even back in, this was what, 2012, 2011, it still felt experimental, which is weird to think now. Very weird to think now. And actually, I was talking to, I don’t know if you know, well, you obviously know Steve Burns, who runs Special Gun. And I was chatting to him the other day, and he was saying, oh, you guys invented Let’s Plays, didn’t you? And I went, what? Like, no, clearly not. But then going back to the PS2 era, the big thing of the PS2 era, and this is another conversation, was the competitive nature of cover-mounted discs, where we would put game videos on discs and say, hey, watch 50 new games on the PSM DVD. But what we decided to do was narrate over the game footage. And then we were doing reviews where we narrated over the game footage, and previews where we narrated over the game footage. And this was 2003? This is before YouTube. Now, I can’t claim credit for that. I think that was maybe our editor’s idea at the time. But yeah, just unbelievable thinking back. And these things are so commonplace. I was a huge fan of those DVDs for years. It was weird. I liked the mag, but I really liked the DVD. I actually mentioned this to Andy Kelly when he was on the podcast where it would be kind of like big enthusiasm for the games you knew about and then a room of five dudes trying to sort of um and ah their way through like the 10th Guilty Gear game that year, which was just to make me laugh. But I remember when I joined Future, hearing your voices in the office. Oh my God, it’s the DVD guys. Because I couldn’t really put any voices to faces in the mag. Because again, I made this joke when Andy Kelly was on here. It felt like everyone on the team was called Dan at some point. There were several Dan’s, maybe a Dave. So it was a bit of a soup of D names. We had three Dan’s for sure. It was me, Dan Griffiths, the editor, and Dan Vincent, the designer. So it was like tripping Dan for it. Yeah, that was a bit of a kind of eye opening moment of being in the office and being like, oh, it’s them. I sort of know these guys already. But it’s exactly how I felt when I first joined. I think that sense of meeting people, the stuff you’d like noodled over. Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it? It’s quite exciting. I was going to get really mad and philosophical about it, but I think for so many people, particularly when you’re like a late teenager, you forget how important these obsessions can be for people. I think I’d found such solace in knowing there were people who were equally, I guess, like demented about video games as me. And here we go in YouTube, and that’s everything we do, and it’s all those shows we talked about. But it definitely felt much more, I guess, underground then, I guess. You know, it wasn’t underground. We sold hundreds of thousands of magazines, but it just didn’t feel maybe as global or connected. Yeah, great stuff. Well, Dan, look, there’s loads more I could ask you about your career, but I feel like we’re going to cover a bunch more in the next session. So shall we take a quick break and then come back with some more discussion of MAG competition? Let’s go. Welcome back to the podcast. So, in this half, we’re gonna talk a bit about games magazine rivalries. Dan, when I first met you, it was 2008 on a Metal Gear Solid 4 review event trip, and you had this beautiful-looking Metal Gear Solid 4 cover with you that you were showing to the Konami Reps there, and I worked on Play Magazine at the time. We were competing magazines, and I felt incredibly jealous. And I was curious if you could explain a bit about what mag rivalries were like and why they differ to sort of like website rivalries now. Why it felt a bit more personal and different. Yeah, wow. Can I say as well, Sam, I’m gonna start by apologizing to you. Why? Because I remember, and I really hope you’ve forgotten this, so maybe I shouldn’t bring it up. At one of these industry parties, when I was, like many times, probably too drunk for my own good, I am sure you came up to me being super nice and really friendly, and we got chatting and you said, what do I think of Play Magazine? And here’s an insight into the rivalry. And I said, I don’t think anything about Play Magazine. What an arsehole. I had actually forgotten that. I got the strong sense that you weren’t like that big on it, but I think that there was just a culture in the air of like competition between these mags that was like, you just got invested in whether you’re a staff writer or an editor. It’s a real thing, right? Yeah, absolutely. We used to have, there’d be beef internally, so there’d be a huge thing between official PlayStation and PSM. I think earlier as PSM, we got incredibly lucky with the composition of our team. Joel, my fellow staff writer, Joel’s a genius. Joel’s ability to flatter you with copy, but to write it in such a simple way to make you feel like the genius, where really it’s his genius brevity of phrase. I thought that was absolutely wonderful. Our designer was probably our secret weapon, a guy called Christian Day, who went on now and he works with NASA and Adidas. So Chris is like, he was crazy good. You describe something terrible to him. So I’d be like, I’ve been playing Gran Turismo and this bend is like this, and you can see light coming through the trees and how do we do it? And then he’s like, right, I’m going to design these car dials and it’s going to look like this. And it would just come back and it would be so flattering to work with him. So I think there was that sense of professional integrity rivalry plus a massive fight over exclusives. Now I remember PSW magazine, you probably remember PSW Sam. And we probably all know the various people who worked on these titles. And I definitely don’t want to talk about people or names. Looking back, I think very generously of almost everyone. But they took a much more hands-on PR approach. Where you’d hear stories of them meeting the PRs at 3pm on a Friday to get them oiled up with lagers. And then there’d be an off-the-record exchange of brown paper pag full of discs. And there was one publisher who definitely shouldn’t have been doing this, who was clearly supplying PSW with, like, plutonium grade exclusives. And I think it was based on essentially getting drunk together and bonhoming. Or maybe blackmail. Who knew? I find that very stressful as an editor because I don’t think I’m that warmer personality. I couldn’t take someone to the pub and, like, woo them just with my company. I find that very stressful. Oh, Sam, you definitely could. And you’ve got that elusive thing we all search for. Integrity. I think that goes a long way. Oh, I’m not so sure. So, when you were running PSM3 then, you had official PlayStation magazine, PSW and Play. For you as an editor, how difficult was it to secure exclusives when you had that much competition? Yeah, hard. So I think you knew certain things were never going to happen. For example, you knew it was always going to be tough to presumpt the official PlayStation magazine to first party Sony product. You just didn’t really fight those battles. You try and negotiate a kind of B deal where you go, we preview it the month before they review it. And that was the strategy that would work then. So, you know, we’d work, the mags would work in tandem. But where we’d win is, I guess, with the third party publishers and the, I guess the emerging publishers. So I laugh as I think about it. So we definitely had some hot Midway exclusives. So I think you didn’t read about Dr. Muto anywhere other than PSM2. And I think the reality of it was, and Sam might know this, is you’d have to suck up the odd Dr. Muto in order to get a Mortal Kombat or to get a Stranglehold. Which I think we were the first magazine to lead on that, that John Woo shoot again. That was the PS3 era. So someone like Midway we’d work with. And then the incident Sam refers to, the Konami cover, I would say, not ungenerously, that was probably six years in the making, where the stuff I talked about earlier, where going to see Konami and playing Metal Gear for the first time, Metal Gear Solid 2 for the first time, being so close to them with Pro Revolution Soccer. And the mag as well was in a good spot. I think our sales were competitive enough for us to be an option. And the stars aligned and we had our 100th issue of PSM coming up. And it was around about the dates of the world’s ever first review of Metal Gear Solid 4. And this was in Nassu in Japan. Now, I mean, I’d never been to Nassu in Japan. I’d never even heard of Nassu in Japan. I probably bored you with the story down the pub. But, you know, amazingly, the stars aligned, the Konami said, yes, we can do an exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4. I can’t believe it was like a review or the final verdict to one of those crazy slices of coverage we cook up. But we were like the, I think the only UK mag who went and there was like 10 journalists worldwide. I tell a lie, I think maybe Edge were there, maybe. But it was very, very few people. And we get into Tokyo and they took us on a bullet train up to Nassau. Now, Nassau was where the Japanese royal family live and it’s so far removed from the way Tokyo feels. You feel like a vampire seeing the light. It was just beautiful. And then we drive and we’re on these hills, on the top of these hills and you look down, you can barely see anything. What you can see is a winding road, a series of wind turbines and at the bottom of it, what is effectively like a Teletubbies house. And it turns out this was like Konami’s secret off-site training HQ. So this is where we get there. And then, you know, look, hey, it’s Hideo Kojima. It was all of his crew at the time. And it was like a sort of Metal Gear Solid 4 luxury butt-winds where we got to play the game 10 hours a day and then in the evening because no one could go anywhere, right? So Hideo Kojima was basically forced to eat with us and to chat with us, which is kind of, you know, it was amazing. It must have been incredibly awful for him. So there was one evening, you could tell, he was sat at one side of the table with his, you know, his work colleagues and they were chatting. But it became increasingly obvious that everyone just wanted to hear him talk. So one by one, the people along the length of the table kept hushing up and got cocking in ear towards what he was saying. And I think he realised that the only way he was going to get any peace was to essentially hold court. So he gathered everyone around and did this like, you know, half hour wait, I can’t even remember what it was about. He just chatted about the genesis of MGS4 and the various different things. And Konami’s HQ was so plush and wild. The main briefing where they said, you’re here on this tactical mission to play Metal Gear 4 was delivered in a Bond villain style HQ with a circular table where the TV screens flipped up out of the central console. It was unbelievably mad. Just the craziest thing. And then after being there a day or two, I was outside with someone. I think someone was smoking and I was chatting to them because I wanted to talk about what we thought of the game. And we looked up and on the top of the Teletubbies house, there was a singular glass rectangle. And I was like, that is the weirdest thing. There’s a singular glass rectangle on top of this building. We go back into the house and I was talking to one of the Konami reps and said, why is there this glass rectangle there? And they said, oh, that is the president’s of Konami’s private viewing portal. Wow. Yeah, wow. Only he, only he has the key to go upstairs to sit in the viewing portal. I bet Kojima was so jealous. He was. He was jealous. This is the brilliant thing. Someone said, Mr. Kojima-san, even he’s not allowed up there. And you knew he was jealous. And a mere five years later, he parted way with Konami. You know, who knows? Who knows? If you’d just let me into the viewing platform, you bastards. Yeah, I would have stayed. I’d have finished Metal Gear Solid 5. You know, who knows what went on there? But Konami is a much bigger company than we used to see. You know, we just see it be involved with the game side of it. It’s a massive corporation that was involved in health and began with Pachinko and all these different things. I think that brought home that this is a huge company and this is the Japanese boardroom culture in Excelsis. I’ve never seen anything like it. That was one of the best, probably for me, the best strip I’ve ever done, because being able to play that game first. And that game is hatchet. You know, Sam knows this. This game is wild. But what a fun thing to experience for the first time. And it was also super fun. I’m sorry, I’m digressing again. One of the funniest things about it was, because we played a not quite finished version. The section, you know, the sort of Prague section where it starts where you look like Young Snake and it’s like, oh my God, I’m Young Snake. And he takes the mask off and he’s pursuing that guy whilst being pursued by those stupid balls. And that section is a little bit boring. Yeah, worst bit of the game. Yeah, worst bit of the game and a touch tricky. Now in the unoptimized version, there was nothing. You had no prompts, no clues. The idea of when you’d be seen and when you wouldn’t felt completely arbitrary. It seemed to me stupid that the game would put you in the Young Snake mask. But then the way to play the game would be to immediately remove it and put your stealth camera on. It just felt stupid to me and like nobody did that because we all thought we’ve got to play this section as Young Snake. That was some couple of days. So Dan, going back to the mag stuff then, that was an amazing story, like one of the best stories I’ve ever heard in gaming. But do you think that heightened competition led to better magazines among the PlayStation lot or just dirtier tactics? Clearly both. We would do it internally where we’d get the new OPM in. We’d pour through it. And you’d love every page that was weak. And every page that was good, you’d swear and say, ah, jammy, you know, bab, bab, bab. They were lucky to get that access. That’s not good craft. We were terrible losers, right? And then I think it worked both ways. And maybe people wouldn’t admit that or say it. But I think that rivalry was great because it would drive you to new heights and new creativity. And, you know, probably even more so with external mags, particularly when they got exclusives. And it was just a crazy time, just a really crazy, you know, tit for tat time. I remember, like, a really happy day on Endgamer when official Nintendo magazine had a poster for, like a Zelda poster for a Zelda special. And they’d obviously, like, made the logo themselves. And it had a typo in it. I actually think it was a double whammy. I think it was a Phantom Hourglass art, but the logo said Twilight Princess, and Twilight was spelt wrong. And I remember us, like, literally fist pumping of, like, yes, this is so good that this has gone wrong for them. Because that’s what it was like. Yeah, and that’s what I also loved is, before you told that story, you laughed to yourself because you remember how good it felt for that to happen. And I love that. I love that. And that’s exactly how it was. And it’s one of those things, in the room, it felt like the loudest noise in the world, you know, the universe barely moves an inch. No one cares. We cared a lot. And I think that’s what made it super fun. I think for people who work in this crazy industry, it’s that creativity that’s the best bit, I think. Absolutely. So as an editor, Dan, did you have like an ethos or a set of values about what the mag did or didn’t do? How did you lay those out? When I joined the mag, this is credit to Marcus Hawkins, the editor of the time, he had a very, very clear vision for what he wanted from the magazine. And we had like a brand-facing tagline from day one. And it was a little bit oer matron, but the tagline was longer, harder, faster. So we definitely had some jokes about that. You know, it sounds bad, right? But the ethos was nobody plays games more than PSM. And we’re 100% hardcore. It was like an ultimate independent magazine manifesto about, you know, it’s not quite good, fellas. It’s not like, he hits us for the thing, we take a fat. It wasn’t quite that. But it was, you know, it was definitely, we play it longer, we play it harder. We’re going to do things you’re never going to do. We’re going to go deeper. And I think it was that mindset that stuck with me. And I think even when we were doing things like GTA V o’clock or the Metal Gear analysis stuff, it was just always about going that layer deeper into something that’s essentially ridiculous. But going deeper and playing, giving the ridiculous material the respect it deserves and playing it straight. And I think that’s important. Now when I was editor, we used to do, our company would do this all the time, we’d have brand eyes, wouldn’t we? Where we’d write the magazine central message in the centre and the various different tangents would say different things. But I think in reality that’s a thing you write down and the way the magazine lived and received. It’s how you walk the walk every day. I think for me it was just about integrity of the process and the writing. So knowing the people we commissioned really knew their stuff, that their copy was gleaming, we’d rewrite so much stuff. It’s probably awful really, but nothing would make me angrier than giving someone something to review and then you get it back and the first two paragraphs are just pressure. There’s no detail, there’s no opinion, there’s nothing exclusive, they’re just puff. And I get furious because I’m like, why have we paid someone to turn in this shit? I can do a better job if I go on Google now and just pretend I played it. That used to piss me off. And then I think through that. I don’t know if when you spoke to other journalists, like Keza, if she said the same, but I think magazines were crucible for writing talent. Because when you were forced on deadline, you’d be exhausted. You’d work a week or 10, 12 hour days. And then your editor would say, one last thing, can you just fill in, and Matt Castle will appreciate this, like the dreaded Roundup page. And you’d be like, oh shit, no, no. And you’d have to source and write 10 crappy previews in 35 words each. And it would be living death. But I tell you what, if you want to own your crap, that’s the equivalent of 10,000 hours Beatles playing German, right? Doing those box sections. You were good at writing because it had to fit the page. It wasn’t like the internet. It didn’t keep going. You had to hit the word count. And I think that made people good writers. And you could see then from people you commissioned, and this is a guy who probably doesn’t need more praise, but absolutely deserves it. I remember when we had copy from Christian Donlon, and I think it was the first piece of copy where I couldn’t delete a single word without losing something of value. And that’s when you think, wow. And I didn’t necessarily agree with everything he said, but it all was constructed meticulously. And that is somebody who knows his craft. Yeah, great stuff, Dan. So what do you think that magazines do well that websites still can’t? Obviously you’re content director and oversee basically every bit of game stuff in the future that isn’t PC Gamer now. So what is it do you think that magazines still do well that websites can’t really replicate? I think it’s stuff we’ve touched on. I think it’s a sense of club and community. And this sense of like we are part of the, you know, the PlayStation crew or the, you know, whatever it is, whatever console you’re affiliated to. And it’s definitely the design, isn’t it? You know, I think this sense of fusing words, themes, it’s more like marketing and more campaign-led than the internet. So much of the internet is essentially machine and Google-led and scientific. Magazines, you can craft narratives. And I think the very best editors have a vision and a story they want to tell. And magazines allow you to do that and you can do it visually. And I think that could be even things like, you know, every summer we do our Hot 50 special. And it’s a big moment for the readers because they’re like, oh, what’s this year’s Hot 50? And I think that the boldest editors will have the ability to go from blank page to here’s the idea, it looks like this, it’s designed like this, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. You don’t do it alone. You’ve got to bring people with you. And I think it’s the other people involved that make it brilliant, you know, the designers and the other bits of contribution. But I think that’s the thing that magazines do so well because they’re collaborative, aren’t they? And I think so much of what’s done on the internet is solo, mostly, like certainly written articles. You know, people use the tools, they write the things on the page, they file them in the CMS, it’s gone. The magazine page was like, you know, real-time collaboration on a sculpture or something. You know, you’d have many eyes and many people on a page. When you’ve got that chemistry right amongst the team, it was something special. And I think that’s the magic of magazines. Great stuff, Dan. Well then, just to close out then, I tasked you with giving us your five favourite PlayStation games ever. Kind of a nice cross-section of your tastes and to dig a little bit more into your memories of working on covering PS2 and PS3. So how do you find that process of making a little top five? Hellish. Because when you start thinking about it, it gets worse, doesn’t it? Because you realise that actually there’s been such a… I’ve been doing this 20 years, Sam. There’s so many games. It’s absolutely shocking. And I think what was also telling was that of the recent games, hardly any have made my list. That’s not to say I don’t think I’ve adored some recent games. Now, obviously, this isn’t a PlayStation game, but I became obsessive with Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. That would be in there if it was my all-time favourite games. But it’s a Nintendo game, so that’s out of the running. I think Sony’s recent God of War was exceptional as a production piece. I also enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn, but I didn’t think maybe quite as magical as God of War was. But yeah, I can hit you up with my top five PlayStation games in reverse order. Yeah, kick off. I could definitely debate the ordering of the five, four and three, but I’m going to go with number five, Portal 2. Portal was brilliant, but I think Portal 2 is arguably one of the only perfect video games. And by perfect, I mean the intent of the game could not have been any more perfectly realized by the design. It’s like I was saying about Christian Donnellan’s writing. There’s no fat in that game. Everything has a reason. The design of the game intuits you towards really the only way you can complete it. But yet, it feels utterly organic. And the great thing is, because it is so designed and so cold, and it’s a robot controlling you, it’s intercut with this idea of rebellion and you finding these secret paths through this world. And the fact it’s so funny. Like Wheatley is so funny. Genuinely funny. And there hadn’t been many funny games until that point. So for that reason, you know, it’s one of my favorite all time video games. Great pick. Yeah, not someone we talked about in this podcast before, but yeah, you’ve got basically JK. Simmons and Stephen Merchant doing all of the heavy lifting of that story. And the writing is just perfect. Oh my god, was it JK. Simmons? Yeah, I think he’s like the guy who runs the corporation. Yeah, the kind of gruff one in the middle section where his name is. God, how many smokes. Wow, wow, wow, wow. So what’s your number four, Dan? Number four, after much pondering, Silent Hill 2. I’m sure this has been on the podcast many times. Lots of people have said it in lots of different ways. Again, this is all about context. I think a lot of people were really reverent of Silent Hill, but I remember when Silent Hill 2 came in on PSM and I got to review it. Even at a technical level, it was astonishing. Simple things like when you stand in front of the mirror and your torchlight shines against the mirror, it just looks amazing. But that story, those designs, pyramid head, everything everyone would say, that is a haunting video game. And it has stuck with me to this day. And actually it was an absolute… One of the reasons I remember it is it was a joy to write about because the material was so strong. And that month I won Futures Golden Pen for review of the month for writing about… The highest possible honour. Was it an actual pen? It was a real pen, like it was a real moderately good pen, like probably a 20 quid pen, quite a good pen. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was like sucking beans out of a pipe or whatever at home with no money, but at least I had the Golden Pen. So that was good. But you know, it’s a pleasure to write about a game like that. What a joy to write about. Even if you played this game, like as a punter, you probably had read about it before you played it. And one of the great pleasures of getting to write about games is that very pure first encounter when there’s literally no expectation, no one has spoiled, no one can spoil it for you. And that game must have been just like, I mean, epic discovering everything that it had. Yeah, the flip side of that, and we’ve all been there, is when you’re the first person in the world to play a game and you get stuck. You’re really stuck. And that’s where love can turn to hate quite quickly. Thankfully, thankfully, I managed to get through signing it all too. Yeah, those apartments are pretty hard to navigate, get lost, and the hospital is as well. So yeah, that’s a great pick, Dan. So what’s your number three? Number three, I’m sure this has come up before, Ico. It’s not come up on this podcast yet, actually, but you know. You’re joking, you’re joking. When Ico came out, it was unlike anything we’d seen, because video games were video games. And along comes this, I remember asking our editor, I remember writing one of those infamous 50 word previews of it, and I was saying to our editor, what’s this Ico game? And he went, oh, it’s some weird Japanese thing, where you’re a boy with horns who’s stuck in a casket in a castle, and you wake up, and I said, oh, it sounds absolutely awful. And obviously, next issue, I get to review it. Yeah, you know, I’m not that crazy for this whole video games are our argument, but you’ve got to say there’s something special about that game. And I think it was the bravery to break away from video game convention, and to offer this essentially UX free environment and narrative light, yet still emotionally rich experience of a horn boy and you know, it’s lived in the main mechanic is press the button to grip onto your dishand. And it’s quite annoying, you have to whack sticks, whack ghosts with a stick. As I say, it sounds terrible. But there’s something about that sense of discovery in that game. When you go from the catacombs area, and you first break out onto the roof of the castle, for a game to give you so little in audio sensory terms apart from the sound of the breeze, that was beautiful to see nature and for it to feel so slow and beautiful. And you know, look, there’s a lot of problems with that game. But by the time you’ve reached the end, heart wrenching. In fact, I’m pretty sure I wrote some ridiculous poetry about it at the time, but it’s a game that’s definitely stuck with me and as close as video games have come to feeling like art. I definitely remember listening to you guys talk about this on the DVD and like it so wasn’t a game for that like vibe of like five blokes bantering in a room. Like I remember thinking like, what the hell is this? This doesn’t fit with the rest of this stuff at all. Not being dismissive of it, but you know, maybe, you know, I’m not really understanding it until I kind of played it for myself, but I really remember you guys talking about that particular game. It’s a really good point you make because during this period in history, this was kind of like the Ladmag era and like the era of megabants. You know, men were more, it’s not like the olden days, but like, you know, men were men and it was all a bit more blokey. So the idea of us all sitting around in a group to discuss the artistic credentials of Ico. This kind of speaks to just the PS2 strength of just being an absolute juggernaut and having this like vast array of software that no one else could match. Just yeah, wonderful stuff. So what’s topped it, Dan? What’s number two for you? Number two. And as I read it, I feel like I’ve got to change it, like I’m thinking of another game I want it to be. Is it Star Wars Battlefront 2? Oh, no, I’ve forgotten that completely, Sam. Oh, God. I don’t think that’s not one of my favorite games ever, but I don’t think I’ve played a game more. I remember you talking about it in the office a lot and I thought, wow, this game has formed like a big part of this dude’s life. I mean, it really has. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into the seven out of 10 Star Wars Battlefront 2. Je ne regrette rien. I love it. It was a perfectly perfunctory experience. But number two, with a heavy heart, because as I say, I’m thinking of another game. I’m going to say SSX and I think I’m going to say SSX3. I was originally going to say SSX because I think the impact that had more in terms of my life, I think when I first joined the magazine, the idea that it was the first 90% scoring game, playing it in split screen with Joel, it was associated with a lot of really good times. A lot of the best video games we associate, I think, with things that are a bit bigger than the game itself, whether it’s the people we played them with or the moment in our life that we engage with them. So I think there’s a big sense of that with SSX. But if I’m true about the one I think is probably the best, maybe SSX3, because purely because of the 20 minute mountain peak ride where you drop in in what feels like the surface of the moon while poor Leno plays, and it’s such a beautiful moment. I just love the SSX series. But all that said, as I said it, I felt like I was cheating on Skate 2. So that’s another. It blows my mind that it took EA so long to bring that back, because if you can think of a game that’s better for YouTube culture and Let’s Plays and crazy physics, it just isn’t. That’s perfect. So I’m obviously thrilled that it returns, which takes us to number one. Go on Dan, give us your number one. Well you know what it is. It’s Metal Gear Solid and quite clearly number three, which is I would say the best game of all time. Certainly my favourite game of all time. It’s tied, I think, to what I was just referencing, the way I played it. I was a huge Metal Gear Solid 2 fan, initially as I said for technical reasons, and I remember someone else, Paul Fitzpatrick, had been given Metal Gear Solid 3 as a freelance review. And at that time, Metal Gear 3 was a very quick turnaround from 2, and there was this sense of Konami are rushing out a sequel to make money. It’s in the jungle, it’s in the 1960s, looks a bit weird, big tonal change again. And all that said, Paul Fitzpatrick, we were just talking to him, and he said, yeah, I’m not sure either, I’m not really looking forward to it. Turns his copy in, absolutely gushing, 97%. And I think it was the biggest score we’d ever given, and myself, the editor, everyone took it in turns to ring him and go, seriously though, 97%, you’re having a laugh, you’re having a laugh, but he stuck to his guns and he went, trust me, this is something else. So I had my copy and I took it home with me to my parents’ house over Christmas. So I was sat in my childhood bedroom and I’d started playing it, and on Christmas morning I remember I was playing the bit where suddenly Metal Gear Solid 3 absolutely picks up. I think it’s after you fight Volgin, there’s a chase with the Rex, you know, it’s the bit where it’s like dum, it’s non-stop good bit, and I remember it so vividly because I could not put the pad down because it was utterly breathtaking, and also because my mum kept shouting at the stairs, are you coming for dinner? Are you coming for dinner or what? You coming for dinner? And so I ended up going, when I went down my dinner was like absolutely stone cold, but I couldn’t put the pad down. And there’s that section of three, two, three hour section, and it’s a strong, like an album style composition of play styles as I think there’s ever been. And it just keeps mixing it up and it keeps surprising you and it keeps pulling the rug from under your feet. And like Kojima has tried and never bettered that sequence of events in the last few hours of MGS3, to the point where he’s just parodied it and covered it, whether it’s in Metal Gear Solid 4 Act 2, which is like a cover version of the end of MGS3, or even in Death Stranding’s ending where he does a very weak version of the same thing, but if you’ve never experienced it before, you might say, wow, that was great. But MGS3 is amazing, and again, MGS3, like I was saying earlier, a game that I didn’t even like for about two hours because it doesn’t explain itself, it’s difficult, it’s slow, and it was only when you discover how to use CQC and you can neutralise in an alert area, it utterly transforms your experience. And I remember years later going back to watch YouTube videos of guys who had mastered all the weird sub things you can do, like the laying down of the gentleman’s magazines to distract the guards, and then there were people who used like 20 gentleman’s magazines around a HQ and were like systematically lining guards up and then punching them and they’d wake up and they’d get up and dance, it was like synchronised dance, done through the medium of gentleman’s magazines, that’s a video game. Great stuff Dan. Yeah, I feel like MGS3 really won out from the fact that 2 and 4 were like the most hyped games of my early life, I can’t think of any other games that had the level of hype they did. And 3, I think because it was a prequel, just sort of seemed to arrive, like you say, and was maybe underestimated. And yeah, I think that just does a lot for it, being uncoupled from the continuity in that way, you know. Yeah, so much, and you’re right, so much of this is about expectations, isn’t it? And to be able to experience a brilliant game or film or anything without the burden of those expectations is increasingly a rare gift. So I think that’s even with a run up and knowing Metal Gear 3 was good, I didn’t know that much about it. So, you know, it was such a great experience. Well, great stuff, Dan. But thank you so much for joining us on this episode, Dan. It’s been amazing to hear your war stories, so we really appreciate it. Really awesome stuff. We’re definitely going to have to get you back on in the future to talk more because you know, all this stuff is gold to me. Just message us when your wife and kids go away again for like a week and you’ve got a bit of time on your hands, so we’ll figure it out. Well the good news is this podcast has been so long that people will still be listening to it in 2022 when I get some free time again. So I look forward if you’d be kind enough to invite me again, it would be a pleasure to talk and it doesn’t have to be about the olden days of PlayStation, even though it might be. Okay, thanks so much Dan. For people at home you can follow the podcast at Back Page Pod. Dan, are you at Dan Dawkins on Twitter? Chex, yes, I am. Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? MrBazzill underscore Pesto. I’m Samuel W Roberts on Twitter. We’ll be back next week with a new episode. Thank you very much for listening.