Editing PC PowerPlay, 2001–2003 and 2007–2010

2001–2003

When I arrived at the offices of PCPP in late 2000, fresh and dewy-eyed from the hospitality industry clutching nothing but a tax file number declaration form and a review of Star Trek: New Worlds, PC gaming was on the verge of its first great transition.

As relatedThis piece was part of a feature where each previous editor related their PCPP experience. Former editors David Wildgoose and Ben Mansill had already explained the 1990s PC gaming experience in Australia, thus “as related”., the years from 1994 (when PC commoditisation really kicked off in Australia) to 1999 were a heady time for people selling advertising space for PC games. With over a dozen game publishers and distributors to approach, each issue of the mag was stuffed full of weird games and weirder ads.

From 2000 though, things were about to change. Game publishing and distribution would quickly consolidate around six or seven key publishers – some with names we recognise today like EA and Activision, and others with names half-forgotten like Vivendi and THQ.

This made us do weird things, and make some questionable decisions. But it also made “videogaming” a part of the mainstream media, turning it from a niche curiosity into a multi-billion dollar sector that would soon eclipse the Hollywood box office.

With the departure of David Wildgoose from the editor’s chair in mid-2001 it was time for me to step up, because this was the late summer of the golden age of magazine publishing, and back then, being a deputy editor was actually a pretty strong guarantee that you’d be the mag’s next editor.

It was also the golden age of the internet Forum, precursor to actual social media as we labour under it today. And boy did I have fun fighting with readers over whether or not Deus Ex: Invisible War deserved a 98 (Wildgoose made me score it that high, your honour!) or the now hyper-obscure Iron Storm a 96 (I was desperate for something, anything that wasn’t another Unreal-engine game, and apart from that I have no excuse, your honour!). Wait did I say fun? It was awful, but fortunately there were hundreds of other readers who came to the Forums just to talk PC games, to make up for it. Back in 2002, and before Facebook – let alone Discord – it was one of only a few places you could hang out with Aussies online and talk about PC games (as opposed to games in general).

As editor my solidest move was expanding the tech section from a handful of pages to, well, a whole section. I’m also proud to take ownership of PCPP traditions like MyPC and Reshuffle. Ah Reshuffle, where we’d force whoever was tech editor at the time to get in six identical videocards (nobody called them GPUs yet) and write 200 words about each one and how it was different. We learned a LOT about the minute and meaningless differences between a Leadtek and a [looks at notes] Hercules?

A, um, less-solid achievement of mine was the ill-fated Xbox section. I introduced this in 2002 in time for the launch of the original Xbox in Australia, mostly on the instruction of the publisher and advertising department, but hey if we blamed the publisher and advertising department for every bad thing that happened in the mag we’d [looks at notes] oh wait no that is what we did, we always blamed them.

Anyway, readers reacted strongly to the Xbox section. Many sent angry emails saying get that console filth out of my magazine. One reader diligently cut out the entire section and sent it back to us via mail, for all four of the issues in which it appeared.

What the “Xperiment” did teach us, or perhaps reassure us, was that in 2002 there was still very much an appetite for PC gaming in Australia, as something that was distinct and unique from gaming in general. Given the rise in sales of PS2 games (selling more than The Sims for the first time in 2002), we could be forgiven for being nervous about the viability of a “PC” gaming magazine. But it was a misplaced fear. PC gaming wasn’t going anywhere.

2007–2010

After a sabbatical in Canberra as the magazine’s “associate editor” (which meant editing the tech section from a three-bedder brick-venereal in Melba, and also not being allowed to review Half-Life 2 even though I was the only person on the team with a GeForce 6800 Ultra [shakes fist] Wiiiildgoose! – man did Lost Coast look good on that thing a year later but I digress)… wait what was I talking about?

Anyway, I returned to Sydney in late 2007, just as then-editor Timothy “C” Best was about to catapult himself back into that wildest of wild frontiers, Western Australia, from whence he came. The slot re-opened and I slid into it like a SNES cartridge sliding into a SNES. And I didn’t even have to blow the dust off, because 2008 would turn out to be a bit of a banner year for PC gaming.

But first 2007 had to be rung out with my personal favourite issue – PCPP#146. Christmas 2007 (yep we did 13 a year) had Crysis as the lead review, and Valve’s Orange Box as the second. Can you imagine? Half-Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. It was a smorgasbord – no a cornucopia of gaming goodness, all mashed into a heady 30 days of our art director Glen Downey playing the opening beach mission in Crysis over and over to see how many different objects he could use to wipe out the soldiers at the first camp. Yes, chickens were thrown as useful distractions. No, you can’t grab sharks.

As for 2008 being a banner year, how about this for a run of covers, from PCPP#141 onward: StarCraft 2, Fallout 3, BioShock, WOW: Wrath of the Lich King, Command & Conquer 3, Crysis, Gears of War, COD4, Assassin’s Creed, Red Alert 3, Mass Effect, Age of Conan, StarCraft 2 again (the first hands-on), Diablo 3 (live from Paris) and finally Far Cry 2. (Yes there was also a cover for the “FPS future of Command & Conquer”, Tiberium in there but… eh as Primus once said, they can’t all be zingers).

But all good things &c, and by 2010 I was ready to move on to the even weirder and more pedantic world of Popular Science magazine, where instead of being crucified for writing about Xbox in a PC mag, I would get crucified for using “kph” (only “km/h” exists you know) and accidentally captioning a spider as “poisonous” (because in Danish, the word “gift” means both poison and ven… oh look it doesn’t matter). But I kept contributing to PCPP until 2018, because who wouldn’t want to be a part of such an important Australian tradition? Websites come and go, and YouTubers will on Tuesday embrace what on Monday they condemned, but magazines man… we put our convictions down in black and white (and occasionally ear-searing magenta on yellow etc), and we made you pay up front to read them.