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 Tim, would you like to introduce yourself? Hello, I’m Tim Clark, and I am brand director at PC Gamer. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us, Tim. So we’ve both got like a long history with you, so we’re really excited to have you on here. Is it time to settle a bunch of scores in audio form? I don’t want to litigate old PC Gamer top 100s and Game of the Years, but, you know, no, it’s all good. It’s really nice to have you on here. How’s things going, Tim? Yeah, good, thank you. I was really excited to be asked. It’s a pleasure to be here. Oh, thank you. You’re being very sort of formal. It’s not question time, just so we’re kind of clear about the vibe. It’s like… I was just saying, I feel like nervous about coming on because when you get invited on to this show, they bring you into their secret Discord and you see like all the previous guests and the kind of, you know, these famous alumni of UK Games Media. And I was like, well, why wasn’t I asked earlier? Well, building up to you as the main event, that’s like the logic there. You know, it’s sort of like you’re like, you know, not the end boss, but like second to end boss. And then there’ll be… All barrels have a bottom, is what I’m hearing. So we really appreciate you coming on, Tim. Obviously, you’ve got a long history working on PlayStation Mags and At Future and, you know, like you say, now on PC Gamer. I’ve been working on there for a long time. So I suppose to go back to the start, Tim, like before you got into games media, did you grow up playing games? Were they an important part of your life growing up in the UK? Yeah, absolutely. I was trying to think like what the very first kind of video game I encountered was. And I’m so old that I think it was one of the Atari like pong type home things. I remember going to visit, I think, a cousin who had one and just being like staggered that that could exist in your house and furious that we didn’t have one. And after that, that kind of like triggered, I guess, like a campaign really to try and persuade my parents to buy me a personal computer under the kind of disguise of this will be used for homework. I mean, who was using their piece like a computer for homework in those days anyway? You didn’t even have a printer. I’m not sure what you would have been doing. And my parents like fairly wisely knew that I only wanted one for video games. So they split the difference by not letting me have a C64 or a Spectrum and getting me instead the Amistrad CPC 6128, which I have like super fond memories of. I think I got the one with the built-in disk drive, but then because the difference between like tape games and disk was like about a five or I ended up getting most of the games on tape and then they would like habitually not load and stuff. I remember like not being able to load Trantor, the last Stormtrooper over and over again and just spending whole nights just listening to it kind of doing the noise. Yeah, I was obsessed with them really from the get-go and I used to go around to my buddy’s house, he had a BBC Micro and we would kind of like co-op elite where one of us would fly on the keyboard and the other one would shoot, like which is literally one button. You can see that kind of a fleshed out co-op experience. The other one I remember really playing on BBC was the game Exile, which I’ve looked up a few times since and it was kind of like fated in the day and it was this kind of side on, almost like proto-Metroid affair where you’re like a crashed space explorer of some sort on this alien planet. Did you remember this game? No, it predates me. Like, I’m getting slightly older, but I think you’re about eight or nine years older than me, Tim. So we’ve got slightly different frames of reference on this stuff. Yeah, so anyway, it would have like semi-realistic physics, like you could pick up a beaker and try and get like space water into the beaker and carry it somewhere. And we like literally couldn’t get out of the starting area, because we were like, I don’t know, probably like eight or nine years old at that time. And we would just spend hours and hours like pootling around this starting area of this game that’s clearly too complicated for our tiny, tiny brains. So when you got, I guess, like student age, were you kind of, what sort of, what was around at that point? What are you kind of buying for yourself to sort of facilitate your, your interest in games? Yeah, when I was, when I was at uni, I did the classic thing of dropping my student loan on a PS1 at launch. I remember playing like Battlerina, Toshinden, Tekken, which was obviously the much better version of Battlerina, Toshinden, Wipeout. Like I was a fairly like, I guess I was like a fairly like, was I like a saddo at uni? Probably a little bit. I definitely wasn’t doing like a ton of work. So I would, I would spend like an inordinate amount of time in my kind of halls playing PS1. I had like a SNES before with like the, you remember you could get the thing that you stuck in the top that would let you play NTSC cartridges and you would have to pay like literally 70 pounds for a Street Fighter Turbo. I’d had like a Mega Drive as well. I remember my dad, I remember my dad, who’s a troubling man in a lot of ways, being furious with me because he found me playing Donald Duck’s Quack Tales. I think that’s what it was called. And he, at the time, he worked in TV. He was having a lot of troubled business relations with Disney. And he somehow like blamed me for that because I was playing a Donald Duck game and therefore funding the Disney machine. I mean, I was probably about fucking 10. My word. Sounds like succession. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you met my father, you would realize how on the nose you are with that. University was like actual soccer as well. I used to go around to my friend Simon’s room and we’d play actual soccer for all hours. I mean, I’ve never been not playing video games, basically. The other really seminal memory I remember having is going to the arcades at my grand’s house down in Eastbourne. And there was, I’ve looked it up since, but again, I apologize because it’s going to come a bit, my memory’s not great, but there was a space shooter which I think used cut off footage from TV shows. It was like the illusion of you were playing a TV show. And I remember thinking, even as a kid, I sort of knew it was being spoofed. It looked like it wasn’t quite real, but it looked so incredible that I kind of had a sense that even then, the games were getting better all the time and that eventually this would be reality, which I guess it is what has been for a while. That promise of them has always been, I think, the lure. I also remember saying to my ex-girlfriend, we were on holiday once and she said, I’m a terrible one for not committing to things and I hadn’t proposed or anything. I think that’s what the conversation was really about. She said, well, what are your kind of really long-term ambitions? What do you kind of hope to happen and stuff in a decade’s time or two decades’ time? I think I said something like, I’d really like to be around to see PS6 and how good that is. She was like fucking livid about it. You know, I understand the B-Side. It’s what every girl wants to hear. I think I did actually say something similar to my parents once, which is I just want to live to see Metal Gear Solid 4 and know the ending of that series. So, yeah, I completely understand. So which games made you want to write about them for a living, Tim? It sounds like PS1 was like a big part of your life. Did that change your gaming taste a little bit? Did you feel yourself quite aligned with how sort of PlayStation was going at the time? Not really. I never really kind of bought into that whole like, all games are hip now because like Sony’s giving out like, you know, LSD looking paper at Glastonbury or whatever with the, you know, PlayStation logo. I never really cared about that sort of stuff. I guess probably because I’ve grown up playing a bunch of kind of old nerdy games that I already loved them, right? So I didn’t need Sony to convince me. And I don’t think there was like one game that made me want to go into games media. I think like candidly, it was much more like I’d come out of university with, you know, an English and philosophy degree, had no clue what I wanted to do and figured if I could do something that was even like adjacent to something I loved, it would be a good idea. Although my old man had always warned me like, the more you enjoy your job, the less they’re going to have to pay you to do it. And that has largely rung true down the years. You said that while throwing your copy of DuckTales into the fire, I see. Yeah, good stuff. So I was stalking your LinkedIn page for your background, Tim. You have an interesting start to your career. You started at Trinity Mirror and Playboy in the UK. What was that like and how did that progress into a games media career? So basically I was in like trash cable TV, as you’ve successfully alluded to and discovered. When I was when I was at the Mirror Group, it was actually live TV, which again, you may be too young for ball was like literally the worst television channel that has or ever will be. It was a TV channel that had something called like the News Bunny, which was to fun up the news. They had someone in a rabbit suit behind the newscast, so like acting out the stories. Multiple news bunnies got fired. One because he was doing they were doing a story on like drugs and he like mimed shooting up heroin. This is like a man in a rabbit suit on a newscast, right? Right. Another one got fired because they were doing a story literally about a terrorist attack and he mimed like a Kalashnikov being fired. So like this was the channel. When I started there, I was like a researcher on like, I think I was on like 10 grand when I started. And I was on a show called The Vinyl Frontier, which was about, it was about like finding, you know, record memorabilia and stuff. And what they had me doing was literally they put a phone book in front of me and I would just call people up and say, like, have you got any old records? There’s going to be like a record fair. Would you mind bringing your old records to it? I mean, you can imagine the response to being phoned and asked that question, right? One poor woman, like I phoned up, there was this huge long pause and she said, my husband died yesterday and you’re asking me about the Beatles. And I was like, I’m so sorry, like put the phone down. And then like at that point, there was me and another girl who these kind of like, you know, just out of college researches, we refused to do any more cold calling. And the woman, it was like a Canadian lady who ran the show. She was very angry with us and she said, I’ll do it. And I’ll get you like 10 guests by the end of the day. She didn’t get a single one. So then the vinyl frontier had to kind of switch tack a bit. So I hated that and I quite quickly got moved off onto the late night desk. And late night at live TV was basically like a bunch of kind of red shoes, diaries type stuff. And they also had like a magazine type show called The Sex Show, hosted by a very funny woman from Newcastle, where they would have on like sex therapists and stuff, just with a view to being able to justify they would also have on exotic dancers once a night. So I was doing that for quite some time. By the end I’d moved into the promos department, which is basically like cutting adverts, which I really enjoyed. But then we literally all got made redundant just overnight, just came in one day and everyone was fired. Did they have the news bunny behind the person telling you you were being made redundant, miming you picking up a box off your desk? I remember coming in and I was late and someone said, check your e-mail. I’d come out of university by not even knowing how to use a computer. Someone had to show me how e-mail worked. Someone said, check your e-mail. There was this thing basically saying, yeah, you’re all out. Me being, and Samuel maybe relate to this, tried to continue finishing the project I was on and the guy next to me was like, what are you doing? Just come downstairs and have a sandwich with the rest of us. You idiot. See, after that, I was out of work for about six months, I guess, and I really listlessly applied for new stuff, because I’ve got a bit of a payout, but we’re still living at home. I would do the thing of I would send off one job application and then wait for the result of that one to come back rather than sending a lot out, which is obviously the strategy. Eventually, I got this job. I was called the executive of honor promotion and something else at Playboy TV, and I was working out of Hayes and Harlington, which is right by Slough, and it’s just the biggest shit heap and it was the most depressing job. I was writing continuities mostly because everything was like, basically it was all the stuff from America that you would just kind of shed and play out. I would have to write the kind of continuities in between for voiceover people to read out. The sorus for dirty words was exhausted after 10 days, and I was just going to recycle all these adjectives. Yeah, I was commuting two and a half hours each way and just go into the pub on a Friday and just collapsing. So I only did that for like six months. So then I worked for a company called The Network of the World, and they did have a gaming, because this is kind of where we get to gaming. It was like, I guess, first or second dot-com boom, I forget, but they had an enormous amount of money from Hong Kong to the tune of like, there was like maybe 200, 300 journalists working in this building in Chiswick. They had so much money that their science channel had its own science vessel boat that would sail up to the Antarctic to try and film whales birthing. There was this big pod of whales that, I guess, like other TV documentaries and stuff were trying to film too. And ours was the only boat that missed it. We were like kind of a mile to the south when we should have been to the north. But that was the level of money that was being pissed up the wall. So we all knew it wasn’t going to last from day one. We were being paid pretty well, even by London standards. Everyone joked that the building was kept warm just by burning £50 notes in the basement. So there was this kind of very strange, fatalistic attitude. So you had to pretend that it was a real company, but everyone knew it wasn’t really. And on my first day there, they were like, oh, the guy who’s running, because I joined the games channel, right, because I wanted to write, I thought I was coming to do TV stuff about games basically because I was a TV guy at that point. And on the first day there, a guy said to me, oh, the dude who was running the website, because it had a website, has quit. You can write, you did English, do you want to just run the website for a bit and see how that goes? And I loved it and I kind of built a little team there of five or six people. Like no one was reading it, obviously. The site was built on a platform. This was like pre-broadband. It was kind of theoretically at the dawn of broadband. And the site had, as you landed on it, like a splash page that said, if you do not have broadband, don’t bother coming in. Like don’t bother visiting our website. And it wasn’t even because our website had anything good on it, like flashy video or anything. It’s just they got this sense that we were going to be a broadband portal for these various special interests. But yeah, like I think I actually, strangely enough, learned quite a bit there about managing writers and, you know, doing news. And funnily enough, I remember being visited by I think like James Bins and whoever was running PCG at the time. And Binsie was trying to basically like leech off some of this company’s money, as far as I could tell. And me thinking, oh man, Future, they’re the big boys. That’s like real games journalism, I wish I could kind of get involved with them. I was like a big edge guy as well. Like I’d read Edge pretty much since it started, like religiously. I used to get really excited about going to the Smiths and picking up Edge. But yeah, surprise, everyone got made redundant there as well. They actually kept, they tried to strip it down just to the gaming stuff, because that was the thing that was kind of working best. And I kind of like slightly out of career cowardice stayed on to relaunch it and do a redesign rather than take the money and run. But just as I relaunched it, I took the job of Future. So that job was, you were an online editor for the official PlayStation Magazine website, is that right? Yeah, it was odd because it was, I was essentially like half funded by Sony, like my salary. So I like half, I kind of like work for Future, but I kind of like had one foot in Sony as well, because the stories we were writing would be published to playstation.com, the official site. And it was part of the kind of the license thing. So I kind of was, and OPM had never had any kind of web presence at all. So I was kind of like a little one man band and I would just sit there and write, you know, three or four news stories a day, use their incredibly rough CMS back in those days. And then a chap at Sony would run his eyes over them and a chap at Future would run his eyes over them. And then I would publish them. And it was a really exciting time. Like that was when I guess OPM would have… It was weird actually, because I think OPM at the time was probably selling mid a hundred and something thousand copies a month. Like maybe like 150, 160. And you’re like, when you do the maths of it costs probably like around a five of them with a demo disc. Like the money’s insane, right? But this is something I’ve always said to people at Future. We were still paid the exact same amount of money. We were still treated the exact same. It’s like no level of success got us paid better. And also because the original PlayStation Mag had gone north of 200,000, it was seen as a huge failure. So the atmosphere was actually really bad. I remember like Sam, who was there at the time, different Sam was under like massive, massive pressure for kind of just not delivering. It was regarded as, it was so short-sighted. It was regarded as, you know, he’d kind of like, you know, missed a trick or wasn’t kind of, wasn’t kind of doing something that he should be doing. So there was this strange sort of mood. Another thing that stood out for me at that time was that I felt like the magazine was too dry and too staid and too kind of like, it was too kind of content to be like the official thing. It was a bit kind of smug and it was just dry. I remember like being a little bit jealous of like Dan and Joel on PSN, who were kind of having this much more kind of like renegade time. And I remember like Graham Dalzell, who was our art editor at the time saying like, you know, you know, the magazine is better than that. And I was like, what do you mean? He’s like, it’s better. It’s better written. It’s kind of more fun. And I, that really like stung me because I was like, well, why aren’t we doing something about it, right? Why aren’t we kind of changing OPM? So I found it quite frustrating at first because I was like, you know, I didn’t have any real power. I was there just really to kind of dip a toe into the war of online for OPM. I mean, by the way, like there were great people on OPM at that time. Paul Fitzpatrick was a fantastic writer. Mike Goldsmith, who hired me, I absolutely loved. But he, Mike really liked, I think, the kind of just the more stylish, cool side of Sony, which I wasn’t as into. It’s interesting you say that. And I’m sure we’ll get into this when you, you know, worked more heavily on the MAG side of things. But I always, and I’m not just saying this because you’re on here, Tim, I always thought of the three official MAGs, OPM was the one which had a bit of like pizzazz and comedy and humour and, you know, still kind of an official product, but like definitely had a lot more of its writers personality in it. I would say, but I’m talking about like OPM2 forwards here. So something I associate with you, I would say. I think it did. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, I was happily building up to it. Obviously it was better under me. I think like it went through like real eras, right? So there was that kind of very stiff, but kind of cool, very brand safe version. And then it swung massively in another direction under like Stephen Pierce and Rich Keith. And it was kind of the lads magia. And I think, you know, we would all agree. And I don’t wash my hands of this. It went a bit too far. What Stephen did do, though, was like force us to try and be creative on every page. He like, he would not accept us handing in a preview that was just a preview. You had to you had to think of an angle with either how visually it was presented or what the writing was doing. Stephen was a fan. He was actually a tough boss to work for. But like he is, is and was a fantastic writer. So that kind of pushed us. And I think we’re going to come to it later. But yeah, and when we relaunched in the PS3 era as well, I think like that was when I mean, that was when I was in control and I think we did something quite different. And I’m proud of that era for sure. So it’s 2002 you came in to work on official PlayStation 2 magazine. So this is like firmly the PS2’s heyday. Editorially, what sort of opportunities were you getting around then? What do you remember about like the sort of what was coming the OPM’s way at the time? Do you mean in terms of what we’re being offered? Yeah, what you’re being offered or what you just kind of remember, I guess, from like your first couple of years being there during that kind of like red hot PS2 time of like Vice City and Pez and stuff popping off, you know? I mean, I think like as Dan said, I remember it being like an incredibly competitive era. I mean, we were all cutting each other’s throats the whole time trying to secure covers, right? Like getting the first look at Vice City or something, or being the first one to put it on the cover was just like, it was just kind of guaranteed gangbusters sales and excitement. I mean, I remember there being a ton of travel, right? We would kind of like, people were just kind of cycling in and out, going to like America to see things, or Europe and very occasionally Japan as well. So it was like a young person who hadn’t done a lot of that. That was like incredible. I’d done E3 before going to future, so I’d had a bit of a taste of that. I mean, my first ever E3 was an absolute disaster. I don’t know if you want me to tell you. Oh, yeah, yeah. Of course. So I’d gone over there with Network of the World. I had no idea what I was doing. I actually met Tony Mott for the first time. It was kind of a little bit starstruck by him, Tony walking around with his new balance and his rucksack on both shoulders. Absolutely iconic if you’ve ever. And I’ve got like screenshots. We’d seen the Toby Guard game, Galleon, was it called? So I’d seen it and I knew Edge was into it. So I was like, I’m going to be into it as well. I’d got this kind of like probably CD with screenshots on it. I took it back to the hotel room and I was like, shit, I could get these screenshots back to Britain to kind of get someone there to post them for me. Because I think the CMS didn’t even work abroad. And I ended up sending them down like the hotel phone modem, which I had to plug into the lamp. The lamp had like the kind of ethernet cable. And it took all night to send like six screenshots back, right? Of like a couple of meg each. And when it came time to check out, the bill for that one phone call for like six screenshots was like $300 or something. And I was like, I like nearly vomited on the desk immediately. I think I said to my boss, I was like, I’ve ranked up this expense. And he was like, you know, must have been for a really big story. And I was like, yeah, it was six, six new screenshots of Toby Gardscally. And I think probably three people read that. So yeah, opportunities. I don’t remember. I still remember, like, I think because there were so many mags around, it wasn’t like people were like beating a path to our door necessary. I mean, the official cover was prestigious for sure. I mean, maybe because I was like slightly divorced from those conversations that were happening at the time, I was just kind of plugging away online. But I don’t remember it being like, I don’t remember it being easier, to put it that way. I feel like mags were always hard and that seems absurd because you look at the team sizes back then. I mean, we had a production editor and a sub. Do you know what I mean? We had two art editors. Nowadays, mags are made by like a person. Yeah, right. If you get Robin Valentine on, I’m sure he’ll curse my name. But you kind of convince yourself back in the day, well, we simply couldn’t do this with any less, right? We could not, like it would be ridiculous to try. But, you know, like having teams like that afforded you to do some really cool work as well, I think. Yeah, for sure. Were there any PS2 games you remember being particularly significant during your time on the, I guess on the website and then moving on to the magazine itself? Like, what do you remember from the PS2 days that seemed like a huge deal to you on the team at the time? The game that sticks out the most to me is TimeSplitters 2, because I think that was one of the first cover reviews, and maybe it was the first cover review I wrote, and we were obsessed with TimeSplitters on the team, because it was that kind of split-screen co-op or whatever, right? That just… Like, each mag team would tend to have a game, right? And TimeSplitters was ours, and you come up with all these kind of stupid verbiage names for things in the game, like we called the P90 assault rifle the Butter Knife, right? Because it just kind of would go through you, and we would only play the Chinese map, and we’d go, like, who’s on for some chinois at lunch? The French word for Chinese for, like, no fucking reason, you know what I mean? Like, you’d develop these kind of, like, these, like, in-jokes in this language. Like, when we were playing Pez, it was similar, right? I remember we all called, like, Zinedine Zidane the bear for some reason, because he was, like, this huge presence in midfield. And I used to… Because it was all these people who just loved words, right, and language, and, like, kind of riffing off each other. The game that probably, like… The game that stands out to me most from PS2 personally, and this will make me seem like a really wanky suit, but was Killer7. Like, I was obsessed with Killer7, partly because I was probably, like, listening to, like… I used to, like, listening to, kind of, or still do, sort of difficult music and being into the cool thing, right, and the stylish thing. But I was, like, really… I was really obsessed with that game, and I still kind of count its ending as, like, my favourite video game ending, because it kind of actually had this real emotional clout, and it resolved in a way that I think I didn’t expect it to, but had been, like, foreshadowed really well throughout, considering how, like, largely bonkers the game is. I don’t think it’s either of your sorts of game. I think Matthew, you must have played this, right? Yeah, I must admit, like, I like the kind of cruder, dumber, suder stuff, you know, when it was all just sort of, you know, erection jokes, so that’s more my speed. Yeah, I’ve not played it, truthfully, Tim, but I think I ended up with your copy of it after you gave me your GameCube before you moved to America. That GameCube holds a very dear place in my heart. I remember having to drive up to Hammersmith, I think, when I was maybe living back there, and my other half at the time had got it for me as a Christmas person. It has the switch on the back, right, so you can play NTSC stuff. And I got given it for Christmas, and I got given it with, I guess, Rogue Squadron, and I can’t even remember what the other games were, but on Christmas Day, it didn’t work, it just wouldn’t boot. And I was so upset, and in my way, I got frustrated and just like, I think I just jammed the laser with my finger, and it turned out it was stuck. Maybe I could see that it was sticking or something, but that fixed it and it booted, and it still remains one of my most beloved machines, the GameCube. Soulcalibur on the GameCube. What a game. Yeah, some of your games are actually imported from Japan as well, so I assumed you were a big GameCube guy as well as being a PS2 guy at the time. Like, I’ve always had everything, right? Like, I’m trying to think if there’s any machines I’ve skipped, like only things like the PC engine and stuff. I didn’t have the money for the time, but I’ve always had, yeah, all the consoles. Funny enough, like, now is the time I play least console stuff at all, just because I don’t feel the need to with the PC being as strong as it is and wanting to kind of, you know, be a good PC soldier. Yeah, very on-brand for you, for sure. I was going to ask, were you a big Kojima head? Because I know it was like super important to Dan Dawkins during this time. And I remember really good Metal Gear coverage in official PlayStation, where I just I remember this preview where I think the gimmick was like codec conversations between, I want to say, you and Paul. Paul Fitzpatrick, yeah. Paul was really good on the deep Metal Gear lore. I was absolutely like a Kojima head, yeah, for sure. And again, like I had read, I remember reading the preview for the OG Metal Gear or the one that was on PlayStation anyway, the first one. I know it was once before. But let me just quickly tell you an anecdote about Paul Fitzpatrick. Paul, who is like a great, a great but long suffering member of the OPM team, at one point for a next month page, I think it was for the next month page, or it was like an and finally tight page, like a back page. It was for Silent Hill and we covered Paul. Have you done this before on the back page? No, but I know what you’re going to say, so I can remember the image. Yeah. So for the back page, we’d always do kind of like a photographic treatment that kind of like summed up the game. So for Splinter Cell, they’d be one of us, like trying to balance in the top bit of a corridor, like the goal was on. For Silent Hill, we wanted to make Paul into like a meat monster. So we covered him in like, I don’t know, like 10 packs of fucking bacon. He was like in his pants, covered in bacon. We sprinkled like mints on his head. George Waltler, who was the then news editor, made like a blood, a fake blood substitute out of like corn syrup. George had like read up how to make fake blood because he was into horror movies and like just drenched Paul in this like corn syrup mixture and bacon and mints. And then we photographed him under lights at the future studio. So the meat was like starting to like part cook, the smell. Was just like horrendous. But yeah, anyway, Paul was the Metal Gear guy. I went to Japan to do, I think it was for Metal Gear. It would have been for Metal Gear 4. And the reason I know this is because, so we did the interview with Kojima. It had gone really well. And Kojima says through his translator, you know, thanks for coming. I will join you later this evening when you’re out in Tokyo. So we’d gone out to this and I kind of was like, well, he’s saying that to be polite. He probably won’t actually show up and didn’t really have my hopes up. And I bought Kojima as well. I knew he was into like Britpop and kind of British rock. And I bought him like as a gift, like a, I think it was like Star Sailor or Embrace or one of those kind of like slightly complaint rock British bands to enjoy. And which he seemed pleased with. So anyways, we go out for a night in the town in Tokyo, get pretty drunk. We end up at a karaoke bar. And just after midnight, like Kojima turns up with like one of his guys. And I’m pretty, like I’m honestly pretty half cut. And I say like, I would love to sing Mr. Kojima a song, as you know, a tribute, you know, my gift to him. And then I go, I could already see like the PR for Kanami going, I’m not sure this is a good idea. So I stand up and I said, like, you know, in honor of Metal Gear Solid 3, which had like a real bond theme to it, I would like to sing Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better. So I like, the lady from Kanami finds the song on the machine, pops it on. And immediately I’m in trouble, right? Like big, big trouble. Because I can normally sing quite high, but for some reason, like immediately, like my pitch is off. And the Japanese karaoke machine has like a knob you can twiddle, that will change the pitch. So the lady from Kanami, like immediately sensing I’m in trouble, starts moving the pitch up and down. So now I’m kind of trying to chase that as it goes back and forth. And Kojima’s like looking at me just like in like, at first it’s like horror, but then he’s like fully laughing at me, just going, this like, this idiot. And a couple of people like stood up and I’m like, nobody does it better, makes me feel sad for the rest. And a couple of people like join in and put their arms around me and they’re trying to help me. That’s how bad it is. But yeah, that was definitely like one of the best chips I went on. And I remember like Kojima actually saying like at the time, he, it was one of the, it stuck in my mind. He said he wished he could put his games out on PC and that they developed, you know, they would develop on PC and then kind of convert it over. And he had a kind of lot of love for the platform. Yeah, which obviously, you know, significant later on when MGS5 made the leap and then Death Stranding. Death Stranding seemed to be like weirdly a great fit for PC in terms of like, you know, it was just odd enough to be perfect for that platform. So, yeah, but congratulations, Tim, on telling an anecdote that’s gone right to the top of the pile of those told in the podcast. Does everyone have a Kojima anecdote? I felt like more people than you’d think for sure. Like, I think like maybe we have three so far between me, Dan and you. So, I haven’t got one. Yeah, I’ve never met the man. I’ve got one about you, Matthew. I was thinking about like trips we’ve been on and I think it was an E3 we were going to and we were sat next together on the plane, you and I. And I’d brought like, I don’t know, a laptop or, it was probably an iPad, actually. And I started to watch the erotic thriller Chloe with Ananda Seyfried and Julianne Moore. And you looked absolutely horrified. Like, just like, what are you doing? Why is there, why are you like, openly, have got like, nudity happening within a meter radius of me? Yeah, I do remember that. I think that’s the first time we like, ever properly like, chatted outside of work. And you’re like, what the fuck is happening here? I was like, who’s this grotty man? I saw someone watching Factory Girl on a plane once. And like, it may have been a coincidence, but they just happened to be on a scene where like, Sienna Miller was topless in like, a sex scene. And when I like, sort of woke up and glanced over a screen, I just thought, oh God, I just have all the films to watch, you know, just put like fucking Happy Feet 2 on or something, you know. I’m still not sure what the A-Cat is really, because you have like, on Virgin, you can watch some like incredibly violent films and stuff. And then you look across the island, there’ll be like a fucking eight year old kid smiling at you. I’m so sorry. I actually was on a flight, just pre-pandemic, cross country in the US, and I got sat next to this old boy, and on his iPad, all he watched was dentistry gone wrong videos, like horrendous kind of rotting teeth being drilled, as a playlist, like multiple of them. And then he was watching like street justice videos of like people getting in altercations and attack. And then his other thing was kids who’d been caught smoking being made to smoke loads of cigarettes, like just complete psychopath material, right? And I’m like, fucking hell, man. I can’t be sat next to this guy for like four hours. But then, midway through the flight, I realized I hadn’t brought my charger and he could see that I was kind of looking to plug something in. He goes, did you want to borrow my charger? And I was like, oh, maybe this guy’s fine. You’ve got to smoke this entire box of cigarettes if you want it. Yeah, yeah, or else I’m going to drill your teeth. Oh, amazing. So Tim, how do you end up like going onto the mag side? So you seem to progress pretty quickly on official PS2 mags. So how did you get off the website into the mag side? And how did you kind of ascend from there? There was a DEP editor before me had left because I think he had been due to get married and then his fiance had left him and had gone completely AWOL, just not coming to work for two weeks. And then at the end of which he just sort of went, like, I’m quitting, lads. So that created a vacancy. And I kind of won a runoff between me and George Walter. And Future did the classic thing of like going, well, we’ll make you Depphead for a bit. And then if we think you’re doing well, we’ll kind of make it official. And I actually like to think I kind of generally know my own value. And I said, how about you just pay me for it now? And if I don’t do it well, you can put me back to the other role I was doing. Like, see if that works. Because it always felt like they were trying to kind of get a freebie. But being Depphead, as I’m sure both of you remember, basically amounts to like writing still 30 pages a month, making most of the decisions. And it was like the most exhausting job I’d ever had. But good, like I learned, I think, a lot under Rich Keith. Stephen was still there for most of it, but left. But yeah, it was kind of, you just kind of, it was that thing of you would move up into a chair as people vacated, and I guess maybe there was a bit more movement back in those days. So you became editor just as the PS3 landed and the magazine had a relaunch. That was actually quite a long period of time, because I think the PS3 was revealed in 2005, then it didn’t launch in Europe until March 2007. So what was that period like for you when you were redoing the magazine essentially? It was really one of my favorite times. The first time I’d really been involved in that creative process of making something from scratch and having a blank canvas. And I was also lucky enough to work under Mark Donald, who was in many ways a very strange man, but I also think pretty brilliant as an editor and taught me a ton. We had like two amazing art leads in Mark Quinn and Dylan Shannon. We were able to spend just, I think because you’re right, it was delayed in Europe, wasn’t it? I think. Which bought us a bunch of time. And it was a real kind of prestige relaunch. We kind of swung back from the kind of, the vibe on OPS2 had got kind of younger and younger as the audience did and kind of more poppy and cartoony. We kind of swung back to being a bit more prestige. Like the first issue launched in a box, as I recall, like an actual box. Yeah, and it was really, it was like a thick box as well. We didn’t make that many. I think that was issue zero, which was one of these kind of pretentious things they like to do around launches. And it just had the hardware on the cover, really beautifully shot. And yeah, the fact we were able to, the delay bought us like another kind of two or three months or whatever. You could just spend an unbelievable amount of time like finessing these stories. I think I maybe did a feature on, I want to say it was Burnout Paradise. It was certainly one of the burnouts. I think the headline I wrote for it was I Wanted to Destroy Something Beautiful. And we’d got this amazing kind of render we’d done of a car kind of like looking as if it was slow motion crumpling. But like every feature had this, just so much time and love poured into it in a way that you never really get the chance to do on a magazine, right? Because you know, you’ve got three weeks to make it or whatever. My favorite things when you do a magazine redesign is how you come up with all these ideas for like regulars, which are easy to do when you’ve got like three months on that redesign issue. And then how quickly they die when the mag’s like real. I remember, I feel like that’s a backhanded way of me talking about like, because I did, we did the Nintendo game redesign together. I’m sure some of the sheets I handed over, this is a cool redesign. You were like, okay, yeah, yeah, we’ll see along that line. Matthew, is that you alluding to Barrel Watch? No, Barrel Watch, that was official Xbox. Barrel Watch lasted for ages, 20, 30 issues or something ridiculous. Yeah. No, it’s more like when we did the OXM redesign, we were going to have this big interview every month with like original photography of our interview subjects. We had the first three lined up and could get a photographer out and it worked brilliantly. But soon after that, it began getting a little bit like, well, we’ve got the interview but we haven’t got the photography and we started running worse and worse photography and we kind of undermine the idea a bit. Just things like that really. What did you make of the PS3 and the run up to launch, Tim? Because there was a lot of nonsense surrounding it, all of the Ken Kutaragi, Get a Second Job, GTHD stuff. I remember the banana controller, a lot of drama. How did you feel about the PS3 as someone who was working on a mag dedicated to it? My strongest recollection is of being with Dawkins at E3. I think it was at the one maybe where they did the giant crab. Was that pre-PS3? Yeah. Giant crab? That’s right. Yeah. I remember because we would always try and sit together to get an instant reaction. I remember as that was playing out, we literally held hands, just gently held hands and we’re like, this is bad, isn’t it? We’re like, yeah, I think it’s really bad. But also, do you know what? I don’t know if people on other magazines or other official mags felt the same way about it. I didn’t really care. You knew there would be games, you knew that Sony wasn’t going to sell so few PlayStation that it would go bust or all the games would be terrible. In some ways, you’re kind of tied to the mast. You’re slightly hostage to the fortune of whichever platform you happen to be writing about. But also, when they were up, it didn’t really benefit me that much. So when they were down, I felt like it didn’t really fuck me up that much either. Because if the mags sold less, future largely I felt like understood the market conditions and knew that, all right, Xbox is winning in this cycle or whatever and the Xbox mags doing great. So, you know, good news. I never took it personally, I guess is what I’m saying. I kind of felt like I was a PlayStation guy in that era, even though like, as we discussed, like I would play everything, like I would always have all the machines. That memory of sitting with Dan Dawkins has similar energy to when they were doing the Wii U announcement E3s. Do you remember we watched that weird pre-conference in that internet cafe? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because we were out there to do, yeah, because I think by that point you were probably, yeah, you were off APN then, you were more general, overseer and… Jack of all trades. Yeah, you were there on the Nintendo stuff as well. And yeah, we remember sitting through this quite strange, it was Iwata’s like Miiverse introduction, and you have a similar kind of like, well, you know, this is what we got to work with, you know, this is the thing, and we’re an official Nintendo mag, so I guess it’ll be this from now on. I always thought you enjoyed that that kind of underdog vibe anyway, Matthew, like, yeah, you, I felt like it never really got you, I think it got you down when you were like, there’s literally no games to talk about for three months, how the fuck are we going to make a magazine? I think that was rough. The stretch where we did like three Mario Kart covers in a row, that was, that was tough. I remember talking to you about covers and going, is there any other Mario art? And you’re like, we have literally used all the Mario art, there is no more Mario art, stop asking. Is there time for me to quickly say my favorite Nintendo anecdote from these three? Oh, of course. Yeah, of course. So in the same one, it must have been the same one as Toby Giles’ Galleon. It was the one where they showed a very brief bit of Metroid, I think, coming to GameCube. Like a very quick snatch of it. And I’m sure I’ve told you about this anecdote before, but hopefully I’m sure it’ll be new for most of the listeners. So they did like a little Q&A at the end with me and Moatl, I think, at the end of the conference, because the conferences were different in those days. There was a guy who stood up to ask a question who was from Nintendojo. How do you say it? Yeah, Nintendojo, yeah. Nintendojo, yeah. And he had on, they all had on, I think, American football shirts with Nintendojo and then their name written on the back. And they also had like head scarves on, like Ralph Macho and the Karate Kid. That’s how like full weed they were. And this guy, he goes, if it pleases Mr. Miyamoto, I’d like to ask my question in Japanese because I’ve been learning, right? He’s like, he’s all in on weed. And he proceeds to ask his question. And then there’s just this like confused look on the stage and the translator is like kind of cocking her head. And she’s like, she hasn’t got a clue what he said. Like Miyamoto doesn’t know for sure. And gradually, like this guy’s like, he tries to repeat it, right? And it’s still not sinking in. And some guy in the audience just goes, sayonara, buddy. The whole place just like explodes in laughter as this guy’s life ends. Oh, that’s so good. Oh, amazing. I’ve seen that later on that night, Tim, you had to send like one Metroid screenshot down the phone line and that cost another 400 quid or something. So OPM, I thought, was a bit ahead of its time as sort of like mags went. I was on play at the time and I thought PSM were quite similar to us. We were like very much more in the PS2, a sort of laddy vein. And I thought OPM was a lot classier under your watch. So what sort of decisions shaped the thinking on that mag? Because you didn’t have a traditional news section, if I recall. You had a kind of feature section at the start, like a top 10. And that was always kind of like beautiful looking. And I thought the mag generally was just had a high level of thought put into it. So kind of what did you kind of bring to that process? I was a huge thief is the thing, but I kind of stole from everywhere. And so when we were doing both redesigns and launches, myself and whoever I was working with on art, which was often Graham Dalzell, but in that era would have been Mark Winn, I think. We would go to Smith’s and we would buy up like every magazine we thought looked cool from like home and design magazines to women’s magazines, lifestyle stuff, sports stuff, car stuff, movie magazines. And we would just scour through them, cutting bits out that we thought were clever or looked nice or could be applied to games in an interesting way. And that whole top 10 thing was lifted really brutally from Grazia magazine. And it had won awards for it as well, like I think. So I’m pretty, you know, pretty shameless about it. But I think we did enough to kind of convert it to, like the problem we had, right, was like the internet was really approaching the dominance it is now in those days. So trying to write a traditional news section was a fool’s errand. So what we wanted to do was, you know, find stories that were like interesting, surprising, could be illustrated well with, like, we would use a mixture of things like infographics and photography and like just one render full page rather than like a bunch of screenshots. And I think, like, as long as that mag existed in its incarnation, it was probably the best bit of it. And it was one of the most fun to do. And it actually wasn’t that hard to do, right? You would know at the start of the month you had to find ten stories. And this was kind of rough composition of them. And you had like a bunch of formats you could pick from, like a chocolate box. But yeah, I think that was the first time I really felt like Mark had handed it off to me and that like this was my thing. And I could… Each month we could build anything we wanted, you know, within the constraints of, you know, the games that were coming out. And we for sure tried to push beyond just doing the expected. I remember like really upsetting Rockstar because we did a Manhunt 2 feature. And rather than using any of the key art they supplied, Mark had got… We’d found these like medical illustrations of like bodies, like part kind of dissected. And we used those for like all the page art background. And Rockstar were fucking livid about it. They were like, why didn’t you use our staff? This is not our brand, blah, blah, blah. But I think that feature was fantastic. Like it looked amazing and I think it captured kind of what that game was doing. That’s pretty cool. All these years later, I still remember like what your little big planet cover looked like, for example, and like, yeah, you had just so many, such kind of like beautiful, contemporary looking sort of fonts and stuff. And yeah, I really do. Yeah, yeah, that stuff, a lot of that was, yeah, Dylan Chanin, who is now still works with a bunch of ex-future people. I think Matthew probably worked with Dylan quite a bit on Nintendo stuff. He’s a great guy. I remember the cover that took years of my life was we did a Killzone, I don’t know, two or three, whatever it was. We did this cover and on this one occasion, we’d persuaded them to do this holographic finish to this character. It was kind of like the hologram stuff you get on a packet of toothpaste, a good packet of toothpaste, it’s like kind of like rainbow reflection. The only place that did it was this print shop up in Nottingham. I think it cost like 15 grand or something, which is a lot for a mag treatment. We were so nervous about it, we drove up there, Mark and I, all the way to Nottingham just to see this cover, kind of come off the printing presses. I remember looking at it and going, like, fuck me, you can hardly see it. Like it’s doing nothing, like in a certain light, maybe, there’s some fucking rainbow. And we were like kind of, the guy at the print shop was like, he could see us kind of freaking out. And we were kind of holding it under different lights and stuff. We took it out to the car park to look at it. Do you know, ultimately it did end up looking pretty cool. But I think we drove all the way back to Bath just in stony silence, thinking we had made this huge 15 grand error. But yeah, I don’t, I don’t miss that kind of side of it. All these things, definitely, yeah. Take a piece off you, you never get back. Sorry, Matthew. I was going to say you mentioned the little big planet cover. I’ll always remember, was it There Will Be Blood as a little big planet level? Oh, that sounds right. Yeah, because I was obsessed with that film. I remember we ran a competition in the magazine for all the editors, all the writers to make their own level and the readers would choose the best. I remember Nathan Dyson, typically, being so idle about it that his level was just like an enormous beaker full of stickers that were just like, you just cracked it and all the stickers fell out and me being like furious that he hadn’t like, he hadn’t done the assignment properly. But I also remember, I think my level was called Red Hot Salty Balls or something. I guess I was watching South Park at the time and it was like a fairly like, it was like a fairly trad take on like a Nintendo style platforming which took me absolutely like an entire week to make pretty much. And that game was incredible, right? I was thinking about the games from that era and like it was the kind of game where like the concept of it and the proof of concept of it, right? That you could do something like this on console was so incredible. But then when you actually came down time to do it, it was like this is too much like hard work. I think only Leon and our team could really like muster the energy to properly make levels. Yeah, it was an amazing tool, though, like the in the hands of other people. I do remember it feeling like it was pretty special thing that the PS3 had the other consoles didn’t have. But yeah, I too tried one level and then like booted it back up and I spent six hours on it. And it was just like eight circles on a screen. And I was like, what the fuck am I doing here? And you’d like move one cog and the whole thing would fall apart as well in like a manner that you couldn’t really get back. I know you could rewind it, but like it was just like, I don’t think I will. So you a whole bunch of stuff happened after that PS3 launch. So there was a demo disc on the on the on the magazine with the like a Blu Ray demo disc. And you ended up launching a content channel on PS3 as well. So what was that like doing this kind of like multimedia stuff from the mag? Like it was just a literal nightmare, I would say. It was just like really hard and stressful. And like it was one of those things where there were people above me at Future who were like absolutely convinced. Well, we need to be on the console, right? If we can be on the console, that’s going to be this path to, you know, some enormous part of gold. And I think like us never really believed it because the lead times were like longer than for a magazine, right? It was like six weeks or something. So whatever kind of like screenshots or videos you could corral together were going to inevitably be out of date. I mean, that thing kind of spun off now to become it became ultimately a YouTube channel, which some some folk at Future kind of broke off and did still with Sony and is very successful now. And like good luck to you. But doing it, it was effectively like an app kind of on on the PlayStation platform that you would download. And yeah, you would get like screenshots and videos. And I think as with everything, like the people making it were creative and cool. And I think we did it. We did our best to make it work. But it was like a bullet is how I would describe it. I don’t remember it fondly. That’s fair enough. So which PS3 games were a big deal to you at the time? Or were you secretly playing 360 like every other games journalist in the late North East? We’ve talked about Uncharted and I think that that for sure felt like it was a it felt like a kind of a game changer, even if it wasn’t the most played thing. Was I playing 360? I was certainly playing Halo. Like that’s where I think like the bungee obsession that lives on to this to this day was born. I would like play Halo levels over and over again, the same level, just doing things slightly differently or focusing on using different weapons, which ironically is kind of like for sure the kind of seeds of my addiction with Destiny later. I remember Uncharted coming in actually and Uncharted having been being very unheralded when it came in. And it was just kind of this sense of where it’s going to be this Tomb Raider alike and it won’t be that interesting. And then actually kind of getting it in our hands and going, fuck, this is actually really, really slick and blockbuster and clever and consistently fun and being kind of amazed that it felt like kind of Sony had undersold it to the world at that point. I mean, it feels odd in hindsight because you’re like, well, Uncharted has always been one of the biggest things, but it really was when it arrived. It was kind of this, you know, this other game. Yeah, I sort of told Matthew a very similar story on a previous episode and you were surprised by that, weren’t you, Matthew? Is that your recollection of it as well, then, that it kind of wasn’t? Because it was like the next game from like the Jack and Daxter guys, right? Yeah, my memory of it is that like that was the year that Lair and Heavenly Sword came out and they were both like kind of kind of duds. Heavenly Sword was okay, but like they hadn’t set the world alight and then right at the very end of the year was Uncharted. And yeah, I had seen it. That was one of the ones where even OPM goes, all right, you’re getting a five or whatever. There’s no guss seeing that one up. Yeah, but my memory is very similar. Yeah, like Uncharted just sneaks up. And then by the time the second one rolls around, it’s like the biggest deal in the universe. So it was, yeah, that’s kind of how I remember it too. I actually lived with Leon who worked on OPM and yeah, I remember him playing in the flat and being like very impressed by the wet clothes. That was like the big thing. His clothes were really like gooey when he got out of lakes and things and thinking, that’s pretty good. Didn’t it pretty much coin the kind of like protagonist talking to themselves thing as well to kind of feel the dead air like, you know what I mean? Drake’s always talking to himself to kind of… Yeah, it feels like if not created definitely popularized. There was a lot of it afterwards. And obviously like so far, like worlds apart from what we were playing on Wii. So our Wii experience was just so different to everyone else. It was kind of wild. So Tim, at a certain point you became a sort of future management and moved off of OPM. What were your post OPM days like? You described yourself as a jack of all trades. Do you remember it that fondly? The good bit of it was getting to still work with Graham. And I felt creatively the redesign stuff was interesting and satisfying initially at least. I did enjoy doing the Nintendo one. But it was also tied at the time with one of future’s periodic obsessions with like herbifying everything and trying to find like economies of scale, which invariably mean people like doing multiple versions of the same thing, which everyone fucking hates. And it’s very difficult to persuade them otherwise. And I think probably rightly so. I was asked to essentially kind of like merge PSN and XPW, which neither team wanted and I didn’t especially want, but was kind of like sold in as like, well, if we don’t do it, they’re going to be closed earlier than they might be. So that wasn’t the most like I felt like Graham and I gave it our best shot, but there was understandable resistance to it. When you’re in that kind of role, like I think my title at the time was like group editor or something. I kind of had responsibilities for like everything, but also kind of nothing. So anything that kind of went well was like nothing to do with me, but anything that was fucked up was my problem. So it was very kind of like unsatisfying as a role. And I think if not for moving to PCG, I probably would have quit. Although that said, like I’ve been a future for like 20 years, like I’ve stopped counting. So like maybe that’s a bold claim for me to be making. I definitely enjoyed that Nintendo redesign process. I didn’t at the start, and I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, it felt like in my head PlayStation people were coming in and saying, this isn’t how you do it in a hack. And we were like, you know, because we’d been sort of loving our weird sort of irreverent underdog status. But actually I was incredibly proud of Nintendo Gamer and what came out of it I thought was, even though it only lasted about five issues, was like a really smart, great celebration of Nintendo. I almost want to tear up hearing you say that, because I really did think, I really gave it my best and I loved Nintendo actually and had always like played Nintendo consoles. Actually, I knew that you were a great team, like you, Charlotte. I mean, fuck, you wouldn’t have stayed at Future as long as you did if you didn’t really love it and care about it. And I knew you were a great writer, so I didn’t want to let you guys down. I think the PSNX BW one was just harder because it was just like, you still hear it now and then floating around. Future is a very different company to what it was, but you still hear discussions about how can content be reused. Invariably, you end up, to my mind, having to have so many processes and layers of management that actually any saving you might make is a fucking wash anyway. And it’s fundamentally against the reason people get into the job as well. That makes sense. I suppose, Tim, before we take a little break, you’ve already given us two excellent stories to chew on there. The Sayonara story I’m still laughing at in the background here. I have to take off mic sometimes. Pretty good. But I wanted to ask if there are any kind of trip stories from the PS2, PS3 days that kind of jump out to you, anything you consider acceptable to discuss on there? It’s really hard because there’s a story… I can’t even remember if Matthew would have been there or not. I don’t think he was. I think Garrent was there. Do you remember Garrent? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a story where I think… I’m really not sure how much of it I can tell, but I thought it would kill. You can tell us, and if we deem it too spicy, we will edit it out. I thought a PR person had been killed, potentially. We’d been at a bar. I’m not even going to say the company we were with, but the company we were with, it was someone who worked in PR who no longer does. And that person had… I remember being like, I don’t do drugs. I’m going to say that upfront. But that person, to my understanding, had been trying to buy cocaine, and it had gone pretty wild. And they had suggested… When we’d gone back to our hotel in Santa Monica, they had suggested, like, let’s all go swimming on the beach. And I’m like, jeez, I’m pretty drunk. I’m pretty sure everyone is, but I guess we will stick together. And Garen had gone, like, hurtling off onto the beach, right? Started, like, taking his shit off. I’m sure it was Garen. I apologize, Garen, if it wasn’t. And I’m like, shit, we need to get onto the beach so he doesn’t drown or whatever. Because I do, like, maintain a degree of responsibility. And the beach was very near our Santa Monica hotel, so we clambered over this, like, chain-link fence. I’d been, like, the first over the freeway after Garen. And as I looked back, this PR person was, like, halfway over the fence and just dropped, like, a stone down to, like, the sidewalk below where the freeway was. And just, you know, when someone, like, falls and you know they’ve just, like, they’ve really landed hard. And the person, like, wasn’t moving at all. Another writer from PSM, Nathan Irvine, was the next one down. And he just shouted, Tim! And there was a moment genuinely on the other side of the road, like in the terrible thriller, I was like, should I just run? Should I just run away? Like, this is such a bad situation. But instead, like, I crossed back over the road. By this point, there were, like, cars, like, slowing down and honking because this person had, like, one leg in the road. And we started tending to them and they seemed unconscious. I think I said something like, we’re fucked, we’re fucked, the cops are going to come. At that moment, the PR, like, sprung up. And I don’t know if they had been, like, playing up to it a bit. And it was the mention of, you know, John Q. Law that kind of woke them up. But anyway, they kind of sat up. They seemed like all right, like a bit kind of woozy, but not too much for worth of it. Had a bit of like an egg in their hair from a breeze. And we ended up like walking them up and down Santa Monica for like hours because we were worried about concussion and like putting them in bed because someone said, oh, you can die if you go to bed with a concussion. So like, all right, great. We’re going to just, you know, walked around to like almost fucking dorm with this person. Cath Price was there as well. And she was being very, like, you know, sensible about it. But it was literally like a flash moment. I was like, well, someone’s dead now on a press trip. Great. This is going to be really difficult to, like, phone. I think I remember I did phone the mag, because I saw what you did back then. I phoned the mag as they were waking up and going, oh, we’re having a terrible night over here in America. But yeah, I think you could probably include that. It’s probably fine. I think it’s fine. You left out enough details that it’s okay. I mean, I don’t even know who it is. So yeah, if there’s like the one-legged PR going around, that’s, it’s them basically, by process of elimination. There is actually like a follow up to that. It’s the next day, the senior PR on the trip, because we eventually did leave Cass. I think Cass put this person to bed, you know, Irvine and I went off our separate ways. And in the morning, Nathan and I were having breakfast and the senior PR turned up. And he just said something like, good night, was it lads? And we were like, do you think it was a good night? And there was this kind of really like cagey back and forth, trying to work out what he knew about what had happened. Amazing. We’ll take a quick break, then we’ll come back and talk a bit more about PCG. Bye. Welcome back to the podcast. So in this section, gonna talk a bit more about Tim’s work on PC Gamer and moving to America, which is very exciting. So Tim, how did you end up on PC Gamer and making the big move? Because this seemed to happen around 2013 time, but I got the impression it was in the works for a while. What kind of led to you going on to the PC gaming side of things? So I’ve got to know Charlie Spate, who was then running Future in the US mostly because we were both big Arsenal fans and we’ve been to a game together, and he really, I think, got the gaming side of Future and was really invested in, he had been really invested in making GamesRadar work in the US and I think Higana then turned his attention to PC Gamer. And he had identified that the PC Gamer team, which I think was probably under Graham at that point, Graham Smith, after Tim Edwards, was really kind of, the US and the UK sides were consistently at loggerheads and didn’t really communicate and would often kind of do things that made each other’s lives difficult. So he initially wanted someone just to kind of join those two teams up and make them more like one kind of fully functional group. And he wanted that person to be in the US fundamentally, I think, because Charlie Newland was correct to think, he’s like, that’s where the audience is for, you know, America’s a country of 330 million people versus Britain’s 50 or 60 or whatever. And he saw the potential for PCG over there. And what attracted it to me was, I think I kind of, you know, by that point, it was very clear to me that online was going to ultimately be where it was at. Like, you don’t have to look too hard to see that. And PCG already had like a really fantastic and that talent on it. Like it had, you know, Phil Savage, Tom Senior. I forget like when you came in, Samuel, was I on PCG before you or after you? I think you were like… Or was it about the same time? It was about the same time. I think you were like group editor still, but you were, you knew you were moving on to PCG, but it’s quite a lot of work. I remember interviewing you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s right. Yeah. You actually interviewed me for Matthew’s job on O&M in 2012. And then 2013, that was when you interviewed me for the PCG job. So, yeah, yeah, that was my first contest. I think he must have been one of those people, yeah, who I interviewed and liked. I can’t remember why it didn’t work out, but I guess because Matthew was good. So I hear. Yeah, probably. And kept you in my back pocket for something else, which is a good way to go about hiring. I think everyone ended up in their right place, I think. Yeah, yeah. Hope so. I felt bad because I think we had floated the idea of Graham doing it. And then I kind of increasingly, the more I thought about it, it was like, could this be me? Would you be open to that? And he was pretty enthusiastic about that. But he suggested coming out to the US for a period of time to meet the team and get a feel for it and see how it would work. Because I was like, if I don’t feel like I can actually add anything to this mix, I’m not going to do it. I don’t want to just be injected and not be of any use. And the initial plan weirdly was to live in New York and kind of split the time zones. But that immediately became clear it would be dumb. Because you, I think, a bit like Matthew was saying, we’re like, you know, who are these PlayStation people coming in and telling me what to do? You actually need to kind of prove yourself to people and spend time with them. So I did like six weeks in San Francisco, which was, in hindsight, like absurd. Because I was on my own for six weeks. I was actually like, I was pretty lonely, right? Because the Americans, it’s not like the kind of like pub culture and stuff. And I was just like in a new city in this kind of like rented place that Fiatra put me in. And six weeks was just like much too long. Like my other half, Rachel, who’s managing it, we’re on GR now, came out to visit. But that was just like kind of in the middle. And that was kind of really where me playing so much Hearthstone was born. Because I would just go back to this apartment and just sit playing cards for a fucking, till all hours of the night. But yeah, I don’t know. The weird thing is I’ve always considered myself to be like pretty risk averse generally. And yeah, I kind of moved cross country for future once and then moved across the ocean for them as well. And uprooted in both cases, like my partner at the time. I’ve always seen you as quite a bold, confident person. You know, when you went over to do that stuff, I was like, oh yeah, that tracks. I think, do you know what the opportunity just seemed like? I didn’t have kids and I didn’t want kids. And it felt like too, too good an opportunity to pass up. The lure really was like PC Gamer more than America. Truthfully, PC Gamer like Future in so many ways for a long time. I think Sammy will probably agree with this. It took a long time to wake up to the opportunity they had that they had created. It was like one of the few brands Future had, unlike the official mags, where it was a market leader that was its own. It created and coined it. And this was a brand which I think under Tim had had to persuade Future to give it a website. Something that’s based about the personal computers. How can it not have a website? Absolutely ridiculous. But it always seemed like… I mean, you’ll remember it, Matt, I’m sure. There was always this talk of, oh, is the PC dying? And it was like, you look at it now and it’s never been in Ruda House. But you could feel at that time I joined that the mood music around it had changed and people really understood this thing between modding and the potency of online games. And the coming of eSports, even though we never really kind of cracked that nut. It remains this incredibly fertile thing to be involved with. There’s infinite stuff you can write about it. And it’s the antithesis of those Nintendo days. You’re not beholden to one company occasionally pumping out a game. There’s like, I can’t remember how many things are put on Steam each year, but it’s like a disgusting amount, right? Yeah, it was around that time, the end of that console generation as well, that generation had really slowed down. And like, it petered out quite badly for the PS4 and the Xbox One launched. And so PC, meanwhile, was getting stuff that wasn’t on those platforms at quite an alarming rate. And so my attention turned to PC. And I think that you, to your point about like, yeah, these two teams weren’t necessarily gelling. You saw the potential of making that work if those teams were all pointed at the same North Star basically. So that was kind of my memory of it. When you met them individually as well, like you realized there was, you know, talent on both sides of the pond. Like the guys over in the US, like Evan was there, Tyler was there, like fabulous writers both, really smart guys, really wanted the best for it. And the problems were really problems that either future created or kind of based on natural communication issues that exist when you try and work across the pond. But I felt like for sure, I mean, like, I mean, Sam, when you joined PCG, I felt like at heart, you were probably more of a console person. And I certainly was, right? I had played on PC growing up. I remember playing like, you know, quite you can stuff or whatever. But I was in my heart more of a console person. And I was really concerned with like, will they just consider me a fraud or will the fact that I’ve done enough editorial stuff kind of justify me being there? And I think, you know, people were right to be suspicious at first. But I think about like my time on OPM and my time in PCG is like being these two like big love affairs, honestly. And I’ve been like unbelievably lucky to like the best bit of the job. And like, this is a podcast about life in the media, right? The best bit, I’m sure you both agree, is like the feeling of being on a great team as it kind of hits its stride and everyone kind of gets each other and the humor is there. And you know, I don’t want to, I’m not going to say to you any bullshit about like, you know, you’re like a family or whatever, because I don’t trust any company you work for, you shouldn’t. But there’s something about like being on a mag or a website and being in, you heard that expression like when you’re in, you’re like in imperial phase, right? When you can’t really do anything wrong, like everything’s just kind of operating at its maximum ability. Sometimes on a mag, you drop an issue, right? And it would be like that issue couldn’t have been any better. Like, of course, it could have been better if you were given infinite time. But given the constraints we had, like money, members of staff, what’s in the release schedule, right? Given all those constraints, it could not have been any better, right? We nailed it. And then normally the issue after that, you’d kind of all take your foot off the pedal and it would be like a six out of ten. That was like the best bit of, I think, being on mags, like when you knew you would really kind of like drop the bomb like that and really kind of operated at peak. The other thing I wanted to say to you, to see if you two felt the same, is like, I think when you’re on magazines, like you have an absolute shelf life. I think there are only so many issues you can put out. And I know there are exceptions to the rule, people who go on and on. I don’t know if Tony’s been on, but I mean, Tony’s had breaks and come back. But I feel like both with me and you, Sam, like you reach a point where like you just, I can’t make any more mags. Not because you didn’t love mags anymore, didn’t believe in them, but like it takes something from you, that process, I think, like the relentlessness of it. And it’s not to say that making the internet isn’t relentless, but it’s relentless in a different way. I think what’s always been similar about you and me, Tim, and I realised this after I left PCG, is that like we’re both way too caught up in our work and over invested in it. And we both probably derive too much pleasure from it when it’s going well, and then take it far too personally when it’s going badly. I’ve been able to diagnose that in myself, and I feel like you’re maybe kind of similar. I don’t know if you agree with that. But do you feel like you fixed it in yourself? A little bit. Part of this podcast is like it’s something that’s not work that I pour a bunch of time and energy into. And so there’s a bit of pride of something you own that’s not related to work. But no, I don’t think I’ve really fixed it because I just launched the game and got incredibly personally invested in how it went. So, yeah, do you identify that yourself, Tim, or am I kind of off the grid there? The funny thing is, although like, because Stanton said this to me the other day, he goes, you’re not a writer anymore. And I’m like, yeah, that’s probably fair, even though it hurt. And the thing is, I never felt more satisfaction than when I’ve written something I felt was good and just put it into bed. And I think it’s like a unique thing. But I never found like writing got easier for me. I always found it hard and not in the sense I didn’t believe I could do it. I just like physically found it hard, like sitting down in front of a blank page and then trying to. When I was reviewing something or writing a feature, I would basically like procrastinate to the point where I felt like my head was almost going to burst with the thoughts. And the feature would be half written in my head and then the act of writing would be just kind of putting it down. But I’ve always felt like a sense of dread and fear about especially writing anything of any length. It’s one of the reasons I think I like news so much and mostly consider myself a news guy. It’s because I love the kind of short formness and the kind of rip and runness of it. I think the difference between me and you is like I know when something’s good enough. You know what I mean? Like I can be satisfied with good enough. And I think you’re haunted more by the idea of it should be better. And the other thing I would say about working with you, which I enjoyed thoroughly and miss, but I’ve never worked with someone who more consistently thought they were about to be fired for like no reason. You know what I mean? Yeah, I always felt like whenever I was sent you a message, I would have to like preface it with don’t worry. You’re not going to be fired. And like you never did anything came close to getting you fired. So the reasons you kind of worried about it would always be very to me like almost cryptic. Like I’ll be like, what? The thing is, once you’ve seen what you can do and not get fired, you appreciate how far you are from being fired at all times. I felt we didn’t decide whether to talk about it. But I literally dragged official PlayStation magazine onto the cover of the mail on Sunday and didn’t get fired. And I think the only thing that stopped me from getting fired was that probably someone at Sony would have had to be fired if I got fired. Do you want me to talk about it? If you want to, like there’s no pressure from us, but it is legit interesting. I think it’s fine. I mean, it’s a historic thing that happened. Again, like I’ll leave any names out of it. It was in the front section of the magazine, the one we talked about earlier, the Grazia kind of style top 10. It had come to my attention from a source at Sony that Sony had, and like I said, we were always looking for like cool, weird shit that people hadn’t seen. It was surprising kind of culture-y type stuff. It came to my attention that for the God of War 2 launch party in Greece, the person at Sony said, have you heard about this? I was like, no. It’s like, yeah, they did this kind of wild party and they were like topless waitresses and they kind of, this goat got… There was this kind of dead goat that got like kind of faux sacrifice and then there was a competition to like eat from this bowl of guts so that it weren’t really guts. It was like, I don’t know, like kebab meat or whatever. You had to kind of eat this, you know, slightly dodgy looking bowl of meat and the winner who I can’t remember the exact mechanic, someone would want to, would win a PS3 with God of War 2, I want to say. Yeah. And they may be wrong. And I was like, holy shit, are they like pictures of this event? And the person was like, yeah, yeah, do you want them? And I was like, well, that could be like, that’s a pretty wild news story. I mean, even now me saying it out loud, it’s ridiculous. Like, what was I thinking? So we turned it into a double spread and the headline was something like Sony’s Greek orgy. I mean, I don’t know what we were thinking. I do remember that Mark Quinn, who was the art editor at the time, Mark’s vibe was always like, he was one of the most talented people I’ve ever worked with, but he kind of came on like a kind of like haunted jazz trombonist who was really into heroin. He was the only one in the office who wore like a shirt which was open and then like black slacks and he just looked ill, but very dry and very funny. And he was like, we were like laying this picture out with sure enough, this, you know, Greek guy with kind of like wearing animal skin and like this goat corpse, which I think had been slaughtered previously, like by a halal butcher or whatever. And Mark was going, yeah, we need to turn the, we need to turn the blood up, like the red in the blood to really make it pop off the page. I was going, yeah, Mark, you’re right. That’s definitely what we need to do. And I was like incredibly tired at the time. And for some reason, like no one stopped me, probably because they thought I would like, I thought this was the greatest wheeze ever. Anyway, we sent it to print. I went out to the All Tomorrow’s Party music festival with my ex-boss, Mike Goldsmith. I watched a bunch of indie bands and then on a Sunday morning, I got a call from someone pretty senior at Sony who said very sternly, you need to go to the newsagent. And I was like, well, you guys should just go to the newsagent and look at the man on Sunday. And they had run a cover, they had run a front page that just had the word slaughtered with the picture from the magazine blown up. And it was like Sony’s sixth stunt or something like this. Can you imagine like the level of panic? I think I probably nearly threw up in the newsagent. It was like 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning at a music festival. We were hungover. I went and spoke to Mike and I think I just sat in my car for a while in the car park, probably like just going, well, that’s it, I’m done. I phoned my dad and my dad said, you know what you need to do? And I went, no, dad, tell me. And he goes, go in on Monday and ask for a pay rise. And I was like, don’t think that’s going to work. He goes, they’ve never had publicity like this. This is the best thing they’ve ever had. I said, I hear what you’re saying, but that is not how this is going to play out. So I drove, technically I had the Monday off, but I just drove back to the office. James Spins was like a great publisher at the time. Drove back to the office. Sat in, sat in like silence. No one on the, like almost on the Mag Team. No one was talking to me. I think Rachel just went, do you want a cup of tea? And I was like, yeah, please. I can’t remember exactly how it played out. We had to like, the magazine was like effectively recalled and those pages cut out. We had to write an apology. Sony like disavowed all knowledge of it and sort of said that it had been overplayed, which maybe it was. I mean, truthfully, like I hadn’t been, you know, we hadn’t been at that party. So is it the best journalism? Probably not. But I mean, the party happened. Like, let’s be clear about that. Yeah, like that wasn’t my idea. I remember it because at the time, randomly, we’ve been reviewing this video game based on some like Japanese anime thing. And when we imported a copy of it, it came with a remote holder in the shape of a sheep’s head. And I remember being like, oh, this is going to be classic. You know, there’s stuff kicking off about this goat sacrifice. And we’ve got this sheep’s head. So I just kept putting in references to sheep’s head and then having, it must have been Nick Ellis at the time, just removing all of them. And it was like a game of cat and mouse, where I was desperate to make some cheeky little joke about this situation. And he was like, no, no, no, over and over again. I mean, I’d never seen a time for out appears to like pontificate. I mean, it must have been great if you’re in a row and see us taking that size of L, right? Yeah, I think the only reason I didn’t get whacked is that, you know, ultimately the pictures had come from Sony and the event had happened. And they, to be fair, didn’t want to, I think, didn’t want to haul their person over the coals as well. In hindsight, it’s one of my kind of like fond anecdotes to tell. George Water, who I used to work with, piece of shit, would keep the paper on his desk at all times. So whenever I walked over to him, I would see it. Wow, that is next level psychological warfare. Yeah, it’s sort of like good for the male on Sunday, thinking they had the moral high ground on anything ever, frankly. Good for them. The reason it ended up on the cover, I was told, was that they had had a story about, I think it was, the boss of an oil company had been seeing a male sex worker, and they had this as a scandal. And that boss had got a super injunction at the last minute, which meant they had to find something else to put on the cover. I mean, it would have been in the paper anyway, right? Let’s be clear. But they kind of just threw it on as the next best thing. So that kind of was a piece of fairly bad luck for me. Probably below a free DVD of, like, When Harry Met Sally or something like that. Yeah, so PCG, like, I think that I was curious to know what you made of the way games media changed over the years, Tim, because you say that thing about Rich saying that you’re not a writer now, but compared to, like, all other management I worked with in an editorial, you were very, like, hands-on with the editorial side of things in a way that you were invested in the individual stories we’re covering and making sure we were chasing certain things. And, like, it feels like those editorial instincts probably existed throughout your entire career from print to online. But I was wondering what you made of the way that, like, media changed from when you started in the early noughties up until now. I’m still the same for sure, like, I’m still pretty hands-on. I’ll still be, like, poking around at headlines. I’ll still edit stories. I’ll still occasionally write when it’s, kind of, my beats. I mean, look, the biggest seismic changes, I think, you know, aside from, kind of, the shift from print to online, probably has been, and much to my chagrin, the advent of Twitter, and that being, like, it’s both, like, such a good source when it comes to stories and news and being able to tap into, like, communities and people on development teams and stuff, but also, like, I despise, like, the games media’s obsession with the, kind of, naval gazing side of it and the cliquiness of it, and I really, as you will probably remember, dislike the fixation with, kind of, the discourse on there, when I think, actually, it is very much a bubble and the impact it has in terms of certainly traffic and stuff is minuscule versus Facebook, for example, which, you know, is a trash fire in its own way, but just actually has a much bigger impact on who’s coming to your site. But Twitter clearly has, like, changed games media and continues to do so. Gamergate, which I really don’t want to talk about, I think, has had, like, seismic effects beyond games media, all the way up to, kind of, you know, who gets elected in the US, and I look back on my time during that and, kind of, still, to a degree, haunted by could we, should we have done more? Probably yes, but also I saw a lot of people do a lot that had no effect at all, and I think I saw, like, the entirety of mainstream media trying to hold back the same forces and were washed away by it, effectively, so I wonder whether that was just a storm that was coming one way or another. Yeah. Do you know what I was going to say as well? Like, I think, like, one of the biggest changes for Positive is that we, I think, generally, as a group, care much less about exclusivity. Like, it just doesn’t matter so much anymore, and I think that’s been… Like, I think that was the worst thing of the Mags era, the need to kind of constantly get these kind of review covers and stuff, which were, you know… They put, like, such a pressure on the reviewer and the editor and the, you know, just the whole organisation, I think, to keep securing these things, and I think we just don’t care about that stuff anymore pretty much, because reviews aren’t necessarily the most important currency anymore. I remember feeling quite liberated here in Timming and say that on CBG he was, like, didn’t give a shit about going on embargo… I mean, don’t tell this to the rest of the team, but he really didn’t care about embargoes and preferred to go a couple of days later when the kind of… the melee of everyone releasing a version of the same thing on… at the same exact moment of the clock had died down. He’d rather put his thing out, like, 24 hours later and get the attention that way. But I think, like, that scramble for covers, the throat-cutting of that was unhealthy and I’m glad, like, we’re not involved in at all. Like, we picked the game we’re most interested in now and try and get it, and if we can’t get that, we get the next best thing and then keep going. Is there now not a scramble for everything in the age of, like, you know, search engine optimization and whatnot? Yeah, I mean, SCO, sure, that’s a different battle, but that’s much more like a craft, I think, that you can kind of just learn and be good at across the whole piece. I mean, it’s definitely, like, it’s definitely hard in a different way, and you would ignore it at your complete peril. But you’re not kind of, like, you’re not kind of, like, trying to cut deals where, like, oh, give us this announcement, right, and don’t let them have it, which was very much the way of the world back on Macs. And I think, going back to PCG and, like, what I was saying earlier about how much there’s effectively infinity you can write about at any one given point in time, so the job becomes, like, how creative are you at finding an angle that’s going to interest people or excite people? Can you go out into the world and find a story that is being undercovered or not discovered at all yet that’s going to, like, thrill people? And that’s, you know, we have, like, some really fabulous people on the team and, you know, and who’ve come and gone during my time, folks like Steve Messner, Andy Chalk, the news machine we’ve got. In fact, I don’t want to start naming people because that feels like then you kind of buy a mission. But, yeah, I think some of our biggest stories are just us finding a really cool, funny, weird thing and writing a killer headline and telling people something they didn’t know about. And to me, in some ways, that actually is like a DNA through line back to what you were talking about, Matthew, like the really creative days in the mag when you would be like making each other laugh and just inventing cool stuff rather than kind of being… Evan on my team really pushes us away from like… We don’t have to preview all the games, we don’t have to write all the new stories, like actually that’s kind of… has very diminishing returns. And what works is having a voice and finding the cool shit in amongst this kind of absolute male strung of new things. Something I thought you and Evan were really ahead of the curve on was the idea that big online games were like self-perpetuating news industries in themselves. And Steven was perfect at that because he was really good at tapping into stories around Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls of Life, Eve, exactly. All manner of online games. But then it very much became a thing where certain people would own certain games, like when we had Joe Donnelly writing about GTA Online or whatever. I know you’ve got Nat Clayton writing about Apex these days, for example. That sort of thing. You felt ahead of the curve on that. You saw that coming. That seems to be where a lot of those original stories come from. It’s something we took from sports, really, which is like beat reporting, which is like you’d have a person who basically owns a sports team as a beat and is expected to get to know the general manager, have ins with the agents. I don’t want to give away too many secrets, but that’s kind of how we organize ourselves now. You can’t have a beat that just is like the indie game inside, that can’t be your beat, because it’s not broad enough and it’s not got enough sort of staying power, but your beat can be Skyrim, because it turns out people will read about Skyrim, apparently, until the heat death of the universe, and Bethesda will be releasing new versions of it. But I think actually that’s been, for me anyway, it’s liberating. And again, going back to the Twitter thing, you can really embed yourself in a scene. You need to follow the right YouTube channels, you need to follow all the devs, you need to know what the Reddit cares about. Following Reddit is the easiest thing in the world, but you can really build up a portfolio of contacts in a way that is like proper report. It is proper reporting, it’s not like proper reporting. And I love doing that, I love being immersed in a particular scene. Is there anything else you want to say about how PCG is going these days? I’m kind of amazed it kept growing and growing, you’ve got this massive team full of talented writers, the PC gaming show you work on. I guess, how is it these days for you? I think it’s good, I would say you should ask the team, because I’m sure they would be very candid. The pandemic, I think, was, you know, it’s the most facile thing to say ever, but it was very hard, of course, for everyone. We were weirdly quite well set up for it, insofar as the whole US team was remote already, because Future had shut the San Francisco office earlier, there was only me and one other writer in New York, otherwise everyone was scattered across Canada, SF, you know, various other places. So we were kind of already working in that way. A little bit harder for the UK folks to kind of probably wrap their heads around, but I think they’ve done a great job, too. The team keeps growing, because really I think like, there’s still so much headroom there, actually. I think you could probably put, I mean, we’re close to 20 people now. You could put another 20 on it easily and not run out of stuff to write about or things to do. So I tend to try and whenever we have like, you have these kind of like, a couple of times a year, these kind of business reviews, I always try and like squeeze another person or two in there, because there is more to be done. Like, we’re expanded in guides, we’re expanded in hardware. I want to see us expand more in video, that’s been another tough nut to crack for a lot of people. I think we’re behind the curve there. That’s why it continues to be like exciting and fun, because I don’t think we’re anywhere near where it could ultimately be. And I think we’re lucky in the sense that the people who I’ve had managing me, Matthew Pierce now, Aaron before, generally like really understand the potential of PCG. I think it was a month ago we were the biggest website of future, like even beating out like the big tech sites and stuff. I mean, we were living off, we were drunk on Elden Ring and wordle traffic admittedly. It was a hell of a month. That’s awesome. So I wanted to ask a bit about your gaming habits too, because since I’ve known you, you’ve just played Destiny and Hearthstone. And like, I’ve never really known you played, you briefly played Hitman 3 as I understand it. But like, you tend to play games that are sort of lifestyle choices. So I wanted to ask a bit about that. But also, what did you play before those games existed? And how did they kind of like change your habits of playing games sort of like permanently? I was like everyone else. In the future, I would say I was like, I would describe it as like an omnivore. Like I would like just play everything and move on. Like, I mean, like I was one of those, one of those guys who played a lot of PES for sure. But, you know, I played everything. I played shooters and RPGs and platformers. Like I said, I owned every machine. It’s on the, because you’re right to identify. Like I now, I mean, like Destiny, I’m like multiple thousands of hours in. I vlog by Steam and that’s not counting the time I spent on battle.net with it, right? Yeah. It’s like, so I don’t play games less. I just play less games, you know, you know. And I think at times I feel like a kind of guilt about that. But I feel like I’m plugged in enough to the other games and their scenes that I still know what’s happening and what the news should be. But you’re right that I have these two comfort. I mean, Hearthstone is a very loveless relationship these days. But Destiny is like, it’s one of the great games of my life. I mean, it is probably the great game of my life. And it’s become like a social thing where I have like two separate groups of friends that I play with regularly who I’ve never met, couldn’t pick out of a police lineup, but consider friends, play with them every week. And I think because it’s been around for so long and because it’s been through such like spasmodic periods where it kind of had huge problems with it, right? Destiny 2 at launch made some design decisions, I would have said, were like so unforgivable, they would have killed most games, right? That really kind of were damaging to it, that it would take them then, because these games are super tankers, like a year or more to recover from and to course correct. But Bungie, I think, like their art team is ridiculous. They tap into something that I’ve… I think with art and media, sometimes you find things that you almost didn’t know you wanted till you come across it. When I was a kid, there was a book called Spacewreck, which was an art book, and it was all of paintings of like crashed spaceships or spaceships that were kind of like marooned in space and damaged. And the whole Destiny aesthetic has that kind of like ruined future vibe. And I remember saying to one of their art guys, have you ever seen it? One of them is like, yeah, we’ve seen that book. Like, it’s definitely like a thing. So I love being in the worlds they make and have done since Halo. Their combat sandbox is, to my mind, like peerless. The problem is I go to play other shooters or games with even just guns in, and they just don’t feel good to me. Like Destiny remains like popping bubble wrap. Like, as soon as I do it, I just want to do more of it. And I remember saying to, like, Luke Smith, the director, like, what is the secret sauce? Why does it feel so good? And he said that one of their programmers or designers had said, when you shoot someone in the head in Destiny, it’s like shooting a free throw in basketball and it like just hitting the net. He says, it doesn’t matter how many times you do it, we aim for, like, the satisfaction to be the same on shot one and shot one million. And they nailed that. I find that when I don’t play it, I find this kind of almost like withdrawal feeling. I just want to be in that world, like swinging a shotgun or a kind of pulse rifle around. And I think in some ways, even though it’s like, you know, a big deal still, right? People still, a lot of people play it. Sony just paid a lot of money for it. I think fundamentally because they wanted to buy in that games as a service experience. I think people actually don’t give it the credit it’s due. It’s not the last of those games standing because there’s still Warframe, but it’s seen off every competitor in that space really and grown. And that’s not to be done lightly, I don’t think. And I remember as a kid even as well thinking like, because it was all, you know, MMORPGs have existed forever, and people kind of joke about whether it really even is one. But I remember as a kid even thinking like, what would a game be like where you logged in every time it was different, or it was kind of this shared experience? And like, even though like, for long periods, it never really delivered on that promise, it’s starting to, and it has done in some ways, like its narrative stuff is really interesting now. It plays as a soap opera. Like each week you will get like a different, like literally with twist endings and stuff, and like characters doing heel turns. And even though they kind of, they’re delivered in a bunch of different ways, like sometimes it’s cut scene, but also sometimes it’s like over seen, overheard conversation. And it’s doing all sorts of things like that, that are kind of like passing unremarked, unless you are in that world. And I think a lot of people are just like, well, it’s that shooter that’s got multiplayer and like it does raids and stuff. I mean, you played it Sam, right? There’s nothing really, I don’t think, can you think of anything that’s truly like it? No, and I think the point you make about how it’s seen off lots of different competitors is very true. And like it weathers the sort of rise and fall because the heights are just so, so good, I would say. Like you say, the design of the raids, how guns feel, how things look. Yeah, I mean, I played tons of it in 2020 and then haven’t gone back to it since then, but I basically did everything before they started vaulting stuff, but I got almost every gun and really loved it. And definitely had, you know, we cleared off all of the different raids that are being vaulted too. So I’ve done all of those. Because you raid with Chris Thurston once with PCG’s Parish, and I think Thurston said something. I think Thurston said this line and I stole it from him. I think he said that trying to do a raid is like trying to do synchronized swimming while under small arms fire. And that’s such a perfect Chris line. And again, I’ve tried to get some other FPS enjoyers on the team to go in because I don’t think for PC gaming, the PC platform is like ultimately it’s the home of the FPS. I think that would be fair to say like Doom comes from PC. Like it gave it to the world. It gave kind of a strike to the world. But like there’s nothing like it in other FPS to my mind of like six people both having to like mechanically coordinate timing and all sorts of like esoteric kind of puzzly stuff while being fucking shot at. Like it’s incredible. Like you have we did this challenge in the rave this week where it’s all to get this cosmetic title. We played it. You have to play on the hardest version. And one of the encounters you have to kind of complete three different incredibly like combat heavy rooms while carrying these different special items that have to be kind of dumped and deposited and fired and whatever else while constantly calling out symbols from a sheet of about you know 26 symbols correctly. Like it’s insane and some people are very like anxious and they don’t want to call anything out. They don’t want to be responsible for the thing necessarily failing. And we did this for I think we started at 7 p.m. and we finished at half past one at night. Just that just on that one encounter right doing it over and over again. And I was like I’m fucking 45. Am I enjoying this? Like I feel horrendous like I’ve got bodies collapsing as we’re doing this tempers are fraying. But the satisfaction when we got it done, I don’t want to be. Was it worth it? I still probably can’t say. But there’s nothing like that. I don’t think in games. And I think it’s sort of more for me that I don’t play other stuff. But I’m quite busy. I try and dip into things still. I’m going to play actually the game you launched recently, Sam, because I’m a big 40k head. That’s not me just saying it. I really am going to play it on Steam Deck. The Witcher 3, I drained every bit of DLC from it. I had every single piece of, you know, that rare armor you could get that would make you look like Cowardman in Dracula and stuff. One thing, Sam, I have one to pick with you though. Do you remember the E3 where we got shown Cyberpunk? Yeah. And I said to you, that game is in big trouble. It’s not going to be good to play. Yeah, I do remember that. And you were like, no, that was a great demo. Yeah, I do. I do remember that. Yeah. You’re always a lot like wary of this kind of like stuff that I was. I think maybe it’s less like an experience thing. But yeah, I think that was like the second demo they did where it looked more like a real game than the first one did. But yeah, I do remember that. So that’s fair to call me out on that, Tim. Here’s a question for you two as men of games. Do you think Starfield is going to come out this year? And I’ve got like no inside knowledge on this, by the way. So this is not me trying to be clever. I don’t think so, no. I think that’s like a next year thing. It’s in the back of my mind as I think about PR stuff myself. Like when will that move and what will that move look like? So yeah, I don’t think so. What about you, Matthew? Yeah, I think it is just on the grounds that their sort of marketing campaign is so full steam ahead. Like they’re doing quite regular little documentaries and updates and video blogs. I think it’d be weird if that culminated with it not coming out when they said it would. But no one’s really seen it though, right? No, no. That’s the strange thing about these videos. There’s shitloads of stuff about it, but not a second of the game. It’s just Todd Howard saying it’s going to be amazing, or the composer saying, wait until you hear the music. I know that with The Last Sea of Fallouts, they did have super short run-ups, which is I guess the thing that stands in its favour that it might come out, that they went, alright, it’s here in a month and it was here in a month. But it just seems so weird to me with a game purportedly of its kind of hoped for size and impact. Maybe they just know it’s janky is the truth. Well, it’s tough as well because they want that release date right. It’s just such a nice date to hit. So yeah, I think that’s significant. But then like, you know, Fallout 76 was kind of a bumpy launch. They might have learned some lessons from that as well. That’s why I think it’s plausible it might move. But E3, like the Microsoft conference, this will be the big marquee thing, won’t it? So yeah, I guess we’ll see. I was curious, Tim, like just on the Destiny tip, A, do you miss Callus? Because I talked about him in a previous episode, like how good that raid was. Part of the fun of that, the Leviathan raid actually was that the iconography was so gaudy and how much we kind of enjoyed the sort of silliness of it. And the other thing was, which queen? Do you think that’s a good time to like jump in if you’re a new player? Yeah, I think it’s a good time. I think they’ve kind of… I mean, look, if you’re brand new, I’ve played through the new player experience just to see what it was like. And I know a lot of people are pretty critical of it. But I think that… Certainly whenever there’s the big annual expansion, that’s as good a time as any to get in. So it would be fine. Kalas is a great character because he’s funny as a villain, but not in a way that’s cheesy. And I know you said you dipped out for a bit, but it’s heavily suggested he’s coming back quite soon. So I think he’s probably going to get the sendoff he wanted. He’s like a big fat dude who’s got like an army of robots. You shoot his glass of wine or something, right? Yeah, and it makes a really, really satisfying ding. That’s the ones you’re over like. The ding when you shoot his goblet is just like chef’s kiss. But Kalas is really cool. The raid boss they did for the most recent raid as well was like one they did. If you remember Kalas, he just like stood there and took it, like a lot of their bosses have done, whereas the new one marches around an arena, does spinning kicks, all sorts of shit. He’s very kind of a classic boss design, to the point where like having a boss that moved at all, seemed to throw our team into complete conniptions. This isn’t allowed, like what’s going on here? The people who work on the raids are like absolute alchemists. I remember like, I remember interviewing Joe Blackburn, who’s now like the game lead, who had done The Last Wish Raid, which is one which ends with like an enormous dragon that you, like it’s called a wish dragon that you kind of, they do this great, a bunch of great doing drops, where they kind of drop you from the sky, and you see something as you’re falling, and you fall down the length of this dragon and see it. And the tragedy was that with that encounter, it was like moldy part. You would have these rooms where you kind of had to stun the dragon, and eventually you’d end up in a arena where you’d have to shoot. All of you would have to snipe a specific eye of the dragon. He had like six eyes in kind of coordinated timing. But the Destiny community being what they are, which is a bunch of feckless, always take the easiest path. Destiny, by the way, is the whole thing is like a weird thought experiment into social stuff. I’m sure some amazing papers are going to be written about it. But anyway, found a way to like cheese the boss, so they can cheese every boss, where you can essentially like kill this enormous dragon just by like hitting it in the toenail with a certain combination of abilities and items. And after that, like no one played that boss properly ever again. And these poor people had like made this incredible encounter that we would just find a way to circumvent, which is the whole history of bosses in that game, unfortunately. Yeah. Is that the raid that’s got the wall of symbols? That I remember being the hardest part of that raid for some reason. I don’t remember why, but like… So the new raid has got like double the amount of symbols. But helpfully this time they actually provide a key for what they’re called in the game. Because the problem with The Last Wish was everyone invented their own names for the symbols. So you didn’t play with the same people, you were screwed. And we would have names like, oh, it’s the triple boob from Total Recall. That would be the call out for one of the symbols. So yeah, not ideal when you’re trying to communicate stuff in the moment. Yeah, it’s like how there would be like a dog symbol in one of the raids. And someone might call it wolf or someone might call it hound or something. And it’s like then we’d all lose our shit when they’d said like the most esoteric version of that word could be. And yeah, very familiar. Well, great stuff, Tim. I don’t know if there’s anything else you kind of wanted to mention as we wrap up here. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. No, I need to say that yeah, I was glad to be asked on and I miss you both. Oh, very kind Tim. Well, you know, maybe we’ll have you on again down the line. But we’re really grateful for you giving a few hours of your Sunday up. It’s much appreciated. Of course. Look after yourselves, boys. Awesome. Well, you can catch Tim, Timothy D. Clark on Twitter, is that right? Yep. Cool. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. Matthew, where are you on Twitter? MrBazzill and the score Pesto. And we’ll be back next week with another episode. Thank you very much for listening and goodbye.