I'll be the first Tom!

How about we do one of those embarassing circles where we tell everyone a bit ourselves and where we come from etc?

I'm Jack, I'm from Australia and I've been writing about games on and off for the past five or six years for a load of magazines and websites. I usually hang out at www.slicedgaming.com.au, an Australian website, and at the moment all my writing is just volunteer work helping my buddy Daniel at www.vooks.net, which is a big Australian Nintendo site.

I'm currently studying journalism at UniSA which is why I'm not doing more writing (that's not homework). I spent a fair bit of last year travelling around the states and Europe and just generally taking time off which was great.

At the moment I'm playing through Little King's Story for Wii to review (it's awesome!), and trying to work through my back catalogue of unfinished games while there's a bit of a break (Far Cry 2, Tomb Raider: UW, Company of Heroes etc). I've got all the systems which is nice, but it means my TV room is messy. As for my favourite game... well, just don't mention CoD4 unless you want to talk for an hour. Not to mention the classics!

Feel free to add me for a game of whatever;

Xbox: InsanoAimless

Steam: It's either Aimless or insanopointless

PSN: I can't remember

Wii: God knows

Hi Jack, =).

Good starting post.

I think I checked out your profile earlier, and was impressed to see how much writing you'd done / places you'd worked for at such a young age. That's pretty cool. You must have started around the time you were 14 or something? Actually, David "Macca" McCandless started around then, writing for Dennis Publishing's Your Sinclair, and who can forget Julian "Jazz" Rignall editing CVG magazine at the age of 16? [Soz these are UK magazines of old, but my general point is, you're in good company.] ^_^ I love the way in games journalism, the writers can truly be representative of the audience.

I've just had an old contributor friend, Ross, ranting to me about ex-Maxim writers not being experienced gamers, =P, which kinda hints at wanting journalism by gamers for gamers. Although he rants all the time [he used to write a rant column for me]...and I'm sure if all games reviewers were exclusively young gamers, he'd complain about their ignorance of older titles, so go figure. ^_^

Anyway, as you can tell, I waffle a lot.

My name's Andrew, I used to do a photocopied fanzine, sold in the playground at my secondary school. Despite also doing a general school magazine, the videogames mags got a more dedicated following, so I stuck with them, and they got better as the years went on, culminating in United Games - which was irregularly produced, but when I did bring an issue out, I had support from CHIPS and Computer Exchange / CEX stores, and a few others, who stocked the 'zine for me. I did a journalism degree, and produced another issue of United Games in my final year of Uni, that got a really positive reaction from the industry, with 431 stores (including GameStation) interested in stocking future issues based on the strength of that dummy issue, and I had an aspiration to launch it as a commercial magazine, but lacked the finance/capital needed. My mate Chaz and I hatched a plan to do a DVD production on videogames instead - because Chaz and his friends just wanted to go to E3 and needed an excuse, and I needed something cheaper to produce than a magazine, and Cinram gave us a sweet deal on DVD duplication, whilst The Princes Trust and HSBC gave us modest loans. Basically, I went to HSBC and asked for £50,000. They said no - you're students - have £10,000 instead. Prince's Trust gave £5000, and The Phoenix Trust said - "You want money to launch a DVD, when you really want to launch a magazine? You're mad. Go to Southwest Ventures and get the funding you need for the mag" implying we shouldn't waste time with the DVD.

Wise words on deaf ears.

After E3 2004, we didn't have confidence in what we shot alone, so went off to film other events to turn what was original an E3 DVD into a serious videogame documentary, using interviews with key industry insiders. The documentary was so ambitious, it took us into 2005, by which time another E3 came around, so I decided to try again, using film students. Their filming was better, but their games journalism sucked, and having an E3 feature, and a documentary to edit, saw split resources, with neither gaining much progress, so I halted the E3 2005 edit, and attempted to finish the documentary. The documentary was approaching finished by 2006, but all E3 material was looking dated, and E3 2006 was gonna be the big one, with new console unveilings. Attempted to do it again, and got to work with Steve Keen of Thumb Bandits, GamesMaster, and Bad Influence fame, as my second camera man, who proved incredibly professional and reliable, and that year's filming went incredibly smoothly, and fully realised my ambitions for covering E3. Unfortunately, having filmed 106 games....post production, being just me in my bedroom, took forever. In the end, I hired students to help me finish editing, but it was too little too late, we had ran out of money. (Saving grace was, the E3 2006 feature won the Best of Boris competition for post-production effects, and most of the DVD's content is now available for free online).

My friends were all on lovely salaries, whilst I was broke, and I was a bit jealous,

so 2008, I went looking for a job.

Did some office cleaning, then worked in a toy shop, then did temporary sub editing for GameSpot for three months.

After which I attempted to do freelance webwork, but offered to do too much [a complete CMS] for too little cash, and the resulting deal with the client wasn't viable to live off of.

So this year, I'm back to trying to start United Games as a commercial magazine, as I should have done in 2003.

Game-wise, I seem to be stuck in the '90s. =)

Recently I've been playing Megaman X3 on Saturn again, and I love the way frenetic button-bashing makes my arm ache, or I get blisters on my thumbs from attempting manual rapid fire...it's a physical exertion I don't really get from many other games these days.

I also downloaded ScumVM for my MacBook Pro, which runs the old LucasArts games, and am currently having a bash at point and click adventure Sam & Max Hit The Road.

I don't have any of the current generation of consoles, but will hopefully buy them when I get a steady income. Being a bit of a retro gamer, I love the idea of the Wii's Virtual Machine, and having a tendency to support the underdog, I like the look of PS3, and am intrigued by LittleBigPlanet.

I'm quirky and weird, and just have to be different. ;-)

And I type entirely too much online, wasting hours of my life. ;-)

=) Hello Everyone.

You definitely waffle a lot Andrew, that's for sure.

You also made it a hell of a job for others to be the next to say hello in this topic, so I guess I will keep my reply as short as possible. 

Hello Everyone!

I rolled into game journalism out of necessity; as a web coder / webmaster I was looking for an online project and a few days later my first PlayStation fansite went live. Looking for a good and loyal crew turned out to be one of the most difficult tasks, so I started writing my own articles.  

Most of you will probably notice my English is not up to Future Publishing standards, but considering my background as a tech-oriented person, and this being an International network, this may not be an issue for most of you readers. My mother language is Dutch, and I'm from Belgium. If you don't know where Belgium is, shame on you and go check Google Maps.

As this is a social network, more about me can be found in my profile. Looking forward to networking here and interesting discussions. 

Awesome, a forum. Now to make complete fools out of ourselves: hi everyone! You're reading a message posted by Mark Hidding, a former game journalist from the Netherlands. A little chronicle...

Fall 2004. My neighbour applied for a job as an editor with a major Dutch gaming website. For fun, without any experience or interest in journalism. Yet he convinced me to join, so I did. About a month later, disappointed by the fact that boothbabes didn't stack up on his front door on a daily basis, by the fact that the website would not pay for his trips to the Los Angeles Convention Center and by the fact that he still had to purchase games himself, my neighbour quit. I, however, enjoyed the company of the bunch of maniacs who were as passionate about writing as they were about gaming itself. So I stayed.

For several years, I enjoyed working as a game journalist for several Dutch websites and their audiences. However, when I went to university, time became too sparse to keep reviewing all major releases and to keep up with the tedious task of updating the news section, which to this very day is hardly ever done by real journalists, but by human google bots who crawl around the net looking for rumors to copy and paste. As long as I'm mentioning stuff that annoys me, when will one of the most famous Dutch writers within the gaming industry learn to properly capitalize his own name?

Despite my resent towards the common lack of professionality I find in nowerdays gaming media (more specifically: the lack of demand for it), there's lots of things I miss. The cool interviews you set out to do that provided you with content sure no other site could offer, the press events you were invited to, the thousands of people who were waiting anxiously for your latest column to be posted...

Well, I've said more then enough, and that's way more than I intended to say in the first place. Besides, this story doesn't really have an ending, so... err... bye all!

Hi guys - thanks for picking this up, and soz about my waffle. I did go to edit it, but found there wasn't an edit button. Doh.

Hah nah, I love the waffle man, what a cool story Andrew. I love how it started with a photocopied fanzine. Sounds like a bit of a movie. I guess you could say you achieved a lot without really collecting the rewards? Like I said, cool story, I guess when times were hard you didn't think it was cool but good on you anyway. Keep us posted on that mag, for sure.

You're right in that I started really young, I was about 13 if I remember right. I'd done about four volunteer reviews for a tiny Australian gamecube fansite when I got my first gig at Nickelodeon. I was basically just a normal kid on the forum, but very much more into games than anyone else (who were basically just kids who watched Nick TV), the other forums which I had been into for a while had helped with that, so pretty much became the authority on the subject. They asked me to write for them, and soon after a couple of the other kids became interested enough and kinda caught up in general games knowledge and got picked up as well.

Nearly everything after that was basically lucky meetings, being mentioned to editors of those magazines, etc. I'm sure they loved what was basically free labour - for me it was all for profit. They'd send me more games than I could hope to play, and I only had to look at a couple.

Nick closed down without much warning, the magazine sort of moved off, I got some work on other websites that provided me with the games, but I gradually lost my momentum as school picked up. Inevitable really, but it's left a bit of a gap on my resume I'm trying to fill now. I've always had a bit of a talent for writing, and I'm lucky in that my older brother was into games since way back and sort of paved the way for me. He got a NES when I was 3, and I played just about every great game on that system. PC games included Command & Conquer, Raptor, Nova 9 (Dad loved that), Commander Keen, the original Duke Nukems, Wolfenstein, Sam n Max (still a favourite, check my profile Andrew!) and so forth. When he got a 64, the Christmas it came out, and he put on Mario 64. Woah. Him, my sister and I all looked at the screen in amazement (I had a bit of a renaissance of this when I got my DS - seeing 3D on a handheld was amazing. Showed my Dad, he mentioned that last story :P).

Bregt, your English is perfect man. I wouldn't have picked it as a second language. I'm about to start a sort of associate degree in Arabic with no prior experience. We'll see how that goes. I don't think it has any application in the gaming world, hey?

Marcks, I agree with a lot of your comments. I applied for a couple of google robot jobs before I realised exactly what it was I was doing. Even though it was paid the work was pretty soul destroying so I stopped quick smart. I think part of the problem is most of our news, being in the entertainment industry, is pretty much straight from the mouths of PR people. It doesn't take much skill to recycle this. A lot of the better gaming journalists are people who do good features and importantly make good commentary on events. They become sort of celebritised because they appear everywhere and basically run the top tier of the scene.

Did I just post a second introduction/history, and then completely disrail this entire thread? I think I did. Good start.

Keep on introducing, guys!

Hey, cheers. =) Yeah, my first fanzine was called NES-MANIA, and didn't use any columns or frames/box-outs for content. I'd type the first line of one column, and then tab across to column two, and have the first line of that column, and then carriage return, etc. And of course all the pics were photocopied from mags and instruction manuals and then cut and pasted with Pritt stick. ^_^ Wonderful. <3.
^_^ If a bit basic.
As I learnt DTP and Graphic Design, they got better and better.
Yeah...typical of a Brit to do something cool, but not be the one to monetise it [i.e. UK Developers, and US and Japanese Publishers...]. That said, it was lots of fun, so had its own rewards in a way. =) [Although very stressful at times...!].

I'll be writing a few blog posts about the mag's progress when things pick up.

Tim Ponting used to be a PR at Activision before the whole Blizzard merger thing, and I used to liaise with him for video assets for the DVD and other stuff. But it wasn't until a while later, when buying some back issues of Zero magazine, that I realised he had been involved in a lot of my favourite Dennis Publishing magazines from the early '90s. Subsequently, he wrote a piece for my blog, reminiscing about those times, and you being picked up by Nickelodeon reminded me of some of what he was saying about the publisher being able to pick up the right sort of people "who could just hit that sweet spot with 12-17 year olds, because basically we were all borderline kids/adults...".
Another funny story, from the MD of PR agency Indigo Pearl - James Beaven - and how he got into the games industry, is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61oUt1DZfuc

Yeah, it can be difficult to do stuff whilst at Uni. I only managed the 2003 issue of United Games when we had two months off for exam-revision, but my degree was coursework only, so with no exams, I actually had time to finish an issue. Lol. Aww...I loved the NES, but I got mine when the SuperNES was taking off [I went straight from NES to N64 in the end], so I've fond memories of some of its later games, such as Kirby's Adventure, Battletoads DoubleDragon, and MicroMachines. But still have the classics too, like Super Mario Bros, Tetris, Punchout, Megaman II, Zelda I & II, etc. =D Commander Keen....<3...2D Duke!..<3 Heehee. I had a lot of the Dizzy games too. ^_^ Mario 64 amazed me too, and even after I had all the stars, my friend and I were setting new challenges for each other, ...however, although I loved Mario 64, I wasn't happy with my N64 overall, and ended up getting a Saturn, which despite also owning a PS2, is still my console of choice to this day. Saturn and NES are my two favourites. =)
But I've yet to buy into the next generation...maybe by the end of the year that will have changed, but we'll see. ;-)

Well...;-), I did think: "Should I send this response in a message, instead of posting to the forum?"...but hey, we're all journalists to some degree, so I'll assume freedom of speech is generally accepted/tolerated. ^_^
 

Indeed!

Hi everybody.

I registered on Gameleon a week or so ago but didnt quite know how to kick things off as I havent attended any events or know anybody to become a fellow or start a group, so the forum is an ideal starting point for me.

My name is Helen, I'm from Northern Ireland and I'm probably in the minority here as I didnt get into the industry in the beginning through my love of gaming. It actually was through curiosity as my kids had started playing games , therefore I was a late starter with Spyro on the PS1.

I gave my original site away (!) as I just couldn't get reliable reviewers but was persuaded to start over again. This time I began with what I could manage by myself which was point and click titles however I'm starting to diversify a bit more again.

I work full time plus I do some work for a UK distributor of top end gaming peripherals, have three kids and an accident prone dog (who needs walked daily). So keep myself busy

 Heh, I'm surprised they actually made a forum.  Anyways, I am Evan.  This won't be as long as others so lets get started:

I'm currently 21 and started a personal blog in 2005 writing about games, when shortly thereafter a reader asked if I was interested in writing for his gaming site.  It was a very small, pretty much un-noticed tripod site all about the Xbox 360.  It soon evolved into its own site called Game-Spectrum, which I stayed with for a little under 3 years.

Between Febuary 2008(when I left GS) through March 2009 I still wrote on a fairly regular basis on my blog, and then picked up a very brief writing spot at 360Evolved.com until the site owner decided to shut it down.  As of now I'll, presumably, be writing for the upcoming DamnStraight.net with James Pikover and possibly another site.   

It really wasn't until 2006 that I realized I'd like to write about games, or at least technology in general for a living.  At the time I was really into gaming.  However, I've unfortunately lost that 'spark'.  I still enjoying writing about games and the industry, but not like I used to(and I know why).  

Anyways, that's me.

Thanks for introducing yourselves guy.

Helen, I like how you started playing games after your kids! It's not something you hear mums doing all that often, but I'm sure your view on games is probably more interesting than those of us who have grown up with them! The more diversity the better, I think. Spyro is a good place to get started too.

Evan, maybe for different reasons but that spark leaves me sometimes too. I just can't motivate myself to play anything. A good deadline helps but sometimes I just stop enjoying games altogether for a time. I usually manage to bounce back after some downtime. I think keeping your personal blog going is pretty important. Lots of the places I used to work for are closed. Putting together a resume can be a bit harder when the majority of your references don't quite exist anymore! Things never look as nice just on Word. I have my blog but haven't kept it too active lately, and there's not much about games so it's barely any use for that anyway!

Keep them coming everyone