FAVOURITE FEATURES
The team shares its most memorable magazine moments
Since we’re celebrating our 20th anniversary, we thought we’d take another chance to be just a wee bit self-indulgent and celebrate some of the best work to have appeared in Retro Gamer – as well as remembering some of the tougher tasks we’ve crossed paths with.
NICK
It’s not an easy question since we’ve got over 250 issues to choose from, but what are some of your favourite Retro Gamer features?
DARRAN
If we’re talking cover features
I’d probably pick the recent Rare article we did for issue 250. Looking back at older articles, Craig Grannell’s Pac-man Making Of from RG 61 is one of my personal favourites.
TIM
If we’re not talking cover features, then it’s the A Tribute To ones listing loads of games with developers’ recollections on most of the games. It’s a neat package of information and nostalgia.
DARRAN
Those A Tribute To articles have proven to be really popular. It debuted with a banger as well in the form of Treasure.
NICK
After playing the Konix Multisystem emulator on
Llamasoft: A Jeff Minter Story recently, I was reminded of how much I enjoyed the feature on the console way back in RG 8. I’d never heard of it before and the story was fascinating.
DARRAN
Agreed, that Konix feature was excellent. John Szczepaniak also did a really interesting article on the Starflight games, which I think ran across two issues. One of the things I loved about those early issues is that it covered a lot of home computer stuff that I had missed as I embraced consoles early.
NICK
I always liked John’s features that dug into more obscure territory. I remember Gaming Illuminati in issue 35, mostly because one interviewee claimed to have bought guns over a Sonic X-treme prototype. Sonic fans can be a bit much, but… really?
DARRAN
Ah yes, I remember John being rather proud of that article. Another two-parter. So Tim, as a relative newcomer to the mag (three years now), what do you look for in a good Retro Gamer article?
TIM
It’s always fascinating to see what’s going to be in a new issue. There’s usually something I’ve either played when I was wee, or reviewed when I was on other magazines back in the day. Or whatever insane quote from me that Nick dredges up for Back To The Noughties. So, I left games journalism in 2009 to get a master’s degree (which either means I’m dead smart, or it’s a damning indictment on the education system), but came back to mags in 2018 after working on newspapers. So what’d I miss? Were there any features that were incredibly difficult to do?
NICK
One of the earliest ones I did, The Scariest Moments Of All Time, was a different kind of
It’s always fascinating to see what’s going to be in a new issue TIM EMPEY
nightmare to what I expected. Horror games don’t tend to have cheats that let you skip to specific sections, so getting all the screenshots I needed was a total pig of a job.
DARRAN
Ah yes, I remember that one, Nick. Getting access to Japanese developers can be tough, but it’s certainly become a lot easier for us in recent years. Difficult issues in the past have often been due to planned covers changing for one reason or another, leaving us scrambling for something else. Our Icarus moment was definitely RG 200. We flew way too close to the sun for that particular issue.
NICK
Yeah, the concept of packing a condensed history of games into one issue was crazy.
What nearly broke us was the timeline running along the bottom of the pages, we were up gone midnight checking and re-checking that all the dates were in order.
TIM
Ah yes, RG 200 (which I still haven’t got a copy of yet), there was a really good cover on that one. Did it win any intercompany award?
DARRAN
Funny story, Tim. There used to be these in-house competitions where the best-selling or bestdesigned covers would win some vouchers. We felt we were shoeins for that particular issue but we lost out to a bag of chips.
NICK
They didn’t even have any ketchup on them. Utterly shameful, really.
DARRAN
To be fair, I did think they looked incredibly tasty. So Tim, as a recent member of the mag what new articles have you enjoyed?
TIM
The Evolution Of The Last Ninja. My brother and I played those a lot on the C64, so it was brilliant to see the screens and read the interviews. I took a photo to show my brother hoping he’d buy the mag. But he didn’t, bah!
DARRAN
We’ve had a lot of good The Evolution Of features, and many of them have been by Rory Milne. I think The Evolution Of series is a good example of us finding a new way to tell an old story. What do you think, Nick?
NICK
Yeah, I’ve always liked them and they’ve given us some really cool covers, like Wipeout recently. I also like the very offbeat features, like Lewis Packwood’s piece on the retailer Special Reserve or Graeme Mason’s piece Gaming Obsessions.
DARRAN
That’s one of the cool things about receiving pitches, you never quite know what you’re going to get. And that’s probably one of the reasons we’re still around. There’s always something interesting to read in the mag and sometimes I don’t even mention Strider.