Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, it’s episode 50 of this podcast. How are you feeling about this? Holy shit. So that’s a lot, isn’t it? When you said it yesterday, 50 episodes, I was like, oh yeah, that is fucking loads, isn’t it? But how are you feeling about the fact that we’ve been doing this for basically an entire year now? Yeah, good. I think it’s genuinely outside of a job, the longest I’ve sort of committed to something. Yeah, I feel like I sort of was initially dragging you along from the ride, maybe even like, borderline bullying you into doing it, because you already had lots of podcast things going on. Obviously, it’s proven popular and it’s changed like a fair amount as we’ve gone and we’ve gotten better at it, I think. So, yeah, it’s kind of exciting. I was curious, do you have any favorite episodes from the ones we’ve done? I mean, it would be a bit egomaniacal of me if I was like the Phoenix Wright and the Zelda episodes. But I did like those. I thought they came out really well, you know, and I was quite picky about them in terms of, you know, they’re things I care about a lot and I wanted the episodes to be good and they seem to be, you know, reasonably well received. So that was nice. I don’t want to pick play favorites for the guests. I’ve really valued every guest we’ve had. It’s been great that people have given us their time. But listening to some of like Dan Dawkins stories was just awesome. You know, we hear a lot about that episode as well. I think that one kind of resonated with people. Yeah, there’s a certain generation of like games industry person who tweeted about that episode and that seemed to go down particularly well. The episode with Simon too was also just, you know, asking him about the interviewees. The Kojima stuff was some of the best stuff. We’ve kind of, I don’t know if uncovered is the right word, but, you know, talked about on this podcast. That’s good. No love for best Sonic games, Matthew. That was quite, honestly, there’s very few. I couldn’t, in fact, name one off the top of my head where I was like, I thought that was shit. Yeah, I don’t think they’re any bad ones. Some of the mailbags. It’s funny because my mate Dave listened back to, I think both mailbags, and he went, this is probably about twice as long as it should be. And I was like, look, that’s fair criticism, but I’m still going to get very defensive about it. Yeah, it’s during the mailbags where people’s, like, riffing on our bullshit, overtook even our own bullshit, and I got scared. Yeah, that’s kind of how I felt. It’s like one thing to make jokes about JC’s kitchen, but when those things are, like, repeated back to you, it’s weirdly cursed in a way I can’t quite describe. I think it’s just because they’re so detached from what the actual JC’s kitchen is, which is just a man and his wife in a tent serving meat. It becomes very odd that we’ve kind of enshrined it as podcast lore, you know? Well, that’s the thing. I feel like we’ve pulled, actually, like, a very reasonable meat seller into the Back Page-iverse, and he’s completely unaware of it. And I feel like, I haven’t been to JC’s Kitchen for quite a while, but if I was to go there now, I feel like there would be a slightly awkward charge, because I’ve sort of been talking about him behind his back, but in quite a weird way. Yeah, I suppose so. I’ve been, like, I’ve been frequenting the place because I’ve just finished my job at Future, so I’m, like, no longer going to be near JC’s Kitchen, the alleged site of JC’s Kitchen, when on the day is where it’s open. So I’ve been trying to squeeze it in as much as possible. It’s definitely underlined the patchy extent to which he’s actually there. It is funny that I still have to, like, physically walk there and see if he’s there, and if he’s not, then just, like, go off and find another lunch. But, you know, that’s… Do you have a… Is there a particular, like, point on the journey where your eyeline would meet the tent and you’d know if it’s there or not? Like, how far away are you when the disappointment hits? So you know there’s that, uh, what’s that cathedral? That big cathedral in the back? The Abbey? Yeah, yeah, that’s it, yeah. I walked past that. Oh, yes. I’ve only been in there once. Yeah, I walked past, um, there’s like one of the side streets by the Abbey and from there I can glimpse the magical orange and black of his signage on the tent and be like, fuck, it’s happening. It’s good. It’s good meat day. But, um, you know, it is exciting and it’s equally disappointing when it’s sunny and then you get there and it’s just, just the stone of Bog Island, the stone steps and, and he’s gone. But you know, what could you do? But, um, yeah, I’m, I’m sorry that I’ve done that to you. I just keep thinking, you know, there’s that place, um, by future LJ Hugs that would like meat place and it’s like, I keep thinking that that’s like a spin off of JC’s Kitchen. It’s not because it’s got like initials on the title and it says meat and it’s got a very similar vibe like the tent looks similar. It smells kind of similar. It’s really good, but, um, I would say JC’s Kitchen is slightly better, but their location is so, so good. Like right outside of Gregg’s and McDonald’s, which is like the fucking student nexus in Bath. And like, I think that that I think that I just wish that JC’s Kitchen had the same business, you know, I think he deserves it. But, um, yeah, I mean, JC’s Kitchen still is one of the most highly rated restaurants in Bath on TripAdvisor. I think it’s like number two. Yeah. I was just like, yeah, I just, you just should be able to get seven days a week. That’s how I feel. Except maybe on Sunday, which is the day of rest for, uh, for JC. The problem with old LJ Hugs, which I’ve never been to, um, is that the bit of the high street there on is particularly full of cursed seagulls and pigeons. Like that it’s like the most aggressive seagull run in Bath and the idea of standing around with food. Like those are seagulls that will go for you if they know you have food and there’s that huge queue and you’ve got to stand in that queue. Well, you know, seagulls, you know, basically plan to kill you. It’s, it’s just too much. Yeah, I agree with you. Do you know what? I was eating a sausage roll outside of that, Greg’s right? Like 11pm, sorry, 11pm, 11am. 11am kind of existential crisis just staring into the distance. And then like, this pigeon just like flapped its wings like right in front of my face. It was like, is this a fucking Pokemon battle? What the hell’s happening? And I was like, the pigeons in Bath have now evolved to be like, we’re going to take your fucking pastries from you. I always thought that pigeons were fairly innocuous and they just ate the crumbs around you. But they’ve evolved, Matthew. They know that you have baked goods and they’re like, I’m going to fuck you up. They’ve seen the seagulls and what they can achieve. And they’re like, I’ll have a bit of that. Yeah, it’s aspirational, isn’t it? Yeah. So I’m curious to ask about another Bath kind of food place, Matthew. You’ve been to, what is the fancy place? Menu Gordon Jones, right? So you were tweeting about eating a game pie and making yourself sound like you were going hunting tomorrow with your Tory friends. But what was the deal with that? Because that place is amazing. Yeah. So that’s like Bath’s sort of celebrity chef. He’s up on the hill in quite a strange restaurant that looks like an estate agent’s. If you look it up on Google Maps, you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but inside his whole deal is he does like a surprise menu. It’s like a taster menu. So you eat like eight courses over the course of a couple of hours. And he does, you know, basically whisks up something new every week. I think he changes the menu like two, three times a week. It’s pretty crazy. Yeah. And one of our courses was a game pie, which I should say it’s like a very minimalist game pie, venison, kidney, and like a little bit of pastry and some sort of like oniony mash stuff. It was pretty tasty. I’m not a big venison guy, though, because like I say, it’s a little bit medieval. I think it’s a little bit Robert Baratheon in Game of Thrones. Do you go for the because he does like a wine flight alongside it where it gives you a different one? Because the idea of a wine with eight courses, you’d be dead at the end of it, wouldn’t you? Like, yeah, at lunchtime. I think I just feel weirdly self-conscious about like just having like a diet coke with all of this like fancy ass food. Oh, I don’t mind. They’ve got some they’ve got some very like artisan fruit juices. So I feel kind of okay drinking those. But like, imagine getting back to the office and you’ve just had eight glasses of wine. So you went to the you went to menu Gordon Jones for lunch, then went back to work? Well, not the same if you did do that. Like there are people in there who had like the air of business about them. Wow. You have to book that place ages in advance as well. So that’s wild that people are just like having business lunches there. That’s great. Yeah, I ate some eel as well. Oh, wow. Yeah, just all of the animals. That’s some pretty good stuff. I feel like everyone who has ever praised us in the Apple podcast reviews for like being a no nonsense podcast is going to be like totally appalled by this opening 10 minutes. But like, but this is the new direction for the podcast. Yeah, it’s we’re going to talk about GamePie every episode now. GamePie would actually be a great name for a gaming podcast. Yeah, it wouldn’t be bad, would it? But it’s too late now. We’ve committed to this very print media centric one. So we have to just keep going with it, I think. Can’t we rebrand for year two? We could do. Should we just do that? Should we say we’re the GamePie podcast now? It’ll turn out there’s like a YouTube channel called GamePie that was like probably. Yeah, that’ll probably be a thing, weren’t it? But yeah, OK, so we’ll give that some thought. We might rebrand for year two, apparently. That’s a thing that we’ve discussed, but it’s nice to just catch up, isn’t it? Because we’ve had, as some of our listeners have noted, we had a few like guest heavy episodes recently, and they’ve like gone down very well. And obviously, as Matthew says, we’re very grateful to have them on. But I think we were like keen for this 50th one to just have a bit of fun back and forth. And so in this episode, we’re going to have like a little bit of a chat section here. We’re going to talk a bit about some news, which if you want to avoid that stuff. If you’re listening to this six months down the line, you can just skip forward probably about 30 minutes and then we’ll get to what the theme of this episode is, which is how to make a games magazine. So in this podcast today, we’ve covered loads of different aspects of games media. In this one, I thought we could document the entire cycle of making a magazine, according to me and Matthew’s spotty memories, and then to like cycle through 15 things that can go wrong while you’re doing it. So, Matthew, how did you feel about that subject coming to it? Like you say, it’s been a while since I’ve had to do it, so I was just trying to like cast back to some reasonably cursed memories, particularly for the stuff that can go wrong, because obviously try and block that out of your head. It’s such a deadline driven job, and so much part of it is about juggling deadlines, that, you know, thinking about it in those terms and thinking about what I do now, I was actually, it made my kind of day to day work now seem pretty good. Well, actually, there was a lot of stress I had to juggle as an editor, a lot of crazy things to take into consideration that I don’t have to like ever think about again. But yeah, you know, I’m keen to hear your thoughts, because I think you’ve got a slightly better memory for these things. Yeah, I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because I just did PC Gamer for so long, like I was editing the mag, the print mag for three and a half years, which is a long time to do one mag. So I’ve got some good memories of that. I also, I don’t know, I think it’s because we’ve revisited this period so many times in this podcast that it’s brought a load of different memories flooding back. And so, yeah, plus, like you say, the pain of Deadline never truly leaves you, and it definitely like the body remembers, as Charlize Theron said about the making of Mad Max Fury Road. The other thing with these episodes is whenever we compare experiences, it’s always super obvious that you are like way more professional on top of your shit than I was. So I always come out looking quite chaotic. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just because I’ve been a bit more cautious about saving face. Maybe it’s just because. I think it might be partly because, obviously, I’ve been working at Future for the last few years. So I’m not big on upsetting people, burning bridges or giving out company secrets and stuff. So I’m kind of like, what is the sort of sugar-pilled version of this? And probably myself as well, just because I got a bit too much personal pride. So there’s probably a bit of that in it. But yeah, yeah, yeah. So I wanted to really ask you, Matthew, about this anxiety dream you had that you told me about this week. Where, didn’t you dream that we had a huge bust up because I didn’t think you had very good anecdotes? What was all that about? It ties into an episode that we’re going to be doing soon. Yeah, I just dreamt that we were recording it and we had a guest on and you guys were like really in the flow of it. And, you know, had all this great stuff. And every time it came to me, I just couldn’t remember anything. I was really like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You just like lost your shit with me, which is totally baffling because it’s not something that has ever happened on this podcast, I should add. I have no idea where it came from, but it was just really like super vivid. And I woke up and like my first thought was like, I have to make peace with Sam. But when you told me that, I thought, am I really harsh on Matthew? Like I say, just my dream version of you was quite different. Well, that’s quite the thing. But yeah, that’s not something I ever do. You know where you have in Persona, where they go into the mind palaces, and there’s like the shadowy version of the real person. The real person often seems quite civil, and then they’re just the total prick in the dream world. It’s kind of like that. You pretty much got me bang on there, like as a human being. So, yeah, spot on. It’s all behind the eyes, but yeah. No, I mean, like it made me think, am I too stern with Matthew? Like, I try not to be like too much of a dick. Like every now and then I’m like, hey, when are you going to send the mp3 recording over? It’s never got to the point where I’m like, where’s the fucking podcast, Matthew? But like, you know, it’s… This ties into the magazine thing. You’re a lot more organized than I am. And when an organized person has to deal with quite a disorganized person, it’s… I imagine it’s quite stressful. No, no, it’s… Honestly, I’ve just enjoyed in the pandemic having a… Like one thing to pour all of my hopes, dreams and interests into, which has been this podcast. That’s kind of how I feel about this podcast. This podcast is like the purest version of what I think is important in games, I suppose, and what you think is important in games. So that’s why I think people like it so much because it’s so pure. It doesn’t try and be a show that’s totally like bogus. And if we cover a subject that we don’t know, as people have heard with Jeremy, for example, on the Immersive Sims episode, we’re just getting people who do know what they’re talking about. So I like the idea that we’re sort of like curating what we think is good shit. I think that’s just a good ethos for a podcast. And then having like, you know, good kind of print media guests on to talk about their stuff. I mean, that’s definitely the vibe for year one. Obviously, year two is going to be a lot more sort of sprawling, chaotic, as is the GamePy way. Yeah, I’m really, really keen to do another Gamescourt Listener Edition. Oh, yeah, that was fun. It was really, really fun and also like massively, like a really popular episode for us. That’s good. People like drowning. People like Gamescourt. They like Michael Caine impressions. I can’t guarantee they’d be in the next one. Who knows what Judge Castle will come up with for that. But I do encourage people, if you’ve been buying some secondhand nonsense games, by all means email in and we’ll put you on trial in a future episode. That’d be fun. But yeah, so Matthew, I wanted to ask a bit about, just talk a bit about some game stuff really, because we haven’t done that for a little while. So first of all, I want to ask you about the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy Remastered Edition. Obviously, they’ve revealed a trailer for this and the release date is out on November 11th. So, you know, it’s very, it’s imminent basically when we’re recording this. So I was curious what you made of the art style. On social media, I said I like the art style and then afterwards I was like, oh, maybe I’m not sure about the art style and I need it in my hands first. But I was curious what you made of the changes they’ve done to update the games for the modern age. I think they had to do something to drag it into the modern age. I think it certainly looks like it’s going to be quite coherent in terms of it all looks of a piece and maybe brings the three games together and groups them in, you know, by giving them a very distinctive kind of shared look. It’s a little bit Pixar-ish for me. In the little snippets, there was something quite overblown about it. Also, just not very Rockstar in that it’s quite impressionistic and what we use to them is realism and I don’t think they were necessarily going for like super cartoony when they made them originally. It’s tough to tell. It feels like so much of the original PS2 art style was like shaped by the limitations of, you know, being an open world game at that time. When you, you know, they were the trailblazers, as we discussed in our GTA 3 episode. And it’s true that like in the modern age, they almost had to pick a direction to go in with it. Like there is a cartoony style to those PS2 games, but it’s slightly below the surface. Like it’s a bit more, it’s a bit more up to your interpretation of like, are they going for cartoony stylized or are they going for realistic? It kind of sits somewhere between the two. And like you say, they’ve leaned into cartoony for the character models, but then more realistic for the environments, it seems like. And so that’s quite an interesting combination, isn’t it? I mean, really, the stuff that jumped out for me is modernization of controls. I think there was some talk of better checkpointing or more regular checkpointing to maybe take the sting out of some of those missions. The idea of just those games, but more playable and without their frustrations like that for me is a powerful enough draw. I’ve never finished San Andreas, for example. You know, with those games, I’d get stuck on a mission and that would be it. You know, I think the stuff with the little RC helicopter or plane, one of the two in San Andreas, did for me relatively early on. I didn’t get anywhere near full package out of that game. Yeah, there’s zero missions in that game. The David Cross character, where you’re… There’s one where you’re being attacked by tiny planes on top of this building and you’re manning a turret and it’s so, so hard. And that was one that I think I broke a PS3 controller in anger because of that one, which is really embarrassing. But what can I say? I was 18 at the time. That is embarrassing, actually. The 18 thing doesn’t help at all. Yeah, I think I agree with you. Like, in theory, having modern controls makes these games really easy because it was always designed around quite bat shit auto aiming or like lock on aiming of GTA 3, which, you know, you couldn’t elegantly move between targets very well without getting openly exposed and shot because obviously it was a time before cover systems. So, yeah, I’m excited to have those those upgrades, too. The other cool thing is because because the San Andreas one is coming out of Game Pass, I like the idea I can kind of play that and then judge if I want to buy the whole set. You know, yeah, that’s kind of what I’m thinking of doing. Are you in the same boat? Yeah. Aren’t they giving away different bits in different places? Yeah. So I think GTA 3 you get on PS Now in early December. Yeah. But holding back Vice City. They know it’s the one people want, I guess. But yeah, to be honest, San Andreas is the one I want. I like you. I like you. I never finished it. Yeah, for sure. That’s the one I want to play through. I’m pleased they’re doing it, though. I think someone made the point that it sucks that they’ve taken the old ones off sale on PC to sell these ones. I agree that is bad. There’s no reason to do that, really. They could just put them on there and people can keep modding them. But that is disappointing. But yeah, like you, I really want to see how they turn out, because the version that’s on PS4 as it stands is just really roughshod and not very playable in 2021. So, other things, Matthew. I wanted to ask you what you’ve been playing recently, because you play about triple the games I do, and I’ve played 100 hours, 106 hours of Apex Legends in 3 months, and not loads else, which is shameful on my part. Otherwise, I’ve been investing time in like Deus Ex and research bits for this podcast. But what have you been up to lately? I’ve been trying to play lots of stuff so that I’ve got interesting games to talk about in our Games of the Year podcast. It’s just become this huge thing on the horizon for me, where I’m moving towards it and I feel like I really want to have like a definitive top 10, which is obviously insane. Like the idea of that is preposterous. But I keep playing things and not particularly liking them. And then I’m like, well, this isn’t in the top 10, so it’s worthless to me, which is obviously also dumb. I’m just looking for like incredible quality or bust. Yeah, so I’ve been playing a bit of Returnal actually, which I think is good, but it is an incredibly boring take, really difficult. And because of that, it can’t have all my time because I’ve got so much other stuff to be playing. I think that’s the big problem I have with super difficult games, is that if I’m not making noticeable progress in them, my brain switches off and I may as well just try something else instead. I wondered if this game benefited from coming out when it did, because people didn’t have as much competing for their time. I’m not hugely far with it, but already it gives me the feeling that the loops or the runs you’re doing in it are just way too long for that structure. I’ve heard people say it can take a couple of hours to get through a single run, and if you die you’re back to the start of it. That for me is just… I can already sense that the length of time it takes me to achieve anything, to achieve the little that I do achieve, really bugs me, which is annoying because as a technical showcase, as a PS5 showcase, the way it uses the controller and all the haptics and all that jazz and the 3D audio, like it’s probably the most impressive showcase outside of AstroBot, but at the same time, I just can’t claw away at it for too long, I don’t think. Yeah, I’ve played it and I got to a similar point where I was hit by the revelation that I will probably never finish this, and that’s tough because I probably could if I made this the one game I played for like a month or two months, but I’m not quite in the place where I can do that at the moment, and so I fear like not seeing the back of it. I’m pleased that I have it and that I’ve been able to experience it, because like you say, it is a great showcase for what the PS5 can do. I’m actually trying to work out if the timing for it was good, because there’s a limited number of PS5s out there, and you wonder if a game like this had released midway through the lifespan of the console, if it might have found a really appreciative audience for that sort of thing, but regardless, you might be right though, like it was the one PS5 exclusive for a while. I just think the kind of arcade edge of it wouldn’t speak to as many people. You know, Housemarque’s Dust has always been great, but hasn’t necessarily exploded, and I think having this early in the cycle, when there’s not much else for people to play, gives it its best chance. Like I just don’t think in a world where there are, you know, God of Wars to be played, and more Spider-Man games, that people would ever spend their 70 quid on Housemarque. That isn’t to put them down, but just in the context of what they are in terms of PS5 studios, I just don’t really see that myself. One thing I will say about that is that, you know, Sony, if Sony’s been subject to any criticism, it’s that they make too many open world games, they make too many games that are kind of like, you know, broadly accessible for like lots of different people, they’ve made on PS5, you know, they bank rolled Deathloop, pretty hardcore time leap game, and they’ve, you know, they made that Demon’s Souls remaster, Demon’s Souls was like notoriously very hard game and they made a very lavish version of that, and then there’s this, which doesn’t really fit into the camp of anything they’ve been doing on PS4, and they went out outright and bought the studio off the back of it. So, you know, I like the commitment to a bit of variety in that exclusive line-up. Yeah, that’s good. It’s on that level is good. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I’m not putting Housemarque or their game down at all. It’s just you can tell from social media what excites your core PlayStation fan. It is those open world games. You know, it is Naughty Dog, God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn. Like those are the things. So, yeah, for this to have made the impact it has made is pretty cool. It’s pretty impressive. But, yeah, I’m just spoiled by Hades, really, unfortunately, with that model of game. Because that game does it so beautifully. Yeah, Deathloop did as well. Deathloop was like hardcore, but made it kind of comfortable to repeat the day. And yeah, and I had, you know, because of the infusion system, had quite a lot of continuity between those playthroughs. Whereas I would say Deathloop hits you with a hard, oh, fuck, when you’re like dead. And it’s that maybe that changes when you get deeper into it. But certainly, like in the early hours, I found it. I found starting again to just be a little bit, a little bit too arduous for me, you know. So this, I thought this was going to be a quiet, like, you know, holiday period for games. And then I kind of realized that I have Guardians of the Galaxy, Rider’s Republic, Far Cry 6 and Inscription to play along with like The Forgotten City, Toem and I forgot I bought Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. I found that in a box the other day and I was like, oh yeah, I bought that this year. And like there are so many games, Matthew, and Age of Empires 4 just landed on Game Pass. Forza Horizon is imminent and Halo is coming in early December. This is not a quiet year at all, is it? And I don’t know why it seemed that way a few months ago, but now I realize there’s lots to play. Maybe it’s because there’s maybe like there are fewer big sex exclusives this holiday period from Sony and Nintendo. But yeah, how are you kind of like looking at the next couple of months? You know, I’m still wrapped up in all of it for work. You know, it can be quite a juicy freelance period, but that also just changes the relationship with those games. I actually find these days, I almost need to be kind of commissioned on something to give me the drive to really power through something. Otherwise, like my, you know, I’m very stop start with games, but I am definitely in a game playing phase at the moment. Like I have phases where I’m like super into TV or I’m super into books and I’m just reading every spare moment of the day. And I think getting the switch with the OLED screen and Metroid Dread kind of pushed me into a bit of a gaming phase at the moment. So like I’m really up for everything and I’m trying to finish off things that I was really loving and hadn’t quite finished off. You know, I’m super excited for fours. Weirdly, it feels like Halo could be quite good after having a bit of a rough time. It feels like everyone shifting to actually this is this is a good one, which would be amazing if true. Just got to get it all done before that fricking episode. That’s all I’ve got hanging over me. Yeah, it’s funny because for those who listen to the Best Games of 2020 episode, I really shat the bed on that one. I didn’t have any good suggestions at all, really. And maybe like a couple like FF7 Remake and Star Wars Squadrons. But Matthew was like had played like pretty much everything. I was really comprehensive and I was just like been playing more Apex Legends and Destiny. And it’s like those are not exciting entries. If we would, you know, if I was to redo that podcast and have more interesting suggestions. But so Matthew is going to wipe the floor with me again this year, because I don’t think I’ve played more than five games from this year still. So good. Yeah, that’s good. Good. Good stuff. There’s not much I’ve like absolutely adored. Like there’s lots of stuff I’ve liked. I’ve liked a lot of stuff which other people have loved. There’s lots of nine out of tens that maybe would have given like eights or sevens. I’ve got a comfortable list of ten already, but I wouldn’t say it’s a stellar list. Well, a big thing that’s happened with me actually is that I’m having this been the first full year that I’ve really like engaged with Game Pass. And I found that the volume of stuff is definitely pushed me into a kind of like I will play a game for two or three hours, then move on sort of face. And right. Yeah, that’s not to dispute the enormous value proposition of the service. I think it’s great. I think that like the the thing is, though, because I have all these other formats and a lot of other games on different systems that I’ve built up over the years, it’s like maybe it almost feels like Game Pass is utterly perfect for someone who hasn’t played games for about five years and just like picks up a new console as it stands. There are so many indie games I’ve played for about 30 minutes and then like no more. The Artful Escape is one of those. Last Last Stop is one of those. And Twelve Minutes is one of those like it’s they’re kind of like Moon Glow Bay is doomed to be one of those, I think as well. And it’s like it’s no slight against the games. It’s just because they’re shotgunned out at such a pace that I don’t quite have time to sort of get through them all. That’s partly a me and my lifestyle thing. But have you had the same thing or are you a bit more diligent with ticking them off than I am? I think this year more than ever has just kind of made me think that I’m so clearly drawn to like big expensive AAA big releases. I find that there’s been so much interesting indie stuff that I’ve like bounced off or I just can’t get through. Like there’s so many 2D top down Zelda looking games which get like nine out of tens or ten out of tens and people are like this is the best 2D Zelda like since Link to the Past or whatever. And I just can’t, I just can’t be fucked to get on with it. I don’t know what it is in my brain that’s just not interested in that style. Like I just I want big expensive shiny things. I feel like that’s where a lot of the positive reviews for Guardians of the Galaxy have come from. Where lots of people are just like oh yeah graphics, a linear single player game with amazing graphics. It doesn’t ask too much of me. All Matthew wants is someone to make another spin to sell conviction basically. Oh yeah, just that yeah for sure. Yeah I think you, to be honest though, to the people who listen to this podcast, the fact that we like big shiny expensive games is surely no surprise. It’s not a particularly radical take, but I like to think one of the things we do on this podcast is we talk about them fairly eloquently and in an interesting way that sort of grabs people. But yeah, but there’s no, you know, we did an indie games episode and obviously that’s part of like the sort of canon of what we talk about too, but we like big shiny things. That’s just what we do. Metroid Dread was just such a pleasure. You know, spoiler alert for that end of year episode, Metroid Dread currently sits pretty high for me. I absolutely loved it. Just Nintendo firing on all cylinders, so polished and so beautifully made and just really understood that character and executed that character brilliantly. But that’s really what I want. I think I’m also just, I may be feeling a bit of a drought on the Nintendo side in that a lot of the stuff they’re doing like isn’t stuff that I’m particularly like mad about at the moment. You know, like I’m not a Pokémon guy, this feels like it’s a big Pokémon year with Snap and whichever other ones they’re making at Christmas. One of their endless series of remakes. I need a Mario or a Zelda. I need a 10 out of 10 masterpiece from Nintendo to really like blow me away. Metroid Dread wasn’t quite that, but it was like for Samus pretty close, I thought. Are you not excited about Kirby’s version of The Last of Us, Matthew? The Kirby games are often surprisingly excellent. The last couple of Kirby games have gone full on platinum by the end, where you are fighting God in space, which listeners of this podcast will know I’m a big fan of. Except it’s Kirby sucking in the universe. They’re the wildest things. I will never write Kirby off because I know that Kirby can go to some crazy places. Is The Last of Us Kirby going to be one of those games? You know, we’ll wait and see. Yeah, I couldn’t help looking at that and thinking there must be some 3D Mario people who worked on this. It just looks like it looks too much like recent 3D Mario games to not have that talent. But I’m sure that game has an actual name. But Kirby’s The Last of Us will be what it’s referred to on this podcast from here on in. Yes, speaking of single player games, Matthew, this is the last kind of thing I want to ask you about. Amy Hennig making a Marvel game. The timing was really interesting that that got announced the week that Guardians of the Galaxy was out. I thought that was curious because they confirmed it’s this Skydance new media. A lot of film companies getting into game stuff now. I’m not sure what that’s about, but maybe it’s because the pandemic basically wiped out their industry. But basically, yes, Amy Hennig’s studio was staffed up with loads of veterans and they’re making this single player Marvel game, Mysterious. I was wondering what you made of that. Amy Hennig getting to make games is a good thing. You know, I love the sense of fun that the Enchanted she was involved with had. I thought it was a great shame we never got to see the Star Wars game she was working on. That Star Wars game was rumored to be a single player game but have like a bit of an ensemble cast to it. The energy and the excitement of what an ensemble can be, I am still very much interested in from her. And there are lots of things in Marvel where you could sort of make that work. Lots of famous gangs of characters who work together. It’s kind of interesting like what’s going on with Marvel games in terms of them not being based on the films and how people are reacting to that. Because I feel like Marvel’s The Avengers, the Square Enix one, was almost a bit of a sacrificial lamb. Like it had to kind of go out there and basically take the sort of the bruising that it wasn’t the stars in the film. And now people are more open to that being an approach. Like with Guardians of the Galaxy, that has seemed to have been less of a thing. And now that we can kind of just handle Marvel games being their own thing. And there are interesting people. You know, we’ve also got Firaxis are making their kind of strategy RPG thing. That’s super interesting. Amy Hennig working in that space. I’m definitely open to it. I really want to play Guardians of the Galaxy. I’ve heard lots of good stuff about it. Yeah, it’s unlocked on the old Epic Games Press account, Matthew. So we’ll be giving that a go. Well, technically it’s attached to the podcast emails. So, you know, if you need access, just give me a shout. But yeah, I have to give you the authentication code, but that should be fine. That’s good. Good chat. Good thing to talk about the podcast. Yeah. So that was I guess that was our kind of like vague news round up, Matthew. Did you have anything you want to ask me about computer games? Are you excited about the new season of Apex Legends? Do you want to hear me talk about that? The other day you tweeted that it was like a new release every time they did an update. I don’t really follow Apex Legends. I mean, what have they done that is so exciting to you? Well, they add they’ve added a new map basically. And so when they add a new when a Battle Royale adds a new map, it is basically like, you know, a whole other game has been added to it. Because, you know, these games are free. You can download that game on any any format you like. You can go explore that map. You can shoot people across that map. You can enjoy that. That’s that’s really cool. And this time they’ve built a kind of like a sort of an island the sort of map that’s got like NPCs on it. So it’s got like spiders and like these wolf wolves and stuff. So there are different things going on in terms of like enemies who can attack you. And it’s the biggest map they’ve ever done by like 15 percent or something like that. And they’ve done some fucking big maps in that game. The other thing is, it’s by the the lead designer of this one is the lead designer, who did World’s Edge, which is my favorite map of the game, which is the kind of lavery map that had the old party boat and train that I’ve discussed on this podcast in the past. Don’t need to go over that again. And on top of that, they added a new character as well. So they’ve added a character who can kind of basically teleport from one end of the map to the other and has a power that lets them see, who lets them track who killed a player. If you find a player’s body, basically, it will tell you on the map where their killers are. And so you can go hunt them based on that. So that’s quite interesting as an addition to it. Every time they do this, they sometimes… The other thing they’ve done is they’ve reinvented one of the characters who wasn’t very good and wasn’t being used. So her powers are completely different now. They’ll sometimes wholesale change a character, so they’re more viable in multiplayer. Like a bunch of my characters have gotten better over time because not as many people were using them, but they’ve buffed them, so they’re a bit more, like… worth having. So it’s hard to make update stuff sound super sexy, but the new map is the cool thing. It’s like dropping into a new space. When you play the game as much as I do, it’s just good to have a new place to go, basically, you know? These are like communal hangout spaces, like I say, because you spend so much time just wandering around empty parts of these maps, just chatting shit. So, yeah, it is like, again, in lieu of go on actual holiday this year, this is going to have to do. So, yes, Apex Legends, Matthew. It’s available on all good games consoles now. What you’re basically saying is that this is going to be your game of the year again? No, I’m going to avoid that because the listeners are probably fucking sick of it. I mean, I just imagine that people don’t listen to us to hear about live service games. Do you know what I mean? I feel like people probably like this podcast to get away from that. So, I’m not going to inflict it on them. And I haven’t been playing Destiny this year at all, actually. I’m glad you got out of that bad relationship. Well, 259 hours last year was probably enough. Well, the other thing is that I’ve got a Destiny tax bill coming up. So, I call it Destiny tax, because basically, like, you have to buy a new expansion every year to have all the stuff. And it’s like, I think it’s like 80 quid this year, the bill. The bill’s gone up, you know? They need to put like, like the energy cap, there needs to be like a Destiny cap, I think, on the amount that I have to spend on it. But yeah, to get everything, I think it’s like 80 quid, the new edition they’ve got for it. So, yeah, it’s just the way it is. But yeah, I will probably play it, just because the people I play Apex with are so into Destiny that they’re kind of like, I think they’re always up for me diving back into it and eventually I’ll just have to, you know, pay the piper and get on with it. So yeah, that’s a good relationship to have in a game. A healthy relationship in a game. Yeah, very much so, yeah. And I’m excited about playing Age of Empires 4, actually, which I’ve downloaded, and I think that’ll be comforting. I’m a big Age of Empires guy, I know you famously hate strategy games, Matthew, because you can’t do them. I genuinely didn’t know this about you. Yeah, I mean, I’ve talked about Command and Conquer a bit before on this podcast. But yeah, Age of Empires, obviously, you know, like many people, sort of, it’s a very, like, they’re very 12-year-old boy-friendly games, these, because they just let you build loads of units and then, like, tear down a bunch of castles, which is very important to 12-year-old boys. Yeah. For reasons I can’t really explain. But yeah, so I’m excited about that one. I am going to make this the Forza, as well, that I stay up to date with, that I’m, like, playing it as other people are playing it, because I’ve missed that bow each time. So if I just play this one, I feel like I’ll be good, plus it’s just going to be on Game Pass, so that’s good. Like you, as well, I’m excited about Halo. I think that they’ve done a really good marketing campaign, actually. I think the idea that they let the multiplayer do the speaking first and then only showed the campaign when they were really ready to show some cool shit, that was a good strategy. Plus they put a beard on that Craig guy, etc. So yes, there we go Matthew, some games chatter there. Anything else to add or shall we move on to the next section and discuss making a magazine? Let’s move on. Alright, good, it’s over, goodbye. Goodbye. Okay, welcome back to The Back Page, or as it’s now known, The Game Pie Podcast for Season 2. So that’s exciting. Like, what can people expect? Have I been buffed like an Apex Legends character? Yes, you’ve actually been replaced with… Oh, shit. We’ve basically just recruited a young, sexy YouTuber to replace you, and that’s good. And I’ve been replaced too, actually, with one of the other Sam Roberts who are in the games industry, the one who used to work for IGN. He will now be on this podcast. Oh, well, it was fun when it lasted. I think so. I wish them well. So, yes, what can people expect from year two, Matthew? It makes me think of that Simpsons 138th episode spectacular. Magic powers. Wedding after wedding after wedding. What do you think people can expect in year two of this podcast? More poorly remembered anecdotes. Probably fewer of those though, because we’ve done so many of them on these episodes. More guests with bad mics. Try and work out who Matthew’s taking a swipe at there. That’ll be fun for you. I really appreciate all the guests who have come on, however, the mic situation. Well, I mean, there is a but. Of course. Thanks for your time, but not your microphone. Some of the episode ideas I want to do in year two or just riff them off, but we’ve got the best games of the rest of the years to do. We’ve got to get up to 2019 on that one and then go backwards to 2001, which I want to also force Matthew to do at some point. More drafts. Yep. We’ve got the Wii and the PS Vita drafts. Also the Game Pass Rival draft. We talked about that one. That’ll be good. Where big Sammy Holdings and Matthew Castle Productions will come up with their own rival version of Game Pass. You can imagine all the fun nonsense we’ll come up with off the back of that. What we’ll call it, etc. I can’t wait to hear what Matthew’s is going to be called. That’ll be good. Yep. Probably more discussion of JC’s Kitchen. Best Final Fantasy games. We want to do a Witcher pod next year. I might finally play Red Dead Redemption 2. Maybe we can talk about that at some point. I think we should do best Nintendo Switch games at some point, Matthew. Then we can do that as a revised list down the line when there’s more of them to talk about. So, let’s get on with this podcast then, after an hour of waffle. So, we’re going to talk about making a games magazine in this section. So we’re going to go through it from week one to four, which roughly tracks the kind of cycle of how a games magazine gets made. There’s no trade secret-y stuff here. It’s more like what we remember of the kind of creative process and the kind of weird stuff that can happen along the way while you’re trying to get it done. So let’s start with week one, Matthew. The last magazine has finished and the new magazine has begun. What do you do? We go to the pub, which is probably a big mistake because I would say the theme of making a magazine is making the same mistakes over and over again. Every month you make the same mistakes, which makes you have a horrible deadline and then you kind of recover when you should be getting into it and not making the same mistakes. And hilariously, I didn’t learn this over like 10 years. But now I look back on it, it’s so obvious that that is 100% the case. So yeah, I don’t know about you, but NGamer, we’d finish an issue and then the next day would basically be an offsite planning meeting, as we used to call them. Oh, what? You just went to the pub for an entire day? At lunch, definitely at lunch and then, yeah, that would probably be it for the rest of the day. Wow, yeah, that never happened actually, in my experience, like, definitely like going to the pub the day of deadline, like the day it’s over, or maybe the next day, but like, not during work hours, admittedly. So that’s like, you know, my, you know, I was in charge, I should have instigated that as a kind of policy. But yeah. Yeah. So that was quite an important part of it. I mean, that morning, so the first bit of work I would have done, you know, as like a staff writer or a section editor would be putting together the reviews list for the issue. So I’d be looking at basically what was what was happening. Again, another theme of these things is putting together the dream of what you want to happen and then basically navigating your way to the sad reality of what does happen four weeks later. Yeah, that’s basically it. Like, here’s an interesting thing about games magazines, right? And this applies to film magazines and anything as well that’s like anything that’s responsive that has to be up to date in terms of like what it’s covering. So you can’t really be certain from day one what games magazine is going to look like. However, there are other magazines where you can absolutely be certain of what it’s going to look like. So my ex actually used to run a 3D magazine. And she was slightly horrified that when I was working in games, I didn’t have any idea what I was doing on day one for like that issue. Whereas she had the entire issue commissioned before she even started like before she even finished the last one. And that’s because in 3D art, you’re not tying it to film releases and stuff. You’re just doing tutorials or whatever. So I think fundamentally, there’s a difference in like one type of magazines just easier to make scheduling wise than the other. And games magazines are just never easy because you’re always like beholden to preview events and when review code is going to come in and stuff like that. You want it to be as up to date as possible. You want to even if it goes down to the why you want to have the review of that big game. And so that fundamentally makes it reactive and challenging thing to put together. So yeah, that’s one thing that comes to mind, Matthew. But I like you when I was on X260 as a games editor, I too would do the same thing of being like scoping out what can be in the preview section and what could be in the review section. And yeah, that was reasonably fun. But like you say, yeah, it gets whittled down. Suddenly your lead preview is no more. And a game that you’re not entirely convinced by becomes the lead preview. And yeah, your entire review section falls apart. And suddenly you’re doing four pages on MX versus ATV or whatever. You know what I mean? Yeah, I used to feel a bit bad because part of it as well is like calling around PRs to try and get like code. Or you know, you have your list of games, you know, you have your list of stuff. I mean, this goes for like all the way up to being the editor where you, you know, you have like wide, you know, they’re having the same conversations on day one about like the cover that your reviews editor is having about reviews, you know, code or your game editor is looking at previews or whatever. Everyone is having the same thing. And I used to feel a bit bad that like my relationship with a lot of these people was just that phone call every four weeks to basically load them up with all the stuff I wanted. It’s me again with my obligatory monthly call, you know, we’re not really pals. We don’t really know each other at this point, but I’m just going to be asking for stuff, some stuff, and then I’ll be back in four weeks time. I always felt that was a little odd. You underestimate how well liked you are, I think, in games media. Sometimes as well, it takes years to build up those relationships, you know, it’s like it happens over. There are some PRs now I’ve known for like, you know, more than a decade, for example, and I feel like fairly confident about just knocking on their door and stuff. So I think you’re probably undervaluing yourself there, but I totally get it. It becomes a bit more like these are the things I need to solve and less kind of cheerful preamble. Yeah, I think that’s I remember that too. Another thing about the early part of games magazines, week one, is when you write all of your sort of like non-timely pages. So I think the big reason that magazines have like a back section that’s usually got some retro stuff in there or some stuff that’s not particularly timely is because you need something to commission on day one. So your life isn’t like a living hell later on. Because if the whole thing is made up of reviews and previews, it’s all like a roll of the dice. Whereas having pages you could control, very welcome. Is that how you kind of saw that, Matthew? Yeah, but which raises the question of like, why wasn’t that stuff commissioned to be in on day one? Well, sometimes I did get ahead of it sometimes on PC Gamer. Or like, you know, Andy, for example, would roll off of an issue early and I’d be like, oh, hey, can you go write a retrospective on SWAT 4 or whatever? You know what I mean? Like, I could get ahead of that stuff sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. Could you? Yeah, we were always very bad at that. Even though, you know, it was designed to be written by anyone, I always really liked it to be written by in-house staff. I like the regular things to have more of a regular voice. I leant on freelancers a lot more for preview events or reviews, which was mad. So the sections that were designed for easy writing, I definitely made more work, which if I was doing it again now, I’d probably be less precious about it. I think that, like, I take your point though, but no, I was always the same. I always wanted my team to pick up a retrospective or whatever, then every now and then you’d give them a break. So that’s week one then, the planning side of things, Matthew. As an editor, what did, like, selecting a cover always look like early in the cycle for you? Again, a conversation I wish I’d started two weeks early every time, but, like, when you should be having that conversation, you just do not have the bandwidth to ever have that conversation. For me, the big discussion was always, can we make something work with something we don’t particularly have, or do we go with something lesser that we can make happen? That’s basically the big dilemma I feel a lot of editors are constantly facing. If someone comes to you with good access to something not amazing, or bad access to something great, and there is a fair amount of umming and ah-ing, you may even mock up different things to get a feel for which one you’re going for. I remember the early part of the mag, there were two different deadlines for covers and packaging. That’s the big motherfucker, really, because what happens inside the bag can go a bit later, but what happens on the bag, you have to lock down, and that’s the stuff that’s going to be out there. And I feel like, particularly on LXM, locking enough cover hits for that wallet two weeks into an issue, that was always a huge challenge. I think that because I worked on a mix of mags that had bags or wallets and those that didn’t, where you don’t have that wallet, it is easier to have more maneuverability to be like, what’s our big thing? And like, often you’ll find that the companies don’t have the artwork ready for your wallet deadline. So you end up kind of like using a logo, and then, you know, inside the bag that you’ll see the actual artwork, because you get it a bit later on. I had that a couple of times, you know. It’s this whirlwind of different deadlines, and different deadlines mean different things for the mags, because there’s your wallet deadline. So you know, that’s the stuff the public is going to see. So, you know, it has to reflect what is inside the magazine, which you’re only halfway through making. You have the cover deadline, which obviously is dictated by what your cover game is. You have the final deadline where you’ve got a bit of maneuverability around other stuff around the outside. Really annoying when you manage to squeeze something amazing in, but it’s not reflected on the wallet, because you didn’t know about it at the time. For me, like, week two is that maelstrom of endless deadline juggling and making sure the different bits are happening for the different timings. It’s pretty stressful. Week two for me. So when you start a magazine, you make a thing called a flat plan, which is basically just like mapping out your sections with little labels on each page saying what’s on each page. And the reason I think that indie games are like a match made in heaven for games magazines is because unlike games publishers who have like, you know, very concrete marketing plans of like when things roll out for different games. So, you know, when you see a trailer roll out and stuff, that’s been planned months in advance on it. With indie games, people just want you to write about their game. So you know, they’ll you’ll contact a developer and they’ll be like, I can either send you a build or they can give you an interview quote so they can give you some screenshots. Like it’s quite straightforward to sort out. So on PC Gamer in particular, I became quite big on leaning into having like lots of one and two page indie previews, Matthew, just to kind of like look into the blockbusters. Did you ever get into the pattern of doing that? You benefit from being like the absolute sort of indie heartlands of PC. Harder on definitely Nintendo, Xbox, there was like I did Xbox stuff so we could we could have a bit of that. I mean, what was kind of useful over the especially the later years is because indie was becoming you know, so big, you were getting some quite big names from you know, AAA shifting back into indie. So even if like the game itself wasn’t particularly something you were wild about, you could get quite good access to some good names who were better known and you could maybe spin out some stuff like that. I think lots of people do that now. It’s where a lot of these like big series retrospectives comes from. You know, it’s basically all these people who’ve kind of left the left the mothership and are now kind of free to talk about things once their their non disclosure agreements are up. But the big thing in Nintendo was the fans filled so many gaps for us, like people doing interesting stuff. We had a large section in Nintendo Gamer, which was like World of Nintendo. There was always World of Nintendo in NGamer, but there was like 10 Nintendo happenings at the front, which was like six pages of just really nice classy stuff fans are doing. And like Nintendo fans were so sort of fervent that you could rely on them to make nice stuff. You weren’t just putting in like, no offence to the kids, but you weren’t just putting in like crappy sketches that children are drawn of Mario, you know. It was kind of like, here’s someone who’s made like a legitimately nice like, you know, wood carving of Wario or something, you know, and it had like beautiful photography and you could go on people’s Etsies and find all these interesting products. Yeah, stuff like that. So you know, we could really lean into that. We did it on O&M as well. You know, let the fans have like 10 pages of the Mac because they make such professional looking stuff. That was fine. Couldn’t do that on OXM, Xbox and Sony. I just don’t think have the fans doing that kind of stuff. Yeah, for sure. I just imagine as well that you went all those kiddies drawings because you found some better stuff. Just go into a big pile and you set it on fire and go. We didn’t really have that kind of readership. I think our readership skewed older. Like, we very rarely received any kind of pictures from our readers. We got emails, if that. We used to do this thing where we’d go on DeviantArt and get really nice professional drawings from Nintendo things. It was called Ganon’s Gallery and the kind of gimmick was it was all being critiqued by Ganondorf from Zelda. And so it’d be like this really nice piece of art and then it would be a little picture of Ganondorf saying like, oh yes, exquisite brushwork. And then the joke was, if it was ever something to do with Link, he’d be like, disgusting, I hate it. You know, bleh, bleh, I’m being sick, you know, sick noises, that kind of stuff, which always used to make me laugh. Yeah, I mean, it’s not dissimilar to the ethos of this podcast really, when we do our likes of Gamescore. Yeah, I like the bullshit around the edges. That’s kind of what makes it a magazine a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, let’s think. Week two. So try to sort out your covers around this time. On our future, editors just had the autonomy to just pick their covers out, right? It’s one of the things I really liked about working at Future. So PC Gamer, I made loads of choices, and it was good. But yeah, there’s just always such a rollercoaster thing of not knowing whether something will fall perfectly. They’ll be like, okay, there’s a preview event happening at the end of week three of your cycle. And you’re like, okay, I can make that work. That’s fine. Then the preview event moves back a week and you’re like, oh, fuck. And that sort of thing determines whether a cover lives or dies, basically. If it’s not an event, it’s you’re waiting for the screenshots or the interview to come back deep breath. Are we going to have enough to fill the eight pages we’ve put aside for it? And then it’s like four screens and you’re like, fuck. Or you get the interview back and it’s like, you know, one line answers to 10 questions they haven’t answered the other half and then you’re just like, well, we’ve sent that wallet. We’ve committed to it. Yeah. Here we go. And you curse them. You curse them and you’ll say, I’ll never ever work with this person again. And lo and behold, you’re signing up next year for the annual version of that game that shit on you last year and it shits on you again. You’re like, yes, sir. Please, sir. May I have another? Well, it’s always like a thing of like, what’s the best thing for the readership? That’s what you always ask yourself is. Yeah, it’s like finding the middle ground between, you know, what’s going to sell and like what’s yeah, what’s what will the readers care about? And then what do you think is good as an editor? As I discussed on that covers episode, so picking it could be fraught. I mean, honestly, I would say probably like 40% of covers that I worked on were like sorted by week two in terms of like what you had chosen would be the eventual cover. The rest, I would say probably happened in like the in the last two weeks of the issue. So, yeah, so week three, Matthew, that’s when it’s really hotting up. That’s when you kind of like getting most of your content in because by that point, you’ve commissioned a load of stuff to come in from freelancers. Your writers have just been working on that issue and sort of like in the run up. Deadline isn’t quite here yet, but it’s sort of on the horizon. What do you kind of remember about this part of the mag cycle? I mainly remember my production editor getting very nervous. The production editor, for people who do not know magazines that well, they’re basically prodding the text. They’re going through everything and fitting it to the page. They’re doing the quality checks, making sure everything’s working on the page, spelling, grammar, everything, style guide. They’re really working it up. It’s different from mag to mag, but the mags I’ve worked on, they often sort of manage the flow of things. They have in hand when stuff’s coming in, they’re making sure it’s not all getting too bunched up. But because of that, they’re also the person who doesn’t want you to fuck with stuff. On the flat plan, because every time you move anything, it causes so many kind of ripples. When you’ve got lots of references to other things on the mags, where it’s like, see page, blah, for this. And every time you move something, all that changes, all your content pages changes. There’s so many little things that can kind of knock on. If you ever got a magazine where the page numbers are wrong, that’s definitely because someone shifted the pages around, rather than didn’t notice it in the first time. So their job is to stop you from kind of riffing, which you’re kind of probably going to start doing at this point, because better stuff is coming along, and you want to start cramming it in. It’s sort of my memory of this point in the mag. Yeah, if you think of the entire process of making a magazine, it’s like a work pipeline basically. So you’ve got a production editor, and you’ve got an art editor or a designer, and you want to make sure that they’ve both always got stuff to do. So if you’re not careful, the first two weeks can end up being really quiet, and then the last two weeks end up becoming absolutely fucking chocker. So they go from zero work to triple the work they can really handle, and that’s what you want to avoid. Whether you can or not, realistically, I don’t know. I think making magazines is just tough. It just is. To get the best stuff in does require being timely a lot of the time, and it just causes headaches, so it’s quite stressful. But yeah, it gets the best product. I’ve always been quite lucky in that I’ve always had ProdEds who can also write. When we were on NGamer, to start off with, Chrissy and Charlotte were production editors, and they both wrote loads of really great stuff, lots of review roundups, that kind of stuff there, and really helped. I often found with mags that the more consistent the voices could be in terms of here are your five core writers, the better. Having them doing those little bits was always really nice. If they ever got quiet, they could start generating more work for themselves. They probably shouldn’t have been, but it’s fun, isn’t it? It’s fun writing about games. One massive thing on PC Gamer is that Tony Ellis, who was a long-time production editor, was basically the most important person in how the writing within the magazine actually read, because he wasn’t just a guy who made it fit on the page. He would basically rewrite articles to make them better, and he was so valuable for that. He was basically being a deputy editor and sub-editor and production editor at the same time. He would turn something quite average into gold, basically, and the reason why PC Game was so consistent when I was working on it is because I had him to depend on. Production editors are just unsung heroes, really. Tony gets talked about quite a lot by different writers in the games industry because I think he’s taught a bunch of people how to become better writers, essentially. He’s a very valuable figure. Of course, our editors are the other unsung heroes, Matthew. I feel like we’ve not talked about them too much when we’ve done these episodes, but the patience it takes to wait for the right stuff to come in and then sometimes the pace at which a cover feature has to come together. It can be absolutely shotgunned out, but then you still get absolute gold from these amazingly talented people, you know? Yeah, that was always really amazing. You’ve upselld this so well compared to what the kind of crap it actually is. As long as it looks like a magazine feature, it almost doesn’t matter if it doesn’t read like a magazine feature. People don’t always notice. NGamer was particularly nightmarish because in Mags you basically have a lot of templated pages, which are just, you know, like your reviews, previews. I don’t think it’s too unfair to say a lot of them is just kind of like drop the text and images in and they’re kind of designed to be good to go. But NGamer had like so many bespoke pages, so many bespoke elements, even like the reviews pages, the amount of character art on them. It was super hectic, you know. It was sort of semi-designed to be a bit more like your kind of Japanese Mags, your sort of Famitsu, which is just like an explosion of just chaos everywhere. So that was a Mag. That was like super work intensive on like everyone. And definitely the Mags that I worked on as I went along, like whenever we redesigned, we always sort of simplified as much of it as possible. And then you’d have a few, you had a couple of features where like the art ed would really get to do their thing. Doing captions is another thing. Like Tony used to do those on PC Gamer, but like when I had to do them on GameStamp, they must have been, I’ve did so many bad captions as an editor. It was just comical really. But like… So it’s lovely when you get like just, you can really tell when someone just doesn’t give a shit and has phoned it in when it’s just kind of like, there are shots in the game. And you’re like, oh, come on. The thing you know, there’s a picture of a shot. My last resort would always be like a really weak source bit of sort of comedy, like in quote marks, like, let’s say a character is pointing a gun and he’s in like, I don’t know, let’s say he’s in like a shopping centre. And it’s like, oh, I can’t believe they ran out of toilet roll or something like that. That’s just obviously terrible. But it’s the easiest thing to do is that you’re basically saying what you see. And I’m like, is this content? But I feel like I did a lot of those captions, you know. If you write for Edge magazine, like their captions are like super long, like they’re like mini paragraphs, you can legitimately say something important in those captions. So I feel like, oh god, I’ve really got to come up with something good for this. But you can’t just have a man with a gun saying, I can’t believe they’ve run out of toilet roll. I don’t think that would fly in Edge. I feel like I should read this Dying Light 2 piece and see what kind of captions you came up with for that. It might give me a good cross section of how you think about this stuff, Matthew. Yeah, I’m not great at captions. I’m okay at little weird jokes we used to cram in around NGamer, like the footnotes, or the little coloured spots we’d have on character art. Little bits and bobs there, but when I give me 20 words, do I say something meaningful or do I try and make a joke about this guy looks like he needs a shit or something? They’re always the bit that came last and I was always the most tired by that point. And you could just tell, some people are great captions writers, I was never one of them. I struggle with it too. There were some other weird sort of minutiae on PC Gamer. We had the big word, which anyone who’s read PC Gamer will see that when you get to the reviews section, there’s in massive black text a big word at the top that says, it’s like a kind of pun, usually a one word pun that relates to the game. And they were really hard to come up with. The best one I ever came up with was one that never fit, which was when Forza Horizon 3, I think it was, had that Hot Wheels DLC. And like, I think like all of the courses in the game were like orange because it was like the plastic tracks that you get when you’re using Hot Wheels cars. And Orange Is The New Track was the one I came up with. And that was so good. I think like, I think like a really dumb one we came up with, it was for a game, it was like a Spelunky like game. And I think we, me and Phil between us, came up with Sick Cave and The Rad Deeds, which was just like genuinely terrible, but amazing at the same time. So those were hard to come up with. Those are some, that’s just some of the stuff to come up with. And to do, you know, it’s one of those things that you don’t really notice it when it’s done badly, but when it’s done well, it kind of has a real impact. I always used to feel the pressure because it was, that was the stuff people used to sort of say about, you know, the NGamer family line, you know, N64, NGC. It was all the crap around the edges that people fell in love with. So it was kind of like, oh man, I really want this stuff to kind of like sing, you know. Sometimes you can overdo it and you’re, you’re striving so hard for like a joke or a bit or whatever, that it can seem too try hard and it just, it lands horribly on the page. So yeah, still to this day, a very delicate balancing act. So week four, Matthew, the final week of the issue. This is just like always so, so stressful. And I don’t think there was any mag I worked on that didn’t have like late nights. Like I know that some editors could manage their time very well, so they didn’t have late nights. I was either was on that editor or the magazine required too much last minute stuff for that to be possible. I found that like my attention span is extremely good for like writing and editing on magazines. I didn’t think I didn’t really waste time during the day. I was always working, but it just inevitably piles up. What’s your kind of memory of the final week of working on magazines? I was a really close page checker. I was very, very particular, probably too much of a control freak about wanting to, you know, personally sign off every page. You know, some people would give, you know, if their dep head had signed stuff off, that was fine. But we were often so up against it, my dep heads were writing that week. So, yeah, my memory is just is, is A, the manicness of the office, but also just taking home big piles of like slippy A4 slippy folders with printouts of pages, heaps of these bags. I remember them because they were, I called them slippies, they were really slippy, used to have piles of them. They’re always fucking slipping off my table at home and desks. And I was always picking these fuckers up. It’s a memory of Deadline. When you’re really stressed, the last thing you want to do is be picking up all this shit off the floor. That happened a lot. I was a bit of a notorious rewriter in terms of like tweaking stuff and not necessarily sending stuff back, but massaging stuff. You know, I wanted the editor’s hand to be on everything, which is why we had loads of good writers where you’d be reading their stuff and there’d suddenly be like a really shitty dad joke in the middle of it because that was me. I used to feel terrible about like inserting my crap into like, you know, Simon Parkins work or something. You know, it’s just a completely unreasonable thing to do. But you did it anyway. But I did it anyway because I was in charge, god damn it. A lot of late nights checking over these pages. Every different mag has different things that stick with you. I mean, genuinely, like my lasting memory of O&M is having to constantly copy and paste the E with the accent of Pokemon because I didn’t know the keyboard shorthand for it. So I’d have to find an E with an accent and then copy and paste it. I was always having to do that. You have some weird font things where like if you italicize game titles, it’s not just a case of hitting an italicized button. Sometimes you have to pick a special font with like a different weighting because it looks funny when it’s italicized. That’s really nerdy. But like, honestly, so much of deadline is spent pulling off these like quite arcane processes of making very tiny things change on the page. It gets us really, really granular. One thing I just recalled from that was it was never a simple case. On PC Game released, it was never a simple case of italicizing a font. It was like you had to select the words you wanted to italicize and then pick the degree angle at which the words would be tilted. Oh, Jesus. And like it was, I think like when we had the first sort of run at a redesign, like one of the new fonts was like 9.12 degrees or something and it was like, look, this has to be 10 or like we’ll all go mad typing that out every time. So that was one thing. InDesign as a program is like sort of catastrophically complicated. It’s a program I used for like eight years, I think. And then I still never really learned about like 80 percent of what it does because it was just so it was so complicated. And I was that’s why I like Design as a Wizards because you’d see them, you know, take this program and just make gold out of it. But yeah, I just found that so spectacularly hard to use all the time. But yeah, that’s sort of that odd ephemera. Like is this actually at 12 degrees instead of 10 degrees, you know, looking out for these really specific odd things? Weird things are like numbers were in a different font to the text because we didn’t like the way the numbers looked in the font we’d used and stuff like that. And you’re like, every time you hit a number, you have to click on a menu a couple of times, stuff like that. You drive me up the wall like people because that was quite easy to miss even for like a good product. And you were just constantly having to check. And sometimes you’d be looking at something going like, is that wrong? And you wouldn’t until you actually went into the menu, be like, oh, yeah, that’s wrong. That’s how minor these things were. And I don’t think anyone noticed, though, I will say, and this isn’t me being this isn’t me being like a snide shit or anything. But when you see like fan mags, you do notice all that shit not being right. You know, when it hasn’t had necessarily like, you know, the designer’s eye of someone who’s designed magazines for 20 years and a prod head who’s been doing it for 10 years, like my eye is super drawn to that. I don’t know if it’s because I’m so used to close reading magazines or if everyone’s eyes drawn to those those things. But that’s always the stuff that jumps out of me when you get like Patreon mags and stuff. I’m always like, oh, yikes. Like these italics are horrible or like the widows on this paragraph are just fucked and things like that. There’s some stuff I just had a blind spot for on on PC game. I think I would miss missing words would be like probably the most common error of my ones. I think just because a tired deadline brain can sometimes fill in the blanks on your reading, or at least I found that a little bit. So those are more common errors in mine. Not too many of them, but like at least one or two that I remember that I see it into my memory. Generally speaking, Deadline was just like a kind of rush to the finish. Some of the stuff I reflect on like the cover I did where I was like, I don’t know how I did that in retrospect. Well, the answer was I had a good Deputy Editor, Phil Savage, but this we did a Star Wars Battlefront 2 cover. I went on the trip. I sent the I sent the cover feature back from the trip before I got on a flight. And when I landed, I think I went straight to the office and that was deadline day. That’s how tight the timeframe was. It all happened in like the last three days of the magazine cycle. The thought of that doing something like that now makes me so tired because like, you know, I guess it must have seemed theoretically possible to me at the time. But now the prospect of flying to a different country, seeing this game at Star Wars Celebration, which is a really fucking busy and loud event, and then like writing it up on the day, sending it back and then getting on a plane, flying back and sending a magazine, just pure madness. You know what I mean? Yeah. But I did that probably like five or six times throughout my. I did page checking and sending while I was at Gamescom. That was pretty mad. Yeah. So I had just a huge pile of stuff and I was checking because they were all chocker back at there. And I remember like we’d rented like an Airbnb apartment. And I remember the first night, which Gamescom hadn’t started, but I had so much work that I just had to stay in this flat. And they’d all gone to a Mafia 3 like announcement event. And they all came back and they’d all been like, I think it had been done up like some kind of gangster club or something. So they’d all been like drinking whiskey and smoking cigars and shit. You just got to imagine like four of the most opulent smelling dudes coming into this flat when I’m sitting at this kitchen table with my red pen, you know, circling all the twos that hadn’t been done in the right font and just thinking like, man, my life is so fucked compared to theirs. Because I think some of them were like, you know, website people at this point. So they just didn’t have any of that bullshit to deal with. That’s the thing when I moved into it when I’ve such a lot of respect for print people because that deadline doesn’t really have an equivalent on websites, maybe like something like a big launch like an Apple launch or something like that. I would see the tech radar a lot really. Black Friday. Oh, yes. Black Friday as well. Yeah. But like there’s something because of how often Deadline was it was 13 times a year. That’s like it’s an enormous feat to pull off for sure. Yeah. I was kind of like felt slightly gutted. I missed out on this sort of cigars kind of Mafia 3 event. It sounded fun even though if I would have looked preposterous there with my rucksack and my super dry shirt just smoking a cigar. But yes, the last thing I want to ask about with the… No, I want to see a guy with a man bag holding a cigar. The last thing I want to ask about Matthew was eating on deadline. I feel like deadlines were so bad for my diet because you kind of go from potentially a week of like fast food or like quick food or microwave food into probably one or two days where you’d go out with a team to the pub and have like probably a shitty burger and like eight beers. So like, I know, so my body just declined as an editor because I was just like, you know, I didn’t, I think like I emotion, I eat emotionally basically and deadline just kind of brought out the worst in my eating habits. Was it the same for you as well? Yeah. And I think, I think it’s something we definitely bonded over when I, when I was back in the bath office on OXM, you know, of all the other editors, I was like, here’s someone who’s on the same page as me, you know, we’re both like stress eaters. I can, I can identify a fellow person. I think, you know, we, I don’t know if our deadlines aligned, but I just remember a lot of late nights in the office where it was, you know, us and you, rather than any other particular editors. So we definitely like connected over that. I mean, yeah, I mean, I eat terribly 24 seven, but yeah, on deadlines, it was particularly bad. I tell you what, it wasn’t in London. In London, I was so hard up because I moved to London from Bath and I basically wanted to live somewhere that reminded me of Bath, which in London costs you way more than what a magazine editor is paid. And so I had this really nice room in a really nice house in West Hampstead, but I was basically like bankrupt the whole time. So like, I genuinely got so bad where like, I couldn’t even afford the tube. So I had to walk everywhere and it was like, a 50 minute walk from like the office to home every day. So it was actually like, I was surprisingly trim, you know, back then, that was like one time I was healthy, but just out of like poverty rather than choice. And I came back to Bath and things were a bit more comfortable. And then it was just like, you know, the Bath building, the Bath future offices sort of almost touch a subway, which is basically bad news for me. Yeah. Oh my god. I ate like an absolute hog. Yeah. It’s just amazing. But it’s funny because I never saw other editors experience the same thing. Like people were either better at compartmentalizing their sort of stress, or they just, they just weren’t, they just didn’t have the same habits that I did of eating. Like I just, but I’ve never seen like, I never really saw other editors just like ballooning weight, like I did over the course of like editing a mag. Like there’s just, yeah, I think I mentioned before, there’s a photo of me in like 2013 when I was on Games TM where I looked quite trim and pretty good. And there’s a photo of me in like 2014 with like big man boobs outside a bath pub. And I was just like, what the fuck happened in that year? And like, yeah. I mean, there’s a reason like, I pretty much use one of my O&M headshots to this day, even though it does not reflect what I look like. I think it’s quite shocking when I turn up in the flesh. There are only two angles at which I will allow myself to be photographed at this point. Yeah. It’s kind of like a Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now situation. Or Stellan Scar’s gone in June, you know, that’s like a big energy. So that’s kind of, I think we’ve kind of like wrapped it up there with Matthew. I feel like I’ve shared every thought I’ve basically had now on making magazines apart from in the next section, when we talk about things that can go wrong. Do you have anything else you want to add there or do you think we’ve covered the process pretty well? I will say while it was rough, the process did massively bond me with the people. Doing a deadline is a hellish thing for a lot for a group of six people to go through together. And you do come out with a certain amount of like instant respect. And we still had a lot of fun. There were a lot of laughs. It just there would be points where it was just like, fuck, we’ve got to get this done. And the sense of sending a last document, we had this system where like it was colour coded based on like whether things had been sent. And we’d just be like refreshing it until it changed to the colour, which said like, these documents have basically, they’ve been accepted at the printers or whatever. And refreshing it and then the flat plan would all ping green. Everything was done. And then you were like, great, let’s go and waste two days and start the hell process again. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that I love those two days. Fuck, I love those two days so much. They’re pretty good. I think is as well like, you know, this this feels like such a bygone era now. But I loved sending the mag and going to the pub with a piece of game a lot. Like have good memories of going to the Hobgoblin and Bath, which has been replaced with a quite a naff looking wine bar. It used to be quite grungy pub that did a cider called Beasting, which was like 8% or something like that, something nuts. And then we just like drink too many of those and then put money in the jukebox. And it was a really good time. And yeah, I really like that. That was like, you know, like you say, it’s a real kind of like bonding exercise. I think magazines just give you such a work ethic as well. Like I just think that the kind of straight nature of how stuff has to come in is just really good for you as a kind of professional, as a working professional. Like it really kind of like you really learn to prioritize things and balance things and stuff like that, and then just like stay focused. So yeah, I like that. And then of course, there’s the golden moment where you get the magazine back, Matthew, which was when was that not never good? That was like a very specific endorphin rush of seeing it in the flesh for the first time. Right. That was always good. Yeah, it was always good. Maybe a couple of issues where you felt like, oh man, we hated that cover story so much. We hated having to do that for whatever reason, that when you see it, it’s like a wound opening up again. And you’re like, oh no, it’s Wayne Rooney with a, but as a me. We didn’t want to see that fucker again. Yes. So that seems like a good point to pause it, Matthew. Let’s take a break. We’ll come back with 15 things that can go wrong while making a magazine. Only 15? Yes, that we could come up with this time. Bye-bye. Welcome back to The Game Pie Podcast, sponsored by Low Budget Gaming Headsets. That’s… Wouldn’t we be sponsored by a pie? That’s a good point. We’re sponsored by… Freybentos. Oh, that’s really cursed. Like, of all the pies, you had to pick the cheapest, nastiest pie. The crust is pretty good. How do you feel about Freybentos? We’re sponsored by Freybentos’ Cursed Pies. How do you feel about a Freybentos pie? I don’t know if I’ve ever had one. I’m a terrible snob. I am. I’m throwing around the name Freybentos without having any firsthand experience. It’s like, it’s not bad as like a poverty pie. It’s like- Well, it kind of is. It’s like a one pound pie, like, you know, or around that. And I ate it a lot when I was a staff writer. It’s just like, it’s, you know, when I was sort of living on sort of studentish kind of money. So like, yeah, I am, let’s just move on. I’m more of a pie minister pie. Pie minister’s got big like pie Tory energy though, I would say. We probably have to trim all of that. Oh, never mind. Oh, I’m keeping that in. That’s gold. I feel like I’m not really saying that pie minister’s like Tory. That’s, you know- Oh, well it is. It’s very Bath. It’s very Bath. Yeah, but Bath’s not that Tory, is it? It’s like a bit Tory. Maybe it’s that Lib Dem pie. Yeah, there you go. It’s a Lib Dem pie. Let’s do that and avoid- The Tory pie is the Game Pie, as we’ve already established. Yeah, which contains pheasant or a number of other unusual woodland creatures. Venison and kidneys. That does sound very British and cursed, when you just put it like that. And medieval, as you said on Twitter. So we’ve got a fun thing to fire through here. We thought we’d just go through 15 things that can go wrong while making a magazine. So I’ll start with one of mine, Matthew. Accidental duplication of a page. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but this only happened to me once. But it happened while I was on holiday in Amsterdam. And I was doing one of the things you can do in Amsterdam that you can’t do here. That sounds really salacious, doesn’t it? It’s not really. Go to Anne Frank’s house. So, yeah, basically, it wasn’t that, I’ll be honest. It was something else, just to kind of clear that up. And then like someone messaged me like, oh, there’s a page duplication error. And I was like, oh, fuck. And then Chris, the deputy editor, must be saying, oh, no, we’ve sorted it now. And I was like, oh, thank God. But there was like about 30 seconds on holiday where I had like a massive anxiety attack about it. So, yeah, that’s a thing that can, you know, maybe can happen. Unusual, but it can happen. Another one was, second one for me was spelling mistakes, missing words, formatting errors. I’ve mentioned this, but it is always heartbreaking to see a mag come back and it’s got like an error in it. I am, in the first, the full word, like the editor’s intro for the PC Gamer redesign issue, there’s a missing word in my intro. And I thought, oh, fuck, I’ve ushered in a new era of PC Gamer with an error. I just thought, when I saw that, I felt so defeated. But thankfully, they weren’t that common. Do you ever have much of these? I don’t think there was anything that was more reread and closely read than the wallet, which only had about 30 words on it compared to the rest of the mag. But God, I would read those words so many times over and over and over because that’s the stuff where if you make the error, all your peers will be will be taking the piss out of you for years as they do with, was it PSW, I believe, which had the infamous honk kong. That is famous. There’s also a car tosses back, wasn’t that another one? I think I saw Start Tours 1313 on an Imagine One once. That’s unfortunate, but yeah, so it happens. I don’t think I’ve had maybe one on the cover on PCGamer ever, but it is one of those things where you don’t want it to be so embarrassing it follows you around. Honk Kong definitely follows you around. Yeah, my first ever issue of OXM where I’d just taken over as the editor, in my editor’s intro, I got Respawn and Sledgehammer mixed up when I was talking about either Titanfall or the Call of Duty, the Sledgehammer I’m making. To this day, that’s quite annoying that here I am announcing myself as like, don’t worry, you’re in safe hands. And here’s me just blundering in with these mistakes. That wasn’t great. Oh yeah, it’s tough though, isn’t it? You know, it’s like, yeah, it’s difficult. But yeah, I totally get it. Plus, you know, it’s like one big amorphous Call of Duty blob now, isn’t it? It all just happens from like a big massive factory of loads of different studios. Yeah, so I like this first one you’ve got here, Matthew. A debug console needs an update for code to work. We have retail units, but we also had special debug consoles, which would play like early preview and review code. This became less of a thing as it went on. We never had a debug Xbox One, for example. I don’t know if they have them for PlayStation or not now, but we definitely had them for the Wii. They had a special green cover on them. We had a Wii U debug as well. So yeah, you could basically play stuff. But there was so much stuff that could go wrong with them because they had their own firmware updates that retail consoles didn’t have. And getting code in on time and then not being able to play it because everyone needed an update. This happened more in the 360 era. And I just remember being in the games cage a lot with various people on Games Master and PSM and Xbox World cursing that they had some amazing shit to play and their debug was fucking up and they couldn’t play it. Yeah. And it’s not funny, but it seemed funny at the time. The PS3 debug update thing, I tried so many times to actually just sit down and do it. Sometimes they’d send you it in the post and you’d put the disk in and you’d be like, oh, that works. But I think later on they were like, oh, yeah, you have to put on a memory stick, then plug it in and then do it. And that never fucking worked. I followed instructions to the letter and it wouldn’t fucking work. It wouldn’t fucking update. And getting a new game in and it being like, oh, yeah, you need this update to play it. And it’s like, why? All it’s going to do is add a fucking SingStar option to the XMB. Why the fuck does Army of Two need this to play or whatever? And it’s like that kind of bullshit. That was like the worst part of… Well, that’s one of the many bad things about using a PS3. But yeah, that was some mad bullshit. Debug units, what a trip. There were so many times I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. The Xbox was the same too. And it was just like, why did these things just auto update when you collect the internet? What the hell? Why are we doing this manually? Oh, a nightmare. But yeah, good one, Matthew. This next one’s pretty funny as well. This is a writer getting stuck on hard slash broken game. This only happened a couple of times, but you’ve got a massive review in and the person playing it just can’t get past a boss. I guess this is a phenomenon that kind of began to kick in more with the kind of the arrival of like From Software. I just remember there being almost like support groups for Dark Souls people in the office because they were all desperately just trying to get through this thing or play enough to be able to review it and getting their asses handed to them because at this point no one really knew how to play those games properly or how they really worked, you know. The worst thing about getting stuck on a review game is it’s not out. You can’t go online and get the infinite number of SEO guys. You’re just fucked. And maybe at a push you might send a desperate email to a PR going Help! I’m stuck! And hope that they might have an answer for you. I actually had to do that not too long ago when I got really stuck on The Outer Wilds. I had to email the developers that and I was just like I am so stuck on this game. Which was embarrassing. I mean, I don’t think it would hold a mag up massively. Like, I think there does be a point where you are like fuck it, it has to happen. You know, let’s just do it. But I have definitely had moments where I have felt the panic set in of like, oh no, if this keeps happening, you know, this is going to throw everything off. Always stressful. I would have found Returnal really hard to review for example. Oh god. Yeah, but I think they gave that to people. They previewed it as well. I think people had that for basically like a month. I think Sony is pretty good for this. Yeah, I think they’ve like been doing this for a while now. Just you get the code super early. You do previews and then you just do reviews. Like definitely it was kind of the same. So many games now are like designed for everyone to finish them. It’s very, very rare that you hit something which is actually like broken in some way. When I was doing reviewing Lords of Shadow 2, that had a really infamously shit instant fail stealth section. It got to a point where it’s like every time this happens, I’m taking one off the score until we get to the score of this game. Because I was so cross and I was just really, really worried I wasn’t going to be able to do it. I did eventually do it, but there’s so many people talk about the goat bit in Lords of Shadow 2 because of that fucking awful, awful moment in that game. It’s funny how you’re sort of like the world’s biggest Castlevania Lords of Shadow stan. I mean, apart from that section there, you discussed that series surely more than any other games writer on Earth, Matthew. That’s like a big deal for you, the Lords of Shadow series. Especially because I think Mercury Steam are meant to be like Rongans, or they’ve had some shady practices come out in terms of with Metroid Dread, like crediting some of their staff and things. So they’re not like, they’re not the coolest people to be a big, to be a stan of. But, you know, that’s the stan’s lot, I guess. Exactly. Famously, good, elegantly put. So, the next one Matthew, you’ve got here. Sixth one is PR massively under delivers screens. Assets are always just such a roll of the dice with making a magazine, aren’t they? Sometimes you’ll be like, oh, well, there’s only four screens, but is there some like concept art we can use to bulk it out? And like you hope that there is. But yeah, it’s sort of like you wonder, can I put one screenshot across an entire DPS? And then like we’ll just point to bits of it as annotations to make the, to disguise the fact that we don’t have many assets. That was quite a familiar experience. Yeah. The worst one for this was the worst. When we did a Mass Effect Andromeda cover, trying to stretch like a couple of shots of like a man jumping with his fist in the air with like lots of lens flare behind him. Just really not very good. Or screens that looked like they were just taken from the trailer, which they probably were. But the one positive with it, it’s not really positive because it affects someone else’s negatively, but it’s when someone offers something, you don’t take it, then you see someone else do the cover and then you see them have a really hard time of it. And you feel like, yeah, nice one, I made a great decision by dodging that. It’s a bit like letting someone else drink from the grails at the end of Last Crusade. You see them become the skeleton man, you’re like, haha, nice. There you go, we learned a lot about you there as a person. Yeah, this is definitely familiar. Sometimes it’s like, I guess we’ll use a couple of older screenshots to bulk it out because the access… I remember the one I worked on where we just didn’t have anything exclusive, I don’t think. Maybe we had two screens that were new and some new cover art. I’ve mentioned it before, it’s like an Assassin’s Creed 2 cover we did on X360 where I interviewed the weapons designer or something like that. Obviously, the weapons are very good in Assassin’s Creed 2, but they can’t necessarily give you the full scope of the game that a creative director could in an interview, but it was what we had, so we made it work. I just remember it being feeling like slightly hard work to try and get that into a full cover feature and then the assets not being very good. It’s like, do we have pictures of the weapons? Nope. Okay then. I’m glad to have interviewed this guy, but yeah, that can happen. What’s your next one here, Matthew? You get terrible interview questions back. This is the words equivalent of the bad assets, which is where an interviewer is at the key, is at the heart of your access to a cover game or any coverage and what you get back is just so bad that you don’t want to use it. You also feel kind of compelled to use it because fundamentally it’s the exclusive thing. Someone has helped you. Someone has gone to the lengths of getting you these terrible answers. The worst time we ever had this was on the… There was an anniversary issue of O&M. Was it a hundred issues? Maybe? Yeah, well anyway, and the kind of gimmick of the… The gimmick of the issue was that we wanted everyone to like write their dream features. So it’s basically whatever you want to do, let’s try and make it happen and use this anniversary. It’s the one where I did a big Shu Takumi interview. It’s the one where I interviewed Singh about… The ex-head of Singh about them closing down like the legacy of Hotel Dusk. They shot down your last window theory famously. Hey, but listen, that was still cool. It was a cool thing to happen. And I’m pretty sure one of the things Scribs wanted to do was… Joe Scribbles… was a cameo bit. Because Wonderful 101 had either just come out or was coming out. So we sent over basically the same kind of questions that we did to Shu Takumi to get Cameo to answer. And he literally answered them with like yes and no answers. And so we had these like this unusable interview. And I think we ended up putting it in a sidebar in the directory. Here’s this terrible interview from Cameo. And that was it. It sort of ran as a, well, we got this back and it doesn’t really belong here. So yeah, cheers for this, I guess. Yeah. I saw like something I kind of always did when I was working on magazines was like, okay, we’ve got an interview with a Japanese developer. If you’re not careful, if you only ask a few questions, you might get some really short answers. You never know when you might just get like a one line answer back that’s shorter than your question. So the thing I would always do to offset this was like ask like 20 questions or 25 questions, whereas where normally I might ask 10 or 15, you know what I mean? So yeah, kind of going for that sort of like volume sort of thing more than like, sort of like being totally certain I’m going to get good answers back. It’s just so different to being in person where you’ll get so much better answers when it’s going through like, you know, it’s been screened by different marketing people or whatever. It’s just bound to come out the other side, like not as good as it would be in person, you know. Yeah, I just, it’s just that we’d really like landed a couple of like winners with the other interviews with Japanese developers that month. Yeah. It’s just a bit, a bit disappointing. I think even like the PR who sent them over was like, good luck with this. Yeah, sorry. Have you, have you watched the, any of the Archipel stuff on Kamiya Balaway? I’ve watched the first part of it, yeah. It’s good, isn’t it? It’s fantastic so far. Yeah, it’s really good. But in that one, imagine he gave one word answer than that. He was like, tell me about your background. No. You know what I mean? Well, that’s, that’s, that’s the weird thing. In person, he’s a good interviewer. He’s like, you know, he engages. And even if you’ve got like, you’re barking up the wrong tree, I think he, he gives you some good stuff. I don’t know if we just caught him on an off day. But yeah, that Archipel documentary is so good. The stuff where he talks about, like, joining up and then going to the recruitment fair and seeing how much better all the stands were for the companies he didn’t join and him suddenly feeling really bad about his choice. Yeah, it was quite interesting how he bounced around between Namco and Capcom. That was some good stuff. I think the latest episode is about Viewtiful Joe, so I’ve got to listen to that. But, sorry, watch that. But yes, so it’s funny because I was trimming down my patrons a little bit recently because I had a few too many on the go. But I had to keep, had to keep it for Archipel. I thought, like, how would I feel if this no longer existed? I would think it sucks because this thing they make is so good, so I will keep backing it. That’s kind of what that sort of thing is for, so yeah. Okay, this is a very Matthew Castle specific one for number 8. Oh yeah, this is Nintendo announcing Nintendo Direct just before Deadline, which happened a lot of times because, as you know, Nintendo Direct’s kind of come out of nowhere and, like, the rumour mill, you know, often says, oh, I hear there’s going to be one next week. I’m so glad I’m not making a magazine now because there’s basically so many fibbers online basically pushing bullshit about Nintendo that I would constantly be wigging out that I’m about to miss something. Back then, that was less of a case. People were a bit better behaved. Yeah, so we used to have, yeah, a Nintendo Direct’s happening two days before Deadline. Do we just carve out eight pages in the mag? You know, is it going to be a Nintendo Direct where they announced Zelda, which did happen once, you know, or is it going to be a Nintendo Direct where it’s a Rabbids game? You know, it could be one of the two. Always a huge gamble. Some of the biggest rewrites we’ve ever done on mags have happened on O&M because of Nintendo Direct. Very, very stressful. My most stressful time with this was, it’s not for, actually, Nintendo. It’s not Nintendo related, but like, when the PS4 was revealed, Sony didn’t say what the event was. They just said it was a PlayStation showcase or something like that. We knew it was probably going to be the next-gen consoles because they were flying people out. I think we sent one person over for the entire company. But we knew that it was probably going to be a big deal. But I don’t even think the PRs knew it was PS4 until they got on the ground in New York at the event. So it was kept ultra-secret. But this meant that what happened was, we basically had to send the bag the day after the event. So we had a bag that didn’t have anything on it, really. And we hinged it all on the idea. Because it was about 20 pages of the mag we kept to one side as well. And we would have had to fill that if we didn’t, if the PS4 wasn’t real. It happened, luckily. And we just stuck the PlayStation logo on there, PlayStation 4. And then we just pushed it off to press, basically. And then had to generate 20 pages on every part of the PS4 in about, I think, four or five days. Something absurd like that. We delayed the bag as long as we could, basically. So this next one, Matthew, you choose to make an incredibly complicated cover treatment. So when mags have gold foil on them and stuff like that, that’s a whole process and often requires a different… You kind of have to layer the foil on top. It’s a whole complicated thing. It’s not that interesting to talk about. But there’s always the fear that the gold will be slightly off-center. So when it arrives… That’s more it. And the more you do, the more complicated it comes. This only sticks out to me because we did the Rhythm Paradise issue, which had fluoro inks, it had gloss, it had a bit of matte on it as well, and it had a hole cut in the middle. So certain things lined up with an inside cover. Probably the most complicated cover instruction I saw while I was at Future. And our poor art editor, Milf, was juggling ten different files that if any of them were off, the whole thing would have been completely fucked. And it just broke him. I’ve never seen someone more stressed out about their particular thing. And it’s something I could have no input on at all. But I just want to be able to know that that issue was super hard to make. But worth it. I remember we did a World of Warships or something and there was a hole cut in the cover. So it was kind of like a porthole. I don’t think we had artwork to start with. The artwork came in the end. So it was like, okay, we’ll basically build a fake porthole that’s looking onto the cover. And it’s like, yeah, just hoping that that circle comes out alright in the printers, that it’s not ripped when it gets to the shelves and all that stuff. And that someone doesn’t stick a pamphlet in for a mobile phone company, which then sits between the cover and the whole thing. Yeah, that can happen. There’s also things like having to… We did a couple of issues and it went in like a double bag. And it was like two different bags joined together. And you had to orient it, make sure that you oriented it. So the magazine, you didn’t tell the printers to face the magazine away from the shelf. So people would see the back cover inside the back. That’s the sort of thing that kept me up at night. Ultimately, one of the main reasons I had to just stop working in print media was because I became so detail-obsessed that it just drove me mad to think about this stuff night and day. And I was just like, I have to go on the internet now where I can change things if I make a mistake because that’s as bad as… I could just sleep at night that way. So that was kind of my career choice there. This next one, Matthew, I’ve actually got… I wonder if this is too spicy and a bit too mean. No, I’m not naming names. So what’s the number 10 you got here? You receive terrible writing from a freelancer and have to deal with, like, do we fix it? I say freelancer, this isn’t me casting shade on freelancers, but it was quite rare that our in-house writers wouldn’t be there if they were that violently shitting the bed. But occasionally you’d try someone new and it would be, like, just so wrong that you’d have to, like, do we even use it? Do we fix it? Is the time fixing it? Or is the time getting them to rewrite it even worth it? There’s such a thing in freelancers, kill fee, to sort of part ways and agree that it’s just not going to happen. This happened, like, literally once in 13 years for me. You do live in fear. You know, obviously editors have a duty to seek out new voices and, you know, diversify the freelancers they’re using. That’s, you know, really important. Something I, you know, put some effort into solving on TechRadar, for sure. But, like, there’s always a risk, yeah, like, with a first-time freelancer, they might not get the style or they might have to grow into it or something like that. I’ve had some really good experiences with freelancers where I’ve told them, like, just one thing to fix their writing and then it comes back and, like, every piece from then is better because you’ve had that honest moment with them. That can be really, really good. Never had a kill-fee moment. So, not too spicy. No, no, it’s fine. Let’s move on, though. So, yes, this is one of mine. So, cover art gets pulled or changes to art made after deadlines. So, this happened once with one game. I won’t say what it was, but, like, basically the artists kept changing the cover, kept adding detail to it. The artwork wasn’t amazing. They kept tweaking it. And it was kind of like the longer you wait, the better the art would be. And they’d be like, well, how long can you wait to get this piece of artwork? And I was there thinking, well, I really want this out of my life now. So at a certain point, and eventually it got to the point where we sent them out. And they were like, oh, we’ve got a new version of the artwork. And it was like, well, I can’t do anything. And yeah, that’s one of the headaches you might have to deal with. Sometimes the art process can be incremental to get to the point where it’s finished. Sometimes you get a pencil sketch of what the artwork would be or a really rough early render. And you could use that for planning purposes, but you can never use it for the final artwork. So that was just what I wanted to mention, Matthew. That’s one fucking massive headache I remember from being on PCM. It’s turned into just confession. It is a little bit, isn’t it? I was hoping it would be like informative, but it might just be therapy. I don’t know. Absolve me of my sins. I paid a kill fee once. Okay, so this is one of mine. Nothing is happening because it’s January. So in a wider sense, the games industry sort of shuts down at Christmas and then kind of gets started again in like late January or like early February. But every PR in January will tell you the same thing basically, which is, yeah, we’re yet to have a conference about what we’re doing this year. And then when we do, we’ll be able to talk about covers and stuff. And it was like, oh, shit, what the fuck am I going to do? That happened a couple of years. I feel like it’s less of a thing now because games release all year round. And like that wasn’t the case in like the late noughties and even like the last decade, not as much. But now you’ve got the Game Awards in December and you’ve got Elden Ring coming out. It was meant to come out in January or whatever. There’s loads of stuff that’s releasing early next year. So it’s changed a bit. Do you remember that, Matthew? January, just fucking nothing happened. Always a nightmare because we’d often have done, because our next point, we’ll often have done a preview issue already at the end of the year. So you feel like, well, you could just use January to take stock and do another. And often we did. I think often we ended up doing a preview issue of X year and then maybe a themed issue in January to kind of make it work. Like, this is going to be the year of the year Nintendo fights back or the year of Mario or the year of whatever. That was often a cover you’d have to get creative with. Probably the boldest thing I did with a cover was, I think this was a January issue, something like that. We had Prey on the cover, and I went with Meet the New Bioshock as the cover line, which was quite bold. I didn’t normally do that. I always did the game title. But I just thought, let’s kind of roll the dice. I don’t know how excited the wider populace is about Prey. Obviously, on team, we were very excited about it, because it was kind of an immersive simmy and looked amazing. And Arkane, of course. Games journalists fucking love Arkane, as we all know. Anyone who’s on Twitter will fucking know that. So, you know, that’s the thing. But, yeah, like, that was the thing where I was like, well, how can I boldly package this, you know, this game that, like, maybe isn’t as easy a sell as, like, you know, sticking a Total War game on the cover, you know? So, yeah. I’d have gone for Move Over Bioshock. Wow, yeah. Well, that’s a real surprise, Matthew. You would have tried to get Uncharted in there somewhere. Move Over Bioshock. It’s Uncharted in space. Gold, there you go. So, yes. This next one, then, Matthew. Three week or two and a half week issues. So, yeah, this was always the killer, wasn’t it? This was like… I don’t think I ever had, like, a full two weeks off at Christmas because it was never possible. It was like one week because if you had two weeks off, you were coming back to pure carnage, basically. What’s your memory of these? Yeah, this is the answer to the question of why do you do 13 issues a year? And it’s like, well, because apparently we want to make our staff make a really crap short issue, which is worse than the others because they have to do it in half the time. Actually, not worse than the others. Not always. Often, sometimes you do some of your more creative thinking. Everyone had their short issue. They tended to be the last issue in the year. Sometimes it might fall earlier if you were lucky. I had a similar feeling about this that I used to have when we were on exams where you get to the end of the year and then some people are going to have an exam before you and you think, aha, you have to do a horrible exam and I don’t. But then you’re like, well, I’ve still got my horrible exams to come, which is very much the feeling of the short issue. You’d sort of laugh at people when they had it and then envy them once they were done. Often the key to this was to just do make it a roundup issue. The next year in review or the last year in review, something which was just not dependent on anything else happening because that’s really what a short issue means. You just lose all wiggle room for bullshit. It just has to happen as you plan it. And so you design it that it doesn’t rely on anyone to happen, basically. There was that issue of Edge that they did last year in lockdown, which was like the 100 relaxing games or something like that. Yeah. And the entire mag was just that, like one feature basically. And I really loved it. And I thought, I wish I’d done this sort of thing on one of my three week issues. Do you know what I mean? Where it’s like, there’s no news, but it’s like a proper special issue. We’ll talk about some cool shit, but it will be like one thing throughout that’s reasonably easy to produce on team. And we’re not breaking our backs just trying to get a preview section done when there’s nothing going on. You know what I mean? Yeah. But yeah, certainly some very tired nights there. They were always very exhausting cold nights in Bath for sure. So, number 14 is one of yours Matthew. It’s quite funny. This isn’t the zaniest thing you’re ever going to hear. But like move all the magazines around the building and like shift offices. And so you have to do the mag. But you also have to pack up like everything you’ve ever owned. In some magazines cases, they’ve got like a backlog of like 25 years worth of mags. So we’ve got all the N64s, the NGCs, all that. So it’s like moving house at work while you’re trying to also build like a new house. That’s a terrible analogy. Yeah, the feature office is really, really nice these days. They renovated it. But like, I think it’s 2014, we moved to a different floor and like the cycling mags had been there. And there was just like a muddy tire track on the floor, like throughout the kind of area. I was like, was some motherfucker cycling on this floor for the office? Like that was kind of that was a very vivid memory. I was like, why are there tire tracks next to my desk? Like, yeah, so then you’re also like, it’s that time where you feel like you should like Marie Kondo all your stuff and just chuck out all the shit you don’t need. But you end up bringing all the mad shit, you know, you end up bringing the sort of the broken Saints Row dildo bat. And you’re like, why are we still got this? Why did this make the trip with us? Yeah, this should be a skip, but it’s not. You just hoard. Should have been a skip the second it arrived. You hoarding fucking Borderlands top trumps into a sack, you know? Holding on to those for the inevitable day that they become very valuable. Well, one day, I’m telling you. That’s the university fund. But there’s no bloody tire tracks in Keyhouse now. It’s very clean. Very nice. So, yes. So the last one, Matthew. E3 deadline weeks. Holy shit. Doing E3 issues. Usually the deadline, for some reason, would fall on like the first day of E3. Or slightly before E3. Not like the end of the week. Like, in the middle of the week. So, functionally, you know, you wouldn’t be able to get all the stuff you got from E3 into one issue. But you try to get as much of it in as possible. I mean, oh, whether you’re on the ground at E3 or like at home editing it, it’s just really tough, right? When I became an editor, like I started doing, yeah, going to E3s, where it felt like I could be more of a writer and like lump a lot of it on depeds and things. A little bit, like Phil was so dependable that I could just like go off and he’d sort it out. And there was one year where he went and I stayed. So it was a bit fairer, you know. I do remember sitting in like an LA hotel, again, a bit like the Gamescom hotel. I even remember what I was checking. I was like checking out pages of a Sherlock Holmes game review. While there was like, I could look out the window and there was like a swimming pool with all these like beautiful LA people dancing around it and thinking like, what is this? This isn’t right. If they knew that I was up here, like checking for typos in a Sherlock Holmes review, this whole venue would lose all cred and everyone would just have to evacuate. Yeah, I know what you mean. They’re like, wait a second, there is not just a dweeb here. There is such a mega dweeb that we have to demolish this hotel. The king of dweebs is here, everyone get the fuck out now. Yeah, that is funny. Thing is though, it’s funny how all these things that seemed traumatizing at the time now seem quite privileged and like I really miss going to E3. Like it was so good. Now I’m like, now it just hasn’t happened for a few years. And the the act of covering games from home is just so not the same thing. Like that that whole travel aspect is gone. It’s just like such a bummer because it was really it was actually really cool. Yeah. A cool wrinkle in the jobs. It was it was always really hard work. But I also I never want to be one of those people who’s like, oh fuck, I have to go all over the world to do this job. You know, it’s just you know, it’s super lucky. You know, it’s great, even when it’s rough. So yeah, all the best, like a kind of like, you know, big moments I had were at E3 on the ground, you know, like interviewing people like Phil Spencer or Tetsuya Nomura and being like, this is really fucking cool that this is happening. You know, yeah. So yeah, I miss E3 as well. But there were definitely some comically like hard ones like. I think I wrote a Hitman feature in about four hours, a cover feature. I think like I’ve been briefed that the game was being revealed, but we got artwork like the day the game was revealed at E3 and then it went to press the next day and I had to write the cover feature by the next day. And it was just like comically fast turnaround. And I had gotten drunk at the PC Gamer show, PC Gaming show, sort of like after party because I like had a bunch of stuff there and I was quite excited that we’d done an E3 show. So I thought I’ll just get drunk. And then, yeah, I think like basically went home and wrote this feature till 4am and then sent it into the office. And that was like a thing I could do. And I was like, I think it was in my late 20s at the time. I don’t think I could do that now. I’m just so tired all the time, like I don’t know how I did it at the time. But you kind of run on adrenaline when you’re on the ground there, you know. But yeah, yeah, it’s good, though. Working on magazines, kind of fun, wasn’t it? Do you ever think like it was fun? Just if we were in the kind of landscape of like like it was in the early noughties now, I might still be working in print, you know what I mean? Like it was just, yeah, yeah. Just like where there’s a big spread of mags. You can find the one that sort of fits your sort of tone and what you’re interested in. You know, it’s good. I have loads of respect though for the people who make magazines. I always say that in these episodes just in case it ever sounds like I’m winching. I think like, you know, making a magazine, there are so many good magazines still around. And yeah, I really love reading Edge every month, for example. And so I’m pleased to see them keep going. Anything else to add Matthew? Should we wrap up? We’ve talked enough magazines to fill an entire year of Game Pie. Yeah, exactly. Some big gaming gamins energy is that bloke on that forum set. Oh, yeah, that guy’s going to hate this episode. Well, that’s why it’s labeled as such. So I see people just skip it and listen to fucking, I don’t know, fucking best Sherlock Holmes games or Frogwares games, whatever we do next week. Yeah, so yes, thank you very much for listening to this very waffly and odd 50th episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. So I reckon we’ve got like one more mag style episode left to do with us, Matthew, like in terms of like us talking about mag stuff. We know what that is. That’s the episode we were going to do this week. So people can wait for that one. It should be fun. Otherwise, year two, who knows? It’s going to be it’s going to be good fun on the Game Pie podcast. So Matthew, where can people find you on social media? I am at MrBattle Underscore Pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week. See you soon.