A couple of pages past I made a post where I go on about the Computer & Video Games mag, since it's finally shutting down after 33 years. I mentioned Julian "JAZ" Rignall and how he changed (or damaged) the mag during his stint as Editor, and how C+VG was never really a thing after that.
Well...I thought it would be good to check further on that - to see how much of it is truth and how much of it is my personal bias obscuring facts, and trying to fill in some of those holes that I mentioned. I figured the best way to do that would be to dig up the Retro Gamer mags that covered the C+VG, as well as check his Wikipedia page. Retro Gamer #106 has JAZ "in the chair" as they call it, where he goes over his career in gaming in standard interview style. It's a very interesting read as it sheds good light on a few things.
First thing first: JAZ isn't a journalist, or anything close to that. He's a gamer, through and through. He first rose to fame competing in "video championships", holding a couple of UK and World records for high scores, then getting his big break by winning the 1983 C+VG Championship. He used that to get his foot in the door by doing the Hints & Tips section at C+VG and at the Personal Computer Games magazine. In 1985 JAZ is invited to join the launch team for Zzap!64, a mag that focused only on the Commodore 64. Problem was, JAZ didn't own (nor had he touched) a C-64, so he bullshitted himself into a job as a staff writer and later became the editor of the mag. (Nice one, JAZ.) The RG interview mentions how the Zzap!64 team's approach to "gaming journalism" was more of "stream of consciousness", rather than anything resembling normal journalism - plus doing whatever drugs they could score. He recalls one time where Jeff Minter (you know, llamas?) came into the office and they all got totally baked and JAZ lay under his desk staring up at the underside while Minter got on the computers and mucked with all the articles they had written for the mag. Ladies and gentlemen, meet "Gaming journalism" 30 years ago. ;-)
In 1988 JAZ moves over to C+VG, probably as a staff writer. That's also where I first come in as a reader, first with only one issue in the autumn, but then another issue in the spring of '89 and then on a monthly basis shortly after that. In the spring of '89 issue JAZ has already made Deputy Editor, and in the same issue that I became a monthly subscriber he's made Editor, and right off the bat the mag itself connects him with consoles over home computers.
This is where I dug up the issues in question and had a look at things.
The '88 issue is at least 50% home computer reviews. The "big" reviews get colour pages but most of them are b/w. Then there's the Adventure Zone, a surprisingly large section which reviews a few adventure games and features not only hints, but even an adventure hotline to call! Then there's a section about movies (Big Screen), another about roleplay stuff (Fantasy Role Playing), then an arcade section and finally, almost at the very back, a section called "Mean Machines", which focuses on the consoles - two pages about some of the big titles on the NES! (Oddly enough, JAZ isn't involved there.) Except for those two pages, there's not one peep about consoles anywhere in the mag.
The '89 issue features a similar division - there are more colour pages and home computers still get the majority, but the Adventure Gaming section seems to have grown at the cost of the Big Screen section, while the console section - still at the back - has grown to encompass 3 pages (not counting the advertisements, which are mostly lists of retailers in the UK) but it's what comes next that surprised me a bit - there's a "Mean Machines" section for the consoles, and then a completely seperate PC Engine section after that, a whoppin' 5 pages! (Again, not counting advertisements). And remember, the PC Engine has no proper launch in the UK, and wasn't a supported platform there. That's a pretty interesting push...but then again, C+VG would later feature extensive coverage on the Konix. (Anyone remember that?)
(Another bit of interesting gaming journalism: The '89 issue featured the Weird Dreams game on the cover, and it's the opening review in the mag, yet the game only gets a 59% rating. Meanwhile Populous isn't even advertised anywhere and gets the "Game of the month" award and a 96% rating. Can you imagine something like that happening in today's gaming media environment?)
Then there's the issue where JAZ has risen to become Editor of C+VG. The first big news item is about Atari's new console, and there's a ribbon running down the right-hand page of that article where the mag is running an ad to win a PC Engine. Later on, the consoles get full-colour ads, spread out over whole pages. The Hints & Tips section now features stuff for the consoles, and the High Scores section (people would mail in their high scores for various titles) open up with the consoles. The Mean Machines section is now 6 pages (not counting ads) and is no longer the last section of the mag (that's the Previews section - upcoming titles). The Adventure gaming section is still there, but it won't be for much longer...
So yeah...I think it's pretty obvious that JAZ had a big influence in bringing the consoles to C+VG. But back to the RG interview, when JAZ is asked about the changes he brought to C+VG, he did so because he immediately saw that the publisher (EMAP, which were pretty big at the time) would run the magazine into the ground. To quote the man:
JAZ said:
It was so backwards! That was where I cut my teeth on political and corporate maneuvering, because my options were either to keep doing things like they'd always been done at EMAP or try to find a way to slowly but surely get my own way.
What helped me in that regard was that C+VG had begun to lose momentum. It was a shitty magazine when I joined it, to be honest, very 'by the numbers' and completely lacking personality. So I was able to use that as leverage to bring in change, hire new people and get what I wanted. EMAP got sick of what was going on because it was a very valuable magazine; it had a big circulation and was bringing in a lot of money, and there was this big concern that it was going to go tits-up. I came in and had these endless ideas of what to do, that there were these new machines coming out called consoles, and that we couldn't just keep banging on about C-64s and Spectrums - things were really changing, and we had to lead that change.
To give an idea of how backwards EMAP was, he moved over from Zzap!64 where they had rudimentary PCs and basic word processors and had to fiddle with typesets and such themselves to get the mag out the door, to C+VG where he suddenly had to join the National Union of Journalists and was assigned a typewriter. It doesn't take a genius to see that he was right. JAZ saw that the "emerging consoles from Japan" were going to be the big thing, and the 8-bit home computers would soon fade into obscurity, and made changes to the mag accordingly. That still doesn't explain the garish colours that sometimes were used, nor the Yob character who handled the mail.
In 1990 JAZ saw that there was a market for a seperate console magazine, named "Mean Machines" after the console section in C+VG. The first issue was included free with C+VG (I still have my copy) and it focused on the "big" consoles of the time, plus the GX4000. (That would soon be replaced by the SNES.) One thing that Mean Machines (and C+VG) did that was "off" was that they would review imports of various console titles, months before they would be released in the UK (or the US for that matter). This is best shown in their review of Zero Wing - there's not a single word about the intro, which today is by far the most famous thing about that game in particular.
And the reason I previously said that I recalled Mean Machines only ran for a year or two? Because it did, but instead of going under it split into two magazines - one for the Sega consoles and one for the Nintendo consoles. That came after I cancelled my C+VG subscription, so I missed out on all that. As for JAZ, he left EMAP in 1993 because he realized that despite his changes and efforts, the magazines under his command were getting stale. It wasn't like he would be out of a job - he was a regular guest on various TV shows (like GameMaster) to talk about games and reviewing them. He went to the US to work with Virgin Interactive where he spent most of the time 'banging his head against the wall' because that was his first real experience with a large corporation. By the time VIE was bought by Electronic Arts, JAZ moved to San Francisco to try to further his career at IGN. Considering he's credited with making IGN into the "powerhouse of online networking" that it is/was, I'd say that he was successful.
So in conclusion, it seems that I was mostly full of personal bias. While the consoles were a non-entity to me and I didn't mind their addition in the mag, there was a larger plan at work and I was part of the "old dinosaurs" that were about to go extinct. But there's another RG interview with former C+VG staff that gives a different opinion - I'll try to dig that up and post another Wall o' Text.