INTO THE FUTURE
2015-2019
We opened 2015 with a brand-new addition to the team, production editor Drew Sleep, and spent much of the year trying some new things with our covers RG
– the NES cartridge design of 139, Gaming’s Greatest Disasters in RG 141 and the Japanese text of Space Harrier for RG 145 all spring to mind. RG 150 capped off the year, an arduous issue in which we tried to
‘go big’ with an enormous cover feature and big names to back it up.
RG 155 brought two new faces to the team, with Croc enthusiast Sam Ribbits taking over as designer. Luke Albigés also joined us as associate editor for seven issues, as the result of a tumultuous period in which both his former mags, Play and X-one, were closed within months of one another. Another big shock was in store just weeks later when we learned that Imagine Publishing was to be bought by Future – something that we found out on social media before work, and I personally found out during a week off.
We were trepidatious about the deal, and we weren’t the only ones – I’ll never forget some of the worried comments from readers when the deal was approved, lamenting the past losses of mags like PC Zone. To be frank, we felt that Retro Gamer was probably safe in the short term since Future didn’t have a direct equivalent, but we didn’t know what our new working relationships would be like. What’s more, Future had been struggling financially only a couple of years prior, resulting in the closure of CVG and all the layoffs that came with that.
Thankfully, Future’s business was at the beginning of a major turnaround, and it quickly became apparent that our new colleagues cared about Retro Gamer just as much as we did. While circumstances meant that our brief but entertaining foray into Youtube became impractical to continue, the majority of changes were very positive – particularly the freedom to give one cover idea our full attention from the start, which resulted in fewer last-minute changes and less stress. Better yet, we got to do much more in the way of extra gifts, from Super Play issue 48 to sticker sheets and even music CDS.
The result was that Retro Gamer not only survived but thrived, and at the end of 2018 we actually won the Magazine Of The Year award at Future’s annual conference (see the image below). Sam moved on to pastures new soon after, with our current group art director Woz Brown taking the reins briefly from RG 192. Art Editor Andy Salter joined the crew in RG 196, giving him the task of laying out RG 200 – a ridiculously ambitious issue that we worked on until 2:30am, with poor Drew declaring, “My surname is ironic.”
RG 201’s cover featured the newly announced Analogue Pocket, a testament to the ever-changing nature of retro gaming. Little did we know that by the time the console finally arrived in 2021, the process of making Retro Gamer would have gone through drastic changes too.