s I am sure many other PC gamers have done, I’ve grown old with PC Gamer magazine. Reading this magazine as a teenager in the mid-1990s was a formative experience for me, opening my eyes in the pre-internet days to the large industry and community that had grown around PC gaming's earliest years and was now flourishing vibrantly all over the world.
Reading PC Gamer was the highlight of the month, the time when I'd get to hear from the gaming journalists I'd come to know well about the latest PC games. And, what's more, I got to play new PC games each month, too, with PC Gamer magazine coming with disc covermounts. I got to experience the new each month, and it was fantastic.
But PC Gamer magazine was so much more than just the games. It was the opinion, the culture, the regularly brilliant jokes, the events and competitions, the often mad photoshoots and illustrations for The Spy, the developer interviews, the hardware deepdives and tutorials… these all contributed to making PC Gamer magazine the monthly tour de force that represented everyone involved in PC gaming so well. It is the high benchmark we still aim to hit today in 2023 when making the magazine each month.
As such, on PC Gamer magazine's 30th anniversary, I feel it fitting that we celebrate many of the key people who made PC Gamer magazine over the past 30 years. The legends who made the best damn gaming magazine in the world.
“Terry Pratchett seemed keen to scoff the mashed potato from my plate”
PC Gamer launch editor MATT BIELBY on creating the world’s best games magazine
In the beginning…
I was deputy editor of Your Sinclair at Dennis Publishing, which Future bought in 1990, and where I arrived as its freshly promoted editor. That success allowed me to launch further games mags for Future, like Amiga Power, and Super Play for the Super Nintendo game console. With those both hits, and PCs and PC gaming rapidly gaining traction in the market, 1993 saw me offered a new title. It would become, of course, PC Gamer.
The idea
The original brief, as it came to me, was pretty short, “PC games are the future, so do us a mag about PC games.” At the time, I always liked each magazine to have a ‘hook’ – and with PC Gamer the hook was “serious, heavy-weight, American”. So instead of bright colours, the dominant colour-scheme would be red, white, black – plus the shades of grey and brown of so many of the games themselves. The fonts used would be more classical. Even the size would be more American: instead of the wide super-A4 format of most contemporary games magazines, we reverted to the narrower old-school A4 to most closely approximate the smaller format of most American magazines.
The execution
There was definitely a pilot issue, or issue zero. It was – as was traditional at the time – a single 24- or 32-page section repeated numerous times, with most (or all) of it genuine material rather than fake copy, as much as possible to be reused in the genuine issue 1. I remember we used a photo of Terry Pratchett on the front, and my first meeting with him – when he came down to Bath for the photoshoot – was over lunch, where he seemed keen to scoff the mashed potato from my plate as well as his.
Perhaps 15 years after the launch of PC Gamer, an academic from one of the big US universities – let’s say Yale or Harvard – got in touch with me, wanting to see if he could buy a rare issue zero of PC Gamer. I think we only printed 30 or so. I said I probably have one, and I probably still do, but I’d no idea where it was – perhaps in one of many boxes full of old magazines in the loft.
Increasingly desperate, he started offering me money for it: $200, $600, $1,000, $1,500… But I was busy on a new project, and simply couldn’t put in the effort needed to hunt for it. I never did learn just how high he would have gone…
The gaming industry
The game industry by that point was bigger and more professional than it had been, but still friendly and fun: I knew all the UK-based marketing and PR people, and many of the developers and CEO types at that time, plus a smattering from abroad. But with PC Gamer there definitely started to be more ‘remember-the-time-difference’ phone calls than before – no real internet still, remember – and more of a corporate feel creeping in.
Standout moments
We had a great team on the early PC Gamers, including deputy editor Gary Whitta [later to become editor, then editor of the US version, and latterly a screen writer of some repute] and art editor Maryanne Booth, and – in a brand-new office, with views over two pub gardens – the team developed quite a family feel; dysfunctional at times, perhaps, but still a family. Aiding this, an office pet: Winnie the hamster, white of fur and adventurous of disposition, who lived in a cage on one of our desks and toured all the games magazines in her transparent plastic exercise ball, occasionally bouncing down the steps at the end if we didn’t catch her in time.
The most interesting person
In terms of articulate people in the game industry, full of ideas and enthusiasm and always a great interview, Peter Molyneux stands out. I heard, some time back, that he doesn’t speak to the press any more, which seems a shame, if true; he was very good at it. Dave Perry of Earthworm Jim fame was good too, as was David Jones of Lemmings. Oh, and Sid Meier – though it was just his style of strategy game that had first intimidated me at the launch of PC Gamer.
PC Gamer’s legacy
Any magazine that lasts 30 years is a remarkable one, and I love PC Gamer, though my time on it was brief – just a couple of issues editing the UK one, then six months or so in America, getting the US version going. I’m very proud of it, all told – it was always well-written, inspiring, inventive and – crucially – on the reader’s side.
MATT BIELBY
Former editor
1993 -
