J Nash

"Be"ing Staff Writer for Game Zone was the best time I had working on mags.

Part of it was the context and part of it was the atmosphere, but mostly it's because I had nothing whatever to do except to write about games (with the Ed inexplicably happy to print anything I came up with). The sense of freedom after the responsibilities of YS was skippingly glorious and I banged out page after page of untempered rubbish with an enormous beam.

(Checking my files, I see that I overwrote each piece; not slightly, but by thousands of words. The first Cart Fam (er, The Cartridge Family - the Who Do We Think We Are? bit) goes on in the original draft for most of a thin book.)

As the mag had been bought as a going concern from another publisher, the style was already there, and energisingly it was exactly the type of attentively funny stupefoolery I adored, ie a bunch of largely impenetrable in-jokes and refs that made the writers laugh which is why they did it and usually involving photos of Heinz Woolf. Amusingly, Colin The Publisher (for it was he) fiercely hated everything that made Game Zone what it was (practically the first official memo about the mag was "no more pictures of Heinz Woolf or whoever") and was happier cooking up further publicity stunts (such as the compo to win a job at the mag, which we didn't know about until it was widely advertised on radio and television, and the winner of which we didn't get to meet until Colin had announced (to the entrant, then the papers) that he'd won. We had the mag schedule thrashed into submish by that point (generally avoiding the two days syndrome because console publishers were better at their jobs than computer game ones, possibly a side-effect of being international heavyweights, plus there were tons of games every month (hurrah!) so there was always another big exciting parcel of carts to take up the slack) so the poor bloke ended up as a spare tyre dogsbody, taking rubbish screenshots for reviews and wisely chucking it all in soon after to go back to university, racking up the whole affair to building character). We left him to it.

What we didn't realise until later was that Trenton The Ed was insulating us from some fairly grotesque behind-the-scenes shabbery. (Well, I say "we"; I suspect everyone else knew because they didn't spend all day obliviously playing Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine indestructibly against Sega Zone, then overwriting a review of Zombies Ate My Neighbours, then giving Last Action Hero a score of minus eight, then arguing with Simon The Prod Ed about a comma versus a semicolon, then grumpily acceding to his authority, then coming in at 8am and changing the page back after it left his computer but before it arrived at lino, FOR WORK.)

Making up the letters page because nobody had written in again was, to me, excellent fun, rather than, for example, suspicious. Rubbishing terrible platform games in the previews was funny and saved time, and when the PR nerks rang up to cancel the review cart they'd intended to send, that was even funnier. (But not as funny as the time we received an AP-quality phone booting from Acclaim's PR dimwit for the review of Mortal Kombat, which didn't mention you could connect two Game Boys with two MK carts for a two-player bout, a fact we were unaware of because, as we sweetly explained when the froth and gargling had died down, Acclaim's PR dimwit had been too cheap to send us two carts.) Not posting the sales figures; well, that was perfectly normal for a bought-in mag where you'd want to separate the new regime which would take at least six months clear (and as proof I've only just realised we didn't when typing that bit there. No, that bit. No, now you've backspaced too far. No, that's an 0).

Having the head of the Ad Department stroll into the office one day under express publisher orders to tell us that we had to give Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a score of 70% on my Game Boy round-up page because that's what they'd guaranteed the advertiser was horribly face-shouty, but Trenton The Ed diplomatically punted that one away too by commandeering the review and writing it rubbishly as a corner of the page with an alerting intro, giving the game exactly 70% and arranging it to appear opposite the ad. Moving buildings to an awkward corner office flashed no buzzers because, tragically, Sega Zone had just closed and we had to clear out of the Plains of Zone as some upstart troubleflingers called AMIGA PLOUGHERS or something wanted the space for lebensraum purposes. And it was trem exc to see rapid recovery's Linda Barker again as GZ's new Consultant Editor, even though the made-up position appeared mysteriously to duplicate an existing job and one morning she vanished.* What could possibly go wrong?

Accordingly, it was a vast and jarring surprise when I was summoned into Colin The Publisher's new office and told the mag was shortly to be killed off and I'd be leaving at the end of the week to become Features Ed on ("The same certain mag narrowly evaded seven months previously" - Ed). Vast and jarred, I sat there for a bit, then said, "I think I'd better go outside now," and stepped away.

(This is entirely true. I was so thoroughly ignorant of the facts on account of being rubbish that, when the appointment was made, I spent the morning wondering what it could mean, concluding inexorably with airtight logic that I must be receiving a raise for being super and pretty. I'd make the best Poirot ever, me.)

The particularly horrid thing here for my manly posture was that the surviving GZ bods, who kept going for a few days more until prepared positions opened, all went on to console mags, gambolling among the games an' that while I was stuck at the other end of the entire universe with dead articles about ("Coloured lightbulbs" - Ed) and ("Decorative belt buckles" - Ed). (The ex-Geezers shortly moved again, or left to form their own companies instead, because these were stopgap posts, but that spoils the story, so ignore that bit.)

Such was Game Zone. We only lasted seven issues, from GZ12 to GZ19; we were killed off right at the end of the latter, so it didn't appear, but with the aid of Jon The Art Ed I managed to compile the (all but) finished ish and distributed it as a chunky photocopy - with a real (ie black plastic binder clip) spine - to the four or so staff. Judging by events, this was probably one of our best-selling issues.*

NEVERTHELESS, Game Zone was an enduring influence (er, on me); after organising things on YS, all I had to do on GZ was write about games, of which there were plenty. Nearly all of my (um) "style" was forged in the Game Zone crucible; obviously, by "forged" I mean "dishonestly duplicated" and by "crucible" I mean the snooker hall we kept in the cupboard where we'd practise trick shots by throwing the balls at each other and slapping them away with the thick end of the sticks. I tried new things with just about every review (eg playing the game and constructing an informed opinion based on empirical facts, chort chort), fumbled around with some fairly straightforward features (such as rubbishing every single Game Zone vol 1 review in a rEVIsioNIsTHIStorY Bottom Line thing), participated in some funnier ideas (like S Kirrane's justifiably famous Wolfenstein article; it was the first 3D sound game, or something, so we played it with one bod on joypad and screen and the other on headphones shouting "They're behind you. BEHIND - No, wait, they've gone left. LEFT. LEFT. OTHER LEFT. ORIGINAL LEFT," etc) and generally had a grand old time. My bits in the mag are PURE and UNDILUTED and therefore unreadable, and a milko's churn of running jokes began among the shiny pages; the Flight of the Amazon Queen review in AP, for example, was in fact the closing chapter in a serial of unreadableness that included the reviews of Zombies Ate My Neighbours and Secret Of Mana* in GZ; the trilogy was nominated for an award for MOST INTROSPECTIVE IN-JOKE OF 1995 because nobody in the world who read AP51 had ever seen Game Zone, including the judges. (It came second, pipped by an in-joke which had not been entered and did not exist.)

I (hearted) Game Zone. (Gerroff! - G Zone.)

Also, I once got to speak to Dunc Macdonald on the phone when Trenton The Ed was at the other end of the room. I said, "Hang on, I'll just fetch him."