THE IMAGINE PUBLISHING ERA
2005-2009
Although it was 19 years ago, I can still remember the first day I started working on Retro Gamer like it was yesterday.
It was a mixture of excitement and trepidation – excitement because it was the chance to take a popular magazine and apply my own spin to it, trepidation because I’d never run a magazine before.
We had roughly two weeks to get that first issue out before Christmas 2005 and it was a tricky one, requiring lots of extremely late nights and plenty of support. Mark Kendrick, Imagine’s creative director, redesigned the magazine and we would spend a lot of time talking about what it was like for him working on the Newsfield mags, which certainly made that tight deadline a lot less stressful.
There were obviously lots of discussions about what the magazine would and wouldn’t be, what was actually considered retro and whether we’d keep making the coverdiscs. That first issue saw everyone getting involved, from Damian Butt, Imagine’s managing director, to Simon Phillips, who had mentored me when I was on games™ and was now overseeing Imagine’s videogame department. There was a real sense that everyone wanted Retro Gamer to succeed.
The support from readers was incredible during this period – they quickly found the forum before we officially launched it and had nothing but kind things to say at the early events I attended. Issue 19 certainly wasn’t perfect – there are some editorial howlers in there due to the lack of time and a full-time production editor – but it was wonderful seeing it on shelves again. It was particularly nice getting the late Archer Maclean as a columnist, as I loved playing his games as a youngster.
Some readers weren’t happy with the magazine shining a bigger spotlight on games and consoles in those early years, as the Live Publishing era had focussed more on hardware and home computers, but the change made perfect sense to everyone at Imagine – the magazine is called Retro Gamer after all.
Those early years on RG were a fusion of fun and frustration as I got to grips with managing both a magazine and a team for the first time. Sarah Bellman joined as senior designer from RG
21, while John Szczepaniak’s tenure as the mag’s staff writer started on RG 29. We managed to secure plenty of writers from the Live Publishing era of the mag, many of whom still write for RG today. We also had a range of great production editors working behind the scenes, including
Luke Smith, Amy Squibb, Jon White and Daniel Peel – we even had Phil King from the legendary Newsfield magazines subbing for us at one point. Cover meetings could be incredibly challenging at times and the hours could be long (particularly on deadlines, when finishing work past midnight wasn’t unusual), but I was doing my dream job and found the pros would always outweigh the cons.
New team members joined, with Stuart Hunt taking over from John from RG 42 and Stephen Williams replacing Sarah from RG 49. I made a joke in a cover meeting once saying that I’d be surprised if the magazine lasted for more than 35 issues because we’d run out of things to write about. I’m delighted to have been proven wrong.