FROM BEDROOMS TO FRONT ROOMS!

At the beginning of the Nineties, gaming was still very much stuck in the Eighties. In the UK, the most popular gaming systems were still the home computers, with many a youngster still enjoying the delights of the Spectrum and Commodore 64. Elsewhere in the world, Nintendo’s NES dominated gaming. All of these systems were technically from the early Eighties, and many players were getting ready to move on, with hardware manufacturers trying to tempt them to leap to their machines.

“I worked on in 1989, and during that year things like PC’s Mean Machines section, which had grown in popularity since its 1987 introduction. “We were talking to computer game publishers like Ocean and saying ‘are you bringing this out on Nintendo or Sega?’ They were already interested in what they could do on that hardware, so we knew that consoles were going to be a big thing in the next couple of years, and that’s what prompted Julian Rignall to expand Mean Machines into its own magazine,” Paul remembers.