Thought it might be a worthwhile topic to discuss how we all got into gaming journalism.  What inspired us to move in this direction?  Who gave us our big breaks?  What's our history within this world, be it hobbyist or professional?

I guess I'll start.  Erm.  Having written this, I realise it's gone a bit life-story, but I'd be interested to read similar stuff by other people, so it stays unedited.

***

I've been into both writing and games since I was a kid.  I was an avid PC gamer as a youngster, playing from around 1995, and bought PC Gamer religiously from around the year 2000.  I used to love playing games, but equally I loved hearing other people's opinions of them, even at that young age.

As a teenager in 2002, I decided to set up a games site (this was sort of pre-blogging culture, so it was all rubbish MS Frontpage stuff) where I'd just review loads of games.  Eventually, I roped in a few other teens from around the web to help me out.  A few months later, someone approached me from a similar site called Crucial Gaming, asking if we wanted to merge.

We did, and in 2003 we set up a site called Resolution.  We were still precocious idiots at this time, thinking our opinions on games were significant, important, whatever.  As a result, though we gained a small but loyal readership, I think we annoyed a few people.  Specifically, the staff on PC Gamer, who we bugged incessantly for advice and nagged to read all our articles.  I seem to remember at least two PCG staffers blocking some of our own writers on MSN.

One was Kieron Gillen, whose stuff I'd grown up reading.  I started reading PC Gamer around the time he joined, and before long he'd risen up the ranks to Deputy Editor.  I'd been fascinated that someone shared my ego-fueled views on gaming as an artform, something it had never really been considered as until around that point.  I read his stuff religiously - and that of John Walker - so annoying these guys was a bit of a kick in the guts, as we'd never meant to.  In retrospect, I can see how desperately horrible we must have seemed, so hold absolutely no grudges.

Anyway, Resolution lasted a couple of years, before half the team fell out and people generally lost interest.  I started playing less games and listening to more music.  I joined a band, and started writing voluntarily for a few music mags and websites.  I went to uni and discovered heavy drinking.  This gaming hiatus lasted until around 2007.

I bought PC Gamer, totally on a whim, having not purchased it for a year or so and having not thought much about games in the meantime.  I read about a game called BioShock, being headed up by Ken Levine, one of my favourite designers from my gaming past.  My interest rekindled, I got back into the gaming scene, and bought BioShock on release.  It was absolutely fascinating to see how far videogame narrative had come in my absence.

So I really got back into it, and I applied for work at a couple of games sites - RealGamer and HonestGamers, to be specific (the latter of which I still contribute to).  Both were voluntary positions, but I was happy to be back on the scene.  I wrote a tremendous number of reviews for HonestGamers throughout 2008, and realised I found it so much easier to write well, and enjoy writing, about games than I did with music.  But writing reviews didn't quite seem enough.  I wanted to write opinion pieces, editorials, features you couldn't just get anywhere.

So I roped in a few friends from my hometown of Leeds, who I knew were into games and into writing, and we sat down to plan a monthly videogame ezine.  Since Resolution is the best name I've thought of for anything ever, we decided to go back to that.  It was to be an online mag, released every four weeks, containing previews, reviews and features each time.  In November 2008, we launched.

We did this for five months.  Over this time, we began to build relationships with publishers and grab a fair amount of review code.  But this still wasn't the direction we were hoping to move in.  We wanted to be writing other stuff, but reviews were taking up all our time.  So, in April 2009, we decided to switch.  We would recruit a fairly large team of volunteers, structure everything in a business-like manner, and become a regularly-updated website.  www.resolution-magazine.co.uk, as it is today, was the result.

Around that time, I decided I'd like to write about the notion of death in videogames.  Unsure where to start, I emailed a few contacts to weigh in on the matter.  I got in touch with Joystiq's Ludwig Keitzmann, who had written something similar previously.  I got in touch with Tale of Tales' Michael Samyn.  And I sent an email to Rock, Paper, Shotgun's general email address, asking if any of them would be interested.

Ludwig and Michael replied.  So did Kieron Gillen and John Walker from RPS.  I wrote the article, and forwarded it to everyone I'd interviewed.  And Kieron linked back to it from Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

We got an enormous influx of hits.  Overnight, we went from 80 unique readers a day to over a thousand.  The figure's balanced out a little since, but that article - or, specifically, that link-back - marked a real turning point for Reso.  People were taking us seriously.  People liked this sort of article.  So we wrote more.

RPS linked back to us a few times in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, I was furiously pitching stuff to a variety of mags and sites, but not really getting anywhere.  In the end, I wrote two full articles and emailed them to Tom Bramwell, Eurogamer's editor.  He wasn't particularly keen on what I'd written, but liked the idea of one of them, and asked me to re-write it to suit EG's style.  So I did.  I had my first commission.

The other article I'd written was still sat in limbo, so I began to think about where it would fit.  I sent it to PC Gamer, but they didn't take me up on it.  The only other place I could see it working was Rock, Paper, Shotgun, who stated clearly on their site that they didn't accept freelance pitches.  I sent it anyway.

They published it.

That was my real entry to this world, and it's quite an honour - having grown up being inspired by Gillen and Walker - that they should be the ones to give me my big break.  Off the back of that article, I was contacted by Simon Carless of Gamasutra and GameSetWatch, and Tim Edwards of PC Gamer, asking me if I'd be interested in writing for them.  I landed a regular column at GSW, which ended up being cross-posted to Gamasutra.  I'm still in talks with Tim for PCG stuff, but it's looking good.

I signed up to Gameleon.  Shortly afterwards, a new site called FACEOFFGAMES contacted me, asking if I'd like to pitch for some freelance commissions.  I did, and a few were accepted.  I have a few more in the pipeline.  And RPS have asked me to write for them some more.

And, well, that's now, really.  And I can't believe I've assumed any of you are actually interested in this.  You're probably not.  But I'm interested in your stories.  Go!

That's incredible man - hat's off to you!
Seen you on here, and you look and sound professional, although I obviously don't know you that well, so it's nice to get the whole backstory, so I know what you're about.

I have a tendency to waffle too much on Gameleon, so to answer the crux of this question in a mere one line:
I got into videogames journalism when NES mags died out, and I subsequently decided to make my own. =P

I could also point out some parallels - I haven't bought any of the next generation consoles yet - having used my GameSpot money to get a MacBook Pro, Logic Studio, and get into music production. Have also joined a band. So I feel like I'm where you were in 2006/2007...hoping to get back into things next year with a relaunch of United Games.

Pester-power wise, I came up with an advert campaign for Gamecube when Jim Dawling of CAKE was advertising for new talent. He liked some of my ideas and invited me to come in and pitch, but I soon found out he was leading me on, looking more for PR staff than advert copywriters and Leo Burnett were the ones to contact. This wasn't before I nearly crashed his OutLook Express with an image-intensive GameCube marketing email though. =O Whoops! A very irate Jim wrote back with Leo Burnett's contact details.

Heroes wise, Paul Davies of CVG, and most of the Dennis Publishing Game Zone, Sega Zone and early PC ZONE team, - but I didn't pester them much. Just phoned Paul on his birthday, and in recent years have added ZONE veterans to my Facebook friendslist. =)

As regards making it...I discovered Interactive Selection when 19, and phoned up David and said his website looked awful, and I could do better for £250. "Go on then," was pretty much the response, so I had the chance to do a website redesign for one of his recruitment websites. Unfortunately, I took ages to do it, so offering to do it for a set sum wasn't the brightest of ideas, but it was the first games-industry related job I'd done.

Then I was doing United Games, and getting friendly with JoyStick Junkies, and got excited about their games industry parties in Soho...I turned up, and Kim Adcock gave a big hurrah...OPM Response were sponsoring the events, and I was the first person from the games industry to show up. =P I explained I just did a fanzine, and was still a student, etc, but gave her my business card, and explained I was a whizz at page layouts.
A month later, their advert designer had let them down with only 3 days to go till their advert needed to be in EDGE magazine, pre-ECTS. I got an email from a desperate Kim explaining the situation, and worked my socks off to get them a stellar ad done, over the weekend, in time for EDGE's deadline the following Monday. That led to a year's part time advert design whilst I was at Uni.
It ended in 2003, - they wanted an illustrated mascot, and I couldn't draw - and I had too much final year coursework on my plate anyway, so we went our separate ways.

I don't really have many exciting stories about being commissioned to write though. =P My friend Kim Kaze got to run Dennis Publishing's Den of Wii blog for a while, and since I was a NiGHTS fan, I did get invited to write a preview of NiGHTS: Journey into Dreams, but that's been about it.

Whilst subbing for GameSpot, Emma was off ill, and so I was roped in to do two news stories, which I did in my usual waffling style, so Alex had to edit them a bit, ;-), but it at least got me a byline on the site, as subbing and production staff are generally invisible. The story of getting that job isn't much to tell though. I saw it advertised, I applied. Simple, really. I got fired for conduct though, after getting in trouble for a comment I posted on SmartPlanet. I think it was unfair dismissal, but I got three weeks off on full pay, and went to the states to meet two music producers, so it was alright.

Hmm.
Looks like this did turn out to be waffle afterall.

In 2000/2001 my dad had a lovely 56k modem and I was having a wee wander around the internet and my first thing to search was Zelda, as it's my favourite game series. Fast forward about a year or so and I had my own 56k modem on my own PC and started working on a Zelda site with an internet friend called Zelda0, naturally this being the age of pre-PHP and pretty much anything decent we were updating everything in HTML and it was a long and difficult task.

About a year into it PHP was more mainstream and we had a server to cope so I took that up and wrote long, detailed Zelda guides. Boss Guides, walkthroughs, character references and stuff like that. I then left Zelda0 and started Rauru's Return in about 2003. I then continued to work on Rauru's Return slowly learning more and more things about Nintendo and Zelda and slowly getting in contact with the press office in the USA and the UK for information (a 15 year old me doing that - not a great idea but gutsy! XD). I really enjoyed writing for Rauru's Return, so I started the first Zelda e-Zine called Harkinian about the same time as ZeldaBlog came about and helped on both.

I then moved to The Hylia as well as doing everything else and worked with TSA (the well-known Zelda speedrunner) and for a long while I was just "Zelda" and that was about it. The Hylia slowly expanded to all Nintendo news, and then was dropped for Zentendo.com.

By the time Zentendo came about I had basically dropped Zelda due to the fact that I am now old and have to work and I can't just bunk work like I did school for fun things. I continued to work at Zentendo whilst I did other things, a little bit of webdesign, a little bit of feature writing - my first paid piece was about casinos strangely enough, for a couple of sites that have now died. By the time I moved jobs a bit at work I had risen to the Editor and UK Editor of Zentendo and decided that I wanted to expand my portfolio a bit.

I love anime, and the Japanese culture and knew that a position was going at Jade-Screen magazine so I applied and got accepted for their anime writer so now I write for Zentendo and Jade Screen whilst running my own anime website News-Anime.com and doing a couple of other little things here or there. I really enjoy writing about games and anime - entertainment in general really.

Not as grand as some people, but it's certainly a long way to feature and review writing. Rauru's Return gave me a lot of practise at it and practise at coping with large numbers of people reading your work. When I consider the fact that I was pulling in tens of thousands of unique's a month for a large Zelda site just for news, and Zentendo gets hundreds of thousands of people it's a way of building confidence in your own work. Which aside from being able to write in English, is one of the key elements of journalism really - self belief.

Something to attempt to match your link back story with - as you might know from the Hello Everyone thread, me and Chaz got some money to do a DVD, and went off to cover E3 in 2004. On the last day, we turned up early to see PSP, and none of the PR staff were present, as they were all hung over from the Sony Party, so this girl from Sony's Cambridge Studio just let us in to film it all, and months later, it still turns out we were one of the only people with video footage of PSP and its games, so when we stick a trailer for our DVD up on the internet as late as November, it's picked up by Eurogamer and Jeux France as containing the first footage of Wipeout Pure and Ridge Racer to be seen on the internet. =P We had 500,000 hits in two days...
Of course it didn't last, but was a nice moment. =)

To cut a long story short, I was doing a project for Uni (I'm also a full time student studying for a BSc in Interactive systems and video game design) and I had to make an article as if it was to be published in a magazine. It could have been about anything but all the pictures had to be rendered and it had to look professional. After asking for a few opinions on the content and layout a friend of mine suggested that I send it to a guy he works with who just happened to write and has written for several sites. I chucked him a message on Xbox live and sent him a copy of the file as a PDF. After sitting nervously for a couple of hours awaiting a this is rubbish I got the reply 'fancy doing some more' I had never thought about it before so I thought it would be a good way to gain experience and to learn within the industry. Having a big gaming passion served me well and I'm now assistant editor at thisismyjoytick.com which we have been working hard to get off the ground and it is slowly taking shape.

All I can say is cheers to Andy Corrigan for showing me that I had potential and being the only person that can match my gaming obsession. :D Also a big thanks for letting me be on the team!

^^^^^ I rule!

I've been a gamer since I could hold a joystick/pad/operate my older brothers spectrum, but I've wanted to do this for a living since my early twenties, but never had the qualifications for any publication to really take my application seriously (can't afford to go get them at night school either). So I've been writing for a few sites for free, and recently invested in my own (thisismyjoystick.com as mentioned by Si above), basically to build up a selection of published work I can point to when applying for stuff.

Obviously all I've done is voluntary stuff (although I was getting paid by the word at one point), and I'll continue to endeavour and use what I've learnt over the years to get a full time paid writing gig so that I can ditch the current day job, but for now I'm happy working on TIMJ and doing what I love at least in my spare time.

Going to keep mine short.

I first started doing writing in 2006 or 2007 for Wii60.com. I had chosen for my minor in College to be Journalism, and since my dreams of doing game design were slowly dying games writing turned from a back-up plan to my first choice of profession. After about a year I realized games journalism was an ideal career for me, allowing me to not only get paid for playing and analyzing games, but give me the chance to get out and talk with people and meet them.

Wii60.com always had the problem of being, well, perceived as biased. The original owners had just planned for it to host (poorly) photoshopped images mocking Sony, and it wasn't until a lot of the forum members wanted to do more that they modified the site to include news. Shortly after I volunteered, and after that the site creators nearly vanished altogether. Which was problematic, since few of us had access to truly modify the page.

I and a few of the others managed to do our part to appeal to an outside audience, but odds were against us. We tried to write in a manner that wasn't biased, and we didn't attack Sony. We wanted people to see us as gamers that had felt Nintendo and Microsoft were going in a direction we had preferred. However, people made assumptions, and it didn't help when there was an entire fiasco over Razoric owning both Wii60 and Sony Defense Force. In the end, Wii60 was attacked, accusations were made, and when we tried to contact Kotaku, the greatest publisher of this information, we were ignored. None of us working on the site viewed Razoric as the owner, and we tried to tell Kotaku that we didn't care if the jerk owned both websites, he hadn't touched the site in over a year and the people in charge were different. Still, Kotaku didn't even respond, let alone publish our side of the story, and I've honestly kind of resented them for it since.

Wii60.com came to an end in 2008, however, when Razoric came back out of nowhere publishing a "review" for Rock Revolution. I was pretty much head Admin at the time and the primary cause for content to be on the front page in the first place, so seeing that this poorly written review didn't even conform to our community-chosen standards and system, I removed it. Razoric plugged it again and told none of us to remove it, but I kept deleting it until he overrode my authority. He explained that he put the review up for a publisher to see, and if they liked it could get stuff out of them. Afterwards he would focus on it. I wasn't going to have any of that. I told him he does a review right just like the rest of us, or I'm gone.

I left.

This year I started Gamertagged.net as my own personal site, and have actually gotten a large portion of the Wii60.com community to migrate over. I originally had planned for my site to only cover reviews and interesting articles, but time limited me from playing as frequently as I had wanted and coming up with as many ideas as planned. Plus, I had been hoping for friends to contribute, but I was the only one by this point to have the drive to do journalism as a living. So with few exceptions, I pretty much stick it alone. So I chose to start doing news as well, but working for GamersHell.com for a few weeks before switching over to writing for Examiner.com has put a huge hit on that.

I'm in an interesting spot. I have a lot of time to spend writing about games, but I need to find a job as I have just graduated. The biggest problem is I have been trained my whole life to find a job with a cover letter and resume, and I've slowly been learning that's not how you go about it in this industry. I'm also not sure how to advertise my own website through Project Wonderful, as making a gaming site seem unique in a banner ad is...tough.

I'm basically trying to figure out the best way to get my name out there, and as good-natured as sites like Gameleon and Videogames Journos on Ning seem, they're mostly filled with volunteers and free-lancers looking to find a professional gig. The professionals never seem to be around to help out (of course, time is likely a valuable commodity when you're actually in the business).

I'm not giving up hope, though. I'm working hard to find a job of some sort so I can continue working towards games journalism.

I've been playing games for as long as I can remember. Back in those days where you didn't really care what kind of reviews a game got. If you never played it before, it was new to you and if you couldn't beat it, it was because you weren't good enough. I'm suddenly reminded of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? for the NES.

It never crossed my mind to try my hand at writing about games until I was a junior in college. My major was radio/tv/film broadcasting and my minor was journalism. One day I was in my room listening to IGN's Game Sages podcast and the topic was how they all got into games journalism. Up until that point the basic consensus for people who wrote for big sites got their jobs because they knew a guy who knew a guy and it kind of just happened. Someone during the podcast had a situation similar to mine because they didn't live on the west coast of the US and making contacts was more difficult. Their strategy was to write for their own site (or blogs these days) and hone their craft. Then through time, hard work and some luck opportunities came around. I figured I was a pretty good writer. I wrote a children's book when I was in second grade that won some state awards and my school essays were well received, so I thought why not give it a shot?

I started a little blog where I wrote some opinion pieces like how Sony's marketing department dropped the ball with Haze and the evolution of horror games. After reading countless articles about how to break in to the industry I stumbled onto the Video Game Journos Network. While there I found a site called That VideoGame Blog and they were looking for contributors so I applied. About a week or so later I was put on the site I've been there ever since. My time there has taught me a lot and we have had our moments. We broke the Call of Duty 7 story which Activision didn't like too much, I host our podcast and have had a presence at E3, GDC, Comic Con etc...

From there I started writing for a site called Gamertell. It was the first time I got payed for my writings and I'm still there after a little over a year. I've done a few previews and reviews for Hardcore Gamer Magazine Online, wrote a preview for Splinter Cell: Conviction for FACEOFFGAMES and just recently began writing for GameOnn. I'm looking to really churn out some unique features as I type this, but thanks to a flu bug my brain won't cooperate.

I've been doing this going on three years now and I'm truly thankful to everyone who has given me a chance. It's my hope I can write about games for a living one day.

To make a long and boring story short:

I liked gaming, I started to write reviews about two years ago, got early this year a price for Best Review of the Month, got a invitation to write for undercover-gaming.nl, present. TADAA!