Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re joined by another special guest. So, Jon, would you like to introduce yourself? Hello, I’m Jon Hicks, and I was, for a very long time, the editor of Official Xbox 360 Magazine. Yeah, it’s great to have you, Jon. So, you’re currently Digital Editorial Director at ReadPop, is that right? Yes, that’s right. So, in this episode, it’s been a long time since we’ve had a magazine-themed guest come on, really. So, we knew that Jon would be a good value for money, so to speak, just because he has so much experience working on Official Xbox Magazine. So, we’re going to talk a bit about your time working on that mag, Jon, and that kind of like time frame through an Xbox lens. But I suppose to kind of start with, tell us a bit about your gaming history. What were you all sort of found in games and what hardware did you have access to as a younger man? So, I started out on, actually it was BBC Micro was the very first one because we didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid and my dad was a teacher. And obviously BBC was a school machine, so I think he acquired one. And that was the, that was our kind of computer and we had some, you know, playing like Granny’s Garden and all those other sort of studio intellectual things. I think we had a Dragon 32, which was a very short lived Welsh computing platform. I’ve never even heard of that. Yeah, it’s one of those like retro deep cuts that no one’s ever heard of, but it had like three games on it and they were all clones of more popular, higher graphics Commodore games, I think. Were they like Welsh versions? Were there more cultural references thrown in or something like that? You know what, I honestly don’t know. I was too young to understand Welsh references at that time. I should go back and refer to Get Gav Murphy to explain it all for me. But then me and my brother clubbed together and we got a Mega Drive. And then we just used to rent games for that. We got to afford one game a year, but it was possible to go down the game rental shop and spend £4 or whatever to get Desert Strike for a weekend or Monsters Ain’t My Neighbours or The Dolphin, that kind of stuff. And then when we sold that, I got an Amiga with a hard drive in it, which I bought second hand. So I got this Amiga 1200 with a 40 GB hard drive in it or something, which was absolute magic in the Amiga community. Like it was all disc based. And it came with loads of games, loads of cover disc software, like pirated software, the whole thing. Like the guy was just basically, I think he’d got a PC, so he just sold me everything. And it came with some magazines as well. I mention this because I’ll look at it relevant later. But it was like a nearly complete run of Amiga Power and Amiga Format. That was my kind of introduction to games magazines. It was just basically rereading Amiga Power over and over again. I could probably quote big chunks of that magazine verbatim. So yeah, so there was that. And then I kind of drifted onto PC after that. And that was as I was going to university. So I only really played the hits on PC. So that was like Half-Life and The Sims and Theme Hospital and Quake Doom. Well, not in that order. I remember I was there when Quake came out and it was tremendously exciting that you had the ability to look up and down properly and not in the kind of Duke and 3D way where it just kind of warped strangely. That’s interesting. So your angle on gaming was sort of like more PC focused, I guess, before you started working in games media. Oh, yeah, completely. And then my kind of… Well, that was my kind of start in media, full stop really, was I got a job… Actually, I was helping a friend who had a gig writing tutorials, like computer tutorials, and I was looking for a job in the media. And because I didn’t have any nepotism connections, I was kind of striking out on that. So I applied for a job on the staff writer on the official Windows XP magazine. My thinking was entirely like, this job sounds well boring, but it’s at Future. They made that cool Amiga magazine. And I bet there won’t be any competition because nobody in their right mind would ever want this job. Is that true? Surely everyone wants to get into mags at this point. Well, yeah, it turns out I was completely wrong. There was huge competition for this. Job. And that got me into Future. And that was just in the golden age of magazines. But it was a very magazine-heavy world. And Future was a really credible, at that point, fast-growing company. So it was just magazine central down in Bath, and obviously lots of games magazines. And that was how I ended up doing games magazines. By contributing to games magazines, it started just meeting people in the pub. I like video games. Can I write about video games? And annoying them until they started giving me freelance. So what year is this? Is it the early noughties kind of time? Yeah, so this was, claims Bath, 2002. So it’s 20 years this year, terrifyingly. What do you remember about the kind of vibe of future that time, aside from magazines being on top of the world? Like, I suppose on the gaming side, what kind of connections did you form? And how did that side of things kind of grow for you? I mean, most of the connections were with the PC side of things, because I was in, because future at that point was scattered all over Central Bath. There was, they just, because they didn’t have an office big enough to put the whole company in. So everything was just spread all over the place. There were all these tiddly little offices like over, there was one over like a Mexican restaurant, and we were in the one over Halfords, and then there was one in a basement sort of down the road, and there was Monmouth Street. It was basically whenever you had to do a PR meeting, you’d have to kind of phone one of the secretaries and go, I need a meeting room, and they’d go, right, oh, there’s one in Trim Street or something like that. And you’d have to leave the office, walk down the stairs over top of Halfords, walk up to Monmouth Street, meet them at reception, lead them down the road to the, you know, up the stairs over the chicken shop and through this rabbit warren of other meeting rooms until you found the space. It was a very peculiar sort of vibe. But we were in, because I was on the Windows mag, I was down with the PC lot, and it was, so mostly PC format. They did a lot of gaming stuff. And then, really, everybody else was just in the pub. And it was, and I have to, I feel somewhat embarrassed looking back on this, because I moved to Bath for this job. I’d never been there before. And we kind of did the first day, went and, you know, and then we kind of knocked it on the head early, went to the pub with my co-workers. And most of the, it felt like most of the company was in the pub at that point, you know, kind of like 5pm on a Monday afternoon. And I just, and so the following day I was like, well, I guess I’ll just go to the pub again and see who’s there. And I just did that for basically five uninterrupted years. So that was how, so I just ended up, and you know, usually led by the PC format guys, and then I kind of got reasonably chummy with the PC gamer guys, and then some of the guys on the PlayStation magazines, Edge. I have a very clear memory of spending an evening in the pub with Tony Mott, like Edge overlord. God alone knows what he must have thought of me. He was this idiot, 21 year old, he just joined my table. But he was very nice about it. He didn’t cast me out. But yeah, that was pretty much the kind of networking opportunity. And then, you know, we did a little bit of games on the Windows mags. So if somebody came down and they had a PC build, then it would be the case that like, you know, somebody like Alec Muir would come over and go, you know, go over to Ubisoft demoing something in the PC Gamer office. So we’d, you know, we’d go down the stairs and walk across the square and go and, you know, go down into the basement where PC Gamer were at that time. And then we would all get shown like Rayman or something. Because that was still, Ubisoft was still kind of coming out of its weirdo French phase at that point. So like Ubisoft showing up was a bit, alright, what have they got this time? Although I do, this might be a false memory, but I do have a very clear memory of, I swear it was Yves Guillemot doing the demo. Really? Yeah, this little French dude was like, oh yeah, we’ve got this new thing. It’s a bit of a departure for us, but we really want to break into the North American market. We think it’s going to be quite big, it’s called Splinter Cell. And I remember being in the PC Gamer office, which was very dark and very gloomy, and just like, you know, all the lights blocked out by windows, blocked out by piles of magazines and stuff, and this little French guy showing us Splinter Cell on this gaming PC in the corner. I was like, this looks alright, this could go quite well. That’s wild. So yeah, in my head this little French guy has become Yves Guillemot. I don’t know if it actually was, but I’m choosing to believe it was for the sake of making the story better. Oh, I mean, it’s a good story. There’s a big asterisk on that anecdote then, like, it’s, this may or may not have happened, we can’t really be sure. Yeah, this is, like, all of my reminiscences are like this, unfortunately. Like, I’ve got a really terrible memory, so I’m just like, I’m really used to be confident this happened. I’m excited about the factual inaccuracies we’re going to get into during this episode. And that’s when I turned to my deputy editor, Shigeru Miyamoto, and said… I’m not sure about this, Jon. Do you want to go to the pub? Yeah, so, how did you end up moving on to OXM back in 2007? Because OXM was a London joint, right? Like, how did that happen for you? It was because, like, I stayed on the Windows mag. I did keep trying to get jobs on games magazines, actually, but this sounds like a humble braggart. I kept getting promoted. So I’d be like, oh, I could go off and be a staff writer. And they’d be like, oh, no, we’re going to promote you on the Windows mag. And then I ended up… And this was a bit of a poison chalice because I ended up having to stick around to launch the Windows Vista magazine. I don’t know if you ever use Windows Vista, but you, like, don’t use Windows Vista. That was a bit of a disaster. And XP was, you know, the… That version of Windows was very successful. The magazine was very successful. And then it was like, hey, let’s do Windows Vista magazine. That would be even more successful. And I ended up doing loads of work on that. And then we launched it, and Windows Vista was very good. And I was like, I think I… And this was after five years of, you know, rotating around all the pubs in Central Bath, I was like, I’m going to seek my fortune. And I wanted to work in games. I’d done loads of writing for pretty much… I was going to do loads and loads of freelancing, PC format, PC Gamer. I think I was like the technical editor of PC Gamer at that point as a freelancer. Edge and Games Master and all that kind of stuff. So I wanted to work in games. And this job, I wanted to kind of move on from Bath. And then this job came up in… The OXM editor job came up in London. I thought, well, it’s working with Microsoft, I’ve done that. Games really want to do that, want to move to London. So yeah, I applied for it and I got the job. And that was about it. Oh, nice. Do you think your Microsoft connection sort of helped, did help with that? Because it’s my memory at the time that like future was maybe a bit closer to people who did official mags with back then than it was maybe towards the end. Yes, I think it helped because… I mean, the dream with official mags, and I’m sure you encountered this Matthew because you worked on one too, but the dream of the suits was, well, because we’re official partners, we should do elaborate marketing deals with this company. Because we’re trusted brand guardians, so they’ll work with us to do crazy ad campaigns or that kind of stuff. I think we ended up doing a lot of that on a Windows magazine. I think there was definitely the hope that more of that could be done on OXM. I’m sure that helped me, but the Xbox group was completely separate from all the Windows stuff. You’ve got Bill Gates vouching for you. He’s like, yeah, Jon’s like a good guy. Yes, regrettably I was pretty chummy with the Windows UK marketing team. I think that was the hope, but it didn’t really work out that way. Right, that makes sense. Did you have much of a history with Xbox at that point? Did you go into it with any sort of interest in the original Xbox or the early days of 360? What were you going into the job with? I had a 360, because I was doing all this Windows stuff and Microsoft were really talking up the connected home. It’s this amazing, wonderful device. Also, if you had a console, you got to do freelance reviews and things. That was another important reason to get one. I had got onto the Xbox. Previously, my console gaming was a PS2 at that point. I bought a second-hand PS2, mostly, to play Vice City on, really. Then I was living with another journalist who was a big Xbox fan. He was like, Check out this Xbox Live thing. Isn’t it amazing? I just remember getting used to playing Project Gotham on Xbox Live. I just remember really enjoying that because it was so easy. PC gaming was such a slog at that point. Online PC gaming, you had to go through TeamSpeak and GameSpy and all this nonsense. Xbox Live, you just plugged it in and go, and then you just ended up racing around Edinburgh chatting to random Scousers and French people who were also playing it. The dream! Yes, absolutely. I have really fond memories of that. Actually, we were supposed to take the day off work to complete Halo 2 on launch day. Actually, I was late because I had to go into work for something, so I completed the second half of Halo 2 with my flatmate at the time. So I was kind of familiar with Xbox and predisposed to like it, and I thought the Xbox 360 was alright as a platform. And even then going in, it felt like it was in a better place than the PlayStation was at that point, because that was kind of early period, PS3, where Sony were really mucking things up still. So it felt like an Xbox, there was already, particularly 2007, there was starting to be some really good momentum behind it. And it felt like a good console to be working with. It felt like you landed at just the right time, as BioShock, Mass Effect, Halo 3, they’re all kind of happening. So yeah, I can see why it would seem that way. Did it feel like a golden era to you as someone running the magazine? What were the next few years of it like? I started in November 2007, so my first experience of the Official Xbox Magazine was, can I come to the Halo 3 launch party? And they were like, absolutely not. This is the most exclusive party imaginable. We gave our last spare ticket to the voice of Big Brother or something. And it kind of set the tone, I think. Because it was a great party. I honestly don’t think we’ll ever have as good a year as 2007 in console gaming ever again. There were just so many hits. And ones that I’ve still really celebrated, kind of stood the test of time. But it kind of stayed good for quite a while. If you went into 2008, we had GTA IV, Fallout 3, that was a big deal, Fallout coming over from being a weird PC game to this huge RPG. What else? Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2, Rock Band. That was kind of the ridiculous wave of the instrument games. So Guitar Hero, Rock Band, DJ Hero. So yeah, it was a good time. The steam started to come out after a while because whilst all this was happening, the Wii was just taking over the world and Microsoft very clearly kind of switched their focus to trying to go after that. But in terms of those, I think those were the Xbox 360 glory years. Just both in box games and in digital as well because summer of arcade was the thing. So we started out with like Braid and Castle Crashers and then all these retro games started showing up on the platform. So it was just embarrassments and riches really. Were you on OXM when John Woo guested it, is it? No, actually that was just before my time. Oh no. Tragically. The Stranglehold cover. Yeah, I had my hilarious, what did you learn about being an editor from John Woo? Question that’s out the window now. I think probably how to respond perfunctorily to an email from memory, as I think how that one went. I think we did an issue guest edited by, this is bad, Clap Trap from… That’s a step down from John Woo, I think. Yes, I know. All your hard work and you have to attribute it to a freaking cartoon robot. It was difficult, although actually that was, I think I can now reveal it, we actually got a bunch of Clap Trap contributions and they were all written by Anthony Burch. So that was quite nice. He sent us a bunch of stuff, which we scattered through the magazine, as I recall. That’s actually legit. I thought that would be you stressed late at night, trying to get yourself into Clap Trap’s headspace. I mean, there definitely would have been. Like me being stressed late at night, like shitting a magazine was pretty much… That’s part of the course. Yeah, that’s every issue. I can’t shake the image of John Woo in Key House just sending PDFs at like 9.30 at night and going to get like a meatball marinara out of the subway around the corner and just stressing about spelling mistakes on the cover. Wild doves fly around him. This was London, Sam. He would have gone to the Burger King in Marlbone Station. Of course. Yeah, that’s my era. But yeah, that’s really interesting. So Xbox does kind of change over time. What were the benefits to running OXM at that time? Did you get better access as a result of the license? Did it open any doors being in that particular era of magazines? Probably. I think it would have been… The thing about that time was because there were so many magazines and I think everybody had gone into the generation expecting Sony to win. And it kind of gradually dawned on everybody that… I mean, actually, ultimately, it did win by all metrics. PlayStation did win. But there was a period where Xbox was the top selling console in North America, and because so many games were made in North America, that kind of defined the conversation for a bit. But there were four other Xbox magazines on shelves at that point. And it just meant that there was this incredible bun fight for every cover and every bit of content. And although we were the biggest, and obviously I was claiming we were the best, but that being the constant belief of every single magazine editor is that their magazine is the best and all others are worth the strash. But it wasn’t quite as gold-plated, sort of golden ticket as I might have hoped for. We had to fight for stuff and just work around embargoes and that kind of thing. I don’t know if you’ve talked about this on a previous podcast, but we were kind of living in the shadow of Game Informer as well, which was huge circulation. It was basically the free mag you got, the heavily subsidised magazine you got, if you bought games at GameStop. I can’t quite remember the model of it, but basically their circulation was literal millions. And because Xbox was such a big deal, they wanted to cover Xbox games, and their rule was if we cover your game, if we put it on the cover, it has to be a world exclusive, even though the magazine was not available outside North America. So you just end up in these infuriating things where it would be like, well, can we do anything with it? Oh no, it’s Game Informer’s world exclusive, and that doesn’t run out until the week after you’re on sale, so you can’t have anything, sorry. So that’s the advantage of being an unofficial Nintendo mag, is that we were so far from anything juicy, that there was nothing we would want to put on our cover that Game Informer could possibly gazump, like they were not going to do a little King’s Story cover, like we were fine. It was its own challenge, that, but at the same time, I’m not… If it had been an unofficial magazine, and again, there must have been murder on the unofficial magazines, because they were all kind of clawing over each other to get the same amount of covers, and they had some sort of diminished clout, and they didn’t have Xbox games on the cover disc. So, yes, it was a privileged position, but not perhaps as easy as one might think. Yeah, I mean, as someone who was working on X360 when we did our Guitar Hero Metallica cover, Jon, I’ll have you know we had all the access in the world. Yeah, it’s true. You would definitely see an Assassin’s Creed 2 cover on OXM, and then it would come to us, and we’d get an interview with the guy who designed the weapons in Assassin’s Creed 2, as opposed to all the elaborate exclusive screens and stuff. But yeah, it was definitely a pile-up. Two of those magazines were in my building, and Future were the other two. And actually, there was another one as well, wasn’t there, in Bournemouth? Yeah, there was 360 Gamer, which I think was… Their secret weapon was they came out more often than everyone else. Every three weeks, yeah. So it was just nuts. That’s what I was saying about this magazine era. And even when I was down in Bath doing that kind of stuff, that was when it was like, yeah, let’s do a magazine about Game Boy Advance. Let’s just do a magazine that was just GTA versus The Getaway. That was the whole magazine. That was just the concept. Just at that point, people were like, let’s just do magazines, magazines, great. Before SEO, there was just a magazine version of that question asked on magazine shelves. That was… Yeah, basically. People didn’t go to Google. They just went to WH Smith and just let their eyes unfocused and see what landed before them. Yeah. So I don’t know if I can ask about this, but I remember something you mentioned to me when I joined Future in 2013 was that you used to have regular trips to Microsoft, like every six months or something. Now, I can’t remember the exact details of this, but is there anything you can say about what that was like and what kind of intel you got on the company from doing that? Oh, Lord. I mean, I don’t know if… I mean, the most regular trips I used to get to Microsoft was when I was still doing the Windows stuff. I actually got a BA Silver card because I was going to Seattle so often. Wow. But that was… That’s a very shit Patrick Bateman-style flex. But with… On Xbox, it wasn’t quite… Again, because we never really got to that level of the relationship. We had the US Magazine and they were kind of quite jummy with Microsoft in America. But we never really had a kind of like, oh, let’s get together and have a summit kind of thing with the Xbox stuff. It was a bit more ad hoc. But, you know, I’d kind of make the effort to go down to Reading, where Microsoft UK were. I would chat with the PRs and then whenever I was in… You know, kind of go over… They used to do these product showcases in… usually in San Francisco. And so I’d always make a point of going to those and try to sort of ingratiate myself with the Xbox folks. The Xbox folks there and the seniors there at E3. But there was… There was never, regrettably, a kind of… And again, you’d think running the Official Magazine that this would be a thing that could happen would be you’d be able to go in and they’d go oh right, well here’s everything we’re going to do this year and you could do covers on this, this and this. And oh yeah, brilliant, that’s wonderful. No, it didn’t work like that at all. You just found out about things more or less the same time as everybody else did and sometimes after because… you know, because their internal communication was often not the greatest. Yeah, okay, that’s fair. So what was it like making a magazine with a demo disc? Was that a headache? This is like the kind of waning days of demo discs, so what were the challenges of putting that together? I have to say, for me it was absolutely effortless because we had a crew of three guys down in Bath who just did it. They had been doing it for years at that point. I think they started out as a separate company and future acquired them when they were doing the original Xbox demo disc. They were really well plugged into all of Microsoft’s systems where they were like, oh, you can’t talk to those guys because they had to sign all these development NDAs. They were effectively Xbox developers. They had all this access to all the Xbox partner net, they called it, which is what they ran the 360 kind of testing back end on. And basically, they sourced the demos and they put them on disc and they did all the testing. And actually, I was thinking about this just before this call. Future was, for a really long time, the world’s biggest Xbox game publisher because we published a game, we basically published an Xbox game every three and a half weeks in the form of this cover disc. It was considered an official game because it had presumably been signed off and everything. Yeah, so that was the whole thing. So those guys had to source the demos, build the disc, get it through certification. And often, I think we’d… And again, this would hold me up when this certification problem became a thing or we’d get it all together and it would be like, oh, we’ve got the demo of, I don’t know, Castle crashes. And then, which is fine, it’s on PartnerNet, you can use it, but when you run it from a disc, it doesn’t work. So then the disc would fail, and then we’d have to go back, rebuild it, resubmit it. They’d have to call in all these favors with Microsoft to get it certified and all that kind of thing. But yeah, from my point of view, we just go, right, send us the list of what’s made it on the disc and we’ll do the cover art and we’ll have to chase for the, you know, the, because we’re doing like age ratings, like PG, you know, whether it’s PG or 16 or whatever. So yeah, so actually it was, for me personally, it was relatively low effort. Those guys really had to grind to make it. But it was, yeah, but it was obviously a huge benefit to the magazine. And again, like the unofficial mags, they had to have cover discs because that’s what magazines had. But I think, well, Samuel, they had to kind of go away and make the content for the disc themselves. They had to go and record videos and podcasts. It’s a blessing of modern magazines in a way that they don’t have to do this because it is like the deadline stress of just getting a magazine done is enough. And then an additional stress that’s on its own deadline tracker is just like not what you need. And so, yeah, that’s definitely familiar. I’m glad that the NGamer disc exists though, because it’s like a record of my 21-year-old self with no on camera… I mean, this was like pre YouTube being massive, I guess. And it’s just kind of, you know, I think back then you could have gone, this person isn’t destined to be a video star. Luckily, my later employers never saw these discs, and I’ve been employed several times as a video, as the face of a video thing, which is, you know, ha ha, we’ll fool them. But yeah, I’m fond that those things exist. Definitely less stressful to make than your discs from the sound of things. Yes, well, it was, well, yeah, I should say that the other tremendous advantage of having an in-house Xbox developer, which is, you can’t really talk about the history of the Xbox 360 with this, was that it was the Red Ring of Death, which is, you know, the consoles used to go bang with alarming frequency. But I discovered that because they were a developer, they had the ability to just, I can’t remember the term for it, but they just returned them, so just like put it in a box, send it to Bath, they would send it back to Microsoft, get another dev kit back, and these are the dev kits. So these weren’t the, which were the kind of the development consoles you had to use to review games on. So it wasn’t the case of, you know, actually there was one case where all of our dev kits broke. And it was, you know, it was like October, like third week in October or something like that. We’re like charging into the end of the year, all this stuff, and it’s like, and all of them red-ringed, it’s like pleading with the Xbox PR. So we ended up with this. I don’t know what happened to it in the end. It was one of the really weird sort of high hat Xbox dev kits. It had this like huge built-in hard drive, which we definitely weren’t supposed to have. But she found it somewhere, so we were able to actually ship the magazine that time. And then afterwards I discovered, oh, you know, send it down to Bath, they’ll replace it for you. That’s probably in Key House somewhere now and someone’s like hanging their coat on it every day or something. I’m like sure I saw that when The Office Claret happened. I thought, that’s a weird looking 360. But like, it may have just been like thrown into a skip. We’ll never know. Yeah, it was probably unkillable. It was enormous. So we’ve told a lot of press trips stories on this podcast before, Jon. You went to, you were going to E3 at this time as well, I assume. Do you have anything to share to that effect? The press trip I have to mention, although it wasn’t an Xbox 360 press trip, was the trip to Chernobyl, which was when I was still doing the PC stuff and that was for the first Stalker game. And it is, and actually because that game was massively delayed, and THQ were publishing it, and as I remember it, they had a kind of, hey, the game’s going to, the game’s finished, we’re going to do a final launch, you know, big PR blast, we’re going to take everyone to Chernobyl. And they did that three times because the game got delayed three times. Are you meant to do that many repeat visits there? Well, no, exactly, because we went there, and it was an amazing experience, like we kind of went down, like toured Pripyat, went and had lunch in Chernobyl in this, like, abandoned, you know, Soviet-built, it was like really weird Russian food, served by these people who looked like dinner ladies, but they all had metal teeth. Stayed in this really kind of dowdy Soviet hotel in Kiev, where we just sat in the hotel bar all night, and they’d kind of, every half an hour, they’d send in these women to do, like, you know, local Ukrainian dancing, and they’d kind of, like, twirl up and down a bit, and then they’d go out and… Did they also have metal teeth? You know what, I didn’t inspect it too closely, I’ll be honest, I was a good boy. This is the most THQ thing I’ve ever heard, by the way. Yeah. It was amazing. Just wondering around Pripyat was something else, because they were… We had this kind of chaperone who was… And everyone who works in the zone was, like, they kind of work there for a period, and then they can never come back, because they’ve kind of absorbed their, like, lifetime dose of radiation. We were chatting to this guy, and he said… And he had this really kind of unnatural calm about him. And he said, oh, you know… I can’t remember… He’d got some relatively advanced qualification, and he’d taken this job, and it was supposed to be a stopgap thing, but I think he said he’d just, like… Living in this zone for 18 months had completely rewired his mind, and when he had to leave, he was going to go away and become a nature photographer or something. And he was very, you know, very calm. Because I remember he just said he just gave us his Geiger counter, and we were just, like, wandering around, you know, wandering through abandoned shops in Pripyat, poking his Geiger counter into stuff, like, how radioactive is this? Oh, you know, this shopping cart isn’t very radioactive. What about… Oh, moss! That’s well radioactive. And in the background, there was this honking, there was this kind of siren in the background going honk, honk, honk. And we were like, what’s that noise? And they were like, if that noise changes, it will start making a very loud, continuous noise, and if that happens, you run back to the bus and we have to get out immediately. Oh my god! So yeah, sort of a shitable, that was a treat. I think the times on Xbox, I think, because I kind of did it wrong, because that was one of the reasons, you know, when I was working with all the games guys down in Bath, and that was, again, the glory days. I’m sure this has come up before. I’ve always said this, the glory days of Games Media were always just before you got there. I remember when I showed up, they’d just come to the end of all these ridiculous PlayStation trips where they’d just take people snowboarding for a week and then show them five minutes of Dune 2 or something, and then there was that, and they were like, oh, it’s much more sensible these days. But they were still going on, they’d just go, oh, we’ve got this Vietnam set shooter, so we’re going to dangle you out the back of a Huey and strafe this field in Wiltshire kind of press trip kind of stuff. I never got to go on those because I was still on the PC Mac. I came to OXM as the editor. The editors don’t really get to do trips like that because you just have to stay home and argue with the sales guys and muck around with cover lines and things. So I didn’t do that many, but I did a few. There was a really good one in Hong Kong for Sleeping Dogs. It was another great game. So this is kind of quite a late period as well. But yeah, it was square. I said I’ll come out and experience the world of Sleeping Dogs. And it was basically a series of bonkers, experiential things which is like, alright, let’s go in and this weird little shop that sells snake eggs and meet a person and then climb to the top of a tenement and watch two people kickboxing and then let’s go ride this junk out to this floating river in the harbour and eat dim sum and it was great. And that was one of those ones where I was like, okay, even though I’m the editor, I am taking this trip. Yeah, for sure. So yes, I think that was the highlight. And there were lots of other kind of weird boozy nights in E3 and GDC and Gamescom and those Microsoft showcases. Do you ever go to any of the… Disgracing myself with industry luminaries. No, that’s fine. Did you go to any of the preposterous E3 parties? Were you there around those times that that was happening, Activision parties and the like? Yeah, I went to… This is how much of a square I was. They had that ridiculous kind of musician tasting platter show, I think it was 2010, 2011, where they basically took over LA Live and they just had this… It was like two hours of massive musical acts, like Eminem and… Oh God, I’m drawing a complete blank on all… Eminem was there, I’m pretty sure Eminem was there, but it was just like this huge act would come on and do their popular song, and then another huge act would come along and then do their popular song. It was because they had this arrangement with them to do Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, all those music games. And this show went on for so long, and also because I was such a square, I actually left to go to the Connect showcase, like three blocks away, tour around, play a bunch of Connect games, interview Peter Molyneux, and then go back to this Activision thing, which was still going on. So that was a… I like the idea of like, there’s too many celebs, I have to go and listen to Peter Molyneux fib a little bit about his Milo or whatever. Yes, play a kind of caper unconvincingly in front of Connect Sports and be told, yeah, we’ll definitely fix that in time for release. So speaking of Connect there, Jon, so what difference did that make to your time on the magazine? As things kind of changed in the late noughties as Connect was announced, did you remember being apprehensive or optimistic about that transition at Microsoft? I think it was… It varied, like it was very obviously, again, the focus was absolutely on kind of chasing that enormous wee audience. The number of people who played video games as we know them, it just increased dramatically because of the wee. And obviously, Microsoft really wants to get in on that. And that just meant they just obviously deprioritized the kind of the core games. They were just like, oh well, we’ll do a deal with… We’ll do the exclusive DLC thing for Call of Duty and we’ll do, I don’t know, Halo, ODST or something. But their real focus was into Connect Sports and all that kind of thing. So that was kind of not entirely welcome because the magazine was a hardcore magazine and it was built on people who liked playing shooters, who liked playing janky RPGs, if I’m honest. So I was kind of apprehensive about it, but the spectacle of Connect and the potential was really exciting. There was that ridiculous Cirque du Soleil thing that they did to launch it, which I remember quite clearly because my boss at the time had only, like he’d just taken over, he was completely used to video games. And it was like, all right, so, and he was running the whole division, but because he was in London and I was in London, he was like, well, he was going to directly manage me and then oversee the rest of all the other magazines in the company. Oh, Jon can take you to E3 and you can show him how video games work, kind of thing. And I was like, all right, you can come to me to this Microsoft showcase. I don’t know what it is, but I reckon it would be pretty fancy. And then we show up, I think it was in the Galen Centre, and they kind of issue us with these like, you know, and you’ve heard this story, it’s quite well documented, but they give you kind of like ponchos with enormous glowing shoulder pads and you step into a living room and there’s a family watching television, but the television is a portal and this smiling, cheering nuclear family helps you through the portal and you step out onto this show floor and there’s a giant animatronic elephant and there’s a family on a sofa flying across and there’s all these people wearing these ridiculous things with a glowing… My boss who’s there, who’s an otherwise normal man, is approaching all this with this escalating something like terror. And it leads over to me and says, is it always like this? And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, no, it’s definitely the standard A3 experience. But it was nuts. But it was exciting, particularly that debut, they were promising the Earth and they were like, yeah man, this is really exciting, this is really different, it’s like we, only more so. And they said, and we’re talking a lot, oh we’ve got this version of Fable, we’ve got this version of Steel Battalion. It was, initially it was kind of quite exciting. So even though I had, and it was more exciting than the previous expansion things, which had been things like You’re in the Movies. The HD DVD player, of course. Oh, well yes, obviously, that was the great white hope of Tinnitus Entertainment. Yeah, so by the time it launches Kinect, I feel like there’s a little bit of revisionist history with Kinect. It was genuinely successful, but was it interesting to write about for you as a team? I wouldn’t go that far. Yeah, because it was enormously successful. It was the fastest selling consumer device in history. It was one of those slightly asterisks of Guinness World Records it ended up with. But I think it became apparent quite early on that it wasn’t actually entirely up to the job. You know, like all of these dreams about, oh, you know, you are the controller and all this interactivity and stuff. And there were some, and some games really worked it. Like Dance Central, genuinely, I think is one of the, is like a really impressive achievement. I think it is the, you know, it’s like Harmonix doing that thing. It’s like, right, well, Rock Band taught you how to play music and Dance Central is going to teach you how to dance. And it was, so there were that handful of really good ones. Actually, that might be generous. But yeah, but then so much of it was just all this kind of hastily repurposed, like repurposed Wii shovelware, basically, you know, kind of, oh, we’re porting Carnival games to Kinect or whatever. And yeah, so it was, and it was difficult because, because it’s the official magazine, people don’t buy the official magazine to be told the platform sucks. So you kind of don’t take opportunities to put the boot in. But equally, it wasn’t, you know, it was difficult once it shipped and once we started getting into all these like ropey, you know, kind of, you know, it doesn’t really detect you all that well thing. And some of them, some of them are baffling as well, like Michael Phelps swimming in his Kinect game. It’s difficult to become excited about Michael Phelps swimming. So, yeah, so we kind of, you know, and again, like, you know, we’re not here to go, oh, you know, Xbox is terrible, Kinect’s terrible. But I think everybody knew that this isn’t really, you know, what we’d hoped it could be. Which games ended up defining that 360 RFU then as the generation wrapped up? Are there anything that you look back on as like, well, that was significant to me career-wise and also to the platform kind of at the same time? Gosh, I think, I say not as it wraps up, because again, it was so heavily front-loaded with things like Call of Duty Modern Warfare, you know, Bioshock and Mass Effect and all that kind of thing. I think by the time it ended, we’d seen it had kind of, everything had become next-gen enough, like the kind of need for everything to be high-definition, motion-captured, annual franchise. It just basically ground out so many of those publishers. You know, Midway had gone and THQ had gone, EA had gone from going, right, we’re going to do Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space and The Godfather and Dante’s Inferno and all that kind of stuff. And then at the end it was like, right, well, this year we’ve got Call of Duty and it’s the second year so we’ve got Battlefield and there’s an Assassin’s Creed. And so it was kind of, and that’s kind of where we’ve been for a while, you know, it’s just because you need a gigantic studio and a huge amount of money to produce games to that level of fidelity and all the kind of the AA folks just kind of ran out of money and success. I mean, that’s, the games I would really rate, like Rock Band, I think was really something. I really like there to be a Rock Band renaissance because I just think that was a really, you know, cool unifying experience. I feel like there’s, like maybe there’s a chance for like a younger generation, the TikTokers, to discover Rock Band. Left 4 Dead was a really, and that’s more of a PC game really, but I remember Valve were quite, because I knew Valve because I worked on PC stuff. And the thing with Left 4 Dead was we had a cover fell through that I just emailed Doug Lombardi out of the blue and I was like, hello, I’m running Official Xbox Magazine now, cover’s fallen through, I don’t suppose there’s anything to do with Left 4 Dead, is there? And he was like, oh yeah, sure, do you want to come over tomorrow? I was like, sure. And he’s just like, right, here’s your flight booking. I just replied, his email, and he’s like, okay. So I just went to Heathrow and got on this plane and a car met me at the airport and took me to a hotel. The following day I just showed up and just played Left 4 Dead all day. Oh, wow. Which is really good, like really, really good. And we did the cover and I was like, man, this game is pretty good, you know? And then later on when it’s… And then unusually they sent us four, because it’s, you know, four player, and they sent us four check disks, which were the game, which were the disks that they’d had back from certification. So it had been certified, it was ready to go, but it wasn’t actually… That was the point where it went into manufacturing, packaging and everything. So we had four copies of Left 4 Dead, like six weeks before it came out or something. And we just played it in the office, like, endlessly. Like, that was the lunchtime game and the after work game for eight… I mean, it felt like weeks. But that was a really good, really great experience, and a really nice fit for Xbox Live as well. And then, you know, there was all the other stuff, like, you know, Halo 3 was enormous. You know, GTA V, that kind of snuck in there, which is kind of crazy, even if it’s still a contemporary GTA game. But that was a huge deal when it came out. So, yeah, and there’s all the other stuff that people always say, like Portal 2 or whatever. Like, there’s, yeah, there was too many to identify. Yeah, that’s fine. It’s a sort of a weird generation in the sense that it does definitely kind of fade out towards the end in a way that I don’t think this generation did, the one just gone. I don’t know if that was kind of weighing confidence in sort of console gaming generally. It’s like you say, people come more risk averse, but certainly seemed a little bit different on that front. I don’t know if you had any thoughts on that. Well, because the generation kind of went on way longer than anybody expected it to, because you know, you think like the kind of PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, that kind of thing, there was only, there was a relatively, I can’t remember the numbers, but it was a relatively short lifespan of the console, but before the next one came out. And then because, and this is my take on it, I can’t claim that this is canonical or anything like that, but then, and Xbox came out in 2001, and then Xbox 360 came out in 2005, I think. So it was only kind of four years, and then Xbox 360 just kept on trucking for like seven years, I think, before they replaced it. And I think that was because it had a second win with Kinect, which for all of its kind of shortcomings was, still drove huge, still based, still got lots of people playing it. Because of service games and Xbox Live, people could still keep playing online, patching it and that kind of stuff. And I think, as an onlooker looking at Sony, I think because it took them so long to get PS3 to market, I don’t think you could buy a PS3 in Europe until 2007, I think. That’s right, yeah. So, yeah, I think just the whole generation just really dragged on in a way that nobody really expected. And I think, I just kind of felt like, you know, when all the AA kind of died out and everything like that, so I think everybody just kind of got locked into this franchise thinking, you know, let’s just keep plodding along because it’s still selling and we’re still making money, so, sure. But you didn’t really get that kind of, the kind of finger cycle stuff that you used to get on other console generations where it would be like, well, it’s right at the end, we’ve just got used to making games for this thing. And that’s when you used to get the really interesting kind of envelope pushing, if I can use that phrase, kind of releases. I’m drawing a blank on examples of this, but I think, you know, yeah, on 360, like, it was just absolutely… Skyrim. Yeah, well, yeah. I guess Skyrim was probably one of the last kind of, like, majorly significant games, and GTA V, I guess. But it wasn’t, yeah, there wasn’t, like, an ICO for the twilight days of the Xbox 360 that I’m aware of. Sure, that makes sense. Did you get much in the way of FaceTime with the Xbox execs, Jon, in that role? How did that go down? Not masses. There was always, you know, I was always, you know, trying, but it was, I think, at that point, because they were very, you know, Xbox was enormously successful at that point, and I think they weren’t really that interested in specialist media at that point. Like, it was all about talking to, you know, Wired or New York Times or that kind of stuff. I did meet them a few times. I think the, and actually, I will say, I was a Phil Spencer fanboy before it was called, if it’s ever been called to be a Phil Spencer fanboy. But he was, because I can’t remember when I met him. He might even, he might have been back in the PC days, actually, because I know he worked on PC games before he was on Xbox, but Phil Spencer was always, like, felt like he was a nice bloke. He sincerely liked video games, and he could talk authoritatively about them, and he was a bit of a nerd, and you could, like, talk to him about, like, achievement hunting in Crackdown or whatever, and he would totally get it. And then I’d get, I don’t know, 20 minutes talking to, like, Shane Kim or John Chappert or one of those guys, and it would just be very, you know, that kind of slightly jet-lagged, windowless, behind closed doors thing at E3, where you just get, where you’re doing a roundtable with a bunch of business journalists, and all they talk about is, like, attached values and Xbox Live revenues and stuff. So no real, I think the most interesting exposure I got to executives was, ooh, maybe 2010? Which is basically coming across Don Matric, John Chappert, I think Mark Whitten. All of them, actually not Mark Whitten, but Don Matric and John Chappert were extremely drunk, like struggling to stand drunk and very seriously and intently playing Beatles rock bands on the rooftop bar of the Standard Hotel in LA. And ever the keen reporter, I went up to them afterwards and said, I can’t remember, I was trying to do one of those things where they’d tell me the most exciting thing at the show or anything like that, and even so drunk he could barely stand. Don Matric just kind of slurred out one of his pre-programmed talking points. Brilliant, thanks for your time there. Having Yoko Ono on stage, that was the highlight. So were there any particular OXM stories or cover features you remember being happy with, anything that teetered on the edge of disaster that came together at the last minute? I suppose what are your mag highlights of running the mag during that time? See, this is difficult because, and this is a testament to my own lack of organisation, I think. I feel like most of them were teetering on the edge of disaster because I really struggle to think of a cover where we got it all set up and it was all sorted and we did the trip and we got the art and everything was great and it was wonderful. The only one I can think that happened was Bioshock 2, I think, the Bioshock 2 reveal. Everything else was, you had it all set up and then it all fell to pieces the day after the cover should have gone and then it was just this mad panic trying to wring around at which point everything else had already been promised to another magazine so you couldn’t have it. So it feels like there was quite a lot of chaos running through it. I think the success snatched from the Jaws of Defeat one was now. I’m going to choose my words carefully here because I don’t want to slander people still in the industry. It was an E3 cover and I went for a meeting in the months before E3 and I was like, this is important and we want to do this and it would be great if we could work with you on this. And the PR director said, of course Jon, I think this would be great. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity. We will definitely have something for you. I can’t say what it is because it’s a big secret, but it’s going to be massive. It’s going to work. It’s going to be great. I was like, brilliant. And she’s like, you have to come out to E3 and we’ll do it there and it will be wonderful. Brilliant. And so we went and we kind of arranged the cover and we pushed back the ship date and all this kind of thing. And then you go to E3, massively jet lagged. It was just me. I had to run around, do all the interviews, do all the presentations and that kind of stuff. And I’m like, you know, emailing, phoning, texting is like, so what can we do about this cover then? And and I just basically I skipped to the end. There was no cover to this day. I don’t know what she was planning and I subsequently discovered nobody in the entire organization knew either. Apparently, like all of them, she was like relatively senior person and all people standing around going, yeah, we didn’t know what she had in mind either. So then they were like bluffing to hold your cover. Basically, yes, I think. I imagine we’ll have her game. It wasn’t like there was even a backup or anything. We got to this point and this was like three days past the point of no return when the production coordinator is like phoning me on the hour every hour to just shriek. That’s like proper uncut gems starland society. She gave it to one of her subordinates to try and solve it. He didn’t understand the nature of the problem at all. So he just said, I’ll sort this for you. And he came back like eight hours later with like, here is a picture of Master Chief. And I was like, no, no, no, that’s not how magazine covers work. And it was the standard in downtown, so it was in Hollywood. And I remember I was sharing a room with another editor, and he just said like every night, he would go to bed and I would be sat there, like in bed, like with my head in my hands, looking at my laptop screen. And then you go to bed and you wake up, and I would still be in exactly the same position. Because I was getting like two hours sleep a night trying to pull this together. And eventually we did one of those like, I don’t know, it was one of those like last minute cover hacks where we found a piece of artwork that had been, that hadn’t been used in Europe. And cobbled together some cover lines and did a kind of big E3, big E3 showcase. And I think that was the Kinect year, so we led with Kinect. Actually, it was quite a nice issue, and it looked really good and it sold really well. But God alive, it took years off my life. Oh, boy, there’s a lot there that’s very familiar for sure. So obviously the Xbox One announcement comes along in 2013. I have a very distinct memory of this because I was staying at a Bethesda preview event in what can only describe as Wayne Manor in the middle of the British countryside. And I woke up and the livestream had happened the night before and people were not saying positive things amongst the journalists there. Obviously Bethesda wasn’t saying anything. But what’s your memory of the Xbox One announcement and what was that like to cover for you on the magazine side? This was a difficult one because I had actually seen it previously. We had actually been able to, and this is a rare example of, not a rare example, but kind of working with the US magazine, that we had arranged that I could go to the pre-brief, which was two weeks before, so this was May 2013. And I flew out to Seattle and we had, I think, two, three days on campus at Redmond. Basically, they showed us everything. They wouldn’t tell us the name, but they showed us everything else. And it was a bit like, and again, this is me being like, I’m here to represent the core game here. And it was all about, oh, it does great things with TV. And here’s, I think they had a Forza, so they had Turn 10 showing off like Forza 7 maybe. I can’t remember which, Forza 5 maybe. But that was all. And this was after all these rumours swirling around and everything like that. And it was just, and it was, and obviously, you know, and that was lots of FaceTime with the execs, so, you know, interviewing, you know, Don Matric, and again, Phil Spencer and all those guys. And just being like, are you sure people are gonna like this? I feel like my readers perhaps won’t like this TV thing. I think they want the video game. And that was a weird trip. Although again, Phil Spencer, fanboy here, like, Phil Spencer was the only exec I spoke to in that whole two, three day period who was like, yes, I appreciate people will think this is not ideal, but we’re working on it, we understand. There was this whole farrago about, there was a rumor about, it’s not going to let you use second hand games, I think, or not being able to trade second hand games was the thing. That was the rumor. And Phil Spencer was like, yeah, obviously, absolutely, fully understand that’s a poor thing. We want to have a solution for it, you know, completely. And Don Matric was just like, I’ve been, he was unbelievably complacent about it in hindsight. He was like, I’ve been in this business a long time. I think it’ll be fine. And I went back to the office, because everyone knew I’d gone out and signed all these NDAs. I went back to the team and I was like, right, gather together. I was like, some people are going to say some bad things. And it’s important that we remember that the good things, folks. The triggers on the controller are going to feel real nice in force. I heard that trotted out a lot. It was good. That was honestly a good feature. But yeah, so then we got all the access and the assets and everything. I’ve still got somewhere all the recordings I made on that trip. I would keep meaning to dig them out and see if I’m misremembering how complete and done that trick was. But yeah, so then it was like, hey, come out to the showcase. And I was an NDA to the hilt. So they were like, well, what do you think it’s going to be, Jon T? I’m like, I don’t know, let’s see. And yeah, the showcase. And that was, again, we were back to Richmond, to Redmond, sorry, two weeks later and they did the showcase and it was all about, you know, NFL and television and stuff. And it went down appallingly badly. And I remember because I was hanging around with Tom Bramwell because the press corps hang around together on these trips. And I was… He would have been at Eurogamer at the time, right? Yes, I think he was editor of Eurogamer at that point. Yes, he definitely would have been editor at that point. And because I remember he was there, because I remember we were sat there in this cafeteria on campus, waiting to be called into our interviews. And because I remember I was there because I was sat with him and he said, oh, it’s time for me to go and see Phil Harrison. And he goes and he talks to Phil Harrison. He comes out grinning and he’s like, I can’t believe he said that. And I was like, what did he say? And then the PR comes back and says, oh, actually, Phil would like to talk to you again, Tom. And he’s like, brilliant, OK, go back. Goes back and they have finished this interview. And then wouldn’t tell me what it was about. Again, I’ve got a pawling memory, but I’m fairly pretty comfortable with this is how it went down. And then I was sat next to Tom on the plane on the way back and he was kind of typing furiously away. And he kind of shuts his laptop with pride and sits back and rings the bell for a drink and he’s like, I’m feeling pretty good about that. And this was this editorial he’d written about Microsoft killing game ownership. And expects us to smile. I think there’s a headline. And expects us to smile. And that was enormously successful. Shared all over the place. The Phil Harrison interview he’d done was a bit of a train wreck. I can’t remember the details, but I think Harrison thought he’d misspoken, had another go, didn’t improve the situation. And it was just chaos. And it wasn’t a good time to be running the Official Xbox Magazine. It was a great time to be running the Official Xbox Magazine’s Facebook page, because we were like the only outlet on Earth describing this thing in terms of anything other than, you know, this is a blasphemous creation that should be scoured from the eyes of man. So we got incredible Facebook engagement. This isn’t a side, but when I left at OXM, I think it was the biggest gaming Facebook group in the country. Because it attracted all these people who’d come in to slate Xbox, and then all the faithful rushed in to defend it. So we had this huge Facebook community. But then that whole period was… And again, Microsoft said this at the pre-brief. It was like, well, we’re going to do the announcement in May, and it’s going to be quite technical, and it’s going to be about the multimedia entertainment, all-in-one, Xbox One thing. And then we’ll go big with the games at E3. And I was like, OK, fine. So we’ve got six weeks of being kicked all over the internet, and then E3 will happen, and then the announcement of games, and it will be great. And they did. Microsoft’s conference always was first, I think, or still is, I believe that’s still the case. So we went to the Microsoft conference, and they announced the games, and it was OK. I honestly can’t remember what was announced, but it was things like Dead Rising 3 and 4 and 5. Rise? Would it have been Rise? Rise, yes, that was Rise looked very shiny. I think The Phantom Pain was there, maybe. Maybe Super Early, but I don’t know. Yeah, I can’t remember. But we did it, and I was like, OK, that’s all right, that’s fine. And then I was with the US team, and then there was Microsoft usually, again, this is my memory, I’m probably wrong, but they would do a showcase event at the evening of the conference, where they go, right, we’ve got all the games, some of the games you can play to them, you can see the talent, all that stuff. And there would usually be some music acts, like a popular music act would come and play one song to make it feel like a lifestyle event. And this was downtown LA somewhere, so we went to, and it was a bit nighted, downtown LA at that point, so we ended up in this hotel down the road, like in the bar lobby area, just waiting, kind of killing time for about 90 minutes before this thing started. And that was when the Sony conference was, and they had the Sony conference they had put on on the big screens in the hotel bar, and because it was LA during E3, there were loads of gamers there. And Sony did this absolute barnstorming conference. They did the thing about the game sharing where Adam Boyes gave him the disc. You know, like they absolutely crucified Microsoft. And then, and we went, well, I went from thinking, oh, that wasn’t too bad to go, oh, God. And then we went to this Xbox showcase, and it was like a wake. Like everybody had seen this thing, and everybody was like, ooh, I don’t think we’re going to come out best out of this. I was saying to everybody, obviously, you know, they were putting a brave face on it, and they were kind of, oh, I think we’ve got a good offering, you know, all that kind of stuff. But all the media were there, and they were like, mate, you’ve had it. I remember watching it, and you were like, oh, that’s the next generation then. You know, it felt as sort of locked down by one press conference there in the moment. It was, yeah, it was pretty spectacular, the year. Yeah, it was an interesting time. Did you watch the making of documentary on the Xbox that they did recently, Jon, to celebrate the anniversary? I haven’t, actually. Yeah, because I want to go through, I need to cross-reference it with my own memories and experiences, see if anything is being whitewashed out. Well, it’s really interesting, because the execs, including Don Mattrick, are really honest about how that Xbox One launch went. And it kind of feels like that’s, I know we’re in quite a nice place now where it’s not as sore a spot to sort of discuss, but it took them a few years to get out of that, obviously. But yeah, really interesting stuff. So I guess the first year of the Xbox One happens, and that coincides with you leaving OXM. So what were the final days like of your version of the magazine? Well, it was weird, because we were made redundant, basically. So from a gaming point of view, it wasn’t wonderful, because obviously Xbox was in the doldrums and stayed there for a while. And we see that the launch games weren’t particularly good. I struggle to identify. It seemed like any console had a really strong launch lineup. But we were slogging through things like Gunstringer and Rise and that kind of stuff. And other classics. But then, concurrently with that, Future, which had not been doing very well for some time at that point, decided that it was going to close the London office, or dramatically downsize the London office, close a bunch of staff. They sort of shuttered CVG. I think that was when they closed Fish and Nintendo, Matty? Yes, it was at that time. So then it was like, well, your jobs are moving to Bath, if you want to move to Bath, and nobody on the team wanted to move to Bath. So we were like, well, I guess we’ll be off then. So it wasn’t a very inspirational or creative time. It just sort of faded away, really. Although it was, you know, making people redundant is a very long-drawn out process. There’s always kind of consultation, which I had to go through, and working with the guys on Total Film and everything. So it was, yeah, rough time, not really particularly positive, like we kept making the mag, and we did the best we could with the games we had, which were, I mean, I’m struggling to think what we would have put on the cover at that point. Did an Evolve cover? Well, there we go, that’s absolutely… Would have been a bit of Titanfall in the mix? Yes, oh yeah, because Titanfall, that was a great one, I hope, wasn’t it? Yeah, because it was, yeah, Respawn, they’ll do it. I remember this time, because obviously I inherited OXM from you, because I was like the one person at Future London who wanted to go to bar. So, yeah, that was great. As rough as it is, the way it ended for everyone in London, it kind of saved my bacon in a roundabout way. But I remember I’d never worked on an Xbox Mag, and I remember we studied your Xbox One covers religiously to try and crack the code of what was a good Xbox cover and what people liked. So I remember, because you hadn’t done that many, you’d maybe done like a year of them or something at Macs or something like that. And just having, you know, we had them on, I think we even had them on a board with their sales figures, and we were constantly looking at them as if somehow we’d see through the matrix and work out what was going to be a good Xbox Mag going forward. And there was always like a Vault, I think your Evolve cover done weirdly well. So we were like, is there learning from this? We do lots of Evolve covers. I will tell you now, that was not the learning you should take. I mean, I don’t remember the Evolve cover doing that well. I think… That would be typical if I based all my thinking on incorrect stats. I think you got the wrong spreadsheet on that one. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean it was… Basically, is it a shooter or an RPG? That was what the audience liked. I think one thing you guys did really well as a team, and I don’t know… You must have been a key part of this, but you guys were like super diversified in terms of like, you had the website, the Facebook, you had a log making like comedy YouTube videos. It felt like OXM was sort of dipping its toes in lots of waters for a magazine team. Yeah, absolutely. And I think in hindsight, I think I probably didn’t do the magazine justice really, because I was very much like, hey, we should definitely… But also because when I took over, and I’d spent years down in Bath with these kind of old school print guys on the tech side who were just a little bit, you know, snarky about the internet. And it was very clear that the internet was the future. And I had a website, I was like, right, let’s definitely do stuff with the website. And then we got talking to Microsoft when they were doing Inside Xbox. And that was Dan Mar and Andy Farron. I think Dan Mar was like, well, we could probably make space for a weekly video on the Xbox Dash for Mox. I was like, yes, brilliant, we’ll do it. And Log wanted to do his comedy videos. And we had a really good, really creative team who were really up for doing that stuff. I would go to, you know, and obviously, you know, Mike Channel, he’s on outside Xbox now, which I kind of accidentally had a hand in Genesis of because I was like, and Mike didn’t really know anything about video. I was like, Mike, we need to make a video every week. And he very much, to his credit, was able to kind of pick that up and run with it. And look where it got in. Oh yeah, it did brilliantly. Yes. But then there was so much, I remember we did, we went to a, we were in the pub after a launch event or a press event for a Deadpool game, I think. I remember this quite clearly. And I was just in the pub with like Logan, Matt Lees and maybe Mike, a few other people. We were just talking about how terrible the Family Guy game was. And it was a pub conversation. It’s like you could probably create a formula to review this game and how bad it is. And Logan was like, yeah, I could probably program that. Basic JavaScript. Oh, shall we do it? So then Logan went away, learned basic JavaScript, and we published an interactive review of Family Guy on the LXM website, which was just basically a series of, I mean, it was really funny. Like, everything Logan wrote was hilarious, but it was basically you got to kind of tick the box, like tick which offensive statement you agreed with and the number, and it kind of added up to a score out of 10. And that was, yeah, that was, I don’t think anybody else was silly enough to do that. They were probably making a magazine. They were probably making better magazines because they should have put more time into that. But yeah, that was, but yeah, like particularly, you know, through that period with, you know, like Log and Matt and Mike and Edwin and Aoife, everybody was up for doing that, for that kind of thing. And it was like, yeah, let’s do this on Facebook. Let’s do a community event. Let’s do this video series. And yes, very patient production. It had sort of hired us. They were like, we have to do the magazine as well. You always seem to be having a lot of fun. And there was always a risk of Log and Gav coming up to you and asking you to do something completely random for four seconds while they filmed it. And then eventually you’d get stitched into a comedy video like two months later, they’d be like, hold this sausage and say like, I love Bowser. And you’d be like, all right, I mean, as long as this isn’t going to make me look bad. Like, no, zero context. Yeah, I think we’d have spoiled it if you didn’t have the context. Because the OXM report, because again, because they started out as videos to go on the Xbox Dash. And which meant they had to go through this approval process and like localization for Europe and all this kind of stuff. And I remember this lovely bloke, his name escapes me, but he was Italian and he booked out of their office in Soho. And I’d send him the OXM report and he’d be like, Jon, I can’t put this on the Xbox Dash. I would be murdered. I was like, it’s fine. He’s like, you can’t put a video out saying we’re calling them booby soft. That’s not, that’s not a thing. And yeah, but yeah, there was all sorts of stuff. Like we did a, yeah, I think Gavin, like Quentin Smith on this, like, Forza road trip, that is kind of top gear style diary thing. Yeah, I’m just, I’m just reminiscing at random here. But yeah, it was, it was fun. We did, we did a lot of stuff. Probably too much stuff in hindsight. But it seemed to be well received. We enjoyed it. Yeah, like the exposure of being on that Xbox Dash must have been enormous as well. Like, you would just see it whenever you turn the console on. So yeah, that content was probably read by loads and loads of people. Well, sorry, seen by loads and loads of people. So that’s exciting. Yeah, it was, it was enormously successful. And it was, because that was kind of weird because I kind of got the impression there was a kind of turf wall with Major Nelson. Got the sense of it. But yeah, but that was a huge, huge thing, you know, massive following. And then, of course, when Microsoft’s going to shut it down, that’s where, obviously, that’s where outside Xbox came from and Dan went off with his, with his crew and launched Explosive Alan. And Major Nelson breathed a, breathed a sigh of relief. Yeah, knowing that he’d finally sorted those young people out. How did you observe games media changing in the years you were editing the magazine, Jon? What sort of changed from 2007 through to 2014? Well, I think it was, well, 2000, I mean, again, because I’d started doing this in 2002, so I’d kind of seen the rise of websites and that by the time I, you know, got to OXM, that was well advanced. And there was still, because there were so many magazines, and I think magazine covers were still kind of prized by some people in the industry and some PRs, but the kind of the focused switched increasingly to digital, you know, like getting a magazine cover or hitting a magazine embargo didn’t really matter so much. Unless it was Game Informer, Game Informer had the ability to kind of set the agenda a little bit, because it was so huge still, but everything else was just like, oh yeah, it’s just going to go on IGN and you can do a cover whenever kind of vibe. It was never that dismissive, but it was relatively rare to get like a genuine exclusive on the magazine. The best you could do was kind of time it to when the embargo lifted generally, and that trend continued. And obviously it was the rise of the YouTubers, the influencers as they now are, because I think YouTube only launched in 2007 or something crazy like that. It’s not that old, but it got really big really quickly. So it became apparent where you’d meet these people at the call of duty. Because we were in London, there were all these press events all the time. There was this crazy run of, again in the early periods, 2008 through 2012, all the way through from September onwards, there was at least two free bars going every week where you could go, we’ve got DJ Blakey playing for the launch of DJ Hero, we’ve got this thing going on for Call of Duty, we’ve got this going for Borderlands, and you go to the Call of Duty DLC thing and there’d be some YouTubers there. You know, this kind of anxious and polite 16-year-old boys who had 500,000 YouTube subscribers. And so it went. I think there was also the downfall of print, the kind of significance of print waning was more accelerated in the US, of course. I get a game and form I hung in there, but it’s very difficult to make magazines in America. Because towards the end of my time, they got rid of the US team and we had to make that mag. So I got quite into that at that point. But as the US magazines diminished, all the PR decisions were made in North America anyway, really. Then they just got handed down to the rest of the world to enact. So that kind of faded. So yes, sorry, rambling now. But the short answer is websites took over and then YouTube took over from them. And that was well advanced as I left. Yeah, of course. So I’m kind of interested. You had a really interesting career arc since then, because now you’re in this very senior editorial position. Do you want to talk about where you sort of went after OXM and how you ended up where you are now at ReadPop? Sure. So I mean, I left, like again, my job was… I had to leave OXM. And actually, because I’d been through the Xbox launch, I hadn’t really planned to stay past the Xbox One launch anyway, because I’d been on the mag for seven years at that point, and I wanted to do something else. And then, obviously, the Xbox One launch wasn’t much fun anyway, so I definitely didn’t want to hang around for that. But I went to Gamer Network, as was, to do a project called Gamer’s Edition, which I’m going to call, I’m going to say, Before It’s Time. Which was, because I was kind of… We were well into the kind of indie renaissance then, you know. You know, kind of indie games had become, really become a force in the industry. We had this idea that I came up with, with me and Topraman, Rupat Noman, a few other guys we were talking to, that would do, like, collector’s editions for these games, because they were all digitally sold and people wanted to buy physical editions. So I joined them to run that, which I did for a bit. It didn’t really work out. I still think, well, I know the idea was good because, like, Limited Run are doing a really good job of it now. But we didn’t… It didn’t work for us for a variety of reasons. And so I kind of then moved into, because I was kind of indie-adjacent and editorial-adjacent, so I ended up doing a bit of work on the events, so EGX and REST. So I ended up running the second stage we added to the EGX show, the REST sessions, and kind of helping out with all sorts of things, really, like kind of helping out with the events and marketing, and then it was audience development was the job title, and it was lots of things kind of, basically, that was like looking at where we were publishing to, what works, coming up, kind of helping out with SEO and social media strategy and things like that. And then that kind of grew into a sort of more editorial-focused role. And then the company got acquired by Readpop, and then a variety of other things have happened in that time. So I’ve ended up as editorial director, so I’m kind of overseeing all of the Gamer Network, or what were the Gamer Network, now Readpop brands. So it was a funny couple of years, but I did a lot of stuff. And because Gamer Network was still a family business at that point, it was possible to do that. It was a really cool place to be. A place like Eurogamer, peerless reputation, and Rock Paper Shotgun, Digital 7, outside Xbox, Digital Foundry. There’s some really strong websites. Those guys know what they’re doing. But it was also a family business, so there wasn’t a huge team. As far as the editorial group was, I was the management layer, just me. There wasn’t a group of publishers or marketing people or anything like that. It was just me helping out where I could. It’s all a bit more formal now. But it was fun. It was fun to work on the indie side and work with the events as well. It’s really… Events are a little bit like magazines in that respect, where it’s a big push to deliver something. Then you deliver the thing and you feel good about it. That’s that kind of reward. We’ve all, in our different ways, been involved with live events now. And I definitely, at their best, got that same energy of like, wow, that was a lot of hard work, but we kind of got it done. We kind of pulled it off and kind of… It didn’t all collapse. No one got hurt. Yeah, but we’re all very tired now for like three weeks. No, that’s really cool. I think you write about the Games Edition thing as well. That was some really cool stuff you were doing there. And then it was just maybe like two, three years too early, something like that. But I don’t know. This stuff is… Yeah, it’s really difficult to make physical items. And then again, you’ve learned this from magazines as well. But yeah, but it was a learning experience. For sure. So, to wrap up then, Jon, what do you make of Xbox as it currently stands? Do you currently own any sort of contemporary Xbox hardware? Where are you at with it these days? I’ve got an Xbox Series S. The cheap one. I don’t play that many games on it, honestly. I think the game I play more than anything else these days is just Spelunky 2. But I think Xbox is in a really good place still. I mean, obviously Phil Harris, Phil Spencer inherited the Earth. And it’s been sort of wild, this acquisition spree they’ve been on. Because absolutely Bethesda RPGs were absolutely the number one thing for the magazine back when I was running it. Like Skyrim on the cover or Fallout New Vegas. Those were always enormously popular, enormously successful things. And now Microsoft owns Bethesda. And then Call of Duty has got popular and Microsoft owns Call of Duty. And it owns Double Fine. And it’s still Phil Spencer running it. And Phil Spencer still seems to be quite a sort of nice rational bloke who’s got his head screwed on and he’s doing the right things. So, yeah, so it’s really weird. Like it’s kind of like this kind of monkey’s poor suspicion. It’s like, is this a wish I made at some point finally coming good where Microsoft just owns all the studios? The thing is, you know that they would have acquired Activision just after your cover and what it sent. That’s the… Oh yeah, completely. If you were making mags now, it would still be tough. Yes, like I have absolutely no faith that it would have made making the magazine any easier at all. But, you know, we wouldn’t have had to worry about competing with PlayStation Magazine, so that would be that. But I think they’re in… I think it’s in a good place. Like, I think obviously they’re still… I think the misstep of the Xbox One… I mean, you know, the PS4 was so far ahead. And I think that’s still kind of… That impact kind of lingered. But I think, you know, the focus they have now, it’s all, you know, it’s very kind of digital. It’s all about, you know, sort of the streaming and game pass and all that kind of thing. And they’ve got this incredible range of studios. And the hardware is good. Like, again, I’ve got the Xbox One, that’s a good piece of hardware, great controller. So I feel, you know, I’m kind of… When I left OXO I kind of stepped back from paying very close attention. It had been like seven years of feeling like I have to play every single Call of Duty and every single Assassin’s Creed. I’ve got to have a take if challenged. Somebody may ask my opinion on this, on the top five games. And when I stopped I was like, don’t have to do that anymore and relax. I’ll play Spelunky for seven years now. That’ll be… Basically, and Hitman. So, basically just about like, absolutely crazy play times for Spelunky and Hitman. Those are the games I play now. Got to ask Jon, what are your favorite Hitman levels of the World of Assassination trilogy? You got like a top three. Oh, Lord. Sapienza, obviously. I’m trying to remember them now because I haven’t played it for a little bit. Not Colorado. Colorado is dreadful. Paris, you big Paris guy. Yeah, no Paris really well. Because I’ve played these games so much. You like your car games? You’re a Miami fan? Miami is not bad, it’s quite big. But yeah, you can do a lot. You can get the Flamingo costume. You can make that work. Whittles and Creek, that’s classic, feels like. Yeah, I didn’t like it as much as everybody else. And I really liked A New Life, which is obviously, everyone says, oh, that’s what he’s riffing on. But Whittles and Creek just didn’t, wasn’t as exciting for me. The Hospital on a Mountain. Oh, Hokkaido was it? Hokkaido, yes. Of course. The greatest, in my opinion. It’s, well, it’s good. Because I was playing them on Steam and I’ve got that kind of really terrifying counter on Steam where it’s like, you’ve been playing this game for 1400 hours. And I was like, I should stop playing Hitman. I should find something else to do with my finite time on this Earth. So I’ve been trying to go cold turkey and that’s kind of blanking my memories a little bit. Sorry, this is undoing all the good work you’ve done to get your life back on track from that day. I didn’t get all the stories in the Berlin mission. Yeah, the DLC levels for Hitman 2 are pretty solid as well. It’s really well-made. Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Jon. It’s been great to hear you talk about your memories of working on OXM, so I really appreciate it. No worries, thank you. Yeah, where can people find you on social media? Well, I’m on Twitter. I am at MrJohnty on Twitter, although I am very rarely on Twitter. That’s another thing I’ve tried to give up. But if you want to find me anywhere, that’s where I am. I feel like when you do tweet, it’s sporadic, but it’s usually gold. That’s kind of it. For you, it’s all about hit rate. But yeah, good stuff. I will endeavor to live up to this promotion to your listenership. Yeah, no pressure. Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? MrBazzill on the score pesto. I’ve got a low hit rate. I was going to say, you’ve got the Blorko tweet, Matthew. You’re an influencer now. That’s one for the ages. Do you know what, Matthew? I’m really waiting for one of my tweets to blow up so I can go, wow, this blew up. Now check out my friend Matthew’s Blorko tweet in the replies below. I’m desperate to do that. So watch this space. I’ll keep reaching for it. It’ll happen for you. So we’re Back Page Pod on Twitter if you want to follow the podcast. And thank you very much for listening. Bye for now.