Hello and welcome to The Back Page of Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. How’s it going, Matthew? Are you well? You had a good weekend. It’s a Sunday evening. Sort of, I’m a little bit toasty. I’ve had the heating on too high and I’ve eaten a giant roast dinner. How are you doing? Yeah, I’ve actually got a real sweat on because we’ve got the heating up quite high. Is that a bit tory of me to admit that? Oh yeah, yeah. Have you got your smart meter next to you to see how much you’re spending just watching it tick off? No, I’ve just wagged it up. Oh wow, yeah, that’s where the Patreon money is going. It’s on heating 24-7. So yes, we are joined again by a magazine themed guest, Matthew. So Neil, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, hello. I’m Neil Long, former editor of MCV Official Nintendo Magazine, thing called iGamer that no one read, Edge Online, then I worked at Apple for a long time and now I’m the editor of Mobilegamer.biz. Excellent. And so Neil’s here today to blow the lid on Apple and what he thinks of Tim Cook. So I’m excited to get into that. Get those lawyers ready. I am joking, of course, Neil, so let’s talk about working on all the things he just listed. So, Neil, how’s it going? How’s things with you currently? I’m running a website entirely by myself. So that’s good. Busy, busy times reporting on what’s happening in mobile. Yeah, cool. So we’ll get into that after delving into your entire professional history. So lots to ask you about here. And Matthew, what’s part of your thinking with having Neil on to talk about how what the official version of the Nintendo sort of magazine side was like while you were on NGamer? Was that part of the reason you set Neil on? A little bit like when we had Dan Dawkins on and, you know, you were talking a little bit about the sort of magazine rivalry. And it isn’t quite that because to say that like NGamer was in any way an efficient rival to ONM is kind of laughable. In terms of sales figures, but like we both covered the same period, you know, you know, we worked quite closely together. I obviously sort of inherited ONM, but, you know, by then Nintendo in a slightly different place. And I just thought it’d be fun to talk about, yeah, like ONM during the kind of the heyday of like Wii and DS, when Nintendo could do no wrong and like the amazing opportunities that ONM and Neil and his team got as a result of that. Yeah, that’s sort of like an interesting comparison. So, Neil, to start with, what’s your personal history of video games and what are your earliest console and gaming obsessions or memories? I remember playing Pong at my cousin’s house and my cousin had a chipped SNES, like it had like a hundred games on it. So like a trip to my cousin’s house was amazing. You play just anything you could think of and hope the police didn’t turn up. But yeah, I guess before that it was, yeah, my first console was probably Atari 2600, 2600, however you say it. California games, that sort of era. Then I got a NES with like the double pack Super Mario Brothers Duck Hunt. Classic. Then I was a Mega Drive guy in my team years, which I kept fairly quiet while I was on ONM. Right. And then, towards the end of the Mega Drive years, I had a sort of a rich friend who had a SNES with loads of games. And I just said, why don’t we swap? I’ll give you my Mega Drive and my like 11 games and I’ll have your SNES and your like 15 games. So I just had his SNES for a summer, which was great. I had a similar deal with the boys across the river who lived opposite us. They had a SNES, we had a Mega Drive and we’d often swap it. So I feel like we both had a diet of each console. Is this further down the line from when you had played the bootleg SNES then? So were you like, did you kind of have the appetite to check out the SNES off the back of that? Presumably a copper came in and went, or have you got a license for that copy of Earthbound, etc. Like did having that experience exposing you to it make you want to basically like check out what the SNES was all about at that point? Because games were so expensive, I just read Mags all the time. Yeah, I kind of experienced games in a lot of ways just through the magazines. Like Streetfire was like 70 quid in the 90s. And like I think I had one friend who could afford to buy that. And that was my rich friend. It’s worth sort of noting how the rhythms of like how you acquired games were basically just birthdays and Christmas. Or it was for me anyway. So you’d get basically two games a year, so it wasn’t like this bonanza that it is now. You’d like to get your one game for six months and try and make yourself enjoy it if it was a dud. But yeah, after that, I mean, honestly, I kind of lost interest in games a bit. I had a PlayStation, played a lot of Doom on that, which is a weird thing for a PlayStation. I don’t know. It’s not a native. Doom is not a native PlayStation brand, I would say. But yeah, I really enjoyed that. But then I got, I think I borrowed Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy 7 and absolutely hated both. Which is very, you know, very kind of unfashionable, I suppose. And I just got a car. So I at that time, I kind of checked out of games for a few years. Yeah, who needs Gran Turismo when you’ve got an actual car? Yeah, I kind of checked out of games, to be honest. For a good few years, went to university and then came back. And then luckily managed to get a job in games and kind of got back into it at that point. You were there saying that the greatest PS1 game of all time is Doom. That’s quite a good zag, I think, as the take goes. Yeah, that’s a hot take for like a job interview on games media. I know. I can’t really remember having many other games on my PlayStation, apart from Doom and getting the demo. Again, it was a lot through Mags, really. But that’s how you build a really broad sort of like gaming knowledge, isn’t it? Is playing like, you know, 10 different games a month. And then like years down the line when you’re, say, making a podcast for someone who had Nintendo games growing up, it gives you loads and loads of references to draw upon. So quite useful. So the games media side, Neil, what did you pay attention to growing up on on that side of things? Were you, you know, was there were there kind of different eras of mags you were into depending on what you’re playing at the different times? I’ve got the Club Nintendo Magazine and sort of really coveted that, which I don’t think was around for very long in the UK. I might be misremembering that. And then I got into like, you know, CBG, Mean Machines, Sega, Nintendo Magazine System, Edge a little bit. Yeah. And then I remember reading Sega Saturn Magazine and, you know, pick up all the mags. So I was reading Sega Saturn Magazine, not having a Sega Saturn. And also I’d read the PlayStation mags having not having a PlayStation, but not actually having many games for it. So, yeah, it was quite an unusual hobby, I guess. Just reading the mags and not actually having that many games. So what’s your journey to ONM like? You arrive from outside the future gaming ecosystem. So what did your career look like before you were hired by ONM? I got a degree and then I did some bleak temp jobs, one of which it was like data entry around which public buildings have asbestos in them. Which is, yeah, just unbearably bleak. And then I saw a job in my local newspaper for a games reviewer and it was for Special Reserve. So I don’t know if you remember this, but Special Reserve was like a mail order games catalogue kind of thing. And they would take out like spreads in all the games mags in the 90s. So it would be like a big list of games. I don’t know if you remember this stuff, but it would be a big list of games and then like a crude drawing of like a Lara Croft type character. Oh God, I remember those adverts. Do you remember those? And they were just sort of A to Z listings of games, right? And that was a retailer, a mail order retailer that was in a village called Sawbridgeworth near where I live. So they advertised the role on there. You would join as a subscriber and you’d get the magazine every month. I applied for that job and the job interview was like a quick chat. And then it was right. You’ve got 20 minutes to write a review of a game. And I wrote a review of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or something. And I got the job. And then I was I wasn’t there for very long. It was like six months, maybe. And then again in my local in the hot games media atmosphere of Hertfordshire. So this is like Sawbridgeworth is in sort of east of Hertfordshire. Hertford is where MCV is based. And where I grew up. Yeah, there was a job ad in the local paper for an editorial assistant at MCV. So I applied for that and got the job based on my experience in Special Reserve. And then fairly quickly ran a new story at MCV about the closure of Special Reserve, which is going bust just as I left. Yeah, that’s not around anymore. But I think they had forums and stuff. They were fairly early on in like online retail. Right. They got absolutely crushed by like play.com and Amazon. Right. And MCV. I was there for a couple of months and then the editor and then the deputy editor all left. So in the sort of in the absence of anyone competent, I kind of took the reins of the mag after a little while and I was editing it. And then through MCV, I met some people at Future, management people at Future, and then I was offered a job there after a few years. The interview process was four pikes in Tiger Tiger in central London. And that interview was you’ve got the job. Here’s what you need to do in that job. Yeah. And then I started probably October, late October 2008. Right. I can remember you coming to ONM because a lot of people got sort of like promoted from like within and would kind of climb up the ranks. That was often like the magazine sort of structure. Certainly a future. So I can remember you just sort of turning up one day and it being, you know, on the page and being like, oh, who’s this? This is someone new. I do wonder, like, did you think who the fuck is this guy? Because obviously, you know, I’ve been on NGamer for like… And why have you hired him? No, not necessarily that. But, you know, when you’re on a mag for a bit and you’re thinking about like, when will I ever get promoted or like what would promotion look like for me? What would my, you know, path be? And then, I mean, I think we’re pretty close in age, you and I. Oh, here’s this young guy who’s like editing ONM. And I was still a staff writer in 2008, I think. I think that was probably the first time it ever occurred to me like, oh, do I need to be trying to do more? Is my career progression quite slow? The answer is yes, it was. Because I wasn’t very sort of forceful in that. So, yeah, on a purely selfish level, it kind of sort of woke those thoughts up, I guess. Yeah, but like, hadn’t at that point ONM already had some people come from the outside? Like, was one of the previous editors also someone from Imagine? I think that happened, didn’t it? Oh, yeah, but like Chandra had been on Cube and he was from like Nintendo Magazine sort of like ecosystem, I guess, you know? It wasn’t like, you know, it was like, oh, I get it. You know, this is a person who is known to make Nintendo mags. And obviously, Neil, like, because you’ve been doing like B2B stuff. I hadn’t seen you in Cube and apologies. I wasn’t subscribed to Special Reserve. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what Future was thinking, but there I was. Yeah, I mean, it’s a very unusual time. I don’t really know what the motivation was there. They offered me the PC’s own job first. And then I said, I don’t own a PC and never have. Right. Probably would have been bad. You have played Doom, a seminal PC text. Yeah, I mean, I could probably blag about, you know, half a conversation about PC gaming. Yeah. But yeah, I don’t know what’s going on in the future at that time. Financial crash. I don’t know. But yeah, they chose me. So I think I had a good relationship with the Nintendo people from my time at MCB. Of course, yeah. You know, the Wii and DS were just like an absolute phenomenon. And they won, like MCB had these annual awards and Nintendo just like cleaned up, like two or three years in a row. As an industry publication, we were big like champions of that. There’s a bit of crossover there. You know, I got on with all the Nintendo guys. That actually like tracks perfectly because I can remember when I joined ONM, you know, part of the conversation was you already known to Nintendo. And with the big platform holders, with the official mags, if we can have someone who they kind of aware of that doesn’t like scare them too much, it’s a bit easier. So like they literally got Chandra and me. You know, we came in after you. I can completely understand why they’d be like, Oh, we know Neil from MCV. That makes sense. So we’re going to revisit ONM more in section two, where we’ve got some quite granular stuff to talk about from your time running the mag. But I suppose like to sort of skip ahead to the end of your time on ONM. Like what sort of led to you leaving or moving on, Neil? What happened after that? Because I know you stayed within the future ecosystem. So is there anything you can say about what happened at that point? Yeah, we’ve just had the like disaster E3 of the Wii U reveal, which we were there for together, Matthew, right? Yeah, we were there together. Yeah, in 2011 when they first talked about the Wii U. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. And we were and I remember like we had Gav on Gav Murphy, now famous internet man. Yeah. Who was doing Nintendo TV at the time. And we were doing these videos from the show floor and stuff. Anyway, it was fair to say Nintendo was in pretty rough shape. And the editor of CVG left and then they offered me the job of that. The person who offered it to me had previously boasted to me about how clever they were in moving people on to dying magazines. Do I want to take this job from this guy? So, I didn’t. And then, six months later, obviously, rightly, they gave Andy Robertson the job, who now runs VGC. But I had applied after six months of thinking about it and sort of feeling like ONM wasn’t really going anywhere. I applied for CVG as well, and I think at that point, future were like, we need to get this guy out of here. And so one day, they just sort of pulled me into an office and said, you’ve got a new job. You’re now the mobile guy of future. So you’re in charge of mobile games. And you’re going to work out how to sort of maximize the huge opportunity of mobile games. And I was like, OK, who’s going to run ONM? And they were like, oh, don’t worry about that. So like they literally, you know, I just I was just moved into another bit of the office one day. And then and then Steve, my deputy editor at the time, Steve Hoggety, he quit almost immediately as well. And then and then well, you and Chandra were drafted in. Yeah. So you guys came to the rescue, fortunately. Yeah, that really came out of nowhere. You know, that was just a phone call from from management. I wonder if it’s the same management that said they like to move people on to dying brands. But yeah, probably. But I didn’t I didn’t know that. And actually, ONM had a lot more life in it. It turned out then Nintendo Gamer, which was the kind of offer made to me, like leave Nintendo Gamer and come over to ONM. Because, yeah, we we now basically need the two top people on the mag again. So, yeah, Chandra was editor in chief and I was associate editor. It was quite quick. The way I remember it, it’s just like that was it. I think we were I just put the last my last issue was. Absolute bollocks. I think I think we had a cover. I think we had a cover full through. And we were just like, fucking hell. There was nothing coming out. I think we made up some shit about it was like the letterbox feature on the three on the 3DS. Right. You could like, fucking hell, God knows what it was. But yeah, it was not a brilliant end to my ONM stint. Not the issue. Because you guys did an issue where it was either like letterbox or Flipnote Studio on the cover. Yeah, that’s it. That was it. Yeah. And it was like a draw your own cover. Yeah, that’s right. Was that it? I thought that was a good one. That was it. Oh, that was a bad one. You thought that was a good cover? Well, no, because you guys sold it as like a real coup that you were getting to do this. Did we? That’s my memory of it. It was like, look at what a dynamic, daring cover. Rather than, oh shit, we haven’t got anything. So we literally have to do a kind of notepad app on the 3DS as our cover feature. Yeah. Well, I think that was the weird thing about ONM. I don’t know if you got it as well, but like the onus was always on ONM to do something a bit odd. Do something a bit unusual with its covers. Right. Because it was always in a bag, right? There wasn’t, you weren’t selling the cover on the magazine stand. It was always packaged up. So you could put, you could always put Mario, Link and Pikachu on your package. Right. Yeah. And not really, and do something quite wacky with the cover. Which is quite, which is good and good and bad in lots of ways. So that’s why we did like lots of sort of quite odd covers like that. Which was, it was Nintendo, it was part of Nintendo’s thing at the time was like being different and thinking differently to, to Brown Shooter land on, on Xbox 360 at the time. I just stuck key art on the title. When it, when that’s on the cover, that’s all I ever did. It was like, here’s some Mario Kart key art. Here’s some Mario Kart key art, but zoomed in slightly more, more. So you can’t see that it’s the same art. That was, that was my cover MO. The trawling of the Nintendo artwork archives. Right. On a monthly basis was always a fun, always a fun thing, wasn’t it? But yeah, that was, that was my brilliant finale to my spellers ONM editor. Well, if I had a finale like that, sorry, if I had a, you know, an end result like that, where someone dragged me into a room and said, you’re doing this now. I would absolutely shit my pants as hard as possible. So like, I think what, what do I owe you now? I owe you nothing. So here’s my worst work. So I think that’s pretty much fair. So mobile gaming coverage, Neil, do you want to talk a bit about that? Like, I suppose like for mobile gaming generally, it’s a slight blind spot for us. So we have like kind of punter level knowledge. Does covering that scene differ much from console coverage? I’m guessing the answer is yes. But how does it differ? Yeah, yeah, I mean, it’s completely different. It’s, you know, completely different platform holders, Apple and Google, completely different developers, completely different businesses, the way they work. And, you know, they’re all, all the successful ones are all like live service games, free to play games. You know, premium games are effectively dead on mobile. But they do, they’ve sort of moved into Apple Arcade and increasingly now Netflix. So Netflix does games now and they’ve got actually a really good selection of games in the iPhone and the Android app that you can just play for free if you’ve got a subscription. So the sort of premium type games like, you know, like Monomu Valley or Enter the Breach is on Netflix. Point P is really good on Netflix. There’s loads of stuff on Apple Arcade. But yeah, all of that sort of micro transaction in-app purchase free stuff is now lives there. And mobile is this still kind of slightly wild west type market where basically loads of game developers all around the world are like trying to figure out how to get the attention of people who aren’t traditional gamers. So like probably the listeners to this podcast are probably… And you know, a lot of people in the industry view mobile as this sort of blight on the culture of games, which is kind of annoying when you work in it. But like, yeah, it’s just a different industry and it needs to be sort of understood in a different way. And actually, because it’s a different industry and it really moves a lot fast, like with console and PC, with console in particular, obviously you get generations of console and things move in every sort of five or six year sort of periods. But with mobile, like it changes every year, if not every six months. And a lot of the things that happen in mobile end up happening in console games. So like all of the live service and events and ways that game developers keep you playing a game, not all of them, but the vast majority kind of came from mobile because the game, the game in mobile is making sure that game is your like digital hobby that you lean on when you’re commuting or you’re like lying in bed or whatever versus console, which is just a whole different game. So do you see like these trends emerge and then, you know, basically chuckle as you see a tidal wave of shit heading towards consoles sort of down the line? Yeah, I mean, I’m probably unusual in that I don’t find paying for things through micro transactions offensive or right. If I’ve been playing Merge Mansion for like three months straight, what the fuck is Merge Mansion? It’s a game where you merge stuff and you like you renovate a mansion. I told you it was unfashionable stuff. But it’s incredibly compelling. Like really play it every night before you go to bed kind of stuff. Like after two or three months of playing that game nonstop or, you know, once a day for a little while, I don’t really begrudge giving that game developer a few quid to, you know, pay for my time, you know. So it’s just a different, completely different mindset. And, you know, very misunderstood in lots of ways by particularly console gamers and PC gamers. Us. Yeah, I mean, the prime example of that is Diablo Immortal over the last six months, which is an incredibly good and generous game. But almost because it’s on mobile, people are just fucking angry about it. It’s quite interesting to watch. You know, the the forgery around that game is about how it’s monetized, right? And if you ask anyone in the mobile industry, they will tell you that that game does not monetize well enough. Like it doesn’t. It’s not aggressive enough. You know, there are there are it’s incredibly generous. You have to get like hours and hours and hours into it. And you have to really want to top the leaderboards to really spend a substantial amount of money in it. And but I don’t know. It’s just like angry dudes on the Internet see it’s a mobile game. So they just get they get upset. So when it comes to your career future after ONM, so you’ll you end up at Edge Online. What’s your journey like after ONM shuts? And how do you end up on Edge Online from there? So after I’m like mobile guy for a bit, I do a an iPad, a digital only iPad magazine called iGamer, which which no one no one downloaded at the time. Like, I don’t know if you remember this, but this is like 2012. And T3 magazine was making the room. The rumor at Future was that it was making a million quid a month out of its digital edition. Really? On the iPad, right? Which sounds like bullshit now. Definitely not true. Definitely not true. Yeah, that’s what I thought. I think they were selling it for like loads of money. And you may have been around for this, but there was loads of suddenly, Future was like, fuck, there’s loads of money on iPads. And they put a load of people on iPad stuff, like to make money through Apple Newsstand. And I was one of them. And so, yeah, I sort of inherited this thing called iGamer, which was like a spinoff of one of the Mac magazines run out of bath. Over time, I kind of redesigned it and made it, it was like this sort of templated app thing that I could just flow copy into and put images into, and it was a magazine. We sold that like for three or four months, and then no one bought it. And then the Edge online job came up. And during that time, I was like the mobile guy. So I was writing a column about mobile for Edge online, and I was writing a blog for CBG about mobile stuff. And I was running a live blog about the Curiosity Cube. Oh, was that you? Yeah, that was me. Yeah. Fucking insane if you think about it. Just remind people who may have forgotten what that is. The Curiosity Cube was a Peter Molyneux idea, where it was like you download it on your iPhone or your iPad, and you tapped away. The more people that tapped on it, the more layers would disintegrate away from the Cube. Inside, in the centre of the Cube, there was a big secret. Everyone was working together to get to this secret. It was actually a massive thing at the time. It’s kind of a bit of a joke now. I ran a live blog because there was something weird happening on the Curiosity Cube every day. It was incredibly buggy and unstable as well, so you’d fall over all the time. Then Peter Molyneux was reading the blog, and he’d just call me up, and we’d talk about the Cube for a bit. I’d post that on the live blog. Yeah, there you go. That’s what I was doing. Did you follow it all the way? I thought interest dropped off, and then one day I remember reading, someone’s got to the center of the Cube. Did you follow it all the way to the bitter end? No, that’s the thing. I got the edge job, and then I was like, fuck this. So yeah, I did the edge website instead. That’s fair. I feel like there probably have been more offensive things that have happened in the time since the Cube, but people were so mad at the time about Mollin U and the Cube. Is that worse than influencers selling energy drinks? For example, I feel like the landscape of games industry bullshit is now so toxic that a slightly overblown game about tapping a Cube to get to the centre for something life-changing that turns out not to be is not that egregious on the ground scale of horse shit that’s happened in the last decade or so. But I do also sympathise with get me the fuck off of here or get me onto edge. I think they fucked the landing. It would have been really cool if there was something genuinely good in the middle of the Cube and it ended within a month. But it just went on forever and people just stopped caring. So yeah, sad times. So Edge Online, what’s that like? What was the relationship like between the site and the mag and how do you work in harmony together or not as the case paper? Yeah, well, I remember getting the job from Nathan Brown, who moved on to the magazine at the time. And then almost immediately, the other person on Edge Online, who’s Ben, who’s now, he moved on to the magazine as well. So it’s kind of just like, here’s a website, run the website, please. And I was running it from London as well. So I never lived in Bath or unlike you chaps. It was quite separate, really, even though I got these sort of keys to the Edge vault. And I posted a load of stuff from the magazine every month. And I wrote some stuff for the magazine. I did various things, bits and bobs for the mag. It was quite separate. And I remember going down first couple of weeks of the job, I went down to Bath for like online, an online strategy day. So I met the Edge team, the mag team for the first time, really. And it was just at the time, I think Polygon had either just launched or was about to launch. And it was just like, these guys have spent millions on this website. And we were kind of sat around in this meeting going, well, Edge Online should be Polygon. You know, it should look like, you know, it should look as good as that. And it should have as much resource as that. And it should be as high profile as that. But actually, it’s just, it’s just this one guy in London running it. So I don’t think we had from there. It was like, didn’t have much chance of making too much of an impact. But I really enjoyed running that site because, you know, like I say, you got the keys to the Edge Vault. You got the mag every month and all the previews and reviews and news and stuff in there. And I would kind of eke that stuff out over the month while also sort of covering news myself and doing my own features and interviews and stuff. It was brilliant. I really enjoyed it. And it was also at the time I was on a bank of desks in future London, just sort of shoved on the end of the official Xbox Magazine team. And it was right at the time where like Xbox One was being completely fucked up. And Edge was like, Edge did that cover of This Is Your Next Console. Do you remember that? With the PS4 on it? Yeah. And yeah, it was quite entertaining to sit on the OXM team with John and the gang and sort of watch them, watch them watching horror as Microsoft kind of fucked the Xbox One launch that year. You’ve got to get out of bed for something in the morning. Seeing that team kind of go through the wringer was actually quite entertaining in a tragic sort of way. I mean, you could have like turned your head left and seen them and turned your head right and seen ONM, you know, struggling with Wii U. So it must have just been like laughs all around Wii U. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, it was fun times at Future London 2014. What a year. Well, we finally found the person who won out of the Xbox One launch. That’s that’s good. Well, so that’s good. I always thought that Edge Online being and I suppose like I’m asking here like where do things go from here, Neil? Because this is around the time that I meet you on a GDC trip. But like I always thought Edge Online actually had loads of potential to be bigger than it was. Such a great brand and such a prestigious and well-respected brand that is interesting that it’s kind of like locked to a sort of print product. But I was curious what you made of like the unexplored potential of it, I suppose, and like how it how it kind of ended up in the future 2014 apocalypse that happened. Yeah, it’s a real shame. We were making huge progress, you know, there was loads of people read the site and engaged with it. We broke some really big stories and I interviewed Ken Levine and Phil Spencer and Phil Harrison. And this is all I would have to do a lot of it off my own back. So leaning on some of the mad guys as well. But yeah, it was yeah, it was a brilliant time to be because it was like console launch year as well 2013 2014. It was really like enjoyable time to work on edge. It’s just a shame. Yeah, I think I was one of the first out in the big future London cull of 2014. So yeah, again, I was pulled into a room and told by management. Was it the same room? I think it might have been. It was definitely the same HR person. It’s like, oh, you again. Yeah, I was pulled into a room and told my job won’t exist in three months. But luckily, yeah, I had some some other things lined up. I very nearly worked for Gamer Network. I was going to start on the Monday after I left Future doing not like as an editor on Eurogamer, but elsewhere within the business. I was also involved in an Apple recruitment process at the time. And on my last day at Future, Apple rang and said, we’re going to offer you the job of App Store editor. And so I took that. And the iGamer years in the wilderness actually sort of me out with their Apple jobs. So that was ended up OK. Nice. Yeah, you don’t say. It’s funny because I applied for Apple a couple of times. And I never applied because they make you sign in using your Apple ID on their job website, which I think is ridiculous. My Apple ID is tied to what I would say is a very embarrassing 2004 era MSN email address. So I created a new one in order to apply for this job. And I think they looked at it and thought this guy hasn’t bought any Apple products. There’s no way we’re hiring him. And they never even responded to my application. And so, yeah, I find that I just found that very irritating. But maybe with you, they looked to you and thought, oh, look at this guy. He’s bought, you know, 19 seasons of a TV show or whatever. But anyway, just sharing my experience of Apple there. So what is it? What was it like at Apple then? I suppose like there are definitely, I’m sure, inner workings things you can’t talk about, very secretive company. But what can you talk about at that time, Neil? I was the editor for a sort of game section in Europe. So I was the… Basically, back then, there was a… The store would update like once a week, and there would be an editor’s choice game, and there would be like a section called New Games or Hot New Games. I can’t remember what it was. It would change every week. So once a week, I would play the games coming out that Thursday, and then I would just like put them in order of quality, basically, and then they would get featured on the App Store for that week across Europe. And then I would have to like write little taglines and other bits and bobs, and then get those localized and put them elsewhere on the store for like French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc. customers. And then, yes, that was it initially. And then they launched App Stores on all the things. So there was an App Store in the Apple Watch at launch. Well, there still is, but I was sort of loosely involved in the launch of that, the App Store on the watch. And then they have an Apple TV device, which is like a puck that sits under your TV. I’ve got one. There’s an App Store. Oh, you’ve got one? I sort of have to explain it because not many people do have one, but they are good. Yeah, so there’s an App Store on that. I was sort of loosely involved in the launch of that. And then they’ve redesigned the whole App Store in whenever it was, 2017, 2018. And there was like actual editorial content on there. So as a sort of former journalist, I was writing a lot of the articles on the App Store for that launch. And then, so like when you go on the Today tab of the App Store, there’s like Game of the Day and lists and bits and bobs. So I was writing some of that, mostly the game stuff. And then again, sort of loosely involved in the launch of Apple Arcade in whenever that was, 2018, 2019. And then, yeah, just wanted to do something different. So I set up Mobilegamer.biz. That’s like quite like an awesome amount of power to like anoint something in Editor’s Choice, because it kind of puts it like front and centre. Was there pressure involved with that? Or were you like super aware that, you know, that could sort of like make a game in a way? Yeah, you had to be careful what to make Editor’s Choice and make sure it was like suitable for Apple as a like brand. So you wouldn’t you wouldn’t make like some horrific, violent game. Because it’s just like not what Apple does. So yeah, there was there was some elements to it. And then but you were sort of trusted to make the choice and just say like this is the best game of the week. And we’re going to give it to the choice. And there was a bit of debate like, you know, I would talk it through with my with the people in in Cupertino in headquarters. We’d also decide the game of the year as well. So the year I joined was threes. Do you remember that? Yeah, puzzle game and Monument Valley on iPad. So it’s a really good year for mobile. And later on, you’d be involved in launching games as well. So you’d you would be responsible for making a big sort of impact on the store with with like new games from like Supercell or King or, you know, the Candy Crush or whatever. So, yeah, it’s a really, really good, fun job and something completely different from journalism. And, you know, you learn a lot about how big companies work, big American companies in particular and unusual kind of job in many ways, because you were completely anonymous. I wasn’t allowed to sit in even well for the first couple of years, I wasn’t allowed to sit in meetings or meet any game developers in case it like influenced my decision. Right. Well, yeah, it’s kind of what they bribed me or something. Like if there was separation of church and state like that, that’s interesting. Yeah, there was. Yeah. At the time there was. Yeah. Because it would make, like, if you did make like a small indie game and it’s his choice, that would it would be like you would make that game. It would be a hit. Yeah. So, yeah, it was it was it was great, you know, and I would I would sneak in all kinds of weird indie bullshit that no one really like the sort of hyper mainstream Apple customer probably played a lot of that weird indie stuff that I featured and thought, what the fuck is this? It does sound like a cool job, to be honest, like I definitely sort of like think that the Apple Store when I was using Apple devices regularly benefited from that level of curation, it felt like it was localized curation to like I was looking at like a UK version of a page on the different on the App Store. So I think that was valuable work for sure. So as someone who would probably never return to games media at this point, I’m really curious to know why you have and set up your own business like you say Mobilegamer.biz. We’re always interested in what journals do next. So why was this the next step for you? Why do you want to sort of get involved in this side of things again? Mobile is very unfashionable and no one really wants to report on it. So it’s almost like it’s like wildly underserved in terms of media coverage. What Apple and Netflix do in games is really significant and no one really seems to be writing about it. All that time I spent at Apple, I was thinking, why isn’t there really a really good website doing the reporting on this? And then, yeah, after a long time, I just thought I’d do it myself. So here I am. It’s almost a year old now. I’m getting some traction. It’s going OK. Google started noticing my website a couple of months ago, so that’s good. Mobile game developers are into it. Yeah, it’s going well so far. I just need to kind of pay the bills, get some sponsors in. I do some freelance work. I’ve been doing bits for VGC and I was doing a column for a website called iMore. And I do consultancy as well. So mobile game developers who need a bit of help launching their game, I help a couple of them as well. So a bit of everything. But it’s really enjoyable and very different from slogging away in big tech, which is great for lots of people but not for me. Okay, that’s fair enough. I suppose, because I do want you to be able to apply your trade, Neil, how can people contact you if they’re interested in teaming up, etc. I’m not saying that we’ve got any particular poll or anything, but it might be some good contacts out there. So how can people get a hold of you? If anyone wants a good mobile games column or someone to write about mobile games, because like I say, there’s not many people who actually know about this stuff. Yeah, I am on Neil at mobilegamer.biz. That is my email. And I’m on Twitter at Neil underscore Long underscore. Oh, there’s underscore. Sorry, I was waiting for the rest of that. But that is the end. Yeah, no, that is it. Okay, good. Someone’s already sitting on Neil underscore Long, are they? Yeah, some fucker. There’s an ex-Capitol radio DJ called Neil Long. I think he’s got it. Well, okay, that’s a good trivia there about British radio DJs. So, yeah, well, congratulations on getting on the Google ladder anyway. Now you can be subject to their fucking made up SEO rules, which change every month and make no sense. You have all that to look forward to from a tech giant. But I am pleased that you’re making progress, Neil. That’s cool. So, shall we take a quick break there and then come back and talk about some Nintendo mag stuff? We’ve got plenty more to get into, so that should be good. Sounds good. Welcome back to the podcast. So in this section, we’re going to talk all about Neil’s time running Official Nintendo Magazine. We’ve talked a bit about how it began and how it ended. Now it’s all the bits in between. I suppose, Neil, to start with, we didn’t touch on this, but all three of us have done the thing where you’re an outsider joining a team, that you don’t have that prior experience with them. Certainly on PC Gamer, I found it quite intimidating to do that, and there’s an element of maybe a couple of people feel like you need to prove yourself a little bit in order to win them over. What was the version of that like on ONM? When you started and we’re getting the lay of the land, what was the process like of getting the teams buy-in, I suppose? Yeah. There was an awkward couple of weeks where Chandra, my predecessor, was still there. So I was like, I was sat on this other bank of desks, just sort of waiting for him to leave. Like yeah, it’s pretty awkward. But then I took over. It was just too intense to really get to know anyone because it was the end of October, right? And you’re into like, mag crunch seasons. And so we had to get, I think it was two issues out before Christmas, plus also ONM at the time had a Wii special and a DS special, which were like whole separate magazines, which were like sort of repurposed content from old issues of ONM. Yeah, my first sort of couple of months, it was sort of almost too intense to really get to know anyone. It was just like head down and get the fucking magazines out. But yeah, it was, I mean, Martin Mathers, who was deputy editor when I joined, I think he left pretty quickly after I joined to move back down to Bournemouth. So we were like immediately one man down. And one of my first sort of acts as ONM editor was writing an apology letter to subscribers. Because there had been some fuck up with the gift that month, right? They hadn’t ordered enough of this. It was like this quite nice little tin with Mario characters on it, right? Which would be ideal for storing Weedy, basically. As most of the ONM readers would have. I mean, ONM readers loved blazing it up, didn’t they? As you know, Matthew. But yeah, for whatever reason, there was some colossal fuck up in the gifts department. And so subscribers didn’t get that tin, basically. So you’re most loyal readers. Almost the first thing I did at ONM was like writing this letter that would only go to subscribers saying, hey, loyal reader, we fucked up. There’s no tin this month. But I can’t remember what we offered instead. I think we just put out some fucking like posters or something. Some absolute bullshit. That was a fun introduction to the world of future publishing. We had loads of mags to put out before Christmas. I remember being in the office on Christmas Eve signing pages out with like a raging hangover and the production person just standing over my shoulder while I signed out these Wii and DS specials. Quite a baptism of fire. But yeah, the team is great. You know, Chris Gullion, absolute legend who I’m sure listens to this podcast will know. And you know Matthew, obviously, but he was like the sort of heart of the mag, really. He would write an incredible amount every month and his knowledge is like unsurpassed. He’s literally, you know, literally writes encyclopedias now about Nintendo and other platforms. And yeah, there’s some great people on that team. Who did you work with, Dale, didn’t you, the art editor? Yeah, I had Dale and Will, the two art editors who I feel like took them a while to kind of click with me. Like they were just winding me up the whole time. Gave me like an endless succession of nicknames. Both real kind of like funny London lads and coming from Bath and being a bit kind of prissy and posh. I think I was just like couldn’t have painted a bigger target myself if I tried. When I started, it was Chris, a guy called Chris Borgman, who moved. He moved down to Bath and then within about six months of me starting. And then so I’m really like clearly making an impact with all the departures. But yeah, we hired Dale and Dale and I ran that mag for the longest period. He’s an incredibly talented man, very low key, but just really, really good at his job. Well, both of you probably know that the art teams are the real sort of heroes on those mags, aren’t they? So it was good to, I think, you know, Dale and I got on really well and I think so anyway, who hired Gav Murphy to work on Nintendo TV and Steve Hoggety as well after a while. And we had quite a good thing going there around the 3DS years because we’ve redesigned the mag around that time as well. So yeah, it was a great time. I was curious, what was your perception of ONM before joining it? Did anything about the reality of running it surprise you? And I will say actually, like, as someone who was sort of on the outside, I did find ONM a bit dry in, like, 07 time when I first joined Imagine. They seemed like the design of the mag was very much tied to the old, like, Wii, DS, you know, white everything kind of screens and stuff. And I felt like the design of the mag mimicked that. But like, weirdly, I went for the deputy editor job the same time Matthew did on ONM. I was like, I was interviewed for it by Chandra and Tim Clark. And I missed out, obviously. But I was reading, like, you know, issues from your time. And I felt like it had quite a lot of personality to it. And I hope that you obviously had Steve on team and like, you know, some really good writers. But it felt like it actually quite was kind of humming with life in its own way. So what was it like when you joined and, you know, how did you kind of take it from there? Yeah, to be honest, I kind of thought the same. I just wanted to give it, put more gags in it really and make it a bit more human. I like the first couple of years of ONM was really, some of the covers were great. Like they had those incredibly sort of clean white covers and they would always involve the Wii Remote doing something. Do you remember these ones? I remember they did one where they had like a render of a Wii Remote playing tennis or something. Yeah, that was one of the, maybe one of the less successful ones. There was some great ones where like they did an Excite Truck cover, I think. And it was a Wii Remote that had like been run over and it had to just like tire tracks. And I thought it was really different and unique at the time. But yeah, the mag itself internally was like one of the covers where we’re very white and very minimal and maybe not very human. You know, you’re kind of constantly redesigning, slowly redesigning the mag anyway, month on month. Or I find myself doing that doing that anyway. So I would just like put in more, you know, like a joke back page and some like sort of quirky features to like balance out the sort of quite templated previews and reviews sections. And I think that the art teams enjoyed that a bit more as well because they could go kind of a bit crazy with the features while also sort of cranking out the more templated stuff. So, yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, I tried to put in more gags and it also helped that there was a studio downstairs in future London, which was just free to use. So you could just do a photo shoot for one afternoon, just like, I don’t know, make up some dumb reason to, especially when the Motion Plus thing came out, we would have to do these like pictures of us waggling remotes a lot. So like the team itself was a lot more sort of present in the mag after after a while. So, yeah, I think that’s how we did it. And then because the mag is like it’s always hidden behind some packaging on the on the newsstand, you could kind of go a bit crazy with the covers as well. So they would always Nintendo were always pushing us to do something unusual with the cover or something sort of quirky. So we had quite a lot of there’s a lot of pressure to do that. But also made you sort of do more unusual things than just put some put some art on, you know, put some key art on the cover and call it a day. But enough about enough about Matthew’s. That wasn’t like some elaborate way of throwing shade at you. Yeah, replay the long game on that one. From the outside, specifically on NGamer, I used to think, oh, well, and then they have it easy, you know, like it felt like we were often eating like the official mags kind of like leftovers a bit. And NGamer was certainly like more ramshackle and kind of sort of pieced together from wherever we could kind of get our hands on. I know for a fact that no magazine is easy to make and every magazine has its challenges. But like, did it feel like ONM, you know, kind of had the sort of ear of Nintendo? Did you feel like there were benefits to it being official? They were really good about reviews. So we would always get like we did the world first review of Galaxy 2 and Skyward Sword, Spirit Tracks and probably some others. Other M, I think we had the first review of that. Maybe less prestigious, but you know, it was fun at the time. Yeah, they were really good about reviews. They would just say, yeah, when’s your mag coming out? And they would make sure that we somehow got the world’s first review. And then we’d go, we’d sort of tease that through the website and try and get people to buy the mag that way. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And we got good interviews for whatever reason. Aonuma, the Zelda guy, because I think we had a run of Spirit Tracks and then Skyward Sword just kept getting delayed. So I ended up interviewing Aonuma at least three times. Oh, jealous. But it was like, you know, these guys are incredibly well trained to give you exactly what they want to give you, you know. My main memory, like the memory of Aonuma in particular, he kept coming back to remaking Link to the Past again and again in these interviews. And my theory on that is that Nintendo doesn’t let these things happen, like, accidentally. That is a deliberate thing that he kept mentioning. My sort of working theory on that is that a link to the… What was the sort of semi remake of 3DS? Link Between Worlds. Link Between Worlds. I’ve got a theory that that was a link to the past remake, and then they just changed direction on it halfway through. Right. It’s like a semi remake, but also with some new bits in that kind of don’t fit the formula. I don’t know. But yeah, that was good. We got great access and Nintendo really helped us with reviews and also sort of, like I say, pushed us to do these weird, extra, like really elaborate packaging and covers. And we did this, you know, it’s sort of, Nintendo would sort of pay for this stuff. If we came up with a cool idea, they would just like pay for it to happen. Right, right. So like we did, you know, when the 3DS came out, we did like a 3D lenticular cover. Oh yeah, yeah. And like Dale, the art editor, spent a really long time putting that together and, you know, it came out really nicely. So yeah, they were really sort of supportive, but also you knew kind of, you knew kind of not to ask too much of them because like for instance, they were, they loved Edge magazine, right? So often Edge would get first dibs on a big interview. Us on ONM would get Edge magazine and they would just be like, Oh, Miyamoto’s fucking talked to Edge. What’s that about? And then you’d call up Nintendo PR and just be like, what happened there? You know, we’re the official mag. But I guess they, you know, understandably, they know that as ONM, you’re going to write about them every month anyway. Right. So a lot of the time when the real, like the big Miyamoto interviews came up, they would go to The Guardian or Edge or someone else. Yeah. Rather than ONM, but like they, that’s not to say we were second choice. They were incredibly sort of generous and helpful at the time. And, you know, that like people in Japan at NCL were reading the mag and would send us notes on things like the Pokemon on this page is not to scale or, you know, we got a note from Sakamoto once. We’ve commissioned this like, here’s why you should play Super Metroid on Virtual Console. And somehow Sakamoto got hold of it and he sent us like a correction on something we’d said in the article. Right. And it was, yeah, it’s just like, you knew they were reading and it was great, but also sort of came with a lot of pressure as well. Matthew, didn’t you have a similar experience with Mr. Metroid? No, I may have repeated Neil’s anecdote to you at some point. That’s a legendarily cool example. We had it once where we made some me’s of people from Nintendo and Nintendo said, those aren’t their official me’s. Then they got them to send us their QR code so we could put their official me’s in the mag, the ones that they’d made. They were like, that isn’t like Mr. Ooguchi’s me. So that’s about as juicy as it got with us. Neil, I’m really curious actually, what did you make of the side of Nintendo Matthew was working on? Did you have any take on NGamer and Nintendo Gamer from your side on the official way of things? Yeah, well, our interactions every month were like, can you send me a house ad? So we’d always advertise each other’s mags, right? So we’d have a spread on NGamer in ONM every month and NGamer would have a spread on ONM in their mag every month. And yeah, I mean, that was really it. I don’t think there was really that much interaction, was there? We’d have to split certain opportunities and things like that. But geography didn’t help either. We didn’t really talk to each other that way. I remember a couple of times sending the house ad back and just saying, like, can you make this sort of less mental? It looks insane. Because there’s so much, NGamer’s whole thing was like, here’s fucking everything. It was like a whole DPS of just insane big words and pictures and colours. And it was sort of too insane for ONM. So I think I quite rudely just asked your art editor to tone down some of the house ads. But beyond that, I think you did some stuff for us, Matthew. I think we sent you on Pokemon and a Dragon Quest trip. Yeah, two of my best press trips ever were for ONM. The features belonged to ONM, but I got to write about like any other mollocks I could sort of find for NGamer around the edges, which was a pretty good deal, I thought. Yeah, I’m glad you enjoyed those trips. I also feel bad for Chris Scullion. I kind of should have sent him on those trips because he’s such a… He was almost too valuable to the magazine to send away for a week. Worst editor ever. I know, I know. It’s just like, I kind of… Yeah, I mean, it’s like sending me on a Pokemon trip is particularly perverse. I mean, what a fuck you to like Chris, to the readership, probably to Nintendo. Great anecdote for this podcast, Matthew. Let’s face it. Yeah, I’m sorry, Chris. Like, that’s a big regret. I’m glad you enjoyed your trips. Yeah, not for me. I mean, that was perfect. Oh, dear. So, curious like how maybe things might have changed over time with Nintendo, Neil, as like the Wii U and 3DS come along. Like, does the mag become like less of a priority as the kind of Wii and DS era sort of move on? How do things sort of change over time? Yeah, the 3DS, there was a big lull before the 3DS. That was quite rough. We were really piecing it together at the time. And we’d like, we’d have to make up stuff. Not literally make up fictional things. But we’d do covers like, Oh, it’s 25 years of Mario or something like that. Rather than a cover about a game. Yeah, that was pretty rough. And then there was kind of a changing of the guard at Nintendo as well. Kind of around the 3DS launch. Everyone I knew from when I joined had left Nintendo. Basically, the success of the Wii and DS made so many. You could basically get any job if you were at Nintendo during those years. And a lot of those guys, the people at Nintendo UK, they moved on to really powerful, important things now. So they all moved on. And yeah, it was difficult trying to sort of build a relationship with the new people with less games around and kind of just less goodwill towards Nintendo in general. The 3DS launch was pretty rough. I think we put a good face on it. But I think they cut the price about six months through, maybe even three months after it launched. It gave us a load of Game Boy Advance Virtual Console games to say sorry. Great games, great games. I was happy with that arrangement. Yeah, but yeah. Things kind of went a bit south at that point. Such a shame. They could have just released like a more powerful Wii with proper Wii remotes with Motion Plus built in. Or like, I don’t know, they just don’t release Wii U. They’ve completely fucked it at that point. Yeah, it’s a real shame. I suppose like on the sort of slightly jollier side, Neil, obviously you interviewed A&M so many times that you got bored of it by the end. It’s like, oh, stop talking about back in Link to the Past, you’re a boring man. Like, I suppose like aside from that, which other sort of like Nintendo big dogs did you get to interview yourself as part of running ONM? I interviewed Miyamoto very briefly. It was sort of angled around Steel Diver. So it was like, I think I had 20 minutes. I had to ask about Steel Diver. Also, you know, quickly move on from them and get some like proper proper stuff out of him. That’s a real like monkey paw moment, isn’t it? Yeah, it was good. I mean, surreal meeting him and getting his getting his street pass. Avatar guy. Oh, right. Yeah. That is me. Yeah. And fuck, I forgot what me was called. This is 10 years. This is 10 years ago. Yeah, no, it’s great. Me and my team is really interesting and kind of yeah, through a translator, you don’t get a great deal of personality. But, you know, it’s a it’s a box to tick. The the the the weirder one was Kozumi, the Galaxy 2 director, who it was E3, it must have been 2010, 2009. Don’t know. It would have to have been one of those. It was pre Galaxy 2. And I it was like the Thursday of E3. I was having a you know, a lion because it was an exhausting week and there was nothing really going on on the Thursday. A lion being like nine o’clock. But I got a call of I got a call from Nintendo’s PR saying Koizumi is suddenly available. He’s got 45 minutes, but he’s he’s only available if you get here in like half an hour. And then I was in bed and you have to get like I had to get up and just like get myself together and get a taxi over to the Nintendo stand and like get get through security and all this stuff. So I’m rushing in. And yeah, I got 45 minutes with Koizumi talking around Galaxy 2 and his sort of process and all of that. But it was entirely sort of I had to just wing the whole interview because obviously I’d had I didn’t have any notes or anything like I’d just been given the opportunity like half an hour before. That’s tough. Luckily, it was all translated. So you’ve got time while the translator is translating and Koizumi speaking and then the translator is translating again, you’ve got time to think up your next question. So I think I got away with it. And we got a good I think we got a good like six pager out of it in the issue afterwards. I’d love to tell you what was in there in detail. But obviously, the fucking website doesn’t exist anymore. And you don’t have a big stack of ONMs at home? No, I don’t actually. I’ve got a few of them. But not the ones with the not not the ones of that era for some reason. I’m sure it exists somewhere on the internet. But yeah, I was pleased with that to meet him. Very cool guy. He’s he’s high up my list of like if I because I’ve sort of infamously met no one from Nintendo in all my years of doing it, which was like wild. Actually, I tell a lie, I met I did meet a Gucci once in a similar circumstance doing an interview for Edge and it was E3 2012. So they just announced Nintendo Land. So it was about Nintendo Land and it was kind of like I had to cobble that together and I had no idea what I was going to ask him. Well, you say no, no, the sort of big wigs, Matthew, but you have interviewed Charles Martinet, you’ve met Charles Martinet. That’s like, yeah, don’t leave that out of your regulations. Yeah, that’s like, that doesn’t count. No, we did a video with him, with Charles Martinet, around the launch of new Super Mario Brothers Wii, which was the four player one. And he was quite friendly with Nintendo UK. So he was always in the UK for some reason. And so he came to the ONM offices and we were like, oh, it’ll be funny. We’ve got this four player game. We’ll all play New Super Mario Brothers Wii with Charles Martinet and it’ll be great. So we did this video and he’s doing the Mario voices throughout. And yeah, it’s actually quite annoying. I have to say, actually, just imagine talking to Charles Martinet and you know, it would be annoying. Like, no offense to him, but it is annoying. Yeah, that’s unnecessarily mean, isn’t it? No, no, I think if you watched it, if you find the video, you probably can. You can probably see our kind of faces drop after a while. Where it’s like, oh, this is really, this is really funny for the first couple of minutes. And then it’s like, let’s just get to this level, eh? He is a very nice man. Let’s just make that clear. Oh, he’s a lovely man. Let’s just make that clear. Which happens a lot on this podcast, which is funny. There’s only so much Mario voice you can put up with. Like, there’s a reason Mario isn’t like monologuing in-game. It’s because you don’t want to hear his helium voice the whole time. Like, he makes a couple of noises a level and that’s fine. Yeah, there’s a reason he’s not doing like full dialogue for like the Paper Mario games, you know what I mean? Like, it’s… Just an internal monologue for the whole game. That would be a tough hang for sure. Were those all your big interviewees, Neil? Or was there anyone else who still wanted a name check in there? Yeah, no, I think that was it. You met Kojima at that E3 we were there together. Did we? Did I? Yeah, because you weren’t expecting him to be there for Snake Eater 3D. Fill me in. So I only remember it. So that was the year, probably 2011. I went out and I was there with ONM. A bit like the Dragon Quest Pokemon thing. Again, apologies to Chris. Yeah, we really did Chris Dirty that. That is so unfair, isn’t it? Yeah. Well, again, great for me. This podcast literally wouldn’t have happened without these trips. We were doing daily podcasts from E3. You, me and Gavin in your hotel room. I don’t know if you remember that. Yes. It was a preview for Metal Gear Solid 3D. You hadn’t been told in advance it was going to be Kojima talking through the game. But it was Kojima talking through the game. But the only thing I remember from this was that there was someone else there. And he… During the interview, you sit next to this other journalist and you said on his notepad he didn’t write anything except he wrote the word Kojima and then started drawing endless boxes around it. And I remember that just struck me as incredibly funny. But the idea that someone just absolutely biffed it meeting Kojima and didn’t know what… like have anything to contribute so just wrote in his notes Kojima. I think it’s arguably worse meeting Kojima and having zero recollection of it like I have. Wow. That’s okay. I honestly don’t remember. Was that Gav? It might have been Gav. Maybe it was Gav who told us. I remember doing bookings for that year and it was like NGamer, do you want to come and see Metal Gear? And I was like, nah. Because it’s a port. I don’t really need to sit through a demonstration for that. But I could have had a Kojima. I could have been the guy sitting in the room writing just Kojima on my notepad. One feature I was really, really jealous of was ONM did a visit to see Sing, the makers of Hotel Dusk and Another Code. Was that a trip you did? Yeah, it was me and Rich Stanton on Edge. Sort of like a baffling thing for Nintendo UK to do. This was at the height of Wii U and DS Mania, so they were spending so much money. But the idea of taking you out to see Another Code. Which is like niche as hell. But in hindsight, like a trip I would love to have done. I was just wondering if you could, do you remember anything about that trip? Were they cool? Were they cool people? It was weird. I think we got there, had dinner, went to bed, played the game in the morning, interviewed them and then flew out either that evening or the following morning. Oh, that’s tough. Yeah, like all the way to Japan and back. It wasn’t Tokyo, it was Fukuoka. I don’t know if I’m saying that correctly. So we flew to Tokyo and then to Fukuoka. And yeah, so it was pretty tight. My main memory of it is like playing the game, getting stuck on a puzzle, classic stuff, running back and forth between… You’re this teenage girl called Ashley and you’re running back and forth between a pond and your house. There’s clearly some item that you need to take from your house to the pond or wherever. I remember getting stuck on that. I eventually did a very quick stilted interview with them where the Japanese power dynamics were in play where the boss would sit… Is it the far left or the far right of the table? I can’t remember which. They came in in order of power at. The studio and there was an ashtray in this windowless room full of fags. It was a nice feature in the end. We got an artist to do Ashley from the game, a really nice illustration of Ashley with the game holding a Wii remote and stuff like that. I don’t remember the interview being dynamite, but yeah, it was good. I think they maybe saw that in the way that Professor Layton had opened up a new Nintendo player or whatever. I think maybe they saw another code as a way of doing that for a new demographic, I suppose. I don’t know what the thinking was. Honestly, the best bit about that trip was the flights. It was a really nice flight, really nice food. Yeah, quite an odd. That’s my only trip to Japan that I did on ONM because you took the others. Listen, I would have happily have swapped Pokemon for Sing. Yeah, we probably should have sent you on Sing one. Sorry to Chris Scullion again. That’s the theme of this episode. NGamer was quite shambolic and lent into that as its persona. Obviously, ONM as an official mag had a more professional veneer. But I also know that every mag has its kind of horror stories. Subscription tins aside, were there any absolute howlers or clangers on your watch? It wasn’t that bad. The famous one of the Phantom Hourglass art. But the poster said Twilight Princess. And Twilight Princess is spelt wrong. Oh yeah, Twilight Princess or something. That wasn’t me. That was before my time. I’ve always wanted to know how do you get an official logo? How do you modify an official logo to spell it wrong? I mean, that’s a miracle error. So funny. That’s valued colleagues thrown under the bus there. Brilliant. Sorry to everyone involved in that. No, I’ve got my own clangers, of course. We sent the entire wrong news section to print once when I was at Gamescom signing out pages on a fucking Blackberry. It was like the sixth round of pages coming through. I was making like really annoying little changes here and there. And I guess there was some mix up somewhere along the line where I’ve obviously signed off the wrong ones or some fucking mix up. And yeah, there was like the entire news section of, I think it was an August or a September, it must have been a September issue where there was just, it was just riddled with typos and strange errors because we didn’t have a production editor at the time as well. We had like some freelance production editor who just completely fucked the whole thing. So that went out to tens of thousands of readers. That was good. We had a cover pulled after it was sent to print. It was the Mario and Sonic Winter Olympics game. The issue was done and Dale and I were in the pub at half nine, ten o’clock. We got this call from Sega saying the Olympics Committee don’t want to announce the game yet. So you’ve got to scrap the cover and just do something else. So Dale and I had to go back to the office after quite a few pints and just redo the packaging and the cover. I also had to find a six or eight page preview. I had to fill a six or eight page hole in the magazine. After deadline. Yeah, it was gone. It was done. I don’t know if you’ve got in this much trouble with production before, but it was like, if this goes one day late, it costs this many thousands. If it goes two days late, it costs this many thousands. And it was like, this has to be done the next day, otherwise you’re in big trouble. So yeah, that was… I mean, not a clanger, per se. Not anyone’s fault. Can you remember what you replaced it with? It was Dragon Quest 6, I think. Oh, man. Yeah. That explains some things. I think it was a really big… It was just like a really tight crop on the main guy’s face. I remember that cover. And thinking, oh wow, they’re really into Dragon Quest. No, not into Dragon Quest at all. Square Enix were like, absolutely amazing. What a turn out for us. I think the rationale was there was nothing else in the issue and that was the highest scoring review. I think we had the first review and that was the rationale. Right. Also, the biggest selling issue of ONM was just a really tight crop on Sonic’s face years ago. That’s Sonic Unleashed, right? Yeah, I think so. That was the thinking. It was like, okay, big faces work. We’ll go with the big face. And there you go. Dragon Quest, I think it was 6. I had no idea that was the story behind that being on the cover. That’s when you get in as a rival magazine and go, oh, okay. I mean, to each their own. Yeah, there was so much going on. You never know what’s going on with a magazine at any given time, do you? Sometimes you have to pull the whole fucking thing and start again. I always find it interesting the whole production, it costs X amount thing because I sometimes wonder if that was a bit apocryphal to spook editors from trying to do it because there’s a couple of times I pulled things. It was a Christmas where I panicked about using the word redneck in a preview. I thought, is that an offensive term? And so I just changed it and changed the page. And then there was this email in a production that was on Christmas Eve or something like, please can we change this? And they would. Sometimes it was free. And then one time when there was an accidental dragging and dropping of a preview page onto another page and the future is kind of a slightly odd software they use for sending mags to print. We duplicated a page basically. It was a few hundred quid. But I always wondered how true it was. The whole like, you know, the deeper it gets, the more money it costs. Almost like a video game logic to it or something. It was a bit sort of strange. But yeah, I was also going to ask very briefly about Girl Gamer, which I think was on your watch. This was a… Hold on. Not on my watch. Did you inherit it? Yeah, I inherited it, yeah. This was a supplement that came free with ONM, a games magazine aimed at younger female gamers, thus Girl Gamer. No real notes other than it’s like, what are those things you see where you think, oh, I don’t envy them having to make that? And you can almost hear the conversations behind it of like, this is going to happen. Yeah, that was just, I think that was just a thing that the management at the time had dreamed up to get some more money. So yeah, I think, you know, it was a paid for supplement. So yeah, we were just told to do it. And as much as we protested about doing it, it sort of had to happen because deals were done. It didn’t last that long. I think we only did two when I was there. I’m not judging it or anything. On my time on ONM, when I was associate editor, we were making a Pokemon comic, like not to go with the mag. It was sold separately. Like we were making an official Pokemon magazine, but I think it was all comic paper stock. And like that came out of our team. I have no idea who actually like touched it, you know, in terms of on the team. I don’t know if it was an after work project. That was always one of the great mysteries of ONM was like, where the fuck did this Pokemon comic come from? I think I know this, Matthew. I think it was like a German mag that was translated into English. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard that from Nick Roberts, who he used to work with and he used to run the very deeply unofficial and dubious Pokemon World magazine. Basically, yeah, like it was… And so he said that, oh yeah, they basically features now doing its own official Nintendo thing. He said, but the contents all translated from German, so there’s a slightly odd tonal element to it. And so maybe that’s the mystery. Explain, Matthew, I don’t know. Yes, I mean, that goes some way to explain like how no one seemed to be making it, but it was seemingly coming from our team. Like it was credited to our team. I was like, who the fuck is making this? Like I’ve never seen a printout of this fucking mag. That was a true mystery. So I suppose like on a more positive note then, Neil, were there any covers you’re particularly proud of in your time on ONM? It was a good four years or so. So there’s loads of loads of mags in there that I was pleased with. The 3DS cover was, you know, it’s all Dale’s work, the art editor. But the 3D Lenticular cover was just amazing. Is that really hard to make? Like the actual, I don’t really know what the process is. It took ages. Yeah. Like he had to provide the printers with an incredibly complex Photoshop file with each layer of 3D on it. Each of the characters. So it had Ryu at the front and all the characters from various 3DS launch games on it. They all were in their own layer of 3D. And yeah, it took like two months to do. Oh, wow. And it came out amazingly. Like it’s all it’s all Dale’s work, really. So kudos to him. We did a really nice Other M cover and wallet where like the wallet is like the cardboard thing. ONM was always in packaging. So the cardboard was like this sort of mirror cardboard stuff that had this like an oil slick on water sort of effect. You know, that sort of multicoloured effect and that was like Samus’ mask. And then when he took the mag out, it was like Samus’ face. We’ve got this like renderer person to like, we got some Other M art and got a renderer, like a 3D artist to like render these images. So they weren’t official Nintendo images. We did them ourselves. And then we sent them through Nintendo and got those on the on the packaging and the cover. We did a similar thing for Mario Galaxy 2. You know, when you finish a level on Yoshi and he’s got the star. Oh, yeah, yeah. And he’s like, hey, whatever. So really, capsulating the joy of Nintendo there, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, so like we took a screenshot of that and we got someone to render that up. So that was the like we did all kinds of different covers based on like Cloud Mario and all of his other abilities. Drill Mario. So we had like a split run of like five or six different covers. All your favourites. Yeah, you know, Drill Mario, everyone’s favourite. And yeah, the subscriber one was Mario with the Star and Yoshi. And yeah, I was really pleased with that. That was the cover thing on the packaging as well. So it came in like this sort of fancy box with a flap on the front. We got quite good at elaborate packaging for sort of special event covers, which yeah, you know, hard work getting the approval. I say hard work. It was all Dale, the art editor Dale. So, you know, kudos to him. But yeah, getting those approvals and getting Nintendo to be okay with us using sort of slightly unofficial images was like behind the scenes was quite a big job. Oh, yeah. I mean, we never tried pitching anything like that. I think we did some mod. I think we did a bit of modified Rabbids art for when we did Zombie U on the cover. They were nervous about just having like quite a photorealistic Buckingham Palace Guard zombie on the front. So they decided to add this rabbit at the bottom of the art. And he was getting like, is he bitten or something by the zombie? It was like, let’s soften this zombie by the presence of a rabbit. That will make this somehow palatable. But yeah, that, you know, not being a first party thing, we could obviously… It wasn’t as challenging to get that past. Do you have any more covers you want to discuss, Neil? In terms of sort of behind the scenes maneuverings, the GoldenEye Cup… I was going to ask about this one because I remember you guys doing GoldenEye and I remember hearing it was quite a like secrecy ballate. Yeah, so it was in the E3 conference that year. That was a reveal in the E3 Nintendo conference. So Activision sort of came to us a couple of months beforehand and they were like, GoldenEye’s coming back. It’s got Daniel Craig in it. So yeah, we put together this cover and like we moved the on sale date so that it was the day after the E3 conference. So it’s like it’s a bit of a tightrope, high wire act, whatever the whatever the phrase is. Yeah, it was a complicated thing to organize. But we saw the game and we did the reveal and it was like, obviously you never see what’s in the Nintendo, what’s the first party stuff from a Nintendo conference. But third party because it was Activision, it was sort of deemed OK. So yeah, and that was another like nervy last few moments because it was all gone and off to print and getting packaged up. And we I think we asked the printers to like, like do some elaborate shit around no one seeing the mag before. Because if we fucked Nintendo’s conference that year, we would have been in a colossal amount of trouble. Oh, yeah, I think there were some extra measures taken at the printers. So no subs mags went out or anything like that. And no one really saw it until the day after the conference. And it’s all gone as well. And last last minute, Daniel Craig’s people wanted to see the cover. There was like a chance that they wouldn’t like it and would have to pull it all. We sent it to we sent it to Daniel Craig’s people and they had to approve it overnight before we could proceed. And if they’d have said no, yeah, I don’t know what we would have done. But we would have had to cobble something together. Yeah, it was it came out like it’s quite, you know, having Daniel Craig on the cover of a Nintendo magazine is quite unusual. But I think it was worth the main maybe not the best cover per se. But like, but in terms of like announcing something like right on the on the moment it was announced, it was it was worth it, I think in the end for making a we had to tease it very carefully as well. So that like in the next month page, we had to say like a Nintendo classic returns. Oh, but that caused like a huge big old buzz on the Internet. I remember everyone going mad for it because we didn’t want to hype it too much. So if we’d have done like next month ONM big reveal fucking, you know, everyone get excited, it would have been like too much. Yeah, people would have been just annoyed. Yeah, it was like, oh, it’s oh, it’s GoldenEye because I think people wanted like the forum was going mad for like a new, I don’t know, a new Star Fox or a Donkey Kong or a Metroid or, you know, one of the one of the Doshin is back. Yeah, ice climbers. Fuck yeah. I do like the idea of like Daniel Craig’s people seeing that and being like, yeah, we want to make sure we approve anything going out like including, you know, including Daniel and it’s like if I was his people, I wouldn’t have let him star in a fucking GoldenEye playing Pierce Brosnan’s role in a dodgy remake. That would have been like my move as his people. I’m sure that game wasn’t like a career highlight for him. But yeah, a cool cover opportunity for sure. The other cover I wanted to ask you about, Neil, was you did GTA Chinatown Wars, the cover, right? So I was curious what you made of working with Rockstar and bringing that together because I think Matthew, you’ve said before you were basically shut out by Rockstar on this one. So what was that like, Neil? Yeah, it was great. They were brilliant. They just sort of approached us and said, we’d love to do a cover. You can have the world exclusive, you know, the first review. The first bit of art they gave us was like a picture of this sort of large Elvis impersonator guy on a bike, like a sort of Harley Davidson. And they wanted that to be the cover, is my reflection. And we took them out of that. Yeah, we ended up doing what is basically the sort of pack shot on the cover. But no, they were great. Like they just I went to their offices, I think I previewed it. And then a couple of weeks later, they they just gave us they just gave us the DS cartridge. And I signed an NDA and and I took the I took it home and played it and reviewed it. They were they were brilliant. Really like not at all sort of scary or intimidating. Was there anything like difficult to navigate it being like official Nintendo? Yeah, it was it was like about three months into my tenure there and and it was I think Mad World was out at the same time, right? And Nintendo were a bit yeah, I think they were a bit, you know, understandably a bit nervous about this drug dealing crime game being on the front of their mag. Even after the weed tin incident, even after the yeah, maybe they maybe they got into it after the weed tin and they were like, yeah, drugs are drugs are cool guys. Well they never got one because the subscopies didn’t have them. So they never saw the weed tin. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Rare as hen’s teeth, those things. I think they they saw the opportunity to you know, to work. It’s a GTA game on their platform is I don’t think that it was the first it was the first one, wasn’t it? Apart from maybe Manhunt? Yeah, Manhunt 2. I mean, we had had like table tennis and Bully, but GTA outside of Gameboy games and things, it was yeah, not a not a going concern for sure. I think the the power of GTA at the time overpowered any concerns about it being like bad for the readership. And we we we made sure on the packaging, we almost like made it like this is the 18 rated issue, without sounding too much like a porno or whatever. We were like, because we reviewed Mad World in the same issue, right? So we had GTA and Mad World in the same issue. And it was like only buy this if you’re over 18. We had to be very careful with how we did the packaging that month. Right. I think I can’t I can’t really remember. But I think we put something sort of more Nintendo-y on the packaging and just had the the logo, the GTA logo on it. And then next to Kirby. Kirby hoovering up some drugs. Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t really remember. But yeah, we had to position it quite carefully. That’s for sure. And the main memory of that is like getting the sales figures in a couple of weeks later and seeing. Yeah, it was like it was a big disaster that issue. No, really. Wow. Well, yeah, I think, you know, ONM’s readership was kids, really. And if you say to mums and dads at the supermarket, don’t buy this for your kid on the packaging, it has a big effect on the actual issues, sales. Kind of makes sense when you think about it. But at the time, it was cool. We just wanted to do GTA. So we did it. Yeah. That’s cool. Yeah. That game, I think, did like undersell a little bit from what they were expecting it to. It sort of arrived at a weird, a slightly weird time when piracy was really hitting the DS hard as well with the old R4 carts and stuff. But yeah, interesting to hear about for sure. Cool. Well, that is everything we wanted to ask you, Neil. Is there anything else sort of stray memories or things you wanted to sort of like mention before we punch out? I just want to say it’s nice to be on my favourite podcast, genuinely. I’ve really enjoyed listening to it over the last couple of years. It came along at the right time as well. It’s brilliant sort of pandemic listening. It started in the pandemic, right? Yeah, yeah, that’s right. End of 2020. Really good. I really enjoy it. So thank you. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, thank you for coming on and sharing your memories, Neil. So yeah, just to sort of like, you know, tell people where to find you. Do you want to like plug the site, plug where to find you on Twitter again? Yeah, my website is mobilegamer.biz. It’s for the mobile games industry. And I’m on Twitter at Neil underscore Long underscore end of Twitter handle. That was the real reason I wanted you to read it out again, I just wanted to come back to that. Yeah, that was awesome. Thanks for coming on, Neil. Really appreciate it. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? Mr. Basil underscore pesto, no more underscores. This podcast is supported by Patreon, patreon.com/backpagepod. If you’d like to extra podcasts a month, four pound 50 XL tier is the one you want. Join over 600 hopefully happy people who are supporting us every month, which we really appreciate. You can find me on Twitter at Samuel W Roberts, the podcast and backpage pod on Twitter. There’s also backpagegames at gmail.com. And we’ll be back next week with a new episode. Bye bye.