Over 33 years, CVG has frequently delivered the biggest breaking games industry headlines. Today, sadly, we're part of the story.
I've dwelled on this post for weeks, striking sentences and struggling to form meaningful metaphors for what's happened. But there isn't really an elegant way to tell you that Computer and Video Games as you know it will soon cease to exist.
The current site will be closed and some content migrated in to the new GamesRadar+. Currently, no CVG writers will be part of the larger site.
ZoomAs those of you who follow the trade media will know, it's been an uncertain year for the CVG team and our Future colleagues, with one round of consultation taking place in May, followed by a lengthy wait until the second this month.
During this time our parent company Future Publishing has transformed beyond recognition and in our London base virtually every one of our games colleagues have departed.
I won't lie: at times it's been traumatic and stressful for the editorial team - as it would for anyone whose job was uncertain - particularly in those early days when the whole restructure news came as a total shock.
"I'm so immensely proud of what we achieved as a team"
In many ways we did the grieving for our CVG roles during that period six months ago. But that doesn't make it any less painful to now part from the brand which we love.
My personal association with CVG has lasted almost ten years, from the twilight days as a teenage work experience rookie, to three enjoyable years as editor and all the memorable times in between.
I've been lucky to be involved with the site's evolution during an exciting, disruptive decade for video games, as mega-franchises broke entertainment records and new platforms took the medium truly mainstream.
Zoom I'll never forget Christmas 2006, when my entire family gathered wide-eyed around Wii Sports for an evening of heated competition. For a young man who, like most lifelong gamers, remembers all too well the days when video games were relegated to the small TV in the corner of festive celebrations, it was a revelatory moment.
I'll also forever cherish the education of my three senior editors - John Houlihan, Gavin Ogden and Tim Ingham - and the many, many talented colleagues who took me from boy to man (and during our afternoon Quake and Mario Kart sessions, back to boy again).
Despite the sombre end, I'm so immensely proud of what we achieved as a team, doubling our traffic in a few years and, more pleasingly, delivering regular editorial and video content at, in my opinion, the highest quality the site has ever seen.
During my time here I tried to encourage our teams to make genuinely great content - not just traffic on a graph. Stuff like Real Games Journalist, Off The Record and our sweeping, investigative features probably wouldn't get made by sites obsessed with the page view churn, but it was worth it for the kind words and plaudits whenever we bumped in to you at the pub.
Of course we balanced this with what we knew what was successful - which is reflected in the fact we broke our traffic record on a near-monthly basis in 2013.
Zoom But the medium, digital world and profession of journalism is rapidly changing, and the way in which games content is delivered online ultimately needs to change. We would've loved CVG to have been part of that shift, as it's adapted so many times before to the times, but alas it's not to be.
In February GamesRadar+, which has many talented writers in the US, UK and Australia, will replace CVG's daily news and review output. They're a great bunch of people and I wish them every success.
I could scribe for days what CVG means to myself and the many brighter, better qualified custodians who've filled its pages over the decades. But we've been just that - custodians. Below are the thoughts and memories of just a few of them.
Thanks to every reader, writer, games developer, newsagent and ISP that made CVG possible - it's been super. And I'll always be proud to say I was part of the story.
- Andy Robinson
Julian 'Jaz' Rignall
1988 - 1991
Earlier this month, I wrote an article called The Brief History of Gaming Journalism. Front and center was Computer and Video Games - the first ever gaming magazine, and without doubt the most storied publication in the history of the games media. Yet here I am writing its eulogy. And frankly, I'm all double-u tee eff.
Zoom Business is business, as they say, but seeing a 33-year-old publication closed is still hard to take. Particularly as it's not in the least bit lame, and it's still beloved by gamers across the globe. But here we are, and there it goes. Seemingly gone forever, since it looks like it's not going to be sold to a good home, where it could continue to forge its own history.
So that leaves us just with memories, and I certainly have plenty of those. I picked up the very first issue of CVG back in November of '81 as a kid who could barely believe his eyes. A magazine about the most awesome new thing that was emerging at the time: gaming. I read it from cover to cover. I used to look through each page and choose which game I'd buy if I had the money. I'd look at consoles and computers and make pretend purchases with different budgets. I couldn't afford a computer, but CVG was the second best thing to owning one.
In March of 1983 the magazine had a cover line, "Could You Be Our 1983 Arcade Champ?" Since I was rather handy at playing coin-ops, I thought I'd give it a go, and sent in my scores on Pac-Man, Asteroids and Defender. They were good enough to enable me to qualify, and went on to win the tournament. It was the proudest day of my life.
"CVG was responsible for giving me my start in the industry."
As someone who was keen on breaking into games journalism, I talked to the folks at CVG magazine, and ended up regularly writing tips for the magazine - which got me noticed elsewhere. I got a job as a games writer on ZZAP! 64 magazine because of that. Yep. CVG was responsible for giving me my start in the industry.
I had no idea that some four years later, I'd jump ship to my favorite magazine, and would end up editing it for a few years. I loved my time there: CVG's completely open editorial remit let us cover whatever we thought was interesting - which at that period was 16-bit microcomputers and the new emerging consoles.
ZoomThat period between 1988 and 1991 was perhaps one of the greatest eras of gaming, with a myriad of new consoles and hand-helds being launched, and of course tons of amazing games. The import scene was at its height, and even the arcades were booming again thanks to the likes of Street Fighter II.
I moved out of CVG along with a regular column called Mean Machines that covered the latest console games. It had become so popular, that we spun it into its own, highly successful magazine. Again, it was CVG that helped make that happen.
Since then, I've always been a reader of CVG. Initially in print form, and online, once it went digital. As something that had been a part of my life for almost four decades, I couldn't give it up.
But now, it appears we have to.
I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who's worked on the magazine over the years. I don't need to name you; you know who you are. You all contributed to something special. Something that was a fundamental part of the gaming business, and something that brought us some of the greatest and most interesting stories over the years, from consoles we weren't supposed to know about to games you really should.
It's been a wild, rollercoaster, historic 33 years. Thanks for everything.
Paul Davies
1995 - 2000
An explosion of colour, speed and exhilarating soundtracks to match; the era of CVG that I was a part of lived for this kind of excitement.
Games were vibrant and upbeat to lure players into the arcades, and instantly attract in 30-second TV slots for the home consoles. The magazines, of which there were plenty in the mid- to late-nineties, sought to convey the essence of an energized escape.
Zoom On CVG magazine from late 1995 to early 1998, the team was thrilled to be a part of this relatively new form of entertainment publishing. We were fans of Mean Machines in the UK, Gamepro and Diehard GameFAN from the US, and Famitsu from Japan. Somehow we'd wangled jobs on the inside, and with a gang mentality we fought for our share of the turf, to become part of the noise.
We were members of a fan club that had been handed the challenge of producing something close to our dream publication. We were, perhaps, a fanzine with a budget and industry support.
We didn't think twice about eating burgers paid for by publishers while we discussed how to show off X-MEN Children of The Atom, or taking a paid-for trip to Derby to see the new Tomb Raider. We were on a mission to push the best games around, and break down the fun of really playing them.
Our guiding lights were optimistic heroes and valiant fighters, daredevil drivers and indomitable explorers. Our private lives were spent in their company during evenings and weekends, our working hours dedicated to telling their stories in screenshots and not-so-many words.
"We were members of a fan club handed the challenge of producing our dream publication."
The magazine format required a big sell on the cover, and a flow of compelling content from start to end, so by design the end result was a guided tour frozen in time of our adventures until 4am on absolute deadline day.
It was games hype, unashamedly so. It was what had drawn us to our various roles, and the legacy we sincerely wished to leave. We gave you endless pages on Mario and NiGHTS, consecutive months of Tekken.
Our first sighting of SEGA arcade technology behind Virtua Fighter 3 was explained as though we had witnessed a living miracle; the appearance of Gouki in Super Street Fighter II Turbo an arcane chill. We printed love letters to readers' favourite games and didn't take the piss.
ZoomI was incredibly lucky to surround myself with such a bright-spirited and hard working team of surprising talent. That was my biggest contribution to what CVG magazine became for a short while - to recognise an opportunity for us all, and give every hour of my day toward holding it together.
A lot had changed in my professional life by the time I was handed another golden chance to honour the name of CVG: computerandvideogames.com. It had been called Game Online until that point, its miniscule team of three tucked away in a dark corner of the office floor, blazing a respectable trail.
As with the magazine, the three-man team that now included yours truly (after the original leader left for brighter pastures) were obsessive gamers driven by an industry that was clearly on the rise. PlaySation was dominant, with PS2 just around the corner. Microsoft was planning its first assault.
Things had 'gotten real'. But we remained playful about it. We had free reign to transform Game Online into something that we thought opened the bay doors for our daily megatons - such as Pac-Man unlocked in Ridge Racer V, or some super-secret we really shouldn't have shared.
We loved our games. We loved the industry. We loved our readers. We shared our truth.
It was the spirit of the thing that made CVG so special to me, the torch that we all carried. It was the real thing, the original spark that was born in 1981. A heritage to be proud of with its goal at the edge of a never-ending horizon: the celebration of computer and video games and the incredible ways that they entertain, inspire, encourage and unite people from all over the world from many different backgrounds and in all forms of communication. To extinguish this flame after so many years is very sad.
Ed Lomas
1995 - 1999
Computer & Video Games means a lot to me - my involvement with it were the most fun times of my life, and as my first job it's shaped my expectations about work. Basically, it's meant every job I've had since has been a disappointment.
CVG as a brand has always been bigger than whatever product it's currently sitting on. When I was an obsessive reader of games magazines in the early 90s I didn't like CVG so never bought it, but I knew it was an important magazine with a rich history. Everybody did.
Zoom When I managed to jammily wangle work on games mags in the mid-90s as a teenager, CVG was at a low point. It was struggling to stay relevant as consoles boomed and single-format and particularly the new official magazines were grabbing readers. When I got the opportunity to help put together a completely new version of CVG I felt we were doing a great thing, giving this sleeping giant a new lease of life and making it relevant again.
Our version of CVG focused on the games, pure and simple, and the fun we were having playing them. We made the magazine purely for ourselves in the hope there were others out there like us and when the frankly insane letters, pictures and competition entries started coming in we realised those nutters were gradually finding their way to the new CVG. The mental readers entertained us enormously and became a big part of the humour and energy of both the magazine and our office.
One thing that's stayed with me was a submission for the 'Melting Pot' section we used to run, where we'd get people to send in their game ideas complete with a hand-drawn screenshot. One nut-job sent in 'Pat Sharp's Mind-Blowing Sexual Fun House', based on the old 1990s kids TV show only with deranged, perverted games.
The final level was a go-kart race on motorised penises with the aim to drive them up Pat Sharp's arse. The supplied 'screenshot' showed the view from a camera inside Pat Sharp's rectum, looking back at a deranged, smiling child driving a big cock. We had this on the wall and it made me laugh every day for years. The memory of that picture still makes me laugh whenever I think about it, 16 years later.
"The final level was a go-kart race on motorised penises with the aim to drive them up Pat Sharp's arse."
We were - at least initially - left alone to do whatever we wanted with the magazine. Paul Davies had taken over as editor when I believe there was talk of shutting CVG down, so the bosses were happy for him to try anything.
We treated it like a fanzine: we played games all day long, stayed late in the office playing games then went out drinking (talking about games), drunkenly played games back at Tom Guise's flat until we passed out on the floor, then went to work the next day and did the same again. It was totally unprofessional but enormous fun, and the only way you could produce an obsessive magazine like that.
For the last week before each issue's deadline we'd be working until midnight every night, and we'd often have to pull all-nighters to finish the magazine. For the first relaunched issue we did in 1996 (issue 174) we got to 4am when the magazine had been due at the printers earlier in the day, and we hadn't even figured out what whole sections would be called or what they'd look like, let alone written them. That's why the bit at the back of the magazine was called 'New Games' - our brains were fried by then and we couldn't think of anything better.
ZoomWe had a couple of pages in the 'Freeplay' section to fill in the middle of the night and designer Tom Cox was bored of waiting for us to finish writing copy, so he went upstairs to Nintendo Magazine, stole a bunch of readers' drawings and made a two-page section he called 'Drawinz wot you dun', and invented a dog called Hunter who did turds on the worst pictures. It ended up being one of the most popular parts of the magazine.
The issue finally went to the printers - in a private taxi from London to Cornwall, as it was the only way we could send it so late - sometime the next afternoon. I broke down in tears. Tom Cox stormed out, cursing us for being so shit. This happened pretty much every issue yet still we'd spend the first few weeks of the next issue just playing games, then cramming all the work into the last week. It's what any true gamer would do given the opportunity though, right?
It got screwed up later when the magazine was doing well and management started to pay attention, and tried to make it more professional and have broader appeal. They brought in people who didn't know games to run it (actual comment: "The screenshots look blocky - why don't we have an artist draw the screenshots instead?") and they turned it into a load of crap so we all escaped as quickly as possible so as not to be associated with it.
It was a joy working on the magazine. I laughed so much. I played so many games. I made lifelong friends. And I'm really chuffed people still think back on the stuff we did fondly.
It's a tragedy CVG is being killed off. As well as current readers losing a site they enjoy, and staff losing their jobs, Britain is losing a treasured brand - the world's first and longest-running video game publication. It doesn't feel like it's theirs to kill - it's everybody's.
But hey, it's going. Goodbye CVG. I loved you like no other.
Steve Key
1995 - 2000
I have a stack of memories of CVG, nearly all of them fond and ultimately the team of people waiting for me when I joined help shaped my entire working career and made my time on the magazine one of the best jobs I'll probably ever have. Which makes the fact I'm writing this even sadder.
I grew up reading Mean Machines and CVG, so to work on them was pretty unbelievable looking back. Almost as unbelievable as what's happened now.
Zoom The lunchtime Quake games that incorporated nearly all of the people on the mags, as well as some of the management, were particularly memorable. Mainly for the kudos you got when 'The Boss was Ax-murdered by The Silencer' appeared on screen. Walking around a corner and finding their character running on the spot while facing a wall and unable to turn around thanks to the complete lack of gaming skills was a real treat.
As soon as it got to 12.55 you'd hear one machine blast out the 'tink tink tink, urrrrrrgggghhh' of a grenade kill on the intro screen and everyone would down tools for a Quake battle. Oh, The Silencer was my Quake moniker borrowed from the nickname given to an old Mafia hit man. Not the nicest, I know.
We also had a decent system for allowing those writers with the passion or knowledge on a particular type of game to always get them. For example I covered nearly every Resident Evil game after being utterly blown away by an imported Biohazard on PS1 and also managed to be fortunate enough to get most of the Zelda titles.
"We did very little for the first two weeks of the schedule other than play games"
That resulted in a strange press trip where Nintendo flew a group of journos out to a random village in Germany and effectively locked us in a room to play early code of the original Ocarina of Time for two days straight while women in lederhosen walked around.
Another personal highlight of mine was the Sega commercial I 'starred' in for the Saturn launch in Brazil. The concept for the advert was to have the UK, US and Japanese gaming champions all fly out to Brazil to star in TV ads and go on a mall tour playing challenges against random punters. The PR Man from Sega at the time was visiting the Official Sega Mag who we shared an office with at the time and was mentioning how much trouble they were having getting someone to go.
The actual UK gaming champion was Japanese so couldn't really represent the UK as the ad would have been strange having two Japanese champs. The chap he beat was about 10 and wanted to take his entire family and their pets. The next ones didn't have passports, couldn't go for numerous other reasons and I made an off-the-cuff remark about going if they got stuck.
Two weeks later I get a phone call saying I can go as they've got no other choice! About two weeks after that I was on the way to Rio. If you want to see the ad, it's here:
I could go on for pages of all the stuff we used to get up to - ultimately this was a dream job. Hard work, yes, lots of late nights but that was mainly down to the fact we did very little for the first two weeks of the schedule other than play games. The passion and knowledge on that team was immense and I'm so proud to have played a small part in it.
My parting shot - Paul Davies begged us to let him put a new Japanese phenomenon on the front cover. We laughed at him and said it was rubbish and would never work. That 'fad' was the original release of Tamagotchi and it went on to sell millions. He was and still is a genius.
Patrick Garratt
1999 - 2003
This is a bizarre thing to be asked to write, and I take no joy in it. Andy wanted me to put together some memories and anecdotes of my three years at CVG in less than 500 words, but the sentences came a little too easily. I'd need to write a book to tell this story, to do justice to CVG's history, its role in the games press over the years and its importance to me on a personal level. I had to stretch the word-count a little.
Zoom CVG gave me my second job. I started in 1999 as employee number three on game-online.com, after recommending in my interview that the site be closed because the URL was so awful. Rebranding it computerandvideogames.com and aligning it with CVG magazine was my idea, at least in part.
Steve Fulljames and a Scottish guy called Gus made up the rest of the team. On my first day, Paul Davies sent back assets from the PS2 reveal in Japan, and I clearly remember Alex Simmons (now the boss at IGN UK) squealing like at infant at the first next-gen PES screens. That office held a great passion for games.
We sat in the corner in the EMAP offices in Angel and I wrote news. We were an experiment. EMAP's bosses were committed to the internet, but no one knew how to make it work financially and the print guys were terrified. They wouldn't let us publish any of their content on the site. They wouldn't even put our URL on the cover of the magazine at first. We were regarded as much as an enemy as an opportunity.
"We were the frontline of games news in a world where games news barely existed."
We faced opposition for good reason: we cost (we didn't even carry ads in those days). But while it was true we drained the business, we had a fierce reputation for winning. Who knew? We did. Who was on the phone? We were. PR feared us, and I say that with no hint of exaggeration: we literally scared people.
We were the frontline of games news in a world where games news barely existed. Our day was a battle for exclusives, something shocking and entirely new to those entrenched in 30-day deadlines.
Zoom I remember running round the office to catch phone calls (we were far too poor for mobiles), and people laughing at me in disbelief. I was 27 years old. I was an early-stages alcoholic, and fresh from finishing a year with Colin "Gonzo" Campbell on FGN Online. I was borderline insane. CVG was hardcore.
We got the story - any story - regardless of cost. Gus quit soon after I joined, and Paul Davies left his job on CVG magazine to take over the site. I remember him repeatedly calling every Sony PR and leaving grunting noises on their answerphones because they wouldn't pick up.
I had a leaker inside Sega - these were the Dreamcast days - and once their PR called me on the verge of tears, his voice jelly, demanding I reveal my source.
I picked the phone up to Capcom once and the PR screamed, "What the fuck is that?" down the line. That was the first thing he said. I'd printed everything from a casual conversation and attributed it to a "source".
Recording people in face-to-face, off-the-record conversations with the Dictaphone hidden inside my jacket was no problem to me. I did whatever I liked. I didn't care. The only thing I could lose was my job, and I'd lost jobs before. My Walthamstow boxroom cost a pittance, and, regardless, I spent everything I earned on drink and drugs. Luckily, nobody ever fired me.
"I picked the phone up to Capcom once and the PR screamed, "What the f*** is that?"
Everything changed after Dennis Publishing bought all of EMAP's games properties. Paul left to work for Criterion, leaving me in charge temporarily, and the Dennis digital team rebuilt CVG from the ground up. I was eventually appointed deputy editor of the relaunch.
Johnny Minkley had joined the site from the magazine at that point, thus beginning some of the most ridiculous years of my entire life. I finally left (a broken man) to launch Xbox World for Computec, but when I returned to the internet with Eurogamer a year later, we joined a vicious fight with CVG that peaked in the early years of VG247, and, in many ways, defined a new direction for commercial British games sites as they realigned to focus on news.
CVG means a lot to me, just as it has to the history of online games journalism. I could go on for hours, but that, in heartbreaking brevity, is my story. CVG has been part of my professional life for as long as I've had a professional life.
Whatever you may think of it, CVG is an indelible element of video gaming culture, and its closure is an event for which we should feel no cosy glow of reminiscence, nor any kind of schadenfreude, but rather the cold slap of shame. The culling of this publication has left us poorer, and I say this as a close competitor.
CVG is lost, and it shall be forever more. Goodbye, old friend. And thank you.
Tim Ingham
2009 - 2011
CVG always thrived on a bunker mentality. But what a bunker. I've never laughed and argued as much as I did in that office. The people I was lucky enough to work with didn't just love games, they lived games.
Zoom It's weird to think now just how brilliant we were at convincing each other that talents on rival publications who shared those exact characteristics were somehow to be considered 'the enemy'. But it led to some fantastic, ingenious journalism. Some of it long-form, some of it quick and dirty. None of it ever, ever boring.
It's also important to say how much I loved that CVG's forums were plagued with so little of the 'faggot'-riddled, mean spirited nonsense that plagued bigger US sites.
"I have missed CVG greatly every day since my departure"
Commenters were regularly barbed but also funny and fuelled by an overwhelming passion and an emboldening sense of real community. Dickheads were unceremoniously rounded on.
How strange and sorry to see the wider games press fractured and nobbled by accusations of cronyism with corporate entities in recent months - we enjoyed it most when the opposite was unfurling!
Its closure is a great surprise and a devastating waste of talent. I have missed CVG greatly every day since my departure. Now everyone who ever enjoyed it will, tragically, empathise with that feeling. RIP.
