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 have another special guest joining us. So Simon, can you introduce yourself? My name is Simon Parkin, and I’m here. That’s pretty much everything you need to know about the man, so yeah. Yeah, so I suppose Simon, tell us a bit about your background as a writer. Okay, so I’m a freelance journalist, and more recently an author as well. It’s an upgrade on Jeremy Peel, because he just said, hi, I’m Jeremy. And like there was no further context given, like he was Madonna or another, or Prince or another single word celebrity. At least he gave his surname. Yeah, exactly, I appreciate it. So in this episode, Simon’s going to talk to us a bit about his history as a freelance writer in games. We’ve talked a bit about freelancing before with some of our guests, but Simon’s got a particularly long and interesting history in this field. And so we’re delighted that you’re joining us, Simon. So what are your origins in games? Which platforms in games were significant to you as a younger man? It took a little while for me to be allowed a game device, to be honest. So I think my parents viewed it with a bit of skepticism. So my first sort of encounter with games was really going along to, on Saturday morning, sort of getting kicked off by my parents to go along to play tennis or whatever at the local sports club. And then after we’ve done our running around and all of that stuff, we sort of retire to the bar area of the club where they sort of set up a TV screen and we’d watch movies of the 80s, I’d say. So, I don’t know, things like Honey I Shrunk the Kids and The Goonies and all that stuff. And to the side of where we were all sitting, there was an arcade cabinet with Golden Axe in it. And sort of some of the bigger kids would always have a bit of money that they’d put in after the film was finished. And we’d try and complete Golden Axe sort of each week, getting a little bit further. So I remember watching that and just, you know, sort of wishing I could have a go, but they were sort of a bit older and I didn’t have, you know, pocket money and stuff like that that I could use on it. So, you know, after that, it took a bit of convincing and wearing down on my parents. So eventually I got a Game Boy, I think. I think you’re going to say eventually they gave me 20p to play Golden Axe. No, they bought me Golden Axe, the arcade game. No, just the Game Boy, alas. And then, you know, shortly thereafter, I think I managed to get a Mega Drive for Christmas as well. And yeah, so that was sort of my formative experiences. And we had in our local town center, a game shop, which was an independent called Mad Andes, which was run by Andy himself. In my head, sort of, I remember him like one of those sort of older dudes in 80s films that you might see in like Stranger Things or something now, where he was sort of balding with NHS glasses, but also like a beige leather jacket and skinny jeans. So sort of like cool, but not quite. And he ran the store and had like younger kids that were on staff there. And so, yeah, I just used to spend a lot of time at Matt Andy’s sort of browsing the games and chatting to them about what was coming out. And sort of underneath the counter, they had this, would occasionally bring out what looked like a telephone book. And it was essentially had all of the trade-in prices, you know, like you would get computer exchange now, except it’s all computerized. So when someone brought a game in that they wanted to trade in, it would tell them how much they could give in cash, how much in exchange and all of that. But it also had like a one-sentence review of the game and I think a score rating out of 100%. So I would like be forever taking up sort of obscure games that I found in the shop and going, oh, what did this get? And they’d have to, you know, pull out the telephone book and tell me what score it got. Who was assigning these scores? Was it Matt Andy himself? I mean, that would be amazing, wouldn’t it? I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense really, but I guess someone was producing this thing. And you could, you know, if you were a trade in store, you could sign up for it or something. I don’t know. I don’t know how often it was like updated or who was printing it and who was writing it or giving these scores. But I was totally beguiled by it. It was just this amazing thing. And it’s thanks to that telephone, but I bought a copy of Gunstar Heroes on the Mega Drive, which is, you know, just one of my all time favorite games. And I’d never heard of it and took it up and said, can you tell me something about this game? And they looked it up and said, oh, it’s got like, I don’t know anything about it, but it says here it’s amazing. It’s got like 93% or something like that. So I took that home and then, yeah, forever trusted the phone book. The meta critic of its day. Exactly, yeah. You paint a very evocative picture of the tennis club and mad Andes. I can see why you’re an author now, Simon. It’s like very evocative, I would say. So yeah, I read on Eurogamer that when you’re a student a little bit later, you’d buy Japanese import games on PlayStation. What kind of brought that about and what were the highlights of that venture for you? Well, I mean, to be honest, I sort of fell away from games in my mid-teens, as I think like some people do. You sort of get interested in other things for a bit. And then I went off to university and became friends with a guy who had bought an N64. And I’d sort of been a bit out of the loop with consoles. But he had this N64 and he had a copy of GoldenEye. And we just became absolutely obsessed with it and would play it to the extent that we became sort of nocturnal. We’d go to bed at four or five a.m. and then wake up in the afternoon to start playing GoldenEye again and sort of neglecting studies a bit and all of that. And yeah, I just sort of fell hard into games again at that point. I picked up a magazine, some sort of unofficial PlayStation magazine that had Metal Gear Solid on the cover. And I remember reading about that and thinking, this sounds incredible. And yeah, so then I used some of my student loan to buy a PlayStation One. You know, we sort of forget it now, but at that time, if you were seriously into games, then you knew that you needed to have either an American console or a Japanese console because they run at 60 hertz. I’m not quite sure like of the engineering tech side of it, but essentially in the UK and power regions, our TVs run at 50 hertz, which increases the amount of screen tearing and you get less good update rates. So if you were like really serious about games and you would get an import machine and you’d make sure that the games you bought were from America or Japan. And my sort of place for buying that stuff was Computer Exchange in Rathbone Place, which is just off Oxford Street. There were actually a few sort of import stores in London at that time, but that was the main one. And they were just very, they had a huge selection of Japanese PS1 games that they would often get in months before they were localized and brought out in the US and in Europe as well. So it was just quite an exciting time. And I only actually found this out recently. Well, a few years ago, I was doing a 20th anniversary piece on the launch of PlayStation for EDGE magazine. And they’d got loads of fantastic interviews in with some of the Japanese pioneers of it. And there was an interview with Ken Kutaragi, I think. And he was saying that there was, and the sort of origin of PlayStation you might remember is that they had a big fall, they were supposed to make a console with Nintendo and had a big falling out because Nintendo walked away from the deal. And Sony’s president at the time was like, right, we’re gonna bring out our own Sony console, it’s gonna be the greatest thing ever. But he was so concerned that the Sony’s board in Japan would sort of say, this is gonna be a tremendous waste of money, you can’t do it. That he moved the whole operation away from their tech and TV side of things and moved it over to Sony Music where he thought it would have a much better chance. This was sort of a really profound decision because Sony Music, unlike the video game industry at the time, was understood that as well as the real big hitters like Madonna and U2, you also want to be investing in sort of independent indie bands and unknown artists and draw them up. And so they took loads of those principles and sort of seeded much smaller studios around Japan that could, with smaller budgets, but encouraged them to be making the kind of games that they were interested in, not necessarily trying to make the big hit and copy what was selling very well at that time. And for that reason, the PlayStation catalog at that time was just incredibly diverse and interesting, and they were making all sorts of weird stuff. Nana Onsha, which made Parappa the Rapper, was one of those studios that basically came on board because Masaya Matsuura, the founder of that company, knew loads of the people involved with PlayStation from Sony Music. They were sort of old people from there. So I think it sort of Sony set the tone in that sense for a lot of the more diverse indie stuff we see today. But anyway, the point being, Computer Exchange in London got loads of these games in and I was able to sort of pick them up and start to become interested, I suppose, in stuff a little more off the beaten path. And that in turn began to lead me into retro stuff as well. There was, at that time, maybe few people will remember this, but Computer Exchange off Oxford Circus had a sister store around the corner that was called Kecks Retro. It was just this incredible Aladdin’s Cave, a bit like Super Potato in Akihabara. It was modeled on that. I think they had a guy in Tokyo who was buying stuff and sending it over. And of course, at that time, the prices weren’t crazy like they are now. And I remember the first time going into Retro, not knowing that much about old games. I think I’d played Final Fantasy VII and was sort of thinking, well, there must be some earlier Final Fantasies if this is the seventh one. And going into that store and they just had, they had all of this Super Nintendo stuff and going all the way back, really obscure, interesting games. The first time I saw a Neo Geo AES playing behind glass, I think it had Mark of the Wolves playing. And games that you won’t find in shops anymore because they cost like 800 quid on eBay now. But yeah, that shop was very short-lived, but that was a really important 12 months for me of just getting completely lost in this scene of what was happening with PlayStation and then getting more and more drawn into the older side of games as well and learning about that, where things have come from a bit more. That’s interesting because I’ve always wondered this about you, where your tastes come from, because I think of you as a big JRPG and also sort of Japanese kind of arcade type of person. Yeah, I think that’s fair. Yeah, and I always wondered if that was just like a, yeah. It’s interesting that you kind of almost came to it a bit later. Yeah, I mean, there weren’t many JRPGs on the Mega Drive. There was like Phantasy Star, but I never played that at the time. So really, I got into it sort of very, in the very mainstream way of picking up Final Fantasy VII and then working my way back. And actually at that computer retro store, I remember going in one time and by this time, I’d really started learning about Square Soft as they were at the time, Square Enix now. And I wanted to sort of collect all of their, they brought out loads of their RPGs in America, but not in Europe. And I went in and they had a copy of Chrono Trigger behind the counter. Like even then it was, you know, knowing that it was quite special. I think it was like 60 pounds or something, which now, you know, you wouldn’t be able to buy that game for less than 250 quid probably on eBay, but even then like 60 quid for a Super Nintendo game was ridiculous, like no one would spend that kind of money at that time. But it was still in its shrink wrap, but whoever had owned it before had made a little incision along where you open it up and had pulled the cart out that way. So it was essentially sealed, but you could still get to the game. And when I bought it, the guy on the desk said, oh yeah, the guy who brought this in said to us, make sure whoever buys this looks after my stuff or something. And I remember very solemnly taking it going, oh yeah, don’t worry, I’ll really, I will look after it. I love the idea of being a student in Central London and your instinct is like, right, time to go buy Terranigma upstairs. That kind of attitude. That was literally it. Yeah, that’s exactly what happens. So in terms of what you’re reading at the time, what gets you interested in writing about games? What was influential for you, Simon? I actually had a brush with video game magazines when I was a bit younger. So before I owned a console, I convinced my dad to… Well, I think I was just like in a newsagents with my dad and he said, oh, you can, you know, why don’t you pick a magazine? And so I picked up a copy of Mean Machines, which, you know, many people of my generation, that was quite a formative in a console, video game mag and took that home and read it. But of course, I didn’t have any of these systems. I was just sort of reading it through the sort of enviously. But it was just so, so full of character. And, you know, if you’ve ever read Mean Machines, each of the, Julian Rignal and each of the other reviewers had their own cartoon, cartoon sort of caricature, and they would, they would give their their views and scores. It would have like the main reviewer and then also secondary reviewer. And it just had loads of loads of tone. And, you know, for however old I was, like 10 or 11, it was just absolutely amazing. And they, they had a tips and guides section. They invited readers to send in their own tips and cheats for games. I remember desperately wanting to have something to send in, but I didn’t own any consoles. And so I went into Waterstones and they had a, like a, an NES tips and cheats guide there, which I, I, I picked up a, I managed to, well, I bought a copy somehow, and then I just copied out, like, one of the tips for Maniac Mansion and, you know, a game which I still haven’t played to this day. And then, and yes, sent it via letter into meme machines and it got published. And I actually, I know, total scam, terrible, terrible. Where, where are the ethics there? And I actually, like, tracked it down in the day because all of the meme machines have been uploaded to, you know, the Internet Archive or something. And I was like, oh, I wonder if I can find my letter. And I did and it’s so embarrassing, just the most embarrassing thing. I was really into Guns N Roses at the time. And I signed my name, I can barely say this, I signed my name Simon Slash Parkin. That’s got a very different energy to your current outfit. And whoever had printed it had written, we won’t, like, in in parenthesis after they wrote my name, but we won’t ask how he got his nickname. And, you know, hugely embarrassing, but also what a thrill, what a thrill to be in Mean Machines when you’re 11 years old or whatever. So, so, yeah, I don’t know if that if I had that in mind, but basically I finished uni and I was in I was in bands at that time trying to make it as a musician. And we were doing all the sort of London venues you have to do if you want to try and get signed. And we did have like a publishing deal and but, you know, we wanted like a record deal. We were, you know, in that whole throng with with other bands in London at the time. You know, it was just after a while it was it was not working out. So I thought, well, I better have another iron in the fire here. So I made the tremendously wise decision to go down the path of games journalism. The other the other really secure vocation. I’d been sort of super into a magazine called Record Collector, which was sort of gave you it was for, you know, obviously collectors of vinyl. And it would give the current prices and things like that. And I just sort of thought, well, you know, this should probably be one of those for video games. I was in this scene at the time of, you know, being really into vintage games and retro games, and it was very up on what they were worth and their current market values and all of that, because, you know, I was spending so much time, you know, looking, hunting down copies on eBay or in these stores in London or whatever. So I’d been reading Edge magazine around that time. And, you know, that had got me into, I suppose, a more serious way of writing about games, thinking about games. And so I just looked in the front of that for, you know, a name or an email address or something where I could, you know, send in this idea for essentially a video game collector magazine. And I think it was Richard Keith, maybe, was the guy’s name, who was the publisher of Edge at the time. And I had his email. So I wrote to him and said, look, I’ve got an idea for a magazine. Could I come and tell you about it? And I think he phoned me up and said, yeah, why don’t you come to Bath and we can we can talk about it. So I got in the car and drove down there. Didn’t know what I was doing, obviously. I didn’t have a PowerPoint or anything like that. Just literally walked in his office. It’s like, I think there should be a record collector for games. Let’s do it. And he sort of explained how much money it takes to launch a magazine and what it costs to get your magazine into WH. Smith and said, look, it’s a good idea, but I’m not sure the market’s there, which I think actually he was wrong about, or at least wrong about now. But he said, why don’t you, like instead of doing it as a standalone magazine, why don’t you write a series of articles for Edge about collectible video games and maybe do a system at a time and see if you can make it a thing. It was very fortuitous timing because at that precise moment, Tony Mott, who is like the sort of long-term editor or editor-in-chief of Edge, was working on a sort of spin-off Edge magazine called Edge Retro, was the first one at the time. And so he just introduced me to him and Tony said, why don’t you, you know, I need to fill this magazine on Edge Retro, you seem to know about retro games, why don’t you write for me about video game collecting for that. And at the same time, Joao Sanchez, who is editor of Edge at the time, said, you know, agreed to let me try out this collector series for Edge. So yeah, that sort of, you know, what I was reading and where that took me at that time, I guess. That’s amazing stuff. I mean, did you refer to yourself as Simon slash Parkin when you took the meeting with Richard Keith? Is that was that your opening gambit, Simon? I mean, you demanded that byline on every Edge. Fair enough. I do like, though, that, you know, now that you write for The New Yorker, you have ended up at the only other publication that has cartoon avatars these days. So that’s, I mean, again, very different energy. So what was the landscape of games media like back then? What did you make of it as someone who was new to that scene? I mean, you know, I was a big fan of Edge, but when I turned up for that first meeting, I knew who all of them were because there was an Edge forum, so I knew all of the… Even though at that time, Edge articles didn’t have a byline on them. I think I was so sort of into it that I could identify who the writers were on different features. Steve Curran was writing at that time for Edge, who I think previously had written for The Face. So his tone was very vivid. It was not like anything I’d really read before about games. And then he had David McCarthy as well, who was doing cerebral, I suppose you’d say, but also, you know, super intelligent but accessible writing about games as well. And I was working closely with Mark Warbank, who was the features editor there, and sort of trying to learn how to write features at that time. I think, you know, around future, my sense was I didn’t live in Bath, you know, I was a long way away. And I was also incredibly green. I have to say, like, you know, I remember Richard Keith leading me down to meet an editor who was working on like a Game Boy Advance magazine. There were just so many magazines coming out all the time, you know, not only the official ones, but loads of spinoffs as well, which I think says something about how healthy the magazine games market was at that time. And they were so, you know, they were obviously so desperate for copy that, or for freelancers who could write stuff that I remember meeting this editor. And it was obvious that, you know, this Advance magazine was just a side project that he would been given and he was a bit irritated about it, perhaps. He was also, you know, running something else. And he was like, oh, you know, can you can you review Yoshi’s Island for us? It’s going to be like the cover story. And I was like, yep, yep, that’s fine. And he was like, are you okay to take grabs? I don’t know what grabs were. And that is like an un-Googleable term. So I remember like going, yep, yeah, I can sort grabs out, that’s fine. Coming home and like trying to Google what’s a grab. It’s so humiliating. Anyway, but you know, that’s the truth of it. And no one’s like, they just want it done. And then no one’s sort of helping you, guiding you on this stuff. But anyway, I sort of, you know, one way or another found out he meant screenshots. And no, I couldn’t take Game Boy Advance screenshots. So I ended up having to like drive to Bath to do my screenshots every time. Every time I reviewed a game. Yeah, a couple of hours. And I actually remember doing, I think the first game I reviewed for Edge was Kingdom Hearts and I had to come and do screenshots for it. And I remember Mark having a, let’s say a debate with the publisher of the magazine about whether I really needed to come in and they were going to pay my petrol or not. So just sort of being in the background, looking very sheepish, thinking, please pay my petrol. The sense that I got was that, you know, it was very, things were going really well with the magazine business there. I think Official PlayStation Magazine was doing like 250,000 copies a month or something, which is like double what The Guardian sells now in a day, you know, circulation. And, you know, let’s be honest, that was down to the cover disc, I think, where it was giving people demos. But, you know, that was the sense I got, is that it was a good time to be making magazines and, you know, probably the last hurrah, really. But yeah, it was exciting to come in at the tail end of that and even glancingly sort of see what was going on there. That was quite like a hardcore period of Edge. I think when people think of Edge magazine, they’re probably thinking of that kind of voice. Definitely those scores. I think that’s the team that kicks the face off Mario Kart, you know, and things like that, and everyone gets gets everyone upset forevermore. Did you find your voice, like, does naturally fit that? Or I always think it’s interesting when people write for Edge, because you bring all these kind of preconceptions of what the mags like and its reputation, and you maybe find yourself like, morphing into this sort of strange Edge critic that you maybe aren’t naturally. Or did you just find it like, you know, like when you’re reviewing Kingdom Hearts, you know, you’re just like, oh yeah, this is just, this just suits me, but you know, fine. I mean, I’d like to say yes, but no, I think the honest answer is no, I was probably doing an impression of what I thought someone who writes for Edge should sound like, and was probably doing that for quite a long time as well. You know, I’m, I’m super good friends with, with Chris Donlon, who, who started writing for Edge as well, and now works for Eurogamer. And he says that, you know, so one of the misconceptions about Edge is that, you know, there’s an Edge voice when actually the real Edge voice is just, you know, I suppose bright people writing in their own voice intelligently about, about games, which, which I think is, I think is true. And when Edge is at its best, that’s absolutely what it is. To be honest, you know, you’re coming in as a young, a young person, really, I don’t know, it must have been like 21, 22. And you don’t, you don’t really have a voice yet. You know, maybe, maybe a few people do, but I don’t really think as a writer, you actually find your voice till you’re like 30, to be honest. So, you know, maybe that wasn’t true for the, for the people on staff at Edge, but, but certainly I was, I was sort of writing in, in the style, I’m quite good at imitation, I think. So, I was sort of writing how I thought, how I thought it should, should sound. And then, and then at some point, you know, if I write for Edge now, I’m just writing like me and they might sort of round off some of the edges to, to, to, you know, make it fit. But, but I don’t think they do too much of that. You know, you’re sort of, you’re sort of, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got leeway, but when you, when I was starting off, it didn’t have that confidence in, in, you know, mine, what I was doing, I suppose. Matthew, when you’re writing for Edge, do you, have you had any similar sort of experience with it? Because you’re obviously still writing for them. I’d say very similar, because Edge was so different to Endgamer. You know, Endgamer, it jokes, jokes, jokes. It was lots of, we do this, we, you know, we had this big collective thing, you know, we were these big kind of personalities in there. And I think, I think I’m okay at writing for Edge. Like, I’m really proud of the stuff I’ve written for them. But I definitely feel like the stuff I’ve written for them, like in the last couple of years is like a lot more chilled and better for it. Yeah, for sure. If I was in your position, Simon, and I was reviewing Kingdom Hearts for Edge, I would think, okay, well, Edge surely fucking hates Goofy. That’s like the stance, the stance I would take on it, I think. But yeah, so something we’ve covered on this show before is that the PS2 era was particularly outrageous by today’s standards, the dynamics between, you know, games media and PR. And Dan Dawkins told us some stories about envelopes full of preview code that was made it sound super suspect. But I was curious what you witnessed during that time, Simon. Does any, are there any stories that jump out in your memory that kind of indicate the time you were living in? I think, to be honest, you know, I was not sufficiently established to, at that time, to be getting, you know, the really good gigs, you know, in terms of going off to, you know, expensive and exciting places. So a lot of my experience of that stuff in that particular era was hearing about it in a second hand, either from people who were doing that stuff at the time or, you know, slightly, I think, the generation before me. I think, yeah, I think that had been the real time when it was very moneyed. I mean, obviously, this is, you know, pre the financial crash, but even so, I think in the early 2000s, things were tailing off a bit, perhaps. I remember Steve Boxer, who is a sort of older journalist who used to write for The Guardian before, you know, a while back, before I was really involved. And I don’t know who he worked for before, but he was sort of really, when I would see him at events, he would always be sort of telling me his sort of insane war stories. And he was saying that during the Dreamcast era, he’d been, Sega had sent him to Paris to review Crazy Taxi. And when he turned up, they sort of rolled up in an American style yellow cab with two sort of scantily clad women in it, and a driver going, they’ll just take you wherever you want to go, mate, in a French accent, I guess. And I think they even, I think, I mean, you just have to ask him, but as I recall the story, he said that they drove him to Calais in it with the top down, just in the back. And I also remember Ellie Gibson told me a story, and I think this is, you know, this is also indicative of the mainstream sort of lads’ mags at that time, FHM loaded, all of those mags that aren’t really around anymore. But you know, they’re obviously game publishers were desperate to get their games covered in those sort of publications because they were, they had just insane readerships and circulation. I can’t remember which company it was, but one of them went to, you know, one of the editors on like FHM or whichever one it was and said, look, we’ve got a trip to Las Vegas. Do you want to come out and see this game and, you know, write up your one paragraph or whatever it is that they would do? And this guy said, well, you know, do you know, I’ve actually been to Las Vegas quite recently. So how about I just write that one paragraph and you take the money that you would have spent on me going out there and buy me a TV. I’m not going to say charity, but that’s wild. That’s wild. So there was some of that, some of that going on. But I feel like that was that was slightly before before my time, although, you know, going up to the going up to Futures London offices at the time, I was writing for Official Xbox magazine and they they shared an office with like some of the I don’t know some of the non official PlayStation magazines, which would, you know, the sort that would definitely have a lady in swimwear on the front cover. And I remember being there one time to do my grabs. And they’re and they’re being they’re being like just full of women sort of in bikinis were doing their audition for the front cover of the shoot. And just I mean, that just feels like it was a thousand years ago. That just wouldn’t happen now. But I mean, in terms of the decadence, I think now has pretty much gone. The last hurrah, which sticks really vividly in my mind was, I think, like around 2010-2011, Activision took a load of journalists out to Los Angeles for Codex P, which was their big sort of launch of their what would become, I suppose, their esports tournament, annual tournament. I don’t know if it’s still annual, but anyway, this was the big launch of it. And they took over an entire hotel that was only filled with press from all around the world. And they were like, just, we’re going to pay the bill for the whole hotel. So you must have smelled. Yes. Can you imagine? And it was, I mean, already a really lavish event. I mean, it wasn’t put on for the benefit of press. There were thousands of normal punters there, sort of, you know, come to watch the matches. And they had, they booked Kanye West to perform on the, like, last evening. I wrote about this for Eurogamer at the time. And you know, everyone getting bussed to go and see Kanye. It was just after he’d done his collaboration with Jay-Z, the Watch the Throne had come out and he was, he was sort of at the height of his powers, I think, at that time. And he played this, this sort of show. And because we were pressed, we were allowed to stand around the mixing engineer. I remember being stood next to Lindsay Lohan and thinking, this is, this is weird. And then we went to the, the after show party somewhere on like Sunset Boulevard or whatever. And it was sort of like VIPs who were involved in Activision and then like a load of pasty white men from South England with their backpacks looking completely out of place. And they had like a VIP area that was roped off with velvet, velvet rope. And Kanye, obviously, because this was part of his like contractual obligation, was sat like in the corner, like slumped with his hoodie, like right up, just having the worst time ever. And, and like next here was Terry Hatcher, the, the actress who was in Superman in like the 90s. And my very good friend Keith Stewart, I was with him and we were, we were there just sort of laughing about the situation because it’s inherently quite funny. And he’d had a few drinks and I remember him going to me, I’m going to go and say hi. And he sort of went, shuffled over to the bouncer and just obviously said something that worked because then the bouncer sort of beckoned at Terry and she like leaned forward. And I was in earshot and I heard him say, I love your work. Just want to say big fan of your work, Miss Thatcher. So that was like, that was for me the sort of last, the last one of those sort of mythical, big, ridiculous sort of over over lavish and expensive sort of press junkets, I suppose. Amazing. But so as time moves on then, Simon, you’re obviously, you know, you’ve got a big interest in Japanese games, Japanese RPGs and arcade games. I was curious what you made of the HD era of consoles, because we talk about that quite a lot on this podcast. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff happening coming out of Japan in the kind of like late noughties. But I was curious what you made of it at the time as a freelancer covering it. Did you feel like it was an era that changed in your favour or less so? Were there more games you liked or fewer games that you liked? What definitely felt like it was changing is the sort of FIFA model of an iterative series where each year you get the new version of the thing and it’s supposed to be incrementally better. That really felt like it bedded in during this era perhaps. And I was, you know, my interest was really firmly in, I suppose, those sort of standalone amazing games that I’d really enjoyed that were just one thing and it was, you know, there might be a sequel later but it wasn’t going to be like an incremental one in the way that like a Call of Duty game is or a FIFA game. Also, I mean, it’s difficult to imagine now but at that time, it was all about 3D, certainly in the early part of the 2000s, you know, the idea that 3D is the future. That’s what we’re moving towards. Everything was about, you know, what are the polygons look like on this, you know, all of that sort of stuff. And you know, my interest, I was just so into like the Sega Saturn at that time, which was obviously like a system that did very poorly in Europe. But if you liked 2D hand drawn pixel games, like that, that was where it was all happening. That was the system to get into. And it had all the games that I loved. So I definitely, you know, had a had the feeling that the games that that I really loved and was in where it was sort of, you know, still playing regularly were were sort of becoming more and more of a bygone era. But then, of course, Xbox Live Arcade comes along and and then suddenly companies become alive to the fact that their back catalogs are of interest to people, you know, not only people who played them at the time, but maybe new generations. You know, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that like all the way up to 2004, 2005, game publishers just completely forgot about their back catalogs. They had no interest in game preservation or in in in some way, you know, monetizing the games that come out before. There’s a sort of famous story about how Sega, you know, which brought out Panzer Dragoon Saga, just one of the most seminal RPGs of that era, and just lost the code for it. That’s how that’s how little regard they had for these games once they were out. That’s it, right? In the bin, on with the next thing. And that sort of really starts to change, I guess, when ex-BLA comes along. And I remember when Castlevania Symphony of the Night was released on ex-BLA. And I remember thinking, oh, okay, this is about to change. And we’re going to see not only these games that I treasure from the past being re-presented to people, but also maybe games in that style are going to come back into fashion, which to one degree or another has absolutely happened. And I remember feeling very evangelical about the idea that 2D pixel art was an aesthetic choice. It wasn’t that it had been superseded. It was like an artist choosing watercolors or oil paints, to use a pretentious example. But that’s how I felt about it. I was like, it shouldn’t be that that stuff is now out the window. It’s been improved upon. You can have both things. And thankfully, that’s certainly where we are. And I think that was changing in the HD era as it was coming in. There was this new way of viewing games across the spectrum of history. Matthew, as someone who was playing games at the 2D, 3D divide, did you have any particularly strong opinions on that? It’s interesting. So we’ve just recorded our N64 mini-draft episode, Simon, where we were competing to build little collections of N64 games. Sin and Punishment. Yes, Sam got that one. I took Bangai-O. Brilliant. So good. Did you know the N64 version of Bangai-O, they only printed 12,000 copies, which at the time seemed like probably small, but now you get limited run doing 500 copies of a game or whatever. Yeah, which is all the more reason to put it on my N64 mini and for listeners of this podcast to vote for me in that poll. I’ll take that opportunity. The voting is closed by the time this episode goes live. Oh, right, yeah. I appreciate your moxie though. I appreciate the effort. But yeah, like one of my memories from the time was there was a bit of a stigma around 2D games on the N64 in terms of a sense of like, well, you know, why aren’t you making 3D games? Oh, this is disappointing. You know, like you have all this power at your fingertips and, you know, a few things get through, but a lot of the 2D games on that platform I feel were definitely marked down and there’s maybe more affection for them now. I think we’ve maybe like grown up a bit and can enjoy both, which was what kind of came up in the N64 draft and, you know, with the indie scene now and so many people working in 2D and doing interesting things in it. I think like, you know, any teenager now getting into video games now would just not even see that divide. Yeah, but back then it was a little bit like mischief makers. It’s a bit flat, isn’t it? So, Simon, I was curious about how the online, the rise of online media affected you as a freelancer. When did you become aware that online was starting to overtake print a little bit? You know, and I don’t want to speak for everyone, but my personal perspective, I think, was with the advent of Eurogamer, where, you know, for up until that point, sort of for me anyway, personally, Edge is where it was all at. And it was when suddenly some of the people who had been working at Edge started freelancing for Eurogamer and saw those names coming up. And then, you know, the sort of stuff they were writing had like an Edge flavor, but it was also its own thing. And you also got like readers’ comments under the thing, and it just felt different and like there was more back and forth and on all of that. That coincided, I think, with a shift within the idea of what games writing could be. So, which I don’t know if you talked about this on the podcast before, but Kieran Gillan, now the Marvel writer who was a PC gamer, I guess, at the time, wrote a manifesto called New Games Journalism, which was sort of based on the music, new music journalism manifesto of like the 60s or 70s with Lester Bangs and all of that crowd. Just this idea that actually writing about games can be very subjective. Up until that point, certainly on edge, and my understanding was that you try to be as objective as possible. And there’s certainly legions of people on the internet who think that’s still the case. But suddenly, Kieran, who’s very well respected, was sort of publicly saying, actually, it’s very interesting when a writer takes a completely subjective view of the subject and just presents that idea. And that felt like a real permission, really, to try different things. That was happening a lot at that time, especially online. And being able to write different kinds of stories, which now, for me personally, most of them are for you with tremendous embarrassment. But at the same time, it’s a chance to just try out some different voices and some different approaches. And while I think for me, most of those were failures, in the long run, it probably helped me find my voice because I was able to see what worked and what didn’t, how I should sound. I still feel deeply uncomfortable writing in first person, which I know it’s not as crude as, you know, that was the distinction with what Kieran was talking about. They were definitely a crowd, like the PC gamer crowd of all the magazines that was written in first person and what he was doing on Rock Paper Shotgun. At this time, you know, I was on Endgamer. We were still writing as a collective we. You know, even to the point where we were talking about, like, you know, here’s an anecdote about our collective uncle, which made no sense at all. When you read back that stuff, you’re like, our mum, like, we all have the same mum. And here’s a very specific story from my childhood. Which is lovely. But yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. But it’s not that one thing is right and one thing is wrong. There are venues and places and pieces that are right for one particular mode. I think it was just really, it’s okay to try other things. And that was what I took from it really. And then as a result of that, I think I had been writing features for Edge. And in the early part of my career, sort of, you know, trying to learn how to write features, I suppose. And this is just reminded me of another source of tremendous nighttime shame, but very early in my career. Okay, so I think the best features, right, are, posit a question that you as the reader think, oh, I’ve never thought to articulate it like that, but now you have. Yes, I absolutely want to know the answer to that, right? Someone, Sam Knight, who is, I think, probably the best feature British feature writer at the moment, who now writes for The New Yorker, but wrote for Guardian Longreed. He’s the master of this. So he, for Guardian Longreed, he wrote a very famous piece about what happens, like, immediately after the queen dies, and then just went into massive detail on that. And, like, why are British people so obsessed with pack sandwiches when no one else in the world is? Like, that’s just such a great starting point for a massive feature, because, like, it’s something we all are very familiar with. And you think, yeah, why are we? Where did that come from? And off you go. So I think, you know, if you’re a feature writer, you probably need a little bit of that in your DNA, like, the ability to do that. But starting out, I just didn’t have… You know, you’re also limited by access and what’s around you and who you know. And so I remember pitching to… There was, like, a new magazine that had been launched by a kind of Sam something. I can’t remember his surname. He went on to be editor at the NME. And he had previously worked on Arcade, which was a fantastic magazine in the late 90s, I think. Anyway, he’d launched this magazine whose name I can’t remember. And I’d done some work for him. And I remember pitching him, racking my brains. And I sent him a pitch that was like, why don’t I write a series of mini profiles of all the different PR people for video game companies? Because that’s what I knew. Like, those are the people around me. I’m just like, I don’t know anything. And I’m like, okay, I could do that. That seems like an interesting question to ask. Who are the people that market the games? And I remember him just sending me back a one line email, devastating one line email that said, who the fuck would want to read that? That took me a while to recover from. But where’s it going with that? So yeah, you’re a gamer. So anyway, we’ve had this period of trying to do more subjective pieces and personal things. And that just led me into, I guess, a new phase in my personal writing of just being able to ask better questions than that one, for example. And having Eurogamer as a platform to do some of those features was tremendously valuable. I did an investigative piece on people who were playing video games for 20 hours at a time in internet cafes in Taiwan and China and then dying where they sat. And that then turned into what was my first book, Death by Video Game. And it was just a wonderful opportunity to work with some good editors who were very supportive and to just try these different things. It wouldn’t have been quite right for some of the other venues I was writing for. So for me, like personally, it was a really… It’s not very games master that one. No, I suppose not. No. Did you ever want to be on staff at all or were you always quite happy being freelance? You know, if the right opportunity had come up, would you have taken it? Something I suppose that we don’t often talk about in these sort of retrospective things is actually just like how hard it is to make a living as a freelance writer. You know, the word rates are difficult and they were then and they haven’t really gone up in the last 20 years or whatever. So, you know, it is a very tough like industry. And there were, when I first had that meeting at Future, they offered me a job on Edge at that time. And I just couldn’t take it. I just got married and had like moved house and like near Brighton and was, you know, starting a life. So the idea of like uprooting all of that and moving to Bath as appealing as that might have been was just not possible. And yeah, later on I did like apply to a job at Eurogamer, I think as well. And, you know, I didn’t get that for one reason or another. And I think that was the right call. And I’m glad that I didn’t get that job because it allowed me to continue writing features for them and which eventually led to all the other stuff that I’m doing now. I think sometimes you can be so desperate for, you know, trying to make it all work as a freelancer that you end up trying to go for some completely ill-advised roles. And I do remember just like browsing the journalism.co.uk website or whatever it was, looking at jobs that were coming up. And there was a job that came up for like the Friday ads or something. And I was like, it was just like a tough month or whatever. And I was like, oh, I might just do that. And then I’ll just freelance on the side or something. And so I applied to this job and they said, can you include like a writing sample? Oh, gosh, this is so bad. A few years earlier at Edge, when it was, you know, you were talking about how that sort of Steve, David, Joao era was like a really, really classic era. And part of what made it a classic era is they would do like theme issues that were not themed around a video game, something that you wouldn’t be allowed to do today on Edge, I don’t think. So they would do them around issues. So there’s like one famous cover with like an anime guy holding a light gun to his head and the caption was like, Bored to death of video games or something. And they did one one issue that was like all about sexism in games, right? And because because it was Edge and they were taking like a, you know, an interesting approach to it, their cover choice for it was the midriff of one of the one of the beach volleyball girls from Dead or Alive beach volleyball. Right. And it was like a close up of her bikini, right? Of her midriff. And it just said like in the middle girls, girls, girls, I think. I think it might have said the sex issue. I think it might have said that. So I mean, that’s even better for this anecdote. So, of course, like that’s I’m like, so I’m applying to like the Friday ads and of course, looking around for a sample. And that was like I had like that issue lying around on my desk. And I was like, Oh, just shove that in. So like, put the whole issue in with that like that cover. So whoever got my application Friday ads would have pulled that slid out this glossy magazine with like a 3D render of a woman’s vagina essentially. So yeah, that’s amazing. Needless to say, I didn’t get a response for that one. And you lost one of your favorite issues of Edge. Can you send it back? Just calling Futures Back Issues Department. Excuse me, do you have any more of these? Do I have any more of the sex issue? Just to be clear, that issue was obviously not designed to titillate. It was there to, it was very, very ahead of its time, in fact. And I wrote a piece for that issue that was called, I was so pleased with this title, but I would never write this now, but it was all about how loads more women are playing games. I mean, extremely of its time, right? And the title I gave it was Game Girl Advance, which I was just dying down on that for a good month. But now, obviously, wouldn’t do that. Wouldn’t do that again. I was wrong, by the way. It was the girl issue instead of that cover. Yeah, there we go. Either way, you wouldn’t print it in 2021. It’s nice that you read it as the sex issue, though, Sam. I feel like Googling that has just fed the algorithm some information I didn’t want it to know. But what can you do? I guess then from there, just winding back to freelancing throughout the last kind of like 10 years or so, Simon, how do you end up writing for The New Yorker? So I was doing a lot of feature writing for Edge at the time. And I also had actually taken a part-time side job working in making games. It was more on the sort of online flash games as they were at the time. So we would like make games for like movie studios when they had something coming out. Or we did stuff for the BBC and Channel 4. And so I had like a setup that could work. And that did work quite well because it would afford me, you know, I could then justify spending like two months on an investigative piece for Eurogamer or whatever. And because I had that setup, I was able to do quite a long piece. I can’t actually remember when it came out. It must have been about 2012. Which was, I suppose, essentially, you know, finding one of those simple questions that everyone thinks, oh, yeah, what’s the answer to that? And which was, well, you know, when we all know that when Sony wants to put a Ferrari in Gran Turismo, money exchanges hands. Is that also true when someone wants to put an Uzi 9mm into one of their video games? Which, of course, most people do want to put an Uzi in their games because of video games. So it was really just like, does gun licensing happen in games? Like, are these things being paid for? Yeah, so I spent time on that piece, and it came out really well because Barrett, the makers of the M82 50 caliber sniper rifle, the person who spoke to me just for whatever reason broke his NDA and said, yes, Activision pays us money to put the M82 in Call of Duty, which he definitely was not allowed to do, but was obviously a fantastic piece of information to have for this particular story because it showed that this does go on. And in fact, when I buy a copy of Call of Duty, then some of that money goes to arms manufacturers, which isn’t a big deal, I suppose, in North America, but in other parts of the world can be. So I wrote this piece, and it just happened to coincide with The New Yorker deciding to start a new vertical, I guess as they’re called, on their website around science and technology. And they’d hired a guy called Matt Buchanan, just a fantastic young editor who had come from Buzzfeed, and he now runs ETA, I think. But anyway, he joined The New Yorker and was sort of looking for a pool of writers to write about different topics under the umbrella of science and technology. And he asked one of the video game writer at Buzzfeed, a guy called Joe Bernstein, who is now still at Buzzfeed, but he now writes about very serious things, like the rise of the far right and stuff like that. And he asked Joe, said, who would you recommend that I approach to freelance? And Joe happened to, I think, have read this piece on arms manufacturers, and so gave him my name. Lucky, of course, and like good timing, of course. And then, you know, having been offered that opportunity and get this sort of one in a million email through, saying, would you like to contribute something to our website? Just trying to make the absolute best of that opportunity. And I had like quite a clear idea of what I wanted to write about with games on the website. I wanted it to be sort of not advocacy, not cheerleading, which I think some of the mainstream stuff on games can be, but also that would appeal to like non-gamer readers. But then, like for people who were like super into games, they would still be interested in reading it, which is actually quite hard. Like there’s quite a narrow band, I think, of stories that sit within that. But that was what I was trying to do. So I wrote about the video game scene in Iraq at the time, during the war in Iraq, where, ironically, you know, in the rest of the world, parents are constantly trying to get their children to stop playing games and to go outside. Well, of course, if you’re living in Baghdad and there’s, you know, every other car’s got a bomb strapped to it, then you want your children to stay inside and play video games. So they had a very vibrant game scene. So I wrote about that. This is a story I did about, you know, really, that I think did really well. It was about a guy who, in one of the early versions of Minecraft, when you walk sufficiently far from the start point, the world begins to disintegrate because of an error in the programming code. And he had decided to take it upon himself to walk to, they’re called the Far Lands in this early version of Minecraft. And he has been doing that. I think he calculated it had taken 23 years or something. And he’s still going now. That piece was called like Far Lands or Bust or something. And, you know, it’s a sort of story that would, I think is of interest to people who don’t really care about games or know anything about Minecraft, still might want to read that. And then if you do know about Minecraft, hopefully you would still want to read that. That’s the sort of the thing I was trying to hit. Obviously, now you’re a successful author. You’ve written a book, A Game of Birds and Wolves. Please tell me it’s cool that I’ve written it down. And I thought if I’ve got that wrong, that’d be so embarrassing. Like, if it’s like A Game of Dogs and Wolves or something like that. And you’ve got another book out next year called The Island of Extraordinary Captives. Obviously, that’s three books you’ve written now. How does that kind of career path emerge? Is that sort of along the same track as the long form stuff where it’s like the opportunities just naturally opened up as a result of one thing leading to another? Yeah, pretty much exactly that. I was working on a radio feature for the New Yorker Radio Hour about war gaming in militaries. So basically, I’d seen a tweet written by the Russian government who was running a load of war game exercises. So for people who don’t know, war games are essentially where a government or an army will get together and imagine a potential situation that might occur. And then each of the players will assume a different role around the table. So one person might play as the army. Another person might play as France. Another player might play as the police force or whatever. And they’ll go through that scenario, see how this potential scenario could play out. And I’d seen a tweet written by the Russian army, I think, where they were role playing as a fictional Eastern European country that Russia was going to invade. And for their war game, they’d gone to the extent that they were, that they’d come up with these character, essentially RPG character sheets for all the people involved, and had made it public. And I was like, someone has to have the job of writing these scenarios. Who is the dungeon master for Russia when it does war gaming or whatever, right? Which I think is a pretty good question. And so that sent me down the path of doing this war gaming story. And I’d gone to Shrivenham to the UK, where they run war gaming for the British Army. And I’ve been allowed to sit in on one of their war games. And afterwards, I was interviewing the major who writes the scenarios for these things. I said, have you got an example of where something that was learned in a war game turned out to be really useful in a real conflict? And he firstly gave the example, you know, like the red telephone in the White House that links the White House to the Kremlin that’s like in 70s Cold War films. He said, that’s literally an idea that came out of a war game where they were playing, you know, in the 70s, like the idea of like the nuclear annihilation. And he said, you know, if we were on the brink of that, it would probably be good for the president to be able to get hold of Russia without having to go through diplomatic channels. Why don’t we make a hotline? And then he said, oh, and this is another example from the Second World War of where, you know, Britain was losing catastrophically to the U-boats. And then we came up with a war game that exposed the tactic that the U-boats were using that had hitherto remained unknown and turned around the Battle of the Atlantic. So, you know, that was sort of a footnote in the radio story. But it was, you know, even as he was saying it to me, I was like, oh, this is like a big story. I could get, you know, I definitely want to write about this. And I actually spoke to my friend Tom Bissell, who is an American journalist, has written about video games. He had a book out called Extra Lives, but also does lots of, you know, other non games related journalism. And he just sort of, I told him the story and said, oh, like, you know, do you think that could be a film maybe? Because he also writes films, film screenplays. And he said, he said, why don’t you do it as a book and then see what happens. And so that’s what I did. I sort of wrote up a proposal and went away. And that became A Game of Birds and Wolves. And then, you know, it’s sort of like writing a, like writing a very long feature, I suppose. But instead of taking a month or two, you spend two years on it. So it uses all the same muscles, I suppose, and felt like quite a natural progression. And also, you know, there’s the benefit of you don’t have to pitch while you’re doing it. You can like, once you get the green light to do a book and, you know, supposing that your advance is enough to sustain you, then you can just sort of focus on that one thing, which is really lovely, like after quite a few years. Of being in the hustle, I suppose. It’s a tough break for you, though, that your career has been going downhill ever since you had to get those grabs for Yoshi’s Island for the GBA. That’s like a tough break, Simon. But no, that’s extraordinary stuff for sure. So I was curious, your book got optioned, right? Does that mean you’re rich now? You’re learning a lot about my interviewing technique from this kind of thing. What question to ask? Look, on this podcast, I’ve been very honest about the fact that my interviewing technique is a little bit dodgy. So I’m asking the big question, Simon. Does that mean that you’re a rich guy now? I think if you feel that urge rising in you as an interviewer, you have to go with that. That’s a good thing to ask. The answer is not yet. So when your book or your article gets optioned, you get a bit of money. And that means that the studio that’s optioned it, which in my case was Amblin, which is Steven Spielberg’s company, which was an insane phone call to take, as you can well imagine. They have, I think, 18 months to sort of develop it and make a screenplay, appoint a screenwriter, see if they want to turn it into something or not. And at that point, it can just fizzle out and then the rights return to you and you’re back to square one. And so I’m still kind of in that phase, really. They’ve got until next summer to make a decision of whether they’re going to go into production. And then if they do start making the film, then, you know, that will be… I won’t be like… I won’t be retire rich. I won’t be like video game director rich, but I’ll be, you know, it will be… I won’t have to do quite so many Game Boy Advance reviews for a while, which will be nice. This is going to be… This may be a really dumb question, but that phone call isn’t from Steven Spielberg, is it? No. So the way it works is I have a book agent who is responsible for basically, I’ll write a proposal and she takes it out to publishers and they work closely with a film and TV agent. So if once a book gets picked up and if it could be suitable for adaptation, then they pass it to the film and TV agent. And so that’s what happened with this one and she took it out to various places. And I did get a phone call from her that said, Oh, Steven Spielberg read your proposal over the weekend and would like to sort of option it. So yeah, just like an incredible moment. And even if like nothing becomes of it, that’s still a good thing to have experienced once in your life, I suppose. None of my features have been optioned by Steven Spielberg. He hasn’t bought the rights to my 15 saddest moments in Nintendo games. One day, Matthew, one day. I felt really complicated feelings about it, if I’m honest. And when I was doing the initial sort of press tour about the book, I didn’t really want to mention it at all. And, you know, some of it, I had to go on like Radio 5 or something, and they knew about it and were really like, I didn’t mention it. And then they were like really pushing me to say what had happened. And I just think, you know, sometimes those things come along and it can really change all of the relationships in your life, right? Because people are like, oh, well, you know, you’re like too good for us now, or like you’ve just moved to a different place or whatever. And, you know, that can be quite isolating and weird. But I think I’ve probably made peace with it, you know, especially the closer we get to the deadline and it looks like maybe, you know, it could be 50-50 whether it will happen or not. I feel more comfortable talking about it perhaps. But, you know, even after we get off this call, I’ll probably be like, oh, why did I talk about that? People are going to hate you. But that’s just how it goes. No, it’s fascinating. It’s like a fascinating thing. You only ever see the press release version of these things, and it’s just nice to hear actually how it goes down. I think you appearing on this podcast, Simon, literally this is as down to earth as it gets, I think. Restore your status as an everyman, I think. So that’s fine. So, Simon, your next book is The Island of Extraordinary Captives. That’s out next year. What’s the deal with that? OK, well, this is not about video games, so feel free to, like, skip forward two minutes if you’re listening and not interested. But essentially, it’s a war story about a group of Jewish artists who fled to Britain on the eve of the Second World War looking for refuge and sanctuary here, and we allow them in the country, and then the war kicks off, and suddenly there’s this massive… You know, who would have thought it? Britain having a panic about refugees and asylum seekers, but that happens when the war starts because people are like, we’ve let loads of Germans and Austrians in this country, never mind the fact that they’re Jewish and they’re sort of refugees from Nazi oppression, but maybe they’re actually Nazi spies. So, you know, in this mode of panic, the government arrests close to 30,000 refugees and sends many of them to the Isle of Man to a number of internment camps there. And my book is about this one particular camp on the island where these artists end up and they’ve got nothing to do. So, rather than just waste their time, they turn the camp into sort of a cultural centre, you know, putting on lectures and holding art exhibitions and musical concerts. There’s loads of very accomplished people in the camp, Oxbridge lecturers, you know, internationally fated musicians. And so, yeah, it’s really about what happened in this camp. How did they get free? And it’s the story of one young artist in particular and how the camp was the making of him. So it’s, yeah, about their story, but more broadly, I suppose, about the refugee question as well. But in a compelling story, I think. Yeah. Oh, fantastic. So before we get to section two, where we’re going to ask you a bit about some of your most notable interviewees working in games media, I did have a couple of things that I personally really wanted to ask you about. So you worked on Edges making a Final Fantasy feature a few years back, and I was curious about what that was like to assemble for you, because it was a really comprehensive look at that series, and you got some seriously good access, including Sakaguchi, who hadn’t been cooperating with Square Enix at that point before, or at least hadn’t been working with them since The Spirits Within. What was that experience like, putting that feature together? I don’t want to overstate my role in making all of that happen. So it was a sort of happy accident of timing in some sense, because it was the anniversary of Final Fantasy coming up. And as you say, the ice was beginning to thaw with Sakaguchi and some of his crew, who had all left around the time that Final Fantasy The Spirits Within came out, which was, of course, a massive flop in Hollywood and lost the company loads of money. And I think they left for whatever reason, whether they were pushed or not, I’m not sure. But enough water had passed under the bridge for them to be willing to take part in this Final Fantasy retrospective. I don’t know if that was the brainchild of Nathan Brown, who was editor of Edge at the time, or whether it was something Square Enix came to Nathan with and said, what do you think about doing this? Or perhaps it was a blend of the two. From my perspective, I got a call. I was on holiday camping in France and got a call from Nathan saying, we’ve got this opportunity to go to Tokyo and interview all of the key players in the Final Fantasy series. Would you want to pull it together for us? And it was going to be loads of pages, this big lavish thing. I think they did 15 different covers that you could get, one for each game in the series. So just a wonderful opportunity to be given. But in terms of arriving in Tokyo and all of that, these days a lot of my reporting is not organized by PRs in the way that it is when you’re working with specialist media. But this was definitely one of those times where, like, here’s your schedule, we’ve got an hour here, an hour there, and we’ll drive you around, and then you do the interviews, and then you do what you want with them. So yeah, I mean, it was a really lovely week. It coincided with the Tokyo Game Show, so I was able to do that at the end of the week. But really, most of the time, it was just spent going, you know, interviewing some of these people that I have a great deal of affection for. Most of them I had interviewed previously, but never in the kind of context where you’re just allowed to ask whatever you sort of want, and they’re coming with the attitude of we’re going to give answers, we’re not going to try and turn everything back to whatever game we’ve got coming out this month, which is what typically happens with this kind of thing. Do you feel pressure doing stuff like that? Because I feel like when you get genuinely great access, and it’s so rare, I feel an immense amount of pressure to kind of, I really need to make the most of this. Like this is an opportunity to uncover something new or kind of like move our understanding forwards a bit. Do you feel that same pressure? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because like you say, those opportunities are quite rare, and particularly with Japanese interviewees, I might be wrong with this, but my understanding is they don’t quite have the same tradition, you know, this sort of American style long profile that you get in, you know, The New Yorker or Harper’s or New York Magazine or whatever, which, you know, when you’re interviewing, if you go to a US dev with that, you know, they have grown up with those kind of stories being around, and you know, maybe they know like the name Gatorlies or something like that. So that’s sort of in the air. Whereas like in Japan, I think they don’t have that. So it takes a bit of work to sort of get across what you’re trying to do. And so, yeah, when you do get those opportunities, you really want to make the most of them. With this particular Final Fantasy story, I was sort of helped by the fact that the scaffolding for the piece was already in place. You know, essentially, we’re going to start on day one, and you’re going to take us through what was it like working on Final Fantasy VII. But I think the most exciting stuff for me was talking about the very early days of Square, as it was at that time, and Sakaguchi, you know, really sort of students, really. That was the vibe. They were just sort of starting out, and this upstarts with trying to make their way in the world and make games. And, you know, they came in a mode ready to reminisce and give good anecdotes. And so it was incredibly satisfying and, you know, a real privilege to be able to hear that and get to write it down, I suppose. So, Simon, you visited Yoshitaka Amano’s studio, right? The one of the main logo designer and the original character designer of Final Fantasy. What was that like? He I had never interviewed before. I don’t know. You know, he is a proper bona fide star, not like a video game celebrity. He’s an actual like art celebrity in Japan. And, you know, that was very much the atmosphere going into his workshop. You know, he’s obviously wealthy and has like an incredible studio in the center of Tokyo with a massive walls and that can have a he’s got 10, 12 foot paintings on the wall that he’s working on with ladders or whatever. So, you know, being allowed into that context was incredible. And we sat down to talk and he had his assistant with him, which very often like, you know, so big name, older Japanese dudes do. They have their personal assistant sat next to them taking notes or whatever. And I asked, you know, my first question of, you know, tell me how did Sakaguchi approach you with this idea of doing, you know, whatever it was. And he just like puts his head down and like it crosses his hands and his assistant starts answering for him. And she like is a really, really long answer, like four or five minutes. And then I’m sort of like looking sideways at the PR guy. He’s looking sideways at me. And then I do my next question. And she does the same again. And I’m like, you know, thinking what on earth are we going to do? Like this is completely unusable. I can’t just quote his secretary. But like this stuff is not in keeping with the moment, I suppose. So thankfully, like the Square Enix person, who’s an old friend of mine, like he used to be a journalist. And I went on trips with him when we started off. He’s not actually a PR anymore. But he was the one with me. And we know each other well enough that I think he knew what I was thinking. Because he’s got a background in journalism as well. So he just sort of jumped in and said, I’m really sorry, but you’re going to have to answer these questions, Mr. Amano. And then I don’t know if he was having an off day or something. He was like perfectly lovely. And once he was talking, it was totally fine. But it was quite a hairy, like, initial moment. That’s kind of like by putting his hands on his head, he’s kind of activating a psychic power and then speaking through his assistant. OK, let’s take a brief break then. We’ll come back and ask Simon about a few of his favourite interviewees. Peace! Welcome back to the podcast. So, Simon’s been very generous with his time telling us about his career, but in this part, we’re going to talk a bit about some of his favorite interviewees, or rather some of his most notable interviewees. So, Simon, I did kind of brief you ahead of time that this was something we were going to discuss, and you sent over three names to me where I got incredibly excited about hearing these stories. So, why don’t you kick off with the first one you want to discuss? These are not all success stories, let me say that. So, I suppose the first interview that really sticks in my mind was fairly early in my career. I got to interview Tetsuya Nomura, who is the director of Kingdom Hearts, which is the first game I reviewed for Edge. And this was in like 2007, and we had gone, there was like a press trip out to Tokyo for an event that was, I think it was called Square Enix Party or something like that. It was held in Makahari, which is the big sort of aircraft hangars where Tokyo game shows is held. And it was just all dedicated to Square’s games. And you know, you got to play their forthcoming stuff, which is hugely exciting. I got to play, it was around the time that the Final Fantasy Tactics remake was coming out on Vita or PSP, one or the other. And I got to play whoever the director of that was. And if you beat him, this was like, because it was full of punters as well, you could play the director. And if you beat him, then you got like a poster. And I remember like playing him like one on one. And it was so obvious he was like desperately trying to lose. So his foreign journalist could get his poster. So that was… He’s just like dunking his hand held in a glass of milk and things. And you’re like, come on, man. Anyway, that evening on the first night, we were going to interview Nomura. And we were sort of briefed that Nomura can be quite prickly with press, particular foreign press. And there was a story that normally when you… Normally, most video game directors have been sort of media trained and briefed to sort of Scientology levels. And they’ll always say, oh, that’s a great question, Matthew. That’s a great question, Sam. And that’s a good tell for when like, this is a bad question that I have already been briefed for. I still get a thrill from that. I’m like, yes, I’ve done it. So that you feel good about yourself and them, and then you’re going to give them a nice time. Anyway, Nomura does not have this reputation. And I think we were told that a foreign journalist had asked him a bunch of questions, and at some point, he’d just gone, your questions are terrible. I’m not answering them anymore, and it just left the room. So we were waiting for this with sort of apprehension. And he also had a reputation for being quite late. His position in the company was quite powerful. Sakaguchi and all the others had been fired or had left or whatever. He was the last one remaining from that time. He’d designed Cloud and Sephiroth and all of that. So for the Square Enix higher ups, he was the creative heart of the company going forward. So he had a lot of power. So he turns up to this interview like two, three hours late. The hall has closed, everyone’s gone. We’re just waiting around. And then we get led in and he sort of looks quite moody. He’s got most of like Square Enix directors are sort of wearing eight belts and like chains and they just look like one of their characters. He didn’t look like that at all. He had sort of a black Mickey Mouse. It had like the Mickey Mouse from the bad one from Kingdom Hearts or whatever on his cap and he looked pretty cool. And he just sort of sat down and looked like a mopey teenager and started smoking. And I asked him the first question, I said, so he was working. We were there to interview him about Final Fantasy XIII versus XIII, was it? The sort of game that got lost. And anyway, it was at the time when it was still a going concern and we’d seen like the intro movie. It was quite dark. And I said, oh yeah, so it looks like Final Fantasy XIII is going to take a darker approach to the previous ones. And he just sort of looked at me and went, yeah, it’s set at night. I was just, I remember thinking, oh, I’ve really blown that. It was like a bad, not a bad interview, but sometimes you can turn those around, I suppose. And the piece was all right, I think. But it was, you know, one of those group interview situations, which are just the worst when you’re in with, you know, like a journalist from Italy and one from France and you have to listen to their stupid questions and then everyone like writes down everyone, everyone else’s answers and puts them in their piece. It’s just like the so anti-journalism. But anyway, you know, that was, it stuck in my mind as sort of, you know, one of these big moment pieces. I remember reading your, what you did for Eurogamer about Sakaguchi. You’d caught him very jet lagged and in a bad mood. And I think he was, I remember him being grumpy with quite a lot of people. You just went and had a rather sad haircut to cheer yourself up. Yeah. Yeah, my hairdresser knew about Final Fantasy and then, oh dear, yeah, I mean, there’s only so many times you can pull that trick of my, my interview went really badly, but here, let me try and spin it into something engaging. But yeah, I definitely reached my quota of those. Not to make this all about me, but that Sakaguchi visit was for him coming over to do his BAFTA talk about The Last Story, which is where I met Catherine, my future wife. So if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be married. I owe quite a lot to that very grumpy visit. Bless, sad Sakaguchi, after all. Yeah. And bless that haircut, indeed. Yes. So hit us with another one, Simon, another notable interviewee where you’ve got some experiences to share. This one is like an email interview. So like the worst kind of interview you can do, but it was for something quite interesting, I think. So in this is in 2008, I’d like heard about this game that came out for the Dreamcast called Segagaga, which was came out late in the Dreamcast life. And in the game, you assume control of failing Sega and you have to try and turn around their console division and make the Dreamcast profitable and beat the rival console maker, right? What a thing to put out while your console business is going down the drain. And I’d always thought, like, who made that? And how did they get sign off on that? So somehow I managed to get the email address of Tez Okano at Sega, who was still at Sega, and get questions to him. He said, you know, he said, my English isn’t good. I’ll answer them on them over email. So when you do that, you sort of send your questions off with your fingers and toes crossed, because you just don’t know what’s going to come back. And sometimes it’s two lines and it’s unusable. Brilliantly, his, like, responses came back, and they were long and vivid and funny. And you know, he just talked about really how he’s a massive Sega fan. He was, like, breaking his heart how Dreamcast was failing, and he wanted to make a game where, like, people could take, you know, change the story, I suppose. And he sort of took it into, he wrote his pitch up, took it into the highs up, and they just laughed at him, thinking he was doing, like, an excellent joke, and he sort of, like, left the room, like, no, I actually do want to make this. And so they gave him, like, a tiny budget, and then he went away. And it took two years to make, and during this time, like, Sega’s fortunes are continuing to decline. So by the time it comes out, it’s, like, extremely bittersweet. And just the most striking thing about his interview that he gave me back was that his marketing budget on that game was, I think, £120. And so he had no money to do anything. And so he blew, like, £90 of it on a wrestler’s mask. And he was like, I’m just going to wear this and walk around of Kiibara and, like, tell people about my game. And so he, like, set up, I think, he managed to get, like, permission to put a table in, like, three places in a Kiibara at different times of the day. And people could come and get their copy of the game signed or whatever, like real die hard Sega fans sort of went and sought him out. And so, but yeah, just it was, it just came out really well. And that it published in Edge and then I recently sort of helped out on a Dreamcast book that came out with a read-only memory and Future, or Tony said that I could use that interview in that book. So if you’ve got a copy of that, you can sort of read his answers, which is well worth seeking out, I think. That’s great that they’ve been captured somewhere else for people to find. That’s really cool. Yeah. It’s definitely good to sort of shed light on something like that, which definitely has a kind of mythical status among Sega fans. So that’s cool. So what’s your next one, Simon? I suppose I wanted to talk a bit about Hideo Kojima, the maker of Metal Gear Solid, who I first interviewed, I first started freelancing for The Guardian, I can’t remember, like maybe about 2012 or something. And it was quite different. I know you’ve had Kezaron in the past who runs a very tight ship and Keith Stewart before her and with her now as well, sort of runs things exactly as it should be run. But when I was first doing it, it felt like a little bit like The Wild West. There was like a rogue sub editor who had taken control of the games coverage that was going up on the Guardians website. And what would happen would he would just, when an opportunity came in, he would sort of email it around all of the people who were contributors or whatever and said, does anyone want to do this? And the offer came in to do Kojima and someone got there before me. And so I said, well, I don’t really like Kojima. I don’t like his games, but I suppose, you know, I can do it. And normally I would just back down in that scenario and think, oh, I just I won’t say anything. But this time I was like, no, this is a great opportunity. He’s coming like he was coming over for something like the BAFTA thing. And he was the opportunity was like an hour and a half to have breakfast with him and talk about his career. And I was like, this is this sort of thing very rarely happens. So I sort of email and went, look, do you mind if I do it? Because I really do like Kojima and I like his games and I, you know, I would love to spend this time talking to him. And, you know, graciously, this other chap said, yeah, that’s fine. So so I got to spend time with him, you know, interviewing him about his career for that piece. And that sort of started a bit of a relationship with with him in the sense that he knew who I was because I’ve had that one on one for quite a bit of time. Fast forward, like three years, and I was at TGS and was chatting to a member of his team that was working on Metal Gear Solid V, who had had like a few drinks and was saying, like Kojima’s leaving or has left Konami, like no one knows. It’s really bad. Like the whole atmosphere is terrible. The Metal Gear Solid V isn’t quite finished yet. He’s been sent on gardening leave. He’s not allowed to say he’s left for a while. He’s not allowed to say what he’s doing next for a few months. And because I’d had that like previous interview experience with him, I was able to e-message Kojima’s secretary, or he’s got like a, she’s more than a secretary, like the person who basically organizes him and, you know, whatever she is, his personal assistant. But again, that feels like too small for what her role is. But anyway, I emailed her and said, look, I’ve heard this. Is it true? And then, you know, if so, do you think I could interview him about it for The New Yorker? And she came back and said, yeah, it is something like he wants to talk about. But we can’t talk about what we’re doing next, which was, as we now know, Death Stranding and his own company until like December the 15th or whatever the date was when like Konami’s like non-disclosure ran out. But he is allowed to say that he’s left. So, you know, this was sort of obviously a huge opportunity. I’m not really a news guy, to be honest. And I’m not really someone who is super into chasing scoops. I prefer the longer stuff. But, you know, thankfully, I was working with an editor who did realize, you know, appreciate that this was, you know, important. It could be great for getting people to come to The New Yorker to read about it. So he said, you know, ask if you can do it, ask for like exclusivity on it. And so I went back and they said, look, he will talk to you about it, but you’ve got to sign an NDA between you and Hideo to say basically that you’re not going to like say what he’s doing next until this particular date. So I got this contract through that was just between like me and him basically saying, I’ll talk about this and I won’t talk about this until this date or whatever. And then he gave me that story and we published it in mid October saying, I think the headline that they put on it was something like, why did Hideo Kojima leave Konami? Now at this point, like no one knew he had left Konami or if they did, it was only like rumors or whatever. So, you know, this is obviously like within the actual world. It’s like it’s pretty meaningless, but within the games world, like it’s a big story, right? Yeah. And there were loads of people who were very doubtful of the story essentially. And this was not helped by the fact that the story went up like overnight, I think, while the UK was asleep. By the time I woke up, the story had not only gone live on the New Yorker website, but Konami had issued a statement to the Japan Times denying it, basically saying, yeah, the New Yorker story isn’t true. So like for any Kojima fans that were really looking forward to Metal Gear Solid 5, they jumped on this. And like my Twitter was like a trash fire, just people going, you’re just doing this for attention, you know, whatever, not understanding like the New Yorker’s 100 year sort of world class fact-checking department, but never mind. And I was like, I went out for a walk with my dog and I was just thinking, this is just, this is such a shit situation. Like, I know it’s true. I know Konami’s lying about it. They’re like bringing not only my reporting into disrepute, but also the publication I write for, which is threatening to me as a freelancer to be in that situation. Just thinking, what could I do? So, and I just sort of thought, I know, if I can get a photograph, like from his leaving party, then maybe that will go some way to like showing that the story is true. So I wrote to the guy I knew on his team and said, you wouldn’t happen to have a photograph from his leaving day that you could send me and we’ll strip the metadata out. And then I can put it on my Twitter or whatever as a sign. And the story is true. And he went away and came back about like an hour later. He went, here you go, here’s the picture. And so I put that on Twitter and said, here is a photograph of Kojima’s leaving day that Konami says they got no knowledge about. And it had him and it had Shinokawa, the artist he works with both saying goodbye. And then of course, because things are never simple, immediately that sets off another chain of conspiracy theories. And you get like real hardcore Japan dweebs going, well, actually traditionally when you leave a business, you get a particular bouquet of flowers, which you can’t see in the photos. This is obviously from something else. And it’s just exhausting. But at least I felt I’d gone some way to sort of showing that the story was true. And then it’s so unfair because of course, you get like a thousand people going, you’re just doing this for attention. And then when of course the story turns out to be true a month or two later, there’s just like tumbleweeds. No one’s going, oh, okay, sorry about that thing I said back there that really was quite hard when you have half the internet like saying that to you. But that’s the perils of the job. Yeah, I mean, to be sitting on that information is like why, you know, most people won’t get one of those stories in their career and to have it and think, wow, what I can do with this or what should I do with this? That must be pretty wild. I mean, you just wanna do it justice. And yeah, you do know that it’s gonna, you know, I suppose you never quite know, do you, when you put these things out, like, and that’s also something that happens on Twitter, is when you tweet something out, of course, it’s got no likes or retweets on it, it’s just something you’ve said. And then when people come to it and it’s got like 20,000 likes or however many it got, and then suddenly people are coming to it with a different lens and going, oh, you just did this so that you could get loads of attention. But I mean, I suppose, you know, it’s a good lesson to not pay too much attention to these things, but that is in the, you know, that’s easier said than done after the moment. And there is like, you know, a bit of mild trauma, I think, when you’re in the eye of these storms. So, Simon, I was curious if from that, I feel like the full story of why he left Konami has never come out. As someone who had a bit of insider status, do you feel like you’re able to shed any more light on what led to his departure from Konami? I mean, just a couple of addendums actually, very quickly to that. So I subsequently found out, you know, I was feeling quite self-satisfied at having posted that photo and proven Konami wrong. And then actually about a year later, I found out that Konami looked at other photos from that event and figured out the person who had taken the photo by looking at other pictures and then disciplined them as a result of that. So, yeah, so that sort of took the shine off it a bit. But, you know, I think this story, Kojima is one of the few celebrities within video games, for want of a better word, or to, some people might say, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but anyway, he’s one of those people who is almost a household name, I suppose. People will probably automatically side with his version of events. Konami is a big business. Video games were just one small part of it that they don’t seem to care that much about anymore. So people will probably not take Konami’s view. I don’t know what they would say. You know, Konami’s higher ups. Maybe he was a difficult person to work with. Maybe he was asking for too many things. You know, he was obviously occupying a certain position of power within the company where he could command, you know, very large budgets and probably, you know, a certain degree of treatment when he’s going around. And I heard a rumor he had like an apartment that they were paying for in Roppongi nearby and would demand a certain level of travel and things like that. So, you know, I’m sure they would have a version of events of why it was no longer a viable relationship. But in terms of his motivations for going, I’m not sure, what is certainly true is that he does not like talking about Metal Gear Solid anymore. And even at that time, he didn’t really want to, you know, answer any questions about that. And as far as I know, sort of any journalists that would bring that up with him now would get pretty quickly shut down. So, yeah, I mean, it’s one of those where the true stories, let’s say, you know, from the various players’ perspectives, I don’t know, might never come out. It would be nice if someone did an authorized biography with him or something that could tell a bit more of that story, but I don’t know if he’s going to do that or is ready to do that. I feel sort of the same thing actually about Sakaguchi as well and that moment. And, you know, what I was told at the time is that basically all of the people he had hired into Square Enix were sort of pushed out after him as well, which includes Matsuno, who is the guy who made Final Fantasy Tactics, who Sakaguchi hired. He loved Ogre Battle, that game series so much that he just brought that whole team in and said, can you make me in a Final Fantasy-themed Ogre Battle? And, you know, Matsuno famously was director of Final Fantasy VII and left in inverted commons due to ill health at some point during that. And there’s sort of theories about whether he was made to go because that was the time Sakaguchi was going as well, whether he was being difficult. And there’s like a secret boss in the game that’s like named after Matsuno and stuff. So, you know, that’s one story I would, you know, it’s a niche concern perhaps, but it’s one that I would love to tell as well. But, you know, these stories are very difficult to weedle out for a variety of reasons. Yeah, I remember actually at the time, it was around the time that Zodiac Age came out, I think we exchanged DMs about Final Fantasy VII and why Square Enix, when you asked them, the new producers of that version about it, they just wouldn’t shed light on Matsuno leaving. They were like, there was no, there was no behind the scenes trouble. And I noticed that you didn’t quite get that story in the edge piece either, but obviously you were dealing with official Square Enix, but you do wonder, will that story ever come out, you know, because there’s definitely another truth there somewhere. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the problems with the video game industry these days is that companies plaster their staff with lifetime NDAs. So there’s just no opportunity for them to talk about it at any time for whatever company they’re working for at that time, which is, you know, a terrible thing and not how NDAs should be used, I don’t think. Yeah, for sure. So Simon, should we wrap up by talking a little bit about your Miyamoto interview? Because that feels like the last big one. What was the background that led to that interview and what was the actual interview like? Yeah, so I interviewed Miyamoto a couple of times, once for The Guardian and then a couple of times with The Guardian, actually, I can’t remember. But, you know, it was always, I remember talking to Chris Donlon beforehand, who had interviewed him for Edge. And he said, the problem with interviewing Miyamoto is you think that you’re interviewing Walt Disney, but you’re actually interviewing Mickey Mouse. His point being that, you know, he’s sort of the mascot for the company, and that’s the mode in which he talks, which is such a brilliant way of putting it, such a Donlon-esque way of putting it. But I think it was, you know, that had been certainly my experience. I interviewed him at the Louvre when they had brought out like a Nintendo DS guide for the art gallery in Paris, I think. And then… Oh, I was so jealous when I found out that, like, four journalists from the UK were getting to go to Paris to talk to Miyamoto. So, oh, God, I can’t believe it. I wish I was there. And then it was like, you have to talk to him about his app. And I was like… Well, yeah, I think you’ve got to the heart of the issue there. So, he’s, you know, he’s been in the game a long time and he knows how to talk to, he knows how to manage a journalist. And, you know, you want to talk to him about, where do you get your crazy ideas from or whatever. And he really wants to just talk about his app to tell you about the Mona Lisa, which of course like no one really wants to talk to him about as interesting as I’m sure that is. So, yeah, that was the problem. He just, you know, he did talk a bit about other things, but what I wanted to ask him about was of course his life and to try and, you know, all of that stuff that you would want to ask me about in a profile that was sort of, you know, he would answer a bit but would always bring it back to the topic at hand. And that happened at another time when I interviewed him. I think it was the last group interview I ever did where one of the other journalists asked him if he likes cats. And I remember just thinking, I’m never doing this again. It was like for like Mario 3D World. And it was like, that was, that’s your question. Where, it’s me and Moto. You’re asking me if he likes cats. Anyway, anyway. So I’d want to like, occasionally, I’d been building up a relationship with Nintendo in the US who have a bit of sway with Japan, I think. Definitely Nintendo in Japan is where all the decisions are made, as you well know, Matthew. And, you know, but I’d been building up a bit of sort of relationship with his people in America. And we had been talking about, they’d offered like a piece where we could talk to me and Moto and then some of the other directors of like the Mario games, but you’d have to talk to them about their specific games. And it would have to be equal time given to each. Lots of like provisos that in New York, I just flatly say, no, you can’t do that. Like, you know, that’s not what we’re gonna do. But my editor, my current editor there, who’s an amazing chap called Sharon Shetty, and came back and said, look, why don’t you, why don’t you see if you can do something for, we’ve launched a new section on the site called The New Yorker Interviews. They’re sort of, you know, three, 4,000 words, essentially QA formats, but you know, it’s talking about the person’s life and their work, you know, from a bird’s eye perspective or whatever. So it’s something with a bit more ambition, go and see if they’d be up for doing that. So I went back and, you know, of course, because it’s a Japanese company and things have to happen in the right order, they immediately said, no, so, you know, we’ve been developing this particular idea for ages, it has to be this or nothing. And so we were like, well, it’s nothing then. And then, but the US sort of person was like, you know, I love The New Yorker, I’ve been a subscriber for a long time, we’d love to do this, I can totally see what you want to do, but it will take like buy-in. So it was like back and forth for like a year, just trying to like get across the vision for what I want to do, which is like, we don’t want to interview him where it’s like tied to a product that’s coming out. And they kept saying like, can you do something like based around the new theme part that’s coming up, time to coincide with that. And it’s like, no, like that’s not what we’re after here. It’s talking to him, person to person, like an artist really, and trying to have a bit more scope with that. And then because I’d had such, I suppose, difficult experiences with, eventually they come back and say, all right, we’ve got the green light. It’s gonna happen on this date. You can have like, I don’t know, 90 minutes or something. So which is amazing. But because I’d had such difficult experiences in the past where I wasn’t quite sure if he’s gonna answer properly, I did something that I never do. I normally try to just go into interviews these days just with just a few ideas in my head of what I wanna talk about so that you’re having more of a conversation. But this time I was like, do you know what? I’m gonna write every question down, like how I want to say it, so that even if he gives terrible answers, that will be revealing, like in some way, because the question is sort of not snookering him, but putting him in a position where he’s either gonna respond or he doesn’t. And if he doesn’t, then that’s going to say something as well. So that’s what I did. And obviously it was still like listening to what was coming back and asking follow-ups and all that. But I had this sort of spine of questions I was gonna ask, so that I knew that, even if it was a terrible interview, it would work to one degree or another. And thankfully he came back. He came with the right, I don’t know if we caught him at the right moment in his life or whatever. It was like his birthday, I think. And he was talking about his grandkids. And he just came in a reflective mood where he was talking about, he was not talking, he was not in like Miyamoto the mascot mode. He was like talking as a human being, as someone who’s thought long and deeply about game design, which is something I’ve never really got from, my own interviews with him at least. And so it was just like fantastic opportunity. And it came off, I think. And certainly it was well received on the whole, but you always get some people that go, well, I think this interview tells me more about the interviewer than it does about the interviewee, but. Oh no, it’s like, it’s a sensationally good interview, I think. Like I’ve read so many Miyamoto interviews. I’ve never met the guy myself. I’ve never been able to interview him. And it was always a point of frustration that to read interviews where people either asked dumb questions or clearly you were being shepherded down the route. And I really felt like it kind of, like I was saying earlier, it kind of, like it made some progress, you know? It like opened up some stuff. It gave you a better idea of the man. And you know, what more can you hope to achieve really? Oh, thank you. I mean, that means a lot. And yeah, it took a really long time to get to that point, to be honest. And it’s, I suppose, you know, in this industry of like games journalism, I was laughing the other day listening to your podcast where you were saying that someone called you like the gamans of games journalism, right? And I was thinking that would only happen like in this industry where like two guys in their 30s get labeled with a term that like in the real world is applied to people like in their 60s and 70s with a particular view. And it like says something where I remember like being like 30 years old and people going, oh yeah, like he’s part of the old guard of games. What are the industry like the old guard? You know, I feel like I’m just getting started and just like learning. Anyway, you know, I think that me and my, you know, I sometimes think, has it been a bit of a waste of time plumbing away at like writing about games for so long? And that was like an interview where I actually thought, do you know what, like this probably couldn’t have happened if I hadn’t have been like working in space for quite some time. I like trying to build up a reputation or like trust or whatever. And, you know, obviously I only got to do that thing because of the platform, because of the outlet I’m writing for, I’m not, I’m not dumb enough to think it was because of me and not because of that. But like, you know, I do like to think that, you know, I was a factor in that as well. And I was able to like bring together these two institutions, like of The New Yorker, which can be quite Nintendo like in some ways, I think in the way it’s run. And then also Nintendo and sort of go, look, if these two things come together, I think something really good could happen. And, you know, to have made that happen, really took some like just sticking around. Yeah, I’ll just say, it’s just funny thinking about like, how different Kojima and Miyamoto are, because like Kojima, he would definitely know like The New Yorker and what it would mean to be in there and the prestige of it, you know. And he’s, and I’m not saying like cynically so, but you know, he’s just so tapped into the modern world. And you really do get this impression of Miyamoto basically vanishing into that building. I mean, you’ve definitely compared him and used the Willy Wonka comparison in your writing before, but it is like that, you know. It’s, they have this big faceless building in that interview. Like, I love the stuff where you were just trying to get him to tell you like, what’s it like in your office? And he kind of gives you that vague, like, ah, some people can kind of bring toys in and even that you’re like, wow. You know, like, that’s new. I think, I just think of it as this incredibly grim place, and that’s why we don’t know about it. You know, and he’s like, the food’s good in the cafeteria. I just, I don’t know, I really, I love that stuff. That was just like, that’s just absolute catnip. It was great that his essential point as well was like, like I don’t really care what the office is like. That’s not the point. The point is, you know, the point is the work, right? And it was just what you want. You want Miyamoto to say something like that, I suppose. You know, you want him to be blazing. I suppose the food’s all right, but like, we’re making magic here. Like, why are you asking that? Yeah. So I also like that he said, I don’t buy presents for people. And that jumped out at me for some reason. And the other thing was the idea of like, you know, I own the consoles and my kids borrow them off me. I just, that really made me, that just made me laugh. I don’t know why, but. You’re spot on on your analysis about Kojima, by the way, because a few months after that story ran, we ran a pair of stories about Kojima, one when he, like, he was leaving, and one when he announced his new thing. And about six months later, I got like an email from his assistant going, Kojima would really like to write a film criticism column for The New Yorker. Can you make that happen? And I think she sent me one of his columns as an attachment. I was like, I’m sorry, that is way above my pay grade. That’s so good. Amazing. But did you ask me a motor if he likes cats, Simon? That’s the important thing here, I feel like. Maybe I’m being a dick and that question could open up new universes of understanding of who Miyamoto is. But yeah, I don’t know, I’d steer clear of pets as a rule. I think that question says more about the interviewer than the interviewee, yeah. Did you ever interview a water? No, sadly not, no. I wrote his obituary for The New Yorker, but that was it. Sorry, that’s a downer note to end on. Yeah, and that may come to the end of the podcast. Oh, okay, great. All right, well, thank you so much, Simon, for sharing your stories. I guess, you know, it’s weird asking you to plug stuff because I feel like people know who you are, but your website is simonparkin.com, right? Where can people find you on social media? I mean, maybe don’t, I’m on Twitter at Simon Parkin, but I’m not, I’ve got a complicated relationship with Twitter at the moment, so, you know, I don’t post much there, but I do post the occasional stories, so, yeah. Sure, so obviously you’ve got the Yard of Extraordinary Captives coming up next year. Is there anything else you’ve kind of got in the works that you wanted to flag or mention? I’ve got a couple of New Yorker stories brewing which should be out later this year, and so if you would like to read those, that would be great, I think it’s lovely to be able to write about games in that venue, and yeah, I think your listeners would hopefully like those pieces as well. Yeah, absolutely, it’s always a treat to your byline, and I really like your best games of the last year list as well. I think in your intro you really summed up how I felt about games last year, which is the idea that they’re sparkly and full of rewards, but it’s not quite enough to fight the darkness of the world as it stands, and I thought that was very insightful. Yeah, the problem with writing that is like, am I going to write that every year until the end? It feels like maybe that’s the best response to each year now. Yeah, exactly. So, if you’d like to follow the podcast on Twitter, it’s at Back Page Pod. Matthew, where can people find you? I’m at MrBazzle underscore Pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. We’ll be back next week with an episode probably about some complete nonsense, but thank you very much for listening, and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now!