Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Sam Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re joined by another special guest. So, Nathan, would you like to introduce yourself? Oh, God, I wasn’t prepared for this. Yes, my name is Nathan Brown. I used to be the editor of Edge Magazine, but I’m all right now. Yeah, sorry, Nathan. I realized I did put an intro line in the plan I didn’t use immediately, and that must have thrown you off, so apologies for that. It did a little bit, my word. Oh, it was great. It was a great bit of improvised introduction. I loved it. Well, let’s hope that that has set the tone. I should also say, sorry, these days, I am a video game consultant, and I write the modestly popular Substack newsletter, Hit Points, hitpoints.substack.com. Yeah, we’re very grateful to have you on, Nathan. You’ve written or mentioned our podcast in the past, and we think that sent a few patrons our way. So it seemed only fair to get you on and repay the favor. So yeah, much appreciated. How are things going with you at the moment? Are things good work-wise, home-wise? Yes, all good. It’s been a really busy couple of months, actually. The consulting side of my work has just picked up after a rather worrying start to the year. But yeah, it’s been really busy, really full on. The newsletter is growing. It’s got to that point. We’ll talk about this later, I guess. But yeah, it’s kind of passively growing now that I just kind of get signups. I don’t know where they’re coming from. It’s like, OK, cool. So yeah, it’s all good. And yeah, there’s like at least probably like half a dozen readers have said, like, you should go on The Back Page. I was like, well, they should ask me if they have it. And now that you’ve reached the bottom of the barrel of magazine guests, I’m happy to be here. Not at all. We’re trying to collect all of the edge editors, basically. That’s like the slow ongoing goal. And what we see is building up to the great guests. It’s not kind of like working our way down, Nathan. We’re very, very happy to have you. Oh, that’s a much better way of putting it. Thank you. Yeah, you know, this is basically just us trying to get into having Tony Mott on the podcast. So, you know, that’s all this is, basically. Basically collecting the different bits of the Triforce. And so we have the power to. Well, actually, no, that would make Tony Ganondorf. We don’t want to kill him. No, it’s not. I’d say that actually the rest of us are more like Horcruxes. We’re all kind of like fragments of Tony’s soul. And the only way you get him is if you manage to track down like Margaret and Joao and all the rest of them. I wish that was a less cursed reference in 2022. But that’s true. Yeah, so we take all that back. I think I have to keep it because it’s funny. Sorry about that. That’s just the rules. I mean, you know, hey, we can talk about it off air. So, Nathan, I guess to start with your personal history of video games, like what did you, what were you interested in growing up? When did you first encounter video games? So there’s this really like weird, almost kind of dreamlike memory of an Atari 2600, which I guess just from like the timeline must have been the first thing I played. But it’s like, it’s really weird. Like I have this kind of mental image of playing it in a room, but I don’t recognize the room and yeah, so I don’t really count that. But I remember like Combat and ET and Pitfall and stuff like that. And I remember a rental store that had them like in bath when I was growing up and we used to rent games. But I think I must have just been too like too young for it. First one that I was like really conscious of was a family camping holiday. I would guess in like 1984, 1985, something like that. So it would have been six or seven that had like an on-site arcade. And it pissed it down with rain for the like the whole week that we were there. And so all there really was to do was go in this arcade. And they had that sit the sit down Star Wars cabinet. They had a game called Karate Champ, which I kind of like I hold Karate Champ is like the first the first game I ever played or I ever remember playing. And it was like this two, no, one on one fighting game that was played with just joysticks. You had two joysticks and rather than the characters moving back and forth, they like stood like a couple of feet apart and then the round would start and you’d basically choose one move, dependent on which direction you push the stick, each of the sticks in. So like up and up on one and down the other and do something and vice versa and all of that. And I think it was probably really shit. And I was certainly like terrible at it. But yeah, that when you kind of when I look back on it and think about how much of my career, I guess, we’ll get on to this later. But I do owe to fighting games in a fairly like significant way that that should be like one of the one of the first things I remembered playing. And after that, it was all kind of fairly traditional just based on growing up in the in the 80s, really. We had a Spectrum. I had a friend who had a Commodore 64. We pretended not to like each other. And then, you know, the NES happened and that and that was me done basically as soon as the NES came into the house. It was I was a Nintendo fan and on it continued. Would you say that games were your primary passion in life? Do you have other interests at the time that were that would kind of, I guess, like games would fluctuate as the thing you’re paying the most attention to? I think like games have always flowed in and out of my life. There have been times when I’ve been more into them than not. But yeah, I think like because just doing the maths on it, I must have been like six at the point at which I played those arcade games. So it’s a pretty formative age as I know someone who’s got kids as well. You get so easily inspired and you just sponge things up. And that definitely set me down a path. I liked football as well. But I didn’t make a career out of playing football. We don’t really understand sports to the point that we have a sports channel on our Back Page Discord that neither of us go in. I have no idea what’s going in there, but it’s like the sort of absolute no man’s land for us. We think they could be plotting to blow up parliament in there, and we’d never know because we wouldn’t dare look, essentially. So yeah, that’s who you’re dealing with here. Do your kids now play games? My youngest is only just starting to. He’s four. Four and a bit. He’s only just discovering iPads, which is honestly just the most incredible way in to games, I think. Because until you see a kid playing with it, you don’t realise just how immediately intuitive touchscreens are. Having their brain melted by Super Hexagon. I think that will come later. There’s like CBB’s Playtime Island at the moment. But it’s a slope, right? But my eldest, yeah. I mean, he would sit and watch me play stuff from the time he was about five or six. I kind of rather, I don’t know, it was like talk about like dad trying to imprint stuff on to his son. But like he sat and watched me play like pretty much every 3D Mario game. We just do like half an hour a day or something. And I just do a couple of levels on Galaxy or 3D World or whatever. And eventually, I think we got him a Switch Lite a couple of years ago. And you know, that’s like his screen time. He’s fucking obsessed with Pokemon and it drives me insane. Well, it’s a racing Nintendo kit. That’s good. Yes. Oh, God, yeah. That was the only way that was ever going to go. But most of his school friends have got Switches as well. It seems to be like the primary. I feel pretty good about the generation coming through, man. Like, you know, they’re being raised right, I think. You’re just saying, why do you have to play Pokemon and not Splatoon or Arms? You know, that’s, yeah. But hey, maybe, I’m sure one day that will change. Well, he can’t play Arms, can he? Because he’s got Switch Lite. I’ll take the controls off. Don’t get me started on that shit. But yeah, like I say, he still has to borrow my Switch. He loves Ring Fit Adventure. And when we got Switch Sports as well, it’s just all this stuff that Switch Lite just, you know, barely supports. It’s like that Twilight Zone episode where the guy with all the books and he breaks his glasses. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll take that. Neither have I. I’ve just seen it memed. I’m pretending that I know something from memes. I think it’s good Nathan, because you establish a Switch kind of power hierarchy in your household. Just so, you know, there’s like, there are some things that, you know, you are the gatekeeper of. That’s probably not a bad thing to maintain. Okay, a lot of topic there. But so, you know, it’s fine. So you’re a Nintendo kid, like, do you remember what, I suppose, what were the kind of like pivotal moments for you between like, you know, being a kid and being an adult in terms of games you got properly obsessed with? Street Fighter 2, the end, pretty much. I think like from the first moment I saw it in, I think it must have been Mean Machines. And I was just kind of like immediately obsessed with it. Just the fact that, I don’t know, I think you guys were a little bit younger than me. But back then, like, it was like, wow, what big sprites this video game has. And anything with big sprites, with super like final fights. Like, look at them. Look at how much size they take up. It’s incredible. So like from the moment I saw the first screens and everything I read about it sounded amazing. I like went to this incredibly smoky bath arcade that as long as it’s… Bath had an arcade? Oh, mate. So it had loads. I can tell you pretty much where it is, but it would be a bit in the weeds for your non-bath residents. So if like literally about just around the corner from the future offices, it was a carpet shop afterwards next to a pub kind of opposite McDonald’s, like the back of McDonald’s. And there’s just this little like little door with a little staircase going up to it. You can still see now if you just come out the future thing, building, turn right. First thing you see is Quasar, which used to be a laser tag place. And I was going to come on to that, but I played like Street Fighter in the amazing arcade that they had there like twice a week for about four years. Just used to go in and like, you know, play Street Fighter and stuff. And then if you keep going like that way, there’s just this like little glass door and a set of stairs going up, a set of stairs going down. And they have fruities upstairs and they had arcade games in the basement. And I like, I remember going down there and like playing Street Fighter 2 and I’d read, oh, Zangief spinning piledriver is the like hardest hitting move in the game. So I was like, I’m going to do that. And I was like, this, how hard can it be? And so I chose like the least mobile character who couldn’t really do anything, who you had to get really, really close to the opponent and do like the sort of hardest move to perform in the game on. And I mean, like I died very, very quickly. I lost horribly, but I still like persisted. And then people at school played it. I got an import Super Famicom so that I could play it with like 60 Hertz. I paid 65 quid for the for the import, US import version of it. It was a US SNES I had actually, sorry, not a Super Famicom, the Palmer Violets one, which I’m a weirdly staunch defender of. It’s like the ugliest thing and I love it. That is quite a take, I must say. My goal with this this evening, Sam, is to just like cancel myself. So yeah, I stan the US SNES for sure. Did you pay much attention to games media growing up? It sounds like you were reading quite a lot about games, but what was your relationship with games media at the time? I got a subscription to Your Sinclair magazine for I think either my seventh or eighth birthday. Which is like, you talk about credentials. And I used to like, I remember like summer holidays kind of walking down like the hill from, I lived in an area above called Widcombe, which is like a really short hop into town. I mean everything’s a short hop into town in Bath anyway. But yeah, like on summer holidays, like during my teens, I would just walk down to town on my own, cut through boots because they used to have like Snez’s in there that you could play Mario World on. So I’d like cut through and play that and then go out there and then go into John Mendes. I would literally do that every day just to go and see what new mags had come out that day. And I would buy one. I never, apart from that Your Sinclair one, I never subscribed to anything because I loved so much that feeling of like going into a shop, seeing like a familiar logo up there, and then like brand new artwork. And just being like, oh man, it’s the new Superplay, the new like whatever. I once went on a family holiday to I think Ibiza, and all I took in my hand luggage was a Game Boy and a pile of Mean Machines back issues. So like it was always there. And I only had like the vaguest inclination that these things were made in Bath. That like it was right on my doorstep. Like it just never even occurred to me. And I think like the play, I remember buying Superplay issue one from a newsagent in the center of Bath that I’m pretty sure was like maybe 200 yards from where it was made. But the play just like never registered. Maybe you played some of the journalists in the arcade. Oh my God. Maybe you crossed swords with a young Tony Mott. It’s fascinating actually, like Tony and I would talk often. And it’s so obviously because I worked with him, but we would talk often about like those days. And we were definitely like within each other’s orbit many, many years before we knew each other because all the edge lot were out like raving all the time like kind of late 90s when I was coming home from London and going out, you know, all around Bath and stuff. Tony knew this place. I got my US from was a like a kind of import and the Street Fighter as well. Actually, it was an import shop called DMC Consoles, which used to be on a paragon. And I mentioned it to Tony once. It’s only there for like two years. And he was like, yeah, I know that. And he, Tony had grown up in Street. I think it was. So he like and he used to come over with I think it’s Terry Stokes. Like he said, they used to make like a pilgrimage over so that they could go there and buy import games because it was the nearest import shop to them. And it’s just like, wow, man. Like despite the fact that, but like Tony’s career in this stuff is like 20 years longer than mine, I think. Something like that. Right. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. So when did you first read a copy of Edge, Nathan? I kind of sort of hinted at it a bit there. But I moved up to London after I left school for a very short stint at university, but stayed in London for a bit. And I think like that was the one sort of time in my life where I was a little bit less engaged with with games. And that was also the age at which I should have been interested in Edge, right? That kind of like turning eight, like 18 and kind of, you know, feeling a bit more adult and grown up about these things. But I was kind of still buying games and still playing them. But my money was going on like records and taxis at home before the tubes started after going out clubbing and stuff. Like that. So I don’t think I first read an issue of Edge until about 2002, 2003. And it was my brother that put me on to it. He was working for a couple of years older than me, was working for like an IT company and they used to just get it. Like they had an office subscription. Once the boss had read it, Damien just brought it home and he read it and then he gave it to me. And that was by that point, like I think the GameCube had just come out. So it was that kind of era of like the Wind Waker cover. And I think like the moment that I read it, I suddenly was like, oh, hang on a minute. Superplay is gone and N64 magazine is gone. And I thought that part of my life was over in a way. But this is just where my thinking is. I don’t know. I just felt this very powerful connection to it. And I like for years just had a great big stack of them in the bathroom. This is like before smartphones, obviously. But yeah, it was through my brother. And I think that like the main thing was like he also put me on to Rez, like which is a sort of former clubber. Like, oh, it’s like it’s it’s drugs and loud music. The game. How excellent. Like, where did you where did you find out about this? And he was like, oh, it’s in this it’s in this magazine. And so, yeah, that’s kind of kind of where it where it all came from. But yeah, I was a little bit of a latecomer. I’m not sure I ever admitted that, actually. I’m not sure Tony ever asked me how long I’d been reading. That’s quite a I always think of that as the sort of strict period of edge. Like, that’s where the reputation for like some quite harsh scores came from, particularly that period. Yeah, for sure, for sure. But there was there was a lot. There was a lot to love there as well. It was when Nogoshi had his column. Oh, God, yeah. Although I later found out that that was not not much of a Nogoshi column, like he would fax over. Really? Yeah, he’d fax. I think it was Steve Curran. He used to be editor at large. And I remember talking to him at a conference, like pretty much like one of my first trips overseas for Edge. And I was like, you know, oh, man, I used to love Nogoshi’s column. And he was like, thank you. I wrote it most of the time. No, you didn’t. But he would fax like over. I think like sometimes it was pretty much there. Sometimes it was actually very good and just needed like, you know, because how do you get like a non-native speaker to hit like a rigid page word count, right? You’re going to have to like, you know, you’re going to have to be quite, you know, heavy with the brush on something like that. But yeah, that was Steve Curran just destroying my dreams. Nice. The other thing is that you’ve interviewed Nogoshi before, right, Nathan? And does he seem like the kind of guy who would just like write a column to a word count and send it with no fuss? Does he seem like that kind of guy to you based on him? I mean, not by the time I met him, no, but he was like just incredibly important. Like, you know, he was treated with that like real reverence actually by the people around him at Sega. And in that kind of way that, you know, it’s like how much of this is respect and how much of this is just fear because you know that the guy is connected. But yeah, but I got him to talk a little bit about his old days and his party days and stuff, which was pretty much like when he was writing the Edge column as well. And he just really did sound like a kind of a bon vivere and a storyteller. And so I could totally see him being up for it and being interested in it. But no, not like, sorry, Nagoshi-san, but this is 50 words short. And also we think you could do with another run at the ending. Could you get this back to me by 10 o’clock in the morning? It’s not really going to happen. Do you think that that particular era of Edge, was that the kind of era that you saw as… I suppose what I’m trying to ask is how important was that era of Edge to you and how much did it inform how you would shape Edge later on? Oh, not very, actually, because I think it felt so distant by the time I got there, even though it wasn’t like that, I don’t know, what were we looking at, like six or seven years later, I guess, by the time I joined. But it was a completely different team. And I think like one of the, as you guys will know, right, a magazine is always the product of the people that are making it at the time and an expression of their values and all the rest of it. And I think because I had no professional connection to that, I latched on instead to the version that I did have a professional connection to, which was the team at the time that I joined. Sure, that makes sense. So I’m curious to hear what your career was like before you were hired by Edge, Nathan, because I was looking up, I was doing my deep research on your LinkedIn profile, and there’s not much evidence of you existing before 2012 on there. So I was curious, what was your professional life like before you came to Games Media? Were you just raving 24-7? Yeah, totally. I was just barefoot. I went to Goa and found myself. No, I did none of that. So I went to university very briefly and then left, but wanted to stay in London. My wife’s then-girlfriend was in London as well and we were going to move in together and stuff. So it was basically, I have to get a job. So I walked into a temping agency. They did me a typing test and said, right, you’re fast enough to go and do this data entry job at Barclays Bank. I was like, sure, whatever. I’ll do this for a little while. It’s fine. And I didn’t, obviously, I mean, you never realize the importance of these sliding doors decisions that you make. But that kind of set the tone for what I did for the next 8, 9, 10 years. It was banking. It was finance. I worked for like an Iranian bank and a Qatari bank and an American bank. And I worked for a small language school towards the end. None of it was good, particularly. None of it was awful either. I met a lot of cool people. I made a lot of friends with people that I’m still friends with today. I learned a lot. And I think actually the most important thing I learned was that this is not what I want to do. And I want to do something that’s a bit more fulfilling. The only sort of the very brief like departure from all that was in I think the year 2000. After I left Barclays, I went and worked for a tech company for a year. But they had an editorial. They were like, yeah, they were a tech startup effectively. But they also had this like editorial component. It was all based around like clubbing and dance music and stuff. And I went and joined them first as a listings editor, which was basically like data entry again, but writing up like club nights and which DJs were playing, which venue and all that sort of stuff. And then after about six months of that, moved up to music editor where I spent like nine months or a year kind of going out clubbing twice a week and getting sent records and reviewing them and interviewing DJs and musicians and stuff. How do you review a club? In the same way like you review anything else. You kind of you talk about the atmosphere, the DJs, like what the crowd were like. But you’re part of it. Like you’re part of the reason the night is either good or bad because you’re part of the crowd and that’s part of it. That’s true. That is absolutely true. That company was hilarious, man. Unfortunately, they lost their funding after 9-11, like as so many other tech companies did amidst that bubble burst. But it was what they did. They were called Spaced. This was before the Edgar Wright sitcom. And what they did was they had these huge machines, like kind of bit like imagine a big old vending machine that they installed in clubs all around the country. And when you and a bunch of friends were the worst for wear, you could go there and put like a pound in and then pose for a photograph. And inside was a camera and an email client and you could email it to like five friends and add little like text and stuff like that. And it kind of like watermarked it with where you were and when you took it. And it was like, wow. Like that was only, I say only, it was quite a long time ago, but that was only like 20 years ago. And you think how far we’ve come at this entire like quite generously funded company, honestly. Like it was funded by UBM and they had like millions in funding to like go and invent cameras and emails. It’s quite something. That’s cool. So Nathan, should we take a quick break and then we’ll come back and talk about Edge in more detail? Yes, absolutely. Bye Welcome back to the podcast. So we’re now going to grill Nathan about his Edge days. So Nathan, you were hired as online editor for Edge in 2012, but you told me that before that you were freelancing for them. So what was your journey like in becoming a member of staff on Edge? So there are two types of origin stories I found with people who work in games or around games. There’s the plan. I decided that I wanted to do this, and I specifically made a plan in order to do it, and I executed on it, and I made it. And then there’s dumb fucking luck and happenstance, and mine was absolutely the latter. Like coming off finance career and getting, I think, you work in finance, you get made redundant a lot. And I think it was the second time it happened to me, third time it happened to my wife. I was like, I’m not doing this anymore. I had a bit of redundancy package. I was like, I’m going to retrain. I’m going to retrain as a journalist, and off we go. And it never occurred to me in a million years that I could get a job writing about games, or at least not writing about games for Edge, because I was like, oh, you can’t, you don’t just, one does not simply walk straight into Edge, right? You have to prove yourself, like, somehow, I don’t know how, but I don’t have time for that. I was like 32 by this point. So I decided to train in newspapers rather than magazine, journalism, and it was more like news and sport than games. But there wasn’t really any work around, and I was getting a bit worried. The money was running out as well, my redundancy stuff. And so I asked my friend, Chris Schilling. Hi, Chris. So you knew Chris from before times? Oh, Chris was at my wedding in 2007. We met on the Games Radar Forum, I’m embarrassed to say. That’s not embarrassing, that’s nice. Well, there’s a few people around from that era, actually, Matt Pellet, who used to be editor of Official PlayStation. He was from there. Sorry to anybody, I’m forgetting. But there’s certainly a few of us there. Anyway, I went to Chris, I said, look mate, I’m struggling a little bit. I think I’m going to try games. I’ve done a couple of bits for, Chris used to run a little passion project fan site called Press Start. A friend of mine at the time was also working for a website called Inc Gamers, which I think still exists. I’d written a couple of bits for them, I’d done a couple of reviews and stuff. I was like, all right mate, I’m just going to try games because it feels like it might work. He gave me like, I don’t know, 8, 9, 10 email addresses. I just shot out speculative pitches to people. But I didn’t send them to all of them. I left one off the list because one of them was Alex Wiltshire of Edge. I was like, there’s no point. This is just like, forget it. I sent out the other nine emails. They all either ignored me or came back with a polite, no, sorry, not looking for anybody at the moment or were working on similar things already internally. Then eventually I was like, fuck it, whatever. Emailed Alex. I was like, hi, Alex. Introduced myself, explained that I trained in news and was looking to write about games. He replied to me an hour later and said, where are you based? I said, Bristol. He said, could you come and meet me for a coffee? I think two days later, I was having a coffee with him in Cafe Nero in Bath. That was on a Tuesday, Wednesday. Had to do a writing test, did that, and then I started the following Monday as a freelance news reporter. I found out later that what had happened was David Valjalo, who at the time was staff writer, had been like seconded off, he’s hired as staff writer for the MAG, he’d been seconded off to the Edge website to write news, and he’d been doing it for six months and he was just bored out of his mind, which is someone who then wrote the news for a website, like I kind of understand. He literally that morning had taken Alex to one side and just been like, I can’t do this anymore, like you’ve got to get me off. Alex was like, oh my God, what am I going to do? He sits down and then it’s like, oh, there’s a guy says he writes news. Tony was like, where is he? He says he’s in Bristol. When is he available? He says he can start straight away. Talk about dumb luck, right? That was how it happened. I freelanced. It was what future in those days would call freelance anyway, but it was basically like you will be here Monday to Friday, 9.30 to 5.30 and we will pay you a daily rate and give you no benefits, which was I think a lot of people’s situation for probably longer than I had to endure it. But I did that for about 18 months and then Alex had had his own moment of I just hate the fucking internet, please can I make magazines again and negotiated his exit back onto the mag. Then they asked me to move up to online editor in, I guess if my LinkedIn says 2012, Sam, then that’s when it happened. Yeah, that makes sense. Joining the Edge team, I suppose even if you were freelance technically at that time, was there anything about working on Edge that surprised you as a reader with a long history with the magazine? I mean, I think the only thing that really got me originally was like, wow, these people are just like normal. I assumed that they would be on a different, I don’t know, on some different plane of existence, or certainly a different intellectual plane. I think Craig Orens was on a different intellectual plane, to be fair, but we got rid of him. He sailed off to better pastures. I think that was the first thing. But no, there wasn’t anything that particularly surprised me. I guess, and this is going to seem absolutely insane compared to what we’re going to talk about in a few minutes, but I was surprised at how few people they had, and how small the team was. I was like, wow, you guys make a magazine every four weeks, and there’s only like 11 of you. Clearly, I had no idea what was coming my way in the years that followed. But no, really, I was all struck, really. Certainly, early on, I remember the first day walking in, and they had recently done that issue, for the 200th issue, they did 200 covers, and they had at that time, a print of every single cover just plastered along the wall behind them. And that was behind Tony and the art editors, and I was sitting opposite Tony at the time. So every time I looked up, I just saw 200 edges, basically, and I was like, wow, this is me. The first morning I walked in and just there on my desk for no reason at all was a Japanese boxed copy of Majora’s Mask. I was like, fuck it, fuck, I’ve made it, but I haven’t made it yet, because I’m only freelance and stuff, but it’s like I’m here. I’m actually doing it. Yeah. I think we shared the same office. I think we were in the same bit of the office to begin with. I think Edge would down… Because that was when there was like… We shared the floor with PC Gamer as well, right? Yeah, I think so. Edge always had the end of the office. Yeah, they insisted on the end and Tony would always like fuck about with the lights. Much to everyone’s chagrads. I’ve actually said that out loud. But yeah, like it was, you know, we all fit in there at the time. I actually like briefly that the team got so big that they didn’t have room for me anymore. And I had to go and sit with Games Radar, who at the time was the smallest team in the building. There was only four of them, I think, and a majority team over in the US. But I sat with them. They were good fun people for a bit. And then eventually Edge found room for me. And I moved back over. I was going to ask, because I can’t remember when Street Fighter IV became a big thing, but you were definitely part of the office playing Street Fighter IV, right? I actually think I came in after it. So Street Fighter IV itself was 2009. And Super was like early 2010. And so I came in at the end, and by that point, everyone was playing FIFA, pretty much. OK, yeah, that attracts. And there wasn’t much of a scene of it, but I’d hear later, I remember Michael Gappa telling me about how one of the plasma screens got the health bars burned into, because so much Street Fighter was being played. But Michael, you talk about Street Fighter, actually, it was incredibly important, I think, to me, like finding my feet in Edge and cementing myself. I remember having a very early conversation with Alex Wiltshire, and he said, make yourself indispensable. I was like, wow, that’s some career advice I’m going to take to the grave with me. Thank you. And so it was about finding a way in which I could offer something that they didn’t already have either on staff or among the freelance crew, which like, you know, was pretty, there wasn’t a lot. But there was this perception at the time that Edge wasn’t very good at fighting games. They’d given Street Fighter III, Third Strike, a six, and people were very upset about that. I actually will quite happily have the argument with you that Third Strike, as much as I love it, is absolutely an H6. But the fact that I could write fighting games, I mean, like the first things I had in the mag, like I got my portfolio together when I left, and looking back at it, it’s like almost everything I did early on was either like news based for the news section based on stuff I’d been writing about for the website, or it was, oh, holy shit, who’s going to review Tekken on the 3DS for us or Dead or Alive on the 3DS for us? Who’s going to preview Skullgirls? And just being the guy that could do that was tremendously, tremendously helpful, I think. I’ve said it a lot that you kind of start as a specialist, as a game journalist, and you end as a generalist, because by the end you just have to, but you’ve naturally encountered loads of stuff. But also you tend to get senior enough that you have to do a bit of everything, you have to be able to do a bit of everything. So, Nathan, this is a quite strange question for me to throw in that’s not in the plan, but we’ve just not talked about fighting games on this podcast at all, really, because it’s not something that me and Matthew understand. Can you explain to me very briefly why Street Fighter is incredibly important? Because I don’t compute it myself exactly, even though I know it lives adjacent to games like Bayonetta, where I do understand the tentacle appeal of them. So can you explain to me very briefly why Street Fighter is good? I know that sounds ridiculous, but can you? Fucking hell, Sam. I think we might need to spin this out into an Excel feed, honestly. Get a couple of other people in. It’s a pretty hard thing for me to articulate, really. I think it’s the way that it laid down so much of the language and so much of the vocabulary that an entire genre now uses, but does it in a way that has never been bettered. I guess you would point to something like Dark Souls, right? As being an example of that, everything’s as I was like now, but nothing ever really comes close to the game that they’re kind of borrowing from. So I think that’s the first thing. The second thing is just that, to me anyway, it all feels natural. There’s a very obvious difference between pressing light punch and pressing hard punch. It’s like they connect, they look like they hurt. Even the special move motions kind of make sense. There’s a rhythm to combos. That, I think, was certainly what made me fall in love with it in 1990, whatever it was. And I think it’s kind of still fundamental to why I still love it now. It also helps, I think it’s one of the only genres of games that you don’t need to understand. I don’t need to explain anything about this game to you, really. It’s pretty obvious. Two big sprites. Oh, big sprites again. Hitting each other. Big health bars that get smaller. Big timer ticking down. It just kind of makes sense. It’s all very readable, I think. Until you get to the mad anime fighting games that just fill the screen with all kinds of shit and involve you pressing a million inputs a minute or whatever. But yeah, I’ve done a terrible job of articulating. I just love them. Sorry, I ambushed you with a dumbass question. So I appreciate you trying on the spot. Mate, that is excellent hit points prompting, though. Thank you. We’re going to get into that in a couple of months’ time, months of our time to actually think about it. Okay, great. So back to our regularly scheduled question. So in 2013, you transitioned to the magazine from the website becoming Games Editor. How did that compare going to print from online? I’m guessing you always wanted to make that leap. Yeah. I mean, it was the point at which I actually felt like I worked for Edge. But when I was on the website, I’d meet people at conferences or whatever, and they’d be like, oh, you’ve worked for Edge, right? That’s cool. And I’d always go, yeah, but the website. Because it was this sort of, you know, tampening day. It’s like, yes, it’s cool. Yes. And I will happily bask in the reflected coolness, but I’m not like really cool. Right. So it was the first time that, yeah, actually it felt like, like I’d always imagined it would be. Because obviously news is, especially news reporting and online stuff is very reactive. It’s based on what’s happening out there. It’s based on, it’s all very immediate. And based on data and stuff like that, although we weren’t actually looking at data too much then. Whereas the magazine was just creative. And what do we want to do? What can we do? What is achievable? All of a sudden, yes, it’s like I work for Edge now. And it’s the point at which I started going to E3 and traveling a lot more as well. Like I think my first issue as games editor, I did the cover story and went to Poland to see The Witcher 3. And that was like super early and super, you know, exciting. And although that was like you actually you asked me about like mad press trips in the show notes. And that was one of the ones I thought of. It was my very first like cover trip, preview trip. And it was only an overnight stay. I was like, I’m just going to take the clothes that I’m wearing. I’ll be all right. I don’t need a change of clothes. Apart from obviously underwear and socks. I’m not an animal. And the PR for CD Project took me out the night before and spilled a full litre of beer over my jeans. So I had to go to the studio the next morning with with beer which is a baptism of something for sure. That was a great cover though. It was that giant killer, the words on the cover, if I recall. That’s the one. Yeah, absolutely. That was the one. Yeah, that was back. And it was back when we didn’t do a great big feature either for the cover. It was just a six page preview, I think, with terrific access. And I went to E3, I think it was like two months or so after taking over his games editor. And that was in the days when Future would still ship a couple of thousand copies out to E3. And all of a sudden, it’s like, wow, I’m in E3 for the first time. This is incredible. Holy crap, people are walking around with this magazine whose cover story I wrote. So it really was that kind of validation, I think, and the point at which it started to feel proper. When did you start writing those E3 conference reports? Because they were absolutely scorching. I love those. What, for the for the Magi? Because they definitely went up online as well. So I didn’t know if you were doing those when you were on Edge Online specifically. But yeah, they were great. Do you know, I can’t remember. So I know that Duncan Harris certainly was doing them when I joined. And I mean, Duncan was a master of it. I learned so much from that. Just that like managing to be absolutely searing and hilarious while still making like a really good point. Like a really insightful point that no one else is going to make. It’s like, OK, that’s that was kind of like a North Star to aim for. I know I took over at some point, but I can’t I can’t remember, honestly, like at which point I did it. But I reckon, yeah, Games Ed was probably about the right about the time when it would have happened. There was a bit of stormy weather at Future in 2014. So I was curious, Nathan, how how edge changed around you in the years since you started there. And at that point, when there was the closure of the London office, well downsizing of the London office, and it was just generally quite a scary time. I remember being at Future. Can you talk a bit about that? I mean, like you, I saw this in the notes. It was like, what happened in 2014? Because there was always there was like always something happening, I think. Like, and it’s kind of hard to like narrow it down. What I would say as a sort of prelude to that is like when I started, there were like we started on the website, there were a couple of people who had recently left the mag, and I won’t name them because it’s probably not my place to. But they clearly like had a bad experience and had quit with bad memories of it. And it became very, very quickly apparent to me that for as long as I worked for Future and for Edge, there was going to be this like seesaw, this balance. And it was going to be a balance between my enthusiasm for what I did and the thing that I made and the people that I worked with versus my apathy and distaste for the company that paid my wages. And I think like over the years, that was a very difficult balance for me to strike, but I think I at least knew it was coming. I think what happened is that we just got smaller and smaller and smaller. And every time it happened, we said, we can’t possibly get like, they can’t go any further than this. Surely they can’t. This is ridiculous. I mean, we peaked at 14 people, I think, which was admittedly across online. It was when we had a functional iPad edition as well that had like a dedicated team of, I think, like one and a half people just doing art and production and stuff. But still, 14 people. And then by the time I was editor, we had like three, one art editor, one editor, one deputy editor, and one production editor who has to make two magazines, right? So yeah, it just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And I got progressively more resentful of it over time. But every four weeks, an issue of a magazine that I made would pop on my desk and everything would be briefly right with the world, you know, or I’d go on a really cool trip or, you know, something amazing would happen that I knew I wouldn’t get to do anywhere else. And so I dealt with it. But yeah, like one year, Andrew Hind, the Edge’s art editor and a true friend and probably the most talented person I’ve ever worked with, made me a birthday card. And it was like Nathan’s kill list. And then it was just a list of all the people that had left since I joined with like red pen through it. And then at the bottom you’d written all the people I had to kill on the way to the top. And there were like 10 people. Because apart from Games Editor, I didn’t interview for any of these roles. I didn’t apply for anything. I was just sort of parachuted into them. I mean, I parlayed the DepEd role for myself, actually. It was after they made Michael Gappa redundant, or he’d left, I think, during the redundancy consultation. So the team had got smaller and they were like, right, we’re just going to run it with a Games Editor and an Editor. And I was like, you can’t tell me that, like, I’m going to take on most of his work, I would have thought. You can’t call that Games Editor anymore. It’s DepEd. And they went, all right, it’s DepEd. So it was, yes. 2014, I don’t know, man. But the challenge of running Edge changed constantly because we kept getting smaller. It was pretty clear pretty early on that that was going to be the direction of travel pretty much indefinitely. You becoming Editor made perfect sense to me, though, because you seem like such a sensible, careful pair of hands and a great steward for the brand. So it made complete sense to me. If anything, it feels, it felt weird when I joined PCGamer and you were a section editor. And I thought, this guy seems like he projects the sort of persona of an editor, I would say. So, yeah, I’m not sure. I don’t know what point is there, but I just, it seemed like you’re always going to be running Edge, you know? Yeah, that kind of makes sense. I was conscious of the fact that I was a few years older than most people as well. So I think I kind of naturally exuded gravitas and authority and increasingly gray as well, of course. Yeah, I was obviously delighted when it happened. Don’t get me wrong. So how much of running Edge is preserving what came before versus putting your own mark on it? It’s a really interesting question. And I think that especially with something like this of such longevity, right? Like it’s knocking on for 30 years now. You can’t not be beholden to the past. But at the same time, the past is so big and so sprawling and has been worked on by so many people that you also can’t like slavishly adhere to it because Edge has broken its own rules over the years as well, right? I’m sure they used to use the word impressive until one day it was banned. I was like, seriously, my first day, the first thing I wrote for the website had the word impressive in it. And Alex went, impressive is banned. I was like, OK, I’ve never wrote it again. It’s like, don’t tell me it’s impressive. Tell me why it’s impressive. Classic advice. Yeah, man, Alex Walsh was a wonderful human as well. A wonderful boss. Yeah, so there’s not an awful lot of room to put your own stamp on something that is so old, I guess, so loved, so quite rigorously templated. But I do like to think that I kind of changed a few things. This was happening like towards the end of my time on Death Mode anyway, but I wanted to make Edge funny again. I think that people’s criticism of the common criticism level to Edge, that it’s too po-faced and, you know, all the rest of it. But I never really got that. I always thought Edge was hilarious when it wanted to be. And so it was about trying to get some of that spirit back into it. I think the column that I wrote for a few years was a good way of like bringing some of that in because it enabled me to be first person and, you know, self deprecating and be me basically. But it was more about empowering the writers to go, look, you know, I’m not saying do like Love Island gags or knob jokes, but like, please, please don’t feel that you’re going to get told off if you, you know, if you like, just try and make me smile, basically, try and make me laugh. Yeah. And I think that was one thing. And then amongst things, you kind of you make little tweaks in the margins, right? Like, you change the nature of a page here, we change what the back page did. Oh, back page. We changed the back page of the mag to be this thing called the long game, which was a way of hopefully paying attention to the sort of long running live service-y thing that media normally has to abandon. It’s like little stuff like that, really. And I think as a final point, we also, how much of this you can say was my stamp? I don’t know, but we paid a lot more attention to indies. And I think we were pretty early actually in really giving over a significant amount of the mag to that stuff. And I take no credit for this personally. I think for like one element of it was just circumstantial and like AAA stuff was getting harder and harder to get access to, you know, like lead times just shrank to a matter of days and the priority shifted first to online and then to YouTube and stuff. But also I was just surrounded by like Jen Simpkins, who said some really nice stuff about me on this podcast. And I’m going to like just not say anything nice about her at all. That’s the kind of boss that I was. But like Jen and Chris Schilling were like super passionate about indies. And I think the job of a boss, a good manager is to find what your staff or your team are passionate about and then empower them to like leverage, not leverage it, but just empower them to chase after it basically and do the work that excites them and motivates them. And so Jen and Chris between them would just like go out and find stuff that I mean, Jen and I laugh about this quite often. But like there’s this this kind of meme among us when some writer for some website will go, Wow, this game, this indie game. I never heard of it. It’s amazing. Like I think when Outer Wilds came out, there was loads of that. And it was like we’d written about Outer Wilds like four years before it came out. And we’d previewed it like several times. And there was this this kind of recurring sense that we were very much in on the ground floor, like championing, championing quite a lot of stuff. And that was that was very much led and driven by by Jen and by Chris. And I feel bad for saying that I wasn’t going to say anything nice about Jen. But she she knows how much I care for her. Yeah. So are there any issues or covers you’re proudest of from your run? Was the did the lockdown issue happen in your time, Nathan? First of all, yeah, fucking yes, it did. And thank you for asking, because it was recently misattributed to my successor by a by a public by a publication of some repute as well. Guardian, I see you. Yes, then editor Jen Simpkins, my ass. Yeah. So I think like, Feel Better is for sure the one I will always cherish, I think, just because of the circumstances out of which it was born. You know, we were all struggling. We were all scared. We were all, you know, I don’t know, the future was shitting a bed as well and kind of condensing budgets and pagination and not putting issues on newsstands and stuff. And it all just felt very bleak, both within the working world and without it. Right. And someone suggested doing a feature. Why don’t we do a feature of games that would make you feel better? And I just sort of said in an offhand way, like, why don’t we do the whole issue? And that was that. What I loved about that team, I would say something jokingly like that, like, Andrew’s brilliant for this. You kind of say something offhand, not meaning it, just taking the piss or something like that. And then like 20 minutes later, you come back and he’s mocked it up and it looks fucking incredible. That’s got powerful biopic film energy. He said this, I said this and we made history. And then it happened. But I mean, you know, I don’t want to, you know, it’s not history. You could call it history, Matthew. I would never dare, never dare blow my trumpet in this way. But yeah, it was, I don’t know, man, just seeing the reaction to it, seeing the buzz to it and the fact that it was my final issue as well. Like I got quite emotional writing the ed intro, which is always the last thing you write, as you guys both know. And I got quite emotional writing it because it was like, wow, this is the last one and you know, who knows what’s going on in the world and stuff. And just seeing people like taking fucking camera photos of it and sharing it around Twitter and stuff because it struck a chord was just really lovely. So that was definitely like one cover. But there’s a few others as well. One that predates, I think I was, as I was Games Ed or Deputy Ed, was the Miyamoto cover. The Wii U, where he’s holding up the Wii U. Return of the King, we called it. Because that was like, I think about as pure an expression of the power of Edge and the ability that Edge had to kind of make things happen and unlock doors, I guess. So what would originally happen with that, it was never planned as a cover story, nor was it ever planned as us being the first like foreign media to go to Nintendo’s new Kyoto headquarters and all the rest of it. Miyamoto was supposed to be in Paris doing one of those 3DS things at the Louvre that they were doing at the time. And we’d been invited to go over and interview him. And I was going to go and then like last minute, Miyamoto’s father was taken ill and Miyamoto didn’t make the trip. So very apologetic Nintendo PR. I’m like, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. Things happen, whatever. And then like a month or so goes by and the same PR comes back and it’s like, NCL feel terrible and they’d like to make it right. What can they do to make it right? It’s like, fuck about, really? Tony had always taught me to ask, always don’t be afraid to ask for too much. That’s how really great things get done. Always ask for more if you want to see more, you never know. So I was like, well, if you really wanted to rescue it, we could fly out to Japan and meet Miyamoto and sit down with him. We talk about these prototypes for Wii U that we know that he’s working on and we could put that on the cover and we could maybe bring a photographer if you had the funding for that as well and we could do a photo shoot. And I sent that off. It’s like, yeah, whatever. And they came back like a week later and said, yeah. Miyamoto wants to do it. So off you go. So Matthew, you might remember this as well, but not only that, we said it’d be really nice to follow this interview up with a feature looking at the games that are in development for Wii U at the moment. How about if we did a load of email Q&As with the developers of all the big first and third party games that are in development at the moment? And they came back and said yes. So we had Itagaki and a bunch of other people who liked the Splatoon guy, Mario Kart. Yeah, I remember that as being like, oh, here are new people you don’t hear from ever. Because all the time that I was on the Nintendo Mags, there was always this big thing about Miyamoto being the spokesman no matter what the game was. And then I think internally something changed and they started wanting to put other people in front of other people. But that was definitely an early example of, oh, wow, holy shit, all these people. This is crazy, the access you guys got. Yeah, I think I remember you saying, I don’t know if you said it to me or said it to someone else, but I certainly heard that you’d said there’s more Nintendo access in that one issue than I’ve had in the last three years. Ever. I’ve only ever interviewed one person from Nintendo, which was a Gucci, and I interviewed him on behalf of Edge E3. But yeah, so that was definitely one man, because it was that real ask and you never know. You might be surprised just what the brand does. If I can just very quickly mention another couple as well, while I’m here. The Final Fantasy covers, which you talked to Paco about when you had him on. That was another one, actually, just because I think it was about a week after I took over and I was on the train on the way up, after I’d taken over as editor. I was on the train up to London to go to an ARMS event. Ian Dixon, who then was the PR at Square Enix, called me up. He was like, hey, it’s the Final Fantasy 25th anniversary, I guess, coming up. It’s been 25 at that point, I think, or maybe 30. Forgive me for not knowing. This coming up, we’d love to do some kind of cover tie-in with you. What would it take to make it happen? The train was just pulling into Paddington. I’m like, look, mate, I don’t know, I’m just getting off a train. But if there’s not a single game to hang it off, I guess we’re going to have to try and tell the complete story of Final Fantasy in a magazine involving interviews with everybody that’s been involved over the last three decades and maybe some kind of cover split run. I was just honestly thinking out loud and trying to get Ian off the phone so I could go and get on the tube. And he was like, OK, cool, leave it with me. And then that’s exactly what fucking happened. That was a real treat. See, if I’d been having that conversation, because I expected so little on the mags I was on, I would have asked for, could we do some Chocobo drinks coasters as a free gift? That would have been my bitch. To be fair, I’d quite like some Chocobo drinks coasters. But always being that sense of encouragement from Tony to just not be afraid to ask for more than they’re offering. And some variation of that happened every month. Someone would be like, this is the only art we have. And they’d send you two bits of key art. And I’m like, you’re telling me that the entire concept art folder in this development studio only has these two pieces in it. You have more art, right? Please can we see it? And just always pushing back on it. And a lot of PRs and companies were really taken aback by that. By kind of like, no, we’re telling you that this is all we’ve got, or this is what’s been signed off. And it’s like, we’re telling you that you can’t put that on the cover of Edge. And so, you know, we’re going to need to see something else. Like, always being, yeah, always ask for more. Yeah, play hardball. Yes. And lastly, the 25th anniversary, which with the multiple custom covers painted for us by the just staggeringly talented Dave White for absolutely no money at all. Like, just for the love of it, he’d been reading Edge since issue one and wanted to be involved in getting all that done. And that also had like the Nagashi interview in it as well. So that’s another like that we were talking about earlier. So that’s another one that’s very close to my heart. Wow, yeah, amazing stuff. So something else I think marked your time on Edge, Nathan, is you seem to have very close ties to Bungie and you’re very, you’re very kind of tuned into Destiny overall as a series. So what were the origins of that? I suppose like how did you develop that sort of closeness? It just felt like you were several steps ahead of everyone else. I felt like, do you know Luke Smith, the director as well or the then director? Is that right? Yeah, but only as a result of the work that I’ve done on Destiny, the writing that I’ve done on Destiny. I didn’t know him before or anything like that. I mean, honestly, I just played it a lot, like a lot, a lot. The year it came out, I had a regular raid team. I’d run like whatever the latest raid was with at least two, like three characters every week. It was kind of my social club, right? It was the pub that you could go to. My oldest son had just been born. He was like one, one and a half at the time. So still very much in that indoors mode. So it came along at the perfect time, really. Luke would later describe it as the bar I can go to in my pajamas and all my friends are there every night. That’s exactly what it was for me. And I think that the people that I was playing with, they weren’t other game journalists. I tried that once. It was fucking horrible. I was playing with people I knew on forums, people I used to play Street Fighter with and associated friends of theirs and stuff that would come in and come out over time. And they all just were really smart people. And we would talk about the game in this very like, not like, oh, this is bullshit way, but we would, I don’t know, we would just weigh up the merits of the game and all games that we were playing and stuff, but mostly desperately in this very like even-handed way, not trying not to get too emotional about it, but trying to be sympathetic to what the developers are trying to do, just like good game criticism basically. And that really, really informed my thinking on it, right? So when I got the opportunity to go over to Bungie for the first time for The Taken King, which was the first major expansion that came out like a year after the base game, and most cover trips that I went on during my career, I didn’t know anything or I hardly knew anything, right? You take a notebook, but you don’t really need it because you’re just going to walk in and go, so this game you’ve just announced that I know nothing about, could you tell me about it? And you have a conversation and you ask good questions. Whereas by the time I got to Bungie for that Taken King thing, I had like 400 fucking hours of experience. And I was so informed and so on top of not only the state of the game, but their comms, how they were managing their community. And the final interview for that feature was with Luke Smith, who was the, I think, game director at that point. Mark Noseworthy, executive producer, and Eric. Oh my god, Eric, I’m sorry, I can’t remember your surname. Everyone calls him Irk. And it was scheduled for half an hour, and we were still there like an hour and three quarters later. It was just one of the best interviews I had ever done. Oh, wow. Like, just like really in the weeds, really honest. And once they realized that I knew what I was talking about, and that I also was there for a conversation on looking for headlines and all the rest of it, like they just opened up completely. You know, it was just beautiful. And off the back of that, I came pretty firm friends with Luke and Mark. They’re both lovely people. So Eric? No, Eric was the marketing guy. I met him again before they announced Destiny 2, and he was a bit frosty with me. And I found out the reason he was a bit frosty was that I put a quote of his in the piece. The whole studio had been taking the piss out of him before, ever since. So I’d asked about the Activision, because they were Activision-owned at that time, and I think Activision had given them 500 million, I want to say, to build what would become Destiny. And we were kind of talking about that, and Eric said, I drive a Honda Civic, what the fuck do I know about $500 million? And it’s like, as soon as he said it, you’re just like, oh, my God, I could kiss you, that’s beautiful. That was a pull quote, you know, in the feature and stuff. And yeah, he said, like, yeah, I heard that people had always been, but like would often repeat it, and have been a bit sour about it. Sorry. Those Kingkippers were handsome as hell, though. So you had a split run. Yeah, yeah, three way split run, like custom. There’s always been, I think, what really helped me with that is that there’s always, for fairly obvious reasons, been a very, like, mutually admiring relationship between Bungie and Edge going on. You know, the Halo 10, which I think set a lot of things in motion. And, you know, yeah, there’s this kind of mutual admiration for each other. You know, you walk in to Bungie, and there’s copies of Edge on the walls and, you know, all that sort of stuff. Yeah. So I think that kind of helped a lot. And they were super willing just going, yeah, well, yeah, well, do you use three bits of custom cover art? What do you think? And they took notes on them as well. And that just sort of continued, really. And it was like, I used to get the piss taken out of me by various readers because, like, we really did do too much Destiny coverage in that period of time. And it was, you know, like people on, like, Roamuck and stuff, hi, Roamuck, would say, oh, Nathan’s written about Destiny again. He’s found another excuse to do, like, a still play, still playing on it or another review of an expansion or another cover feature or whatever. But it was just because that, I mean, that Taken King one had sold brilliantly by our normal standards. I think it’s still one of the best things I’ve ever written. And, you know, yeah, we’ve just tried, like, I don’t know. I was perfectly happy with us, like, standing for destiny at a time when the consensus was that all these games are dead or shit or whatever. It’s like super rare when you work on a magazine that you get to have that kind of deep relationship. Because so much stuff is kind of like one and you know, you maybe put it on one issue, maybe it gets covered in a second issue and then you move on. And you’re like, you know, that kind of specialist knowledge is maybe more associated with online writing where you can have an ongoing relationship, you know, like, you know, Tim Clark is a similar Destiny head and can revisit it, you know, weekly if he so chooses on PC Gamer. But on magazines, it’s hard to do that. You don’t have an outlet for that kind of specialist knowledge. And like, but I love it when someone does have it and they do get to tap into it. And it’s just so obvious on the page of like, oh, I just, there is nothing better than someone who knows what they’re talking about. Getting to talk about their specialist subject is just especially in print where it’s so beautifully presented and edited and everything. It’s just the dream. Totally agree with everything you just said. Nathan, Edge recently gave out a rare 10 out of 10. I won’t say what the game is because the issue is still on sale and people should go read it. But can you talk about safeguarding your scoring system as an editor? Because I always felt like Edge has done a good job of maintaining consistency with this. When I’ve worked on big outlets with international teams, it’s really, really hard to keep a lid on it, keep it in control. I suppose how much of a conversation would you have about whether something deserves a 10 or a 9? How did you safeguard that system as an editor? Well, to be perfectly honest, it’s because I wrote all of the 10s. I think Chris Schilling said I’m responsible for more than a quarter of all Edge 10s, which, you know, is something. But there was a couple that I think the first one was Chris Schilling reviewing a Switch game that came out in 2017 that wasn’t Breath of the Wild. There you go, Tony. I preserved the anonymity. And that was the first time that I’d had that sort of as editor anyway, that conversation of like, I think this might be the one. And then it’s, you know, it’s really just about like, do you if you make if you convince me on the page, then I’m going to be convinced. It was the same with with Dreams. It was the same when I was writing them myself. It’s just like, you know, I’ve got a fucking, you know, it’s got to go somewhere. It’s got to build up. So so yeah, I think like the tens often are fairly apparent. Like they tend to announce themselves quite ahead of time a little bit. I think there’s like this rare pantheon of games anyway, where you’re like, you sit down with it for the first time, and it’s rather than saying, show me why you are not a seven. It’s show me the ways in which you are not a ten. And I think I think there’s like a very small select, you know, certain Nintendo games. I would argue certain rock star games, FromSoft games now as well, you know, where you kind of you come down rather than going up. I like that sense of the edge, like the review itself. There’s like an inevitability that there’s going to be a ten, you know, when you’ve when you’ve written it right, when you’ve written a ten, I have written probably one of the most hated edge tens of all time. But I still think that review is an edge ten review. I think it’s, you know, like I feel it’s fully justified and I’ll stand by that piece of writing. But even like even outside of edge, when you’ve got a big, big score from the magazine, that sense of like momentum building to it. And even if you skipped ahead and you’ve seen the score, you’re like, oh, yeah, this is it. We’re you know, it’s just this is all working for me. I’m really in I’m really into this. Yeah, I always I loved the idea of like, because the if it’s a lead review anyway, then it spills over onto a third page. There’s an actual page turn involved. So first, there’s a commitment involved, like for the reader to kind of really want to spoil the score for themselves. But you also just get to like, tease them. It’s like, oh, my God, is it it’s happening? Is it happening? Oh, my God. And you’re sort of building building towards it. Can you can you resist the temptation to turn the page? Yeah, I loved it, man. I used to write in my reviews, like write the score at the end in the like the old edge style. I think the era of when I first discovered it, which was like in the school was just in square brackets in plain text and bold at the end. So I’d like all the way through my career. It was just like open, open square bracket number, close square bracket worry about the boat. But Nathan will write Box out on page and send it off to whoever. And I tell you, there is no feeling like more like emotional and powerful than like open bracket one zero close bracket like fucking mic drop walk away raw to the sky. Yeah, man, it’s a terrific, terrific feeling. Cut to one month later and you’re on the forums. And they’re like, what the fuck are you thinking? And you’re like, oh, well, there goes that feeling. Hey, man, I only regret like two of them. So Nathan, last up when it comes to Edge, what was an Edge E3 trip like? I always got the sense you had a slightly different version of E3 to me, maybe one that was slightly less common that games journalists would experience. You seemed like you had a level of closeness to publishers and developers that maybe the publications I worked on didn’t have. Maybe that’s right, maybe that’s wrong. But what was an Edge E3 like for you? I mean, at the beginning, they were exactly the same as everybody else’s E3s, which was whatever shit old future is prepared to put you up in sharing a room and doing your best. I was certainly completely overwhelmed by the first couple of years that I went. But I realized pretty quickly that in order for Edge to do E3 in the way that I felt we should be doing E3, like one of the last multi-format magazines, the luxury of time, normally anyway, like after the show, to kind of put something like big together and also like bluntly like stretched, increasingly stretched in terms of budgets. So we should get as much out of this festival of video games as we can that we needed two people out there. But future would only ever pay for one. So we needed to find another way to get someone else out there, which normally meant getting some kind of like sponsorship. This is a peek behind the curtain from a third party publisher or whatever. And after Michael Gappa had left, he had gone out with Activision, I think, the year before. It was also the year that I was, I think, doing Destiny stuff with them or COD or something. And they were like, look, why don’t you come out to E3? Well, you know, you don’t have to write about any of our stuff at all, but we were going to do a cover trip later that year anyway. Come out and meet the team and all the rest of it. It was all very, like, light touch, very pleasant, like, no problem at all. And so I went from, like, staying in the Ramada Roach Motel with Future to that first year. And it never got this good again, admittedly. And it was apparently the result of some weird, like, block booking rate that Activision had got to make. The Beverly Hills Hotel in an $800 a night suite. And all of a sudden it was like, oh, man, do you know what? LA is all right. I thought LA was, like, awful. And had, you know, like, the saddle ranch. And you have to stay in motels where people have been murdered and stuffed into water tanks and all the rest of it. But yeah, so that, like, that was my first, like, kind of realization. It’s like, actually, if you can do it, you know, better than, better than normal, then the whole experience becomes a lot more comfortable. We also just, you know, it’s not that I enjoyed better relationships with publishers and stuff, but I think I just got better at navigating it over time, like, knowing the quick routes, understanding that you’re not going to get every single, there’s no point putting appointments back to back because it’s going to take you 20 minutes to get from one to the other. And so give yourself half an hour to go outside and have a smoke or, you know, whatever, make your way over there leisurely. And yeah, like, it just became over time. I think as I got to know more people around the industry, it started feeling like more of a social occasion at which I did a lot of work. And I could just like spend time just floating around between various booths, just going to say hello to people. And actually the conversations that you have going to say hello to people are like way more useful and productive than going and seeing like the hands off demo for the new Just Cause. And I think that’s just kind of a function of it. But yeah, I love E3, whatever kind of hotel I’m in or however bad it is. It was like the highlight of my year. And I think it was the same for a lot of people as well, having consumed magazines with such fervour as a kid and then having watched the live streams of them, like being in the room for stuff when it happens. I hope that, I talk about this far too much, but that Sony conference in 2015 with Final Fantasy VII Remake, Last Guardian and Shenmue III in the space of 10 minutes. And I’ve never, as you know, I spent time in loud rooms with loud music and very excitable crowds. I’ve never experienced a room like that. It was just this communal explosion of shock and hype and wonder. What would you give it as a club room? It’s fine. The drugs were terrible. But then, like, you know, the next year you go to the Sony thing and they announce a Crash Bandicoot remaster. And because the audience is American, they all go, can spare again. And all the Brits are just sitting there going, what? It’s kind of business as usual. Good stuff. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for answering our questions in such detail, Nathan, on Edge. That’s much appreciated. So let’s take one more quick break and we’ll come back and talk about Hit Points and some other stuff. Thank Welcome back to the podcast, the final section of this episode, where we’re going to talk to Nathan a bit about his Hit Points Substack and how that’s going and some of the other work he’s doing now. So, Nathan, Hit Points seems like a natural segue from your Edge column that existed in your last few years working on the mags. So what led to you launching it? Instantly, I wonder if you get data, or if you could get data to find out how many people drop off at this point. It’s like, oh, he stopped talking, he stopped telling his war stories now. It’s the boring promo bit. So after I left Edge, I went off and did some marketing, sort of copywriting work for a little while, and it was boring as shit. And I came back and I was like, right, I want to build up a consultancy business and I want to write again. Like I missed writing, sorry, tease. And I wanted to get back into it. But once you’ve written for Edge, it’s going to sound really sniffy, but it’s not as fun writing for other people. It’s the first thing. The second thing is that I think at the time the landscape was such that, quite correctly, the last thing that most traditional gaming websites needed was the input of another old white guy with a beard. They were absolutely right to be looking to add more diversity to their ranks and in the absence of full-time hires, we’re focusing their freelance budgets on that. Thirdly, I think, didn’t pay very well and I certainly knew enough that that wasn’t going to be sustainable in and of itself. And fourthly, the sorts of stuff that you, I don’t know, I’m not sure I wanted to write a copy for today’s web, really. Search optimized stuff, maybe commissioning decisions driven by data. It just didn’t excite me. I can’t see you writing ending explains for Marvel movies. Exactly. Thank you. So I was like, right, OK, what are my options here? And there were, I’m very, very sorry, given what you said at the start, but like I’m going to talk about sports a little bit here. There were two sports websites that have been set up in like recent years that are both in one way or another subscription funded. One is called Defecto, which was like formed from the ashes of an old Gawker site called Deadspin. And that is like, you know, paid pretty much. I don’t think it’s fully paywalled. But I think if you want to comment and if you want absolutely everything and all the podcasts and stuff, then you have to pay. And that’s like a, they run it like a workers co-op. There’s no venture funding. It’s fully funded by readers. They’re their own bosses. They have, you know, they drew up their own like charter of working conditions and all that sort of stuff. It’s fucking amazing. And it’s also a huge success. I think like their first year’s revenue was like three or four million, something like that. So, you know, incredible. The second one is The Athletic, which is like sort of the same thing, but venture funded and driven by subscription revenue. And their business model was we’re just going to go and hoover up every like pissed off, disenchanted sports reporter at every local paper and national paper and get them to like, you know, come in and do stuff for us. So those seem to me like two options for me to be able to do what I wanted. But bluntly, they both sounded like quite a lot of work. They both sounded like a gamble. I thought like the workers co-op idea, like I would love to be able to do that. But what am I going to do? Go to like Donlon, you know, who’s got kids and multiple sclerosis and say, hey, do you want to just come and jump off a cliff with me? Like, I think it’ll be all right, but I don’t know. And, you know, like everybody I know that I would certainly want to work with has got commitments and, you know, I mean, everybody does, right? So that just didn’t feel like it would work either. And it was like, OK, all right, what if I just did something by myself in which I was only accountable to myself, didn’t have to deal with investors or anything like that, and effectively built something like a one man defector for me? And that’s when I became, I mean, I’d been aware of Substack for a little while, but it was just hang on a minute, this might work. And, you know, I knew the tone that I wanted because, as you say, I’d written an edge column, which was that sort of mix of industry analysis and self-deprecating cries for help from a struggling parent. I knew how to be serious and funny at the same time, I think, anyway. And it would also be a decent shop window for my consultancy work, I hoped. And so, yeah, I just like I took the plunge. I started tooling around with it, just me, for a couple of weeks, then brought in a few people like Michael Gappa and Jen and Donlon and Chris Schilling early on just to kind of be like, all right, could you read this for a week and tell me what you think of the cadence of it and the tone and the structure and all the rest of it? And then I was just like, all right, fine, let’s do it. And launched it. And it’s, I mean, look, there are people on Substack who are making, like, millions. I am not one of those people. And I will not be for some time. But I think, like, it’s, you know, we’re coming up on 3,000 readers now, like, very close to, I think that’ll probably hit in the next, like, few days, which is, you know, a huge milestone for me personally. And yeah, I don’t know, Matthew, you said to me a while back, it’s like, it’s so nice to make something that people like. Something that’s yours and comes purely from you and is your voice. That’s what I found on this podcast. Like, I’ve been taught that my value has only ever existed to kind of help a brand happen. And when those brands go away, you’re like, well, well, I’m done then. You know, like, what am I without official Nintendo or NGamer? But yeah, like this sort of new age of something else kind of living, coming from you is just, yes, fucking rad. And that was especially the case, like, for me, right? Because you come, I mean, there’s such a veil of anonymity over so much of Edge still. And I think that, like, the people that knew me knew how much of a, like, impact or an imprint I had, I guess, on the mag during that time. But you’re never entirely sure. Like, I don’t have the profile of a Jason Schreier or, you know, whoever. Shout out to Sam White. That’s how Sam says Jason Schreier, and now I do as well. But, you know, but I don’t have this, like, enormous, you know, profile that could give me a leg up straight away. And there was a bit of uncertainty, really, with, like, were these people who I thought were my friends, like, actually my friends? Or were they just like, you know, well, the Edge guy, you have to be friends with the Edge guy. And, you know, so you never know, like, am I just going to sit? Is this just going to sink? But I think I had like 600 sign ups on the first day and it’s naturally tapered off since then. But but it’s tracking along really, really nicely. I really like the work, like, really like it. It’s some of the most fulfilling stuff I’ve done, like, in my in my entire career, I think. And, yeah, this is a nice little I think you guys probably found this as well. The little the little community building around of it around it. A few people asked for a Discord. I was like, all right. But, you know, it’s like a couple of hundred people in there talking about lunch. It’s just nice. It’s really nice. Really heartening. Do you feel like sort of a weird god descending whenever you turn go into the Discord, though? I don’t think myself a god, but just that you draw people to you because they’re like, oh, it’s the source. It’s the originator. My name is in blue. Right. Yeah. Like, yeah. No, not really. I mean. That’s just you. Yeah, I think that’s… Do not project your little hang ups on to me, Matthew Castle. I shall have none of it. I think the reason it stood out, Nathan, is that everyone seems to think they’re a games industry analyst these days, which is interminable. And, you know, you have this angle and careful honesty you don’t get elsewhere. So what do you make of that landscape more generally? I suppose, what were your values coming into it and shaping it? It kind of goes back to what I was talking about with Destiny, right, and my raid group, and kind of always trying to see things from Bungie’s perspective rather than just complaining about it. And I think, like, a lot of my edge work, particularly, like, the column, and any time I had to write lead news, it was very much like zooming out and putting stuff in some sort of wider context, right? And that’s absolutely the approach that I kind of try and take with it. I think the, I don’t know, like you say that everyone thinks they’re an analyst these days. Like, I don’t think it’s as bad as like that kind of when I when I started, like 2010 era when Michael Pachter was in like every other headline. And you had this kind of like armchair and an analysis thing going on as a result of it. Because people thought that was like how you were supposed to supposed to talk about this stuff. And actually, like the part of the reason I wanted to do is because there was a bit of a vacuum for this sort of coverage. But yeah, like the games industry is still really good at like, you know, breaking things down and condensing stuff. But there’s really like not a lot out there of this kind of, okay, we’ve all read the news. But what do we what does that mean? Like, what do we think about it? Why does it matter? Does it matter even? And having a venue to do that sort of stuff is like, I’ve said this to a few people before, but like, this is all stuff that if I wasn’t writing about it, I would just be like WhatsApping someone about. Like, I kind of need to talk about this stuff to someone. That’s interesting, because when I read Hit Points, what I always think is like, how do you have this many full-formed takes? Like, these don’t just feel sort of dashed out, you know? I’m just interested from a kind of practicality side. Like, how long do you spend writing these things? Because that, like, I look at them and think, and that would be over, like, that would literally be over a day of, like, really intensive thinking for me to get anywhere near that. Like, I will spend the whole day kind of tweaking and polishing in the first draft. It’s never the thing that goes out, but I reckon, like, two hours tops for most of it. And there are, like, enough opportunities. I mean, like I say, like, I’m thinking about this stuff all the time anyway, right? Or I’m talking to people about this stuff. Or I remember a conversation that I had with someone, like, five years ago that all of a sudden seems weirdly fucking relevant, and now it comes. But, yeah, like, it doesn’t take long. I’ve always written quickly, which I’ve always put down to that the very first job I had at Barclays Bank, doing data entry, sending payments around, which these days you can do with your phone. It’s a lot of that in my career, now I think about it. And I went in on my first day, and they were like, right, here’s what you got to do. You got to put on these details, these are the amount. You’ve got one week to do a hundred of these a day, or you’re fired. I was like, OK, I guess I better do a hundred of these a day. And I think that’s always fast and accurate. Fast and accurate has always been the way I’ve worked, at least. I’m by no means fast and accurate in any other respect, but at least once I sit down and start writing. And there are days when it takes longer than that, or if I want to do something a bit more long form. There are days when I just don’t feel like writing anything at all, and I actually have the luxury to not have to do it. But yeah, once it starts, it happens pretty quickly. Apologies if this is getting into the weeds a bit. What’s your recall like? Because the detail and the memories and those anecdotal things, obviously the anecdotes come from your head, but do you go back to other bits of writing ever to kind of just refresh your takes? No, I don’t go. Yeah, sometimes. I have a pretty good edge memory. It used to be the case that if someone was looking for something, they’d be like, hey, when did we publish this feature? And I’d be like, I don’t know, look around, like 290 something. And it would be like 294. And everyone was like, wow, if you’ve got the whole edge archived in your head. It’s like, no, it’s just that I remembered us doing that work. And I remember, I don’t know, who was on the team or what was on the cover and where I’d gone for the cover or where we were sitting in the building or wherever, you know, like something that made me able to narrow it down a little bit. And yeah, I don’t know, it’s just stuff just pops back into my head at the most inconvenient times. That’s why I don’t get enough sleep. I think a key thing that maybe sets Hit Points apart, Nathan, is you can see the sort of a slight Magcraft element to it in terms of like the titles of each newsletter are like edge titles, as opposed to SEO headlines. Yeah, exactly. So many op-eds, I think, are just kind of weighed down by their own headlines and end up saying nothing insightful as a result because they’ve already put their conclusion in the headline, whereas I think just by the nature of how you do it, your point unravels and kind of develops as it goes and it makes for a very satisfying reading experience. So that, I think, is what doesn’t exist at the moment in the same form because everyone has to say what they mean in their headlines. So, yeah, that’s just my take, but yeah. I just like, I mean, it’s lovely to hear, and that’s like fully intentional, actually, as well. So it’s even more, it’s validating as well. I actually had an email a couple of months ago, someone, a paid subscriber who cancelled an email and he was just like, look, some feedback, you know, like listen to it or don’t, like no harm, no harm, no hard feelings kind of thing. But he like made a bunch of suggestions that were just, could you please turn this back into literally every other thing that’s on the internet? Like it was kind of like your headlines aren’t descriptive enough, so I don’t know what I’m reading. If you could put a few like keywords in there, your paragraphs are too long. I get confused, your sentences are too long. It’s like, I know, it’s fucking awesome, isn’t it? He was kind of listing them as reasons that he didn’t like it. And it was like that in itself was validating, to be honest. You know, fair play. Like I don’t expect this to be for everyone, but that was really sort of useful to kind of contextualize. There is a reason I do this. There is a reason I’m not SEOing like my headlines. I mean, I fucking number them, man, in the headlines. Like that’s pretty bad for SEO, I’m told. But I stick issue numbers in there, because when people stumble across it and they see issue 138 or whatever, I want them to think, oh my God, there’s 137 more of these. That’s cool. I should subscribe and I can sign up and read them. It’s the same with, you know, a lineage there, a longevity, same as Edge. Yeah, for sure. So what are the challenges of making a paid tier, trying to fund it and trying to figure out what the paid content looks like, essentially, because we’ve been through this ourselves with the Patreon. And it’s, yeah, it’s hard to get the balance right without creating too much work for yourself. Yeah, man, for sure. There’s a real, like, head and heart thing at play. Like, you know, the unemotional decision is just like, well, put most of what you do already behind the paywall. And a lot of, like, Substacks that go paid do that. They just, like, excise. Okay, currently you get two a week, you’re now only going to get one a week. And, you know, you’re going to have to pay. Or they start sending. Like, you can, there’s a feature in Substack to, like, insert a paywall break, so you kind of send to everybody, like, the first two or three paragraphs or whatever, and then just, like, to read the rest, seven-day free trial and, you know, stuff like that. Just, I’m sure would lead to more paid subscriptions, but it’s just not what I want to do. It just doesn’t make me feel good. I want people to pay because they want to support it rather than because they’re going to, because I’m going to take something away from them if they don’t. And increasingly, I’d like people to pay because they want to support it rather than because I’m going to do extra stuff for them because that’s been really, really, really hard to do when, you know, it’s not a great revenue driver. Like, you know, it’s pocket money, really, which is super nice and super lovely to have, but it’s never going to be a living, or it’s not a living at the moment. I mean, it certainly could be one day, but the time that I have to take out to sort out, you know, the interviews that I do for Max HP, which is the excellent name for the paid side of Hit Points, are so long, like, you know, we’re looking at, like, two, three hour interviews. The last one I did was, like, two, two hour interviews over the, like, two weeks apart, and then the piece was, like, eight and a half thousand words, which I think is the longest thing I’ve ever written as a game journalist. And it’s like, I can’t, I can’t do that every month, because the amount of time that I spend doing that, I could do a consultancy project that, you know, covers my half of the bills for the month. So it’s really difficult, and I’m still figuring it out as I go along, but I’m being, I’m trying to make sure as far as possible that I’m led by the, like, my emotional approach to this than my intellectual one, I guess, which is that I like doing this work, other people seem to like it and like reading it, and some people, a proportion of those people will pay to support it. And over time, if the number of overall people that are reading it grows, then it makes sense that over time, the number of people paying to support it will grow in kind or at least proportionately. And eventually maybe it becomes, you know, something else. And every so often I’ll do some ludicrous profile of one of my friends from the game industry whose story has not been properly told or not told widely enough. They’re great fun as well. But yeah, yeah, like the answer is the challenges of making a paid tier are quite, quite extreme. But I’ve set things up such that I’m not dependent on it, because I think to just jump off a cliff in that way would be pretty suicidal, right? Yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean, we’re in the same boat, really. Like, we couldn’t live off of the Patreon, but we’re extremely grateful for the support we get. It allows us to pay people we have on. And like we were saying, it’s a thing you own. It’s a thing you can grow. Like, who knows, maybe five years down the line, maybe it is a more meaningful part of your income, you know? So, yeah, yeah, lots of admiration for what you’re doing there. But do you have a particular focus you prefer writing about on there? It seems like you’re very tuned into the industry side of things. I was curious if you, because I know you wrote about, wrote some Street Fighter impressions recently, right? Do you find writing about the industry more or less enjoyable than writing impressions about a game? I think my favourite stuff is the industry stuff, but there is some pretty important caveats to that. So when the Activision Blizzard stuff broke and all the Ubisoft stuff was swirling around, I was just so miserable. Like, just, okay, I have to sit down and write about sexual misconduct again. Fucking hell. I mean, I’m not saying it’s, you know, my cross was the heaviest to bear in that situation by any stretch, but like, it was just miserable. And there are like lots of things like, consolidation and acquisitions and stuff were fun to write about for a while, but then after a while, you’re just repeating yourself, you know? It’s just like, here is why this is potentially problematic and, you know, worrying for industry trends and stuff. But when like something really juicy comes, I mean, when the Activision Blizzard acquisition, acquisition Blizzard was announced in January, I wasn’t going to do a newsletter that day because nothing had happened or I was feeling ill or something, I can’t remember what it was, but I was like, no, not happening today, not going to do it. And then that broke like while I was walking to school to get, pick up my eldest. So it’s like three o’clock. I was like, all right, I got two hours to write about this fucking industry shaking. God knows what that’s just happened. I haven’t even had time to think about yet. Like, okay. And I wrote that thing in 45 minutes. And it’s like one of my favorite things that I’ve written because it’s like, wow, I was kind of right with a lot of that stuff. I saw that like really quickly. That is definitely my favorite. But there will never not be a part of me that just loves like playing a game and talking about it, especially if I can find a hit pointsy way to talk about it. Like the only bit of review code that I’ve got so far is Gran Turismo 7 because I’d written all this stuff about Forza Horizon 5 being like a really bad dad game. And I saw and I saw and I like did a really nice like pitch email to Sony. I was quite proud of like I have I have like 2000 readers, but here’s why you need to give me a copy of Gran Turismo 7. And because it actually looks like a, you know, a very capable dad game. Like it’s the anyway. Yeah, that was that was a good time. But, you know, it’s something that I think I can add a perspective to. Street Fighter 6, like, absolutely I can. And Capcom were kind enough to like let me go up and press buttons for for an hour or two, one afternoon and like power or simulator, which is just like, you know, OK, I guess I’ll play this for an hour. Actually, I didn’t intend to play that in order to write about it, but it just sent me on a fairly like weird sort of existential trajectory that I felt was worth writing about. But yes, short answer. I prefer the industry stuff, but it’s all a balance, isn’t it, Samuel? It’s all a balance. I was just going to ask you, what do you find people react like most to when you write? Are there particular themes, topics, areas that seem to get a good reaction out of your readership? No, not really. I mean, I think in terms of stuff that actually got shared and spread a little bit, some of the bits I did on around Elden Ring did pretty well. There’s sort of a discourse-y themed one and then something about game balance that have been set off. And I think that was just in the time when everybody was thinking and talking about Elden Ring a lot, so that they kind of did well. But what I found really nice is that people just seem to like stuff. It doesn’t matter. It’s like the most important thing is that Hit Points by Nathan Brown appears in their inbox and gives them a pleasant six minutes, you know, when they’re on the train or waiting for the kettle to boil or whatever. I’m not going to say I’m not trying to do that Donald Trump. I could walk into Fifth Avenue and start shooting or whatever it was, Times Square and start shooting people. But, you know, people seem to like the thing more than they like any particular aspect of it, which is like super comforting. Yeah, I think we find the same with the podcast, actually. You know, like a common thing is I wasn’t interested. You know, I didn’t think I would be interested in that one, but I listened and it, you know, I really liked it or I don’t care about that game series, but I still liked it. And those are those are big, big wins for morale. So aside from Hit Points, Nathan, you’re a full time video game consultant. And I was curious to ask you about this because I think just from making a brief sort of like interactions of people who who do this side of do this, this kind of work and the idea of working with a developer to improve their game. So I was curious what that’s like, because I found that in people who have written mock reviews or done consultancy work that they become invested in the product in a way that might seem foreign to someone who’s used to working in games media. So what is consulting essentially and what what how do you are you validated by doing that kind of work? Like hugely, more than I thought I would be actually. So the very simple way of explaining what it is, is that I’m reviewing a game, but I’m reviewing it for the people that are making it while they still have time to make changes and take on feedback. So the audience that you’re writing for is naturally a little bit different. But you’re and you’re not like your ultimate goal is not like should someone. Is this a good game and should people buy it? It’s what areas should the developers be looking at in the final six months or nine months or year or however long it is to make it better than it is if they were going to release it today. So yeah, it’s a review for a different audience effectively. Yeah. And in terms of like, is it validating? I was a bit worried when I when I started doing it because most of the sort of stuff that I’d heard about was like mock reviews that were mostly being commissioned by the PR reps at large publishers. And the games were finished and were coming out in a matter of weeks and it was more about them wanting to be able to set expectations internally. Sam, I’m sure Sam can, you know, understands this well from from like the sort of PR capacity. But like everybody thinks that the game they’re making is brilliant and it’s often very useful to be able to manage expectations before the reviews hit of what people are actually going to think of it. That’s what I thought like a lot of the job was. But actually what I’m finding is that while they call them mock, we need a mock review done, it’s very often a lot earlier in development. It’s, you know, stuff that is months away and there is time for your feedback to be taken on board. And I’ve seen stuff that I’ve suggested, like done. Oh, really? Yeah, like and in some pretty big games as well. Like, you know, and that’s really, really validating. I’ve got some stuff, I think, four or five games delayed, which is probably not as good. Maybe one or two cancelled. And there was even something that came out very recently, which I shan’t name. But they had, I think it was like I sent the review through on the Monday and on the Friday, they’d sent back another build with a load of the changes that they’d made in response to it and asking me if I could have another look at it. And I was like, well, I mean, I can only do like a couple of hours. Do you want me to play through it again? And they’re like, oh, no, we can’t. It’s out in like three weeks. What the fuck? Making changes like kind of that that late in the day based on based on feedbacks. I must have, you know, it’s clearly a useful process, right, for them as much as it is for me. But yeah, it’s fascinating, honestly. I’ve always can sort of thought that Edge was a bit closer to developers than most of the rest of the gaming media, I guess, in a way, like kind of, you know, we rooted for developers. We went to bat for them. I always felt a certain kinship on press trips and stuff like that with people who make games. So just being able to get closer to that. And yeah, it’s really nice. It’s really cool. I tell you, though, that it is absolutely reinforced that I never want to make one of these things because for the longest time they are terrible. I’ve done a little bit of mock reviewing myself the last couple of years and when I lost my job on RPS, I thought, oh, maybe this is a sphere I could kind of push into and haven’t done a particularly good job with it. But I’ve had a couple of bits and bobs and it’s super odd going from writing for the public about these things to writing just for the one person who that review would really upset or hurt or reinforce perhaps. And I found that quite a strange thing because I often used to think when I was writing my mag reviews, I wonder if the devs ever read this. And here it’s like only the devs will read this and it’s just you and them. And I still find that an odd thing to kind of get my head around. It is kind of like that, but I don’t know, man. I think they’re actually pretty receptive to and completely understand it as well. And as long as you naturally have to change the approach, change the way that you write. So it’s like do away with the jokes about explosive barrels and instead like make, you know, focus your efforts on like just really, really laser astute feedback that really like isolates the core of an issue in a way that is quite hard to kind of argue with, I think. And generally speaking, there’s been a couple of times I agree, like when I was starting out, when I would send something off and, you know, I project like an edge score, a meta score of like, you know, six and mid 60s respectively or something like that and not heard anything for like a week and a half. And it’s like, right, they hate me. There goes that client. I’ve upset them. I’ve rattled the cadet. And then they come back and they’re like, oh, sorry, it’s been really busy. Thank you so much for that. It’s incredibly, incredibly useful feedback. We’ll use you again in future. And then they’re back like, you know, a month later to ask me to run the rule over something else. So, yeah, like, I don’t know, you’ve always got to be prepared to upset people, but understand that you’re probably never going to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that what is interesting is if people ever saw, ever got a glimpse behind the curtain of this, they would understand the like absurd extent to which developers are committed to making the game as good as it can possibly be. And I think once you’ve kind of seen the human side of that and really understand that, it does change your perspective a little bit on games development in a way where I don’t think you can quite go back from maybe what your preconceptions were. I don’t know if you agree with that, Nathan, but that’s sort of how I found it, you know? Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s just like little things that I’ll take for like, I will never again take the piss out of a bug in an open world game, because I know what open world games look like 18 months before they come out. It is a miracle that those things even, I mean, maybe not Cyberpunk, but like it is a miracle that these things ever, ever get stable enough to ship, like, you know, just skipping everywhere because nothing works and falling through the scenery. And oh my God, like, yeah, like it’s wild. And I think, yeah, once you once you’ve seen that sort of element of it and understand that, like you say, Sam, no one is no one ever sets out to make bad game, right? But it’s just about helping them get get to make the best possible version of that with the time and the money that they’ve got left basically. OK, well, that’s great, Nathan. Thanks for thank you for detailing all that. So where can people go and find Hit Points and support you support your work if they want to? My God, we should probably have done this at the beginning, shouldn’t we? We mentioned it in the beginning, too. Oh, I did, actually. That’s true. Right, like you didn’t trust us to cover it. Of course, I trusted you. So, yes, you can find me at hitpoints.substack.com. I really don’t like the sign up flow on that, because it looks like you’ve got to commit before it will… There’s a little, like, let me read it first button that’s easy to miss, but you can do that. Just pop your email address in, totally free. Pay it if you like, whatever. I’m on Twitter somewhere, at Nathan underscore Brown, but mostly go to Hit Points if you don’t already. There is enough of a crossover, I think, between Back Page and Hit Points, which is lovely to hear. Before we go, can I just shout out Michael Grant, who is my accountant and is a big fan of The Back Page. Oh, I’ve seen Michael around on the social media before, so that’s a nice connection. That’s cool. Hello, Michael. I’m assuming that’s blown your mind, hearing the host talking to you while listening to the podcast. Please give me a discount, and I’m sorry that I’m late with all of my filing. This seems like a good place to do that, to have that conversation. This podcast is supported by Patreon, patreon.com backpagepod, if you’d like two additional podcasts from us a month. There’s also a £1 tier, if you’d just like to say thank you for the work that we do here. Nathan, thanks so much. It’s been a phenomenal episode. Matthew, is there anything you want to plug, MrBattleUnderscorePesto, etc.? Yeah. I mean, you follow me on Twitter. I was complaining about kitchen utensils today, so that’s a sign of how dire that is. Kitchen, good kitchen chat. Once we’ve stopped recording, let’s stay on and talk about kitchens, because that’s a real topic of conversation for me at the moment. Okay, great. Well, you can follow the podcast The Back Page Pod on Twitter. There is also links to our Discord there as well, if you’d like to join that community. And that’s us done. Thanks so much for your time, Nathan. Thank you for having me. Cheers. Bye bye.