PC ZONE LIVES

I haven’t read through enough issues since PC Zone closed to be too embarrassed about my writing from back in the day. However, there are a couple of articles that cause me to wince whenever their pages flick by in my rapidly failing and fusty memory.

One is the issue #112 cover review for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, where I indulged in a reprehensible spot of fat-shaming and which was a step beyond the usual PC Zone modus operandi of spitting out barbed jokes at others’ expense. I can’t even use the flimsy defence that was “harmless banter”, since I recall being uncomfortable with the offending line as soon as it was published. Sorry Lisa. 

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The other article that causes the anus of my soul to pucker up whenever it’s recalled is one I didn’t actually write, but rather contributed to by way of a moment of madness that happened to be recorded, transcribed and printed in the May 1999 issue.

I was with then-editor Chris Anderson, Paul “Mallo” Mallinson, “Dear” Keith Pullin, and Paul “Prezzer” Presley and we were encamped in The Playing Fields1, a gaming bar close to the Bolsover Street office. Being a little quieter and better lit, it had taken over from the pub as the place where where we used to clock off early to discus the merits of various games for our early Supertest features. On this occasion the subject was adventure games.

As was tradition, the conversation kicked off during work hours, but with it being towards the end of the day and the point where heavy drinking was considered necessary to get the best copy, I was well on my way to being inebriated. Thus, having downed a few pints and saying very little of substance about Alone in the Dark, Blade Runner and various LucasArts adventures, we alighted on the final nominee, Discworld 2, probably the one game among them that I had the least experience of playing. Inevitably the mention of Terry Pratchett came up and in my eagerness to relay an encounter with the author by way of ingratiating myself with the baying Zone readership, my fat mouth blurted out “I hate you, your books and your games”.

We’ll get to where that outburst came from in a bit. In the meantime, I think you’ll agree that, even in the context of an alcohol-fuelled PC Zone Supertest and regardless of the provocation, it was a dick thing to say.

I hope I said a few other things that weren’t quite so idiotic, but they didn’t make it into the feature so I’ll never know. Going by what was published, I managed to hold my tongue for the duration of the discussion, but as a parting shot I delivered a final couplet before the proverbial tape ran out: “The man is a tit and his work is shit” – referring of course to one of the most beloved literary figures in human history; one that has sold 85 million books during and beyond a prolific career that shows no signs of abating.

I very much came to regret that boneheaded remark, although not for some time afterwards. I have a vague memory of Mallo calling me up after he’d transcribed the evening’s ramblings and asking if I was ok with that quote being used. True to the PC Zone ethos of dimly not caring much about what was said in the haze of the moment, I likely shrugged indifference and didn’t give it another thought. It’s not like the target of my ire would ever read it, I surely reasoned. Best-selling authors must have better things to be doing than reading about how they are perceived by computer game hacks with teeny-weeny axes to grind.

But, of course, my impulsive and gratuitous utterances came back to haunt me. Not too long afterwards, in fact, when a certain Miss Rhianna Pratchett, only daughter of Terry, applied to become PC Zone’s first editorial assistant. 

Of the job interview that followed I don’t remember much detail, aside from Rhianna being very polite, knowledgeable (especially on the subject of Diablo 2), confident, dressed in black (of course) and, it seemed, oblivious to my published fulmination a year or so previous.

I do recall the conversation shortly afterwards, between myself and editor Dave Woods, about which of the three candidates we’d interviewed was most suitable for the job. All being equal – which they weren’t, Rhianna was the standout candidate – Dave quite rightly thought it high time PC Zone had a female on the editorial team and was particularly taken with them being the daughter of Britain’s best-selling author at the time.

As you might imagine I wasn’t quite so enthusiastic. I’m not the enthusiastic type for one thing. For another, there was a lot of talk during the interview about beardy-weirdy RPGs and very little on the much more important subject of FPSs. Thus I might have muttered something about Rhianna maybe not seeming “PC Zone enough”, which would’ve been a bit rich considering I’d turned up for my own interview wearing a suit and tie and probably didn’t mention shooters at all.

Since reading Tom Bramwell’s 2014 Eurogamer editorial “I am sexist”, I’ve often wondered if I had a problem with Rhianna joining the team; not with Rhianna specifically (not beyond the issue of having to explain my Supertest outburst, anyway), but purely on the basis that she was a woman.

Despite the fact that throughout PC Zone’s history there was a largely female production team, from the magazine’s launch in 1993 until Rhianna was hired in early in 2001 – for close to half the life of the magazine – PC Zone’s entire editorial team was male. Consequently for eight years the people that discussed and decided content, tone, and, of course, who would be writing what in each issue, were blokes. It also meant that most of the freelance writers were men.2

I do think therefore that there was an implicit sense that PC Zone’s identity was bound up in low-level lad culture, even if we were sometimes unaware or ignorant and have since tried to distance ourselves from it. If I’m honest with myself, like letting the girl into the treehouse, I perhaps feared that Rhianna being part of the team would cause us to temper our behaviour, which in turn would dilute was PC Zone was about. In hindsight - and as this article illuminates – it wouldn’t have been a bad thing if it had. In the end it didn’t, and, looking back, it’s a huge regret that we didn’t realise sooner that having more women on the team would not only have made PC Zone better and more inclusive, but likely more successful as well.

So, while I didn’t have a problem with Rhianna joining our editorial clique on merit, I most certainly did on the basis that I might soon have to explain to the beloved only child of the nation’s favourite writer why I’d been so disparaging about him in print.

Briefly it seemed an option to keep quiet in the hope that the offending article would never be unearthed, until it was announced to the office that Rhianna would be joining the team, at which point PC Zone’s ever-tactful disk editor Dan Emery slipped a copy of issue #76 on my desk, open at page 124.

“Good luck explaining that,” he chuckled from within a cloud of cigarette smoke that then bobbed towards the kitchen.

“Fuck.”

In the end Rhianna was very gracious, but then she had no choice, really, given that it was her first week on the job and here was her immediate boss summoning her to his desk to explain something she was in no position to get incensed about. She accepted my apology with a slightly bemused look, and seemed to understand my reasoning, in spite of the fact I bumbled my way through an explanation, which should’ve – but I’m quite sure didn’t – go a little something like this:

Somewhere around late 1993 or early 1994 and fresh from university, I was working in WHSmith in Brent Cross in north London, where Terry Pratchett came one day to sign copies of his latest book for the assembled fans – of which there were many hundreds.

Despite being a lowly shop assistant at the time (three years out from joining PC Zone), I was deemed to have done a decent job of looking after Leonard Nimoy3 a couple of weeks previously (lovely guy) and Margaret Thatcher a few weeks before that (very pleasant actually, despite being evil), so was entrusted with shadowing Mr. Pratchett and providing for his every desire. This amounted to rather gruff demands for water, to stop asking if he wanted anything, and later, before he left, directions to the staff toilets.

Upon fulfilling the final duty I figured I’d wait for him to come back out, thinking he might need guiding to the exit. It’s fair to say he wasn’t too pleased to see me when he emerged a couple of minutes later. “What are you doing?” he charged more in frustration than in anger, but which I took to be the latter. He clearly wanted to GTFO, which was understandable given how packed and chaotic the store had been that Saturday afternoon. It never occurred to me that he might have been to the store before – it was WH Smith’s flagship location after all – and that he didn’t need me to be able to retrace his steps.

It’s fair to say that our brief exchanges didn’t endear Terry Pratchett to me in the slightest. Which was fine. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s not like I was a fan of his books. (I’d bought The Colour of Magic as a young teenager and couldn’t get on with it at all). And so, I surmised him to be generally unpleasant and a curmudgeon, in spite of his fine hat. Of course, it was almost certainly the case that he was just having a bad day – made worse by an obsequious yet absent-minded little shit getting in his way and following him about.

Rhianna explained as much, when, a few days into the PC Zone job, she came into the office one morning, took me aside and soberly offered a belated apology on behalf of her father. It was of course unnecessary and had the effect of making me feel even worse about my outburst than I had before, since now it was beyond doubt that Terry Pratchett had read what I’d said about him and yet he was the one compelled to say sorry. In spite of that, we agreed to draw a line under the whole thing and, on pain of awkwardness, endeavour to not speak of it again. And in the 20-odd years since, we’ve managed to do just that.

That was until it almost came up it in the latest episode of the podcast. There’s an oblique reference just before the five-minute mark, but we didn’t go any further in the end. Perhaps we should have done and I needn’t have written all this.

“The man is a tit and his work is shit.”

I’m still haunted and ashamed by those words. I suppose they’re my equivalent of the Tweet that’s posted in a moment of late night drunkenness that can never be fully scrubbed from the internet. In those terms I’m not the worst culprit and, for sure, the Pratchetts have faced more substantive criticisms and put up with worse behaviour since, but I can’t help but be reminded of my words every time I read mention of Terry or his books, or increasingly the fine efforts of Rhianna in an industry that we share. 

My only hope for a merciful release is that, when my time comes, Death might shepherd me to where Terry Pratchett is waiting to share a frothing pint and – after a final apology – to discuss the greatest adventure games ever made. As long as Discworld isn’t among them, or I’ve had by then the chance to properly play it, we should be ok.

Previously on PC Zone Lives… Daikatana: When PC Zone make John Romero a pitch

The Playing Fields went out of business in 2002, around the time that Supertests became less about drinking and more about dressing up; which was a very good thing for Supertests, but not for The Playing Fields.

Beyond the very occasional freelance contributions of Teresa Maughan and Amaya Lopez (both veterans of Zero magazine, which had a much more diverse team and outlook), I can only recall one other female freelancer writing for PC Zone during my time on the team. The fact that her name eludes me and she would only have written a handful of reviews is suitably damning.

Nimoy was in the UK to promote his autobiography I am Spock, which the internet says was published in October 1995 – which is odd because I’d moved on to other things by then. Anyway, during a break in signings, Nimoy asked me to go over to Our Price on the other side of Brent Cross to see if they had any of his albums in stock. Highly Illogical had recently been rereleased on CD, which, I assume, he wanted a copy of. If he just wanted rid of me, he did a fine job of not letting it show.

'Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.'

These were not, as PC Zone's then-editor Dave Woods acknowledged, 'the words that John Romero would want to see adorning the start of the first review of the full version of Daikatana'.

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It was the early summer of the year 2000 and the game had finally been released. The largely negative appraisals it received were a fitting end point to a long and sorry tale that had once begun in a blaze of hype and excitement, especially in the pages of PC Zone.

Zone had been one of Doom's most enthusiastic ongoing champions, while id Software's follow-up, Quake, was the recipient of one of its more effusive appraisals, a 16-page magnum opus in Issue 43 (October 1996) by the magazine's resident FPS expert, the überfragmeister himself, David McCandless. (Yes, it was the '96%: fucking brilliant' one – you remember).

Quake, though, was John Romero's last contribution to id. During its development, he had clashed with fellow co-founder John Carmack, and upon its completion left the company to strike out on his own. Despite the evident excitement about Quake, attention soon focused on the phalanx of other first-person action games on the horizon: what would be next?

‘I beg your pardon, sir, you’re about to make me your what?’

Well, Quake II, obviously, the announcement of which soon followed in the pages of Zone a couple of months later. The previous month, Issue 44 (November 1996) had featured an update on two of Quake's one-time rivals: Prey, from 3D Realms, whose rumoured demise was poo-pooed as a 'speed bump' and 'minor setback' by George Broussard; and Epic's Unreal, the subject of slightly more enthusiastic and excitable speculation, although still acknowledged as 'an engine without a game'.

Both were expected to be released at some point in 1997, a target that Unreal missed by a year or so, while Prey didn't see the light of day until 2006. (And we haven't even mentioned 3D Realms' other big FPS, the continuing adventures of the big blonde guy who lost out to Quake in ‘96, which is a whole other story). 

Daikatana, then, clearly wasn't the only big-name game to suffer significant release-date slippage, so it seems in some ways slightly unfair that its name, and that of its creator, became so synonymous with delay and disappointment. However, it could also be argued that Romero hardly helped himself, and not just by signing off on that notorious advertising campaign advising potential purchasers of the game that he would make them his 'bitch', but also by cultivating a growing reputation for Hollywood-style arrogance and hubris. 

(As an aside, this writer could find no evidence of the notorious ad in the pages of Zone, although it's entirely possible that it was lost amongst a mass of equally awful but long-forgotten campaigns, such as the use of a leather-clad model to promote the game FX Fighter Turbo ('fancy trying one of your special moves on me?') or a promo for Broken Sword II (which, let's not forget, was a point-and-click adventure game starring a mild-mannered American tourist) showing a woman sticking her tongue in a man's ear. Throw in multiple ads for Dennis Publishing lads-mags Maxim and Escape, the latter featuring the frankly harrowing promise of seduction tips from Peter Stringfellow, and you'll perhaps forgive me for missing a red page with a slightly rude phrase written in the middle).

Willy Wonka’s LSD Factory

The June 1997 edition of Zone (Issue 51) featured the first mention of Romero's new studio, Ion Storm, and the initial crop of games to be released, including Daikatana, fellow ex-id man Tom Hall's Anachronox, and a real-time strategy game from Todd Porter called Stranded, which never saw the light of day. According to the piece, 'Both EIDOS and Ion Storm insist that Daikatana's pre-Christmas release date is "totally realistic", and there's even a chance that it may be released before Quake 2 and Unreal.'

The following month's issue (52) featured an interview with Ion Storm and what Zone called a 'first look' at the game, which amounted to a couple of bits of concept art, and a promise of a full preview to follow. The interview, meanwhile, was conducted by David McCandless, and is of a type that was entirely in line with similar pieces in music magazines of the day – i.e. spend a day with the interviewee/s and get a bit wasted – but would no doubt now prompt nine-hour reaction videos from outraged YouTubers wanging on about corruption and collusion. 

Unsurprisingly light on detail, save for the fact that the game will use the Quake engine, it's a whirlwind of drunken boasting across multiple locations, with Romero throwing around lots of numbers relating to weapons, levels, polygons and frame rates, while CEO Mike Wilson claims that their Dallas offices are 'the Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory of Gaming', and feature 'Oompa Loompas' and 'LSD dispensers in the hall'.

Towards the end of the piece, though, after Romero has elaborated on the concept of a deathmatch game known as a 'Milk Match' ('whoever loses has to drink some milk out of our jug of milk which has been sitting there for five months... [it] comes out as yellow blocks like cheesecake') and the other members of Ion Storm have spoken a little about their projects (with Todd Porter’s aforementioned RTS Stranded now referred to – somewhat confusingly – as Romora), there is some insight on what he wants Daikatana to be: 'The one-player game [in Quake] really wasn't that great. I knew Doom was going to be the biggest game ever. Just like I know Daikatana is going to be bigger.' 

A two-part preview across Zones 53 and 54 (which included some actual screenshots) elaborated a little further, and established some of the basic principles of the single-player experience that remained in the final version of the game: the protagonist, Hiro Miyamoto (the concept art for whom, the piece notes, bears 'an uncanny resemblance to John Romero') and two sidekicks, Mikiko Ebihara and Superfly Johnson, go on a time-travelling quest to retrieve the titular Daikatana (which literally means 'big sword' in Japanese), with each of the four episodes set in a different time period, including escapades in Ancient Greece and the Dark Ages. 

Still, such details have to be picked out of an otherwise chaotic back-and-forth with Romero, during which a lot of the focus seems to be on the multiplayer aspect of the game. The second part of the preview confirms that Ion Storm's offices in the swanky Texas Commerce Tower are more or less as described, LSD dispensers notwithstanding: 'Every desk has... two Pentium 200s with 64Mb of RAM (minimum) with 21-inch monitors. Every section has its own snackbox (contents: popcorn, Opal Fruits, Hershey bars, and other healthy stuff). There are two fridges, containing an endless supply of every soft drink imaginable. There's a fussball table. A table tennis, sorry, “ping pong” table.' An intention to move to the penthouse floor of the building, and fill it with more 'cool shit' is also discussed. 

And what about the game? Well, hidden away down at the bottom of the page of Part 2 is a note that quietly acknowledges Daikatana's slightly underwhelming showing at 1997's E3 and that some of the team have taken the criticism to heart. The mixed reaction is put down to an early (20% complete) build featuring standard VGA graphics, which fail to capture the imagination in a world where early 3D acceleration is increasingly starting to dominate.

Macca, now going by the name 'UberGibKing', is unconcerned: 'Those in the know judge games of design and concept.'

'We know it's going to be great,' says Romero.

A couple of biros and a bit of paper

With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to say that anyone could have seen Ion Storm's downfall coming. In the movie version of the story, this is where our hero gets too big for his boots, spends all his money, and focuses on the wrong things.

At the time, though, John Romero was a guy who had made Doom, and then Quake: who would have bet against him? (Plus, it's also worth pointing out, he was only 29 years old when he started Ion Storm, and if you're anything like me, the major financial decisions in your life at that time would have been whether to draw out cash on your credit card to pay for a taxi because you fell asleep on a train on the way home from the pub).

It probably didn't help that Romero's ex-colleagues took the complete opposite approach when it came to the press. Macca’s interview with John Carmack in Issue 55 (October 1997) is (both figuratively and literally) a relatively sober affair: there is an absence of any ‘cool shit’ in his office, which is described as 'spartan... six workstations sit humming on a row of desks. A couple of biros and a bit of paper can be seen.' 

Moreover, Carmack's understated nature belies a steely confidence bordering on arrogance that arguably exceeds that of old sparring partner Romero. In a breath, he dismisses his rivals: 'A year ago, Quake had been out for around a month and everyone was talking about how these Quake killers were right around the corner... And still none of them – not a single one – has shipped.'

Pressed on the imminent release of LucasArts' Jedi Knight, Carmack holds firm: 'With Jedi Knight, the content's good, but it's not a technologically superior engine and they know it. They're doing the same thing that I am – but they're still half a step behind.'

And, without Daikatana even being mentioned by name: 'There's some sniping about who's doing what and all that... but you can look at it and remind yourself that if Ion Storm have a spectacular success we'll probably make more money than anyone there makes out of it – because we've got a big chunk of the royalty.'

Below a black and white shot of the man himself, wearing glasses that were surely out of fashion even in the late 90s, the interview finished with Zone asking if Carmack planned to take a break once Quake II was done: 'I don't believe in vacations. Last year I took five days and went to England. My God, I was nuts by the time I got back... I had a laptop with me but it wasn't the same.' 

If gaming was supposed to be the new rock and roll, and PC Zone was very much in the camp that believed it was (although I’m sure it would never have lowered itself to such tired clichés) [check this - Ed.]  then this wasn't the guy to be backing against Romero. 

Thing is, though, Carmack turned out to be right. Jedi Knight was reviewed in the same issue, and received a score of 94%, but it wasn't the future. And in the absence of games that truly rivalled Quake, the top FPS titles of the past 12 months had included the likes of Blood, Outlaws, Shadow Warrior and Redneck Rampage, all of which still used sprites rather than polygons for their enemies. Only Hexen II seemed to stand up to Quake on a technical level – because it used the Quake engine. 

As tidbits of news on the supposed Quake killers continued to be delivered in dribs and drabs, id delivered its own, Quake II, in time for Christmas. There was to be no 16-page allocation for the review this time - the überfragmeister had to make do with only three - but he went one better with the score ('97%: It's Doom III and it's beautiful' - Issue 59).

If Daikatana was coming out any time soon, then this was the game it would have to beat, along with a whole host of other new FPS games on the horizon: there were glimpses of Unreal, SiN and Half-Life in the pages of Zone around this time. (And also a game called Duke Nukem Forever, but – like we said earlier – we can only focus on one extremely delayed disappointment at a time). 

Meanwhile, Ion Storm appeared to have gone a little quiet. In Issue 60, McCandless spoke to Romero again and found him in a slightly less ebullient mood, having admitted elsewhere that Quake II was the best game he'd ever played, and in the midst of moving Daikatana over to the Quake II engine. The following month, some other members of the development team featured in a further preview (whether any of them saw it through to the end release is another matter: a quick check of the credits lists those identified in this piece as ‘additional employees’, which suggests they didn’t). 

A completely genuine marketing strategy

The next glimpse of the game was in June 1998 (Issue 64), with confidence in Daikatana evidently still high at Zone towers, as a Hot Shots preview proclaimed that ‘Romero and his team were right to delay Daikatana… [the game] is looking absolutely brilliant’ while praising the level design and the AI of the sidekicks. What exactly this was based on is unclear, but the release date had again slipped to September… which soon became December, as announced in the August issue (66), by which point a post-redesign Zone found it necessary to remind readers that John Romero was ‘one of the men behind Doom and Quake’ while still espousing the virtues of further delays as ‘ample proof of Ion Storm’s commitment to making the best first-person shooter around.’

The following month, Ion Storm’s first game finally made it into the pages of PC Zone. Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3, a real-time strategy game that Todd Porter had once worked on at 7th Level (but was not the once-mentioned Stranded/Romera title that may or may not also have been called Doppelganger) and subsequently sold back to him at Ion Storm, was reviewed by Phil ‘Wandy’ Wand in Zone 67, and received a score of 43%, along with some very unflattering comments.

As December arrived, Daikatana earned another brief mention in the Hot Shots preview feature, as it was explained, with the patience of a long-suffering spouse who hasn’t had quite enough of their partner’s bullshit excuses (but will frankly be absolutely bloody furious if this turns out to be a lie as well, ok, Neil?) that the game was delayed not for technical but ‘marketing strategy’ reasons on the part of publishers Eidos. (It’ll be ready by March 1999, darling, I promise).

Even if the ‘marketing strategy’ line was true (which, of course, it wasn’t), it wouldn’t have made much sense: quality first-person shooters were arriving by the bucketload and although going up against the likes of SiN, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and the new king, Half-Life, might not have been the greatest idea, waiting for the bar to be raised yet again and then putting your game out didn’t seem like the brightest idea either. 

News about Daikatana itself quickly became overtaken by tales of unrest and upheaval at Ion Storm. In PC Zone Issue 72 (January 1999), Paul ‘Prezzer’ Presley noted the departure of 17 members of staff over the previous two months. While Romero shrugged off the news, claiming the game was virtually finished anyway, an unnamed UK developer was quoted as saying, ‘The end of every project is a painstaking time. If a bug appears, the original programmer might fix it in half an hour. If he’s not there, some other poor sod might spend three days just getting his head round the initial code. Plus, if Daikatana is as finished as Romero says, why are these guys passing up a chance to put it on their CVs?’

In Issue 74 (March 1999), ‘The Man Who Knows’ (Zone’s once-regular gossip column) followed up by noting a story in the Dallas Observer which quoted heavily from some leaked e-mails, including one from Todd Porter (who had replaced the departed Mike Wilson as CEO at the end of 1997) following a meeting with Eidos, with the conversation characterised thus: ‘VERY VERY VERY concerned about Daikatana not shipping on time… VERY VERY VERY concerned about people leaving Daikatana - though I tried to assure them that most of those who left were shit anyway.’ 

Meanwhile, Richie Shoemaker (whatever happened to him?) got his hands on a beta version of the game and, while noting some positives, also came to the conclusion that it was not close to release: ‘Daikatana is still in its early stages. Given the amount of time already spent on development this shouldn’t be the case, and from what we’ve seen, there’s still a hell of a lot left to do’.

‘We may as well have gone to Blackpool’

The game that was going to beat Quake had missed its chance to beat Quake II, and was arguably now in a race to beat Quake III into the shops, even though by this point the idea of what Quake actually was had evolved yet again (Quake III: Arena was the cover game of Issue 75, which also featured shots of Unreal Tournament, with both entirely focused on deathmatch play). 

Zone 74 also featured a preview of Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun, another much-delayed title, but one which again arguably benefited from keeping a low profile rather than repeated attempts to build anticipation. That month’s ‘Meet the Team’ feature asked Zone’s writers: would the likes of Tiberian Sun and Daikatana live up to the hype? David McCandless, then in the twilight of his Zone career, said of the latter: ‘It’s a damn shame, but probably not.’

1999 brought more tales of Ion Storm unrest, with the sacking of Porter earning a brief mention in PC Zone’s 79th issue. A Christmas release was repeatedly mooted, but the festive issue of PC Zone (84) featured a preview by Steve Hill which started with the tale of a visit to Ion Storm earlier in the year: ‘Dallas, Texas: February 1999. Atop the Ion Storm skyscraper, the cream of the UK gaming press is assembled for a final look at the heavily delayed Daikatana prior to its pending release. Or so we were told… The long and the short of it is that Daikatana was nowhere near finished, and we might as well have gone to Blackpool.’

Romero, understandably, was continuing to talk the game up, again emphasising the changes in environments, weapons and enemies with each location (‘It’s pretty much four complete games in one’) and contrasting this with Doom: ‘People that got the shareware version of Doom, they’d download it, play it and finish [it]. They thought they’d played Doom, been there, seen it, done it… They’ll play Daikatana, starting with the first episode and think, “Wow, that was really cool, that was really great”. Boom! Go to another episode. “Holy Cow! Y’know, this is totally different.” Boom! “Jesus Christ, what’s going on?”’

The preview continued with a follow-up playtest at publishers Eidos in October, which saw Hill noting a ‘mixed response from the assembled loafers. It’s certainly playable, but still lacking in sidekicks, and with the eponymous magic sword being kept as “a surprise”.’

The cover of the January 2000 issue (85) prom0ised ‘Definitive Reviews’ of a list of games that included Daikatana, but inside the magazine, such a review was nowhere to be found. A slightly exasperated acknowledgement was found in the pages of February’s ‘Millennium Issue’ (86): ‘It’s getting beyond a joke now. Daikatana still isn’t with us, despite the promise of review code for the January issue. (Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed it on our cover). Don’t expect a review next month and you won’t be disappointed.’ Meanwhile, Quake III was reviewed, adding further to the list of acclaimed first-person games (including Kingpin, Aliens vs Predator, System Shock 2 and Unreal Tournament) that had entered the fray in recent months. 

The turn of the millennium prompted much navel-gazing and speculation about the future of gaming from Zone, with 20 top developers contributing their thoughts on the subject, alongside a slightly less serious piece from Charlie Brooker called ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ which featured seemingly flippant news stories from the future. (Those from dates that have now passed  - ‘2007: Bug-Fix Patch Wins Full-Price Release’ and ‘2018: Polygon Count “Beyond Calculation”’ - seem to have been alarmingly prescient. Such ideas might make for a good TV show, I reckon.)

1996, and Quake, seemed like a very long time ago. Under any circumstances, games with a development cycle as troubled as that of Daikatana would have had to battle the odds to succeed, but having one that spanned a period of such rapid technological advancement as the late 90s meant it faced an almost impossible task. 

But there’s always that chance, isn’t there? A small possibility that a great game might somehow emerge and make everyone’s sniping and complaining seem rather silly. (In response to the Dallas Observer piece, Ion Storm’s Mike Breslin was quoted in Zone 75 as saying ‘You see this in Hollywood all the time. Look at Titanic - all they did was talk about how long it took and how much money it took to make this movie. And it came out, and then it was a great movie, and everybody forgot about all the negativity, the delays and everything else.’) 

It’s the kind of optimistic feeling that Zone was probably banking on when the exclusive review finally arrived in Issue 91 (July 2000), tantalising the reader with the question, ‘Better than Half-Life?’ 

No, it’s a bit shit actually

Of course, it wasn’t, as anyone in WH Smiths who ventured beyond the cover and into the review itself would quickly have found out. (My memory is that maybe the magazine was wrapped in a plastic cover around this time, in order to prevent such chicanery, although perhaps I was just a Zone purist who wouldn’t open the magazine until the money had been handed over).

A long list of shortcomings was reeled off (the use of the Quake II engine, the level design, the enemy AI, the annoying sidekicks, the controversial ‘save gems’ which took away the PC gamer’s favoured FPS staple - the habi6tual quick-save…) and a succession of other Zone writers were lined up to give their thoughts, all of which concurred with those of main reviewer Woods. Big movies were indeed mentioned as points of comparison - but they were giant flops like Ishtar and Waterworld rather than Titanic. 

Shortly before issuing a score of 53%, the review concluded: 

‘We’re not kicking Daikatana because it’s an easy target. We were actually looking forward to playing it and proving people wrong by giving it a decent score… If it had been released on time then it would have gone down pretty well. As it is, we’re sure that Eidos and John Romero will be pleased to see the back of it.’

Woods then returned in the back-page feature ‘Team Talk’ to offer some further thoughts:

‘[This month] should have been soooo exciting, because on day one of the issue the world’s first finished copy of Daikatana landed on my desk. You’ve probably read the review by now. If not, turn to page 62 and brace yourself for a big disappointment… You see, Daikatana is a bit shit. Sorry, but it’s the truth. 

‘But as a professional games reviewer I can’t just look at a game for ten minutes, say it’s a bit shit, then launch into Quake III. Despite the fact that I know it’s not going to get any better, or even improve enough to make the experience even slightly enjoyable, I’ve got to play it all the way through. And then go into multiplayer mode for a couple of days. And then kill myself.’

By some strange coincidence, the same piece later referred to a brief return to Zone’s pages for David McCandless, who had covered the Quake III championship in the same issue. The boozy, boastful previews of Daikatana seemed like a distant memory (partly, I guess, because they were). Reading it all back now, though, it’s just about possible, for a moment, to imagine another world in which Daikatana had been released on time, and reviewed enthusiastically by Macca, in the days of a slightly edgier incarnation of Zone.

The new action role-playing benchmark

A couple of months later, in Zone Issue 93 (September 2000), the buying public had their say in the monthly readers’ reviews section, Feedback. The general consensus of opinion was that the review had, if anything, been rather too kind: ‘It deserves about 12 per cent, perhaps even less! What has John Romero been doing for the last four years?’; ‘This is the worst excuse for a PC game I have ever seen. I couldn’t un-install it quick enough’; ‘I went off to buy it… 20 minutes later I was groaning in misery and smacking my head against the monitor’. 

As it turns out, though, that was the last real mention of Daikatana in Zone (budget re-releases notwithstanding). Ion Storm had another new game out, and reviewed in the very same issue: Deus Ex, another Zone exclusive, received a score of 94% (‘the new action role-playing benchmark’).

To the extent that Eidos was ever able to have a coherent ‘marketing strategy’ when it came to Daikatana, at the last moment it had somehow managed - whether by accident or design - to bury Ion Storm’s great big failure, by following it up with their greatest success.

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'Merch' is such an unpleasant word, don't you think?

It's not that the 'eeuurgh' sound you emit when throwing up your breakfast is given greater emphasis in the shortening of 'merchandise', but that the word has come to mean any physical item with a logo on it. The insistence being, of course, that said item has come into existence to promote whatever brand the logo represents, rather than for its own joyous sake.

Which makes me do a sick in my mouth when announcing that you can now get PC Zone meeuurghch! And right now, until October 26th, there’s a 25% discount on everything!

The reason for offering PC Zone ‘stuff’ (ah, much nicer) isn’t because anyone has asked for it, or because research has been commissioned into what you secretly desire, or even because I need the cash. It came about because after the 30th Anniversary party in the summer, I wanted to thank my co-organisers, Jamie and Will, for their considerable support in ensuring we had a great venue for the evening and for reaching out to enough people to ensure we could fill it on the night.

I settled on getting a couple of mugs made up and tried a couple of merch sites to see how expensive it would be and, as it turned out, for single items it was a tiny bit cheaper and a hell of a lot easier to just to set up an online store.

I then thought I’d get myself a couple of t-shirts made up, because, why not? They actually turned out ok. Here’s one of them after a fifth wash – just before the heavens opened up to offer a sixth:

Right now there’s not the greatest selection of stuff, admittedly, but it’s authentically PC Zone and in the absence of anyone else offering anything better, I figured I’d keep the store open and see if anyone is interested in acquiring anything. If enough people are, maybe I’ll put in a bit more effort and get some professional designs made up. In the meantime, if there’s anything you’d like to see changed or added, let me know in the comments below and I’ll see what can be done.

Of course, being a store, we (“PCZ Team”) are credited a small amount on each item sold. Around £1 for a mug and £4-5 for a t-shirt. It would be nice if we could put that lolly (£12.75 currently) towards rewarding contributors for their efforts, but we’ll see how it goes.

Speaking of contributors, there’s a new name to add to the roster: Rik. (Yes, just Rik.) Rik is one half of the A Force For Good team (the other being Stoo), a site that we might lazily call a retro PC gaming blog, but is in actual fact a carefully curated hub of new reviews of old games that in many cases have long fallen into undeserved obscurity.

Some readers may recall it was Force For Good that provided the most complete and objective history of PC Zone ever committed to the internet. If you’ve not read the eight-part series before, you absolutely should.

Rik’s first piece for PC Zone Lives will be up soon. If at some point in the future his article disappears, the site goes dead, and you hear categorically untrue reports that I’ve been spotted in the Cayman Islands, you can take it to mean the store has been doing a lot better than initially anticipated.

He who controls the Spice, controls the universe!

Sadly, the only spice that Richie Shoemaker has any influence over are the chilli flakes that make it onto his Lidl pizza. Not enough to control much of anything really, but just enough to be able to summon Rhianna Pratchett, Mark Hill, Martin Korda and Keith Pullin (PC Zone’s one time staff writer, news editor, section editor and Dear Keith respectively) to talk about their contributions to PC Zone circa June 2001.

As well as cover game Emperor: Battle for Dune, the team talk about the games they reviewed but can’t remember playing, dealing with reader’s dirty phone calls and dressing up for issue 103’s iconic stealth game Supertest.

You can access issue 103 of PC Zone at archive.org or download the full set of PC Zone issues and supplements from pixsoriginadventures.co.uk.

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More stories from beyond the games at pczonelives.co.uk

Today marks 13 joyless years since PC Zone officially closed, when the UK’s first and best PC games mag appeared on newsstands and subscribers’ doormats for the final time. Yeah, it still bothers me, but you know what? Dennis selling the magazine to Future was the first nail in the coffin, before its death by a thousand cuts.

… Another time perhaps. I’m not here to dwell on the demise of PC Zone, but whether it could one day be reborn. Not just as a slapdash podcast supplemented by the odd newsletter, but as a magazine you hold in your hands and read without your eyes leaking precious bodily fluids. Like in the olden times, before your hand became a claw with all that scrolling through… er, ads.

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There are a few of them still about. Magazines, that is. Retro Gamer, Edge, PC G**** of course. Speaking of which, have you picked up a copy of Future’s flagship PC games mag recently?

I was in my local Big Tesco the other day, mooching along the magazine aisle, when I eventually found a copy of last month’s Gamer hiding behind a motorhome magazine. It had the demeanor of a publication that had seen… things. Terrible things, like the kind of abuse usually delivered upon Cbeebies magazines with Bluey toys taped to the cover. I quickly realised that the magazine wasn’t quivering becuase it lived in fear of small children, but because its pages were so insubstantial that the aisle’s microclimate had them all aflutter.

Now I’ve worked in magazines for a long time. I work on one now and I know that paper prices are pretty high, but I really had no idea that paper could be made so thin.

When he was PC Zone‘s news editor, the great Paul Mallinson used to thumb through a new issue of Gamer and say, in his salty northern accent, “I wouldn’t wipe my arse with it”. He was referring of course to the quality of content. These days however you couldn’t dual-use the mag even if you needed to. Your fingers would go right through before making contact.   

Thankfully other games magazines are available, all with less pages, granted, but with weighter paper. Weirdly they’re mostly for platforms that haven’t been mass produced for decades. There’s a Sega magazine (Sega Powered), two for the Amiga (Zzap! Amiga and Amiga Addict), then there are the resurrected titles for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC which you will no doubt recall from your youth as Crash, Zzap! 64 and Amtix.

All three brands were, like PC Zone, acquired by Future and quietly closed when they were deemed no longer viable. But then a few years ago a guy called Chris Wilkins (who ran his own boutique retro mag called Fusion) went to Future and signed a deal to bring them back, first as annuals, then as regular magazines. They are of course smaller, thinner, less frequent and more expensive than they were in the 1980s, but they retain the spirit and even some of the writers from the original publications, which is what matters. Because of that they’ve enjoyed moderate success and you can even find them in selected branches of WHSmith – as you can with Amiga Addict and Pixel Addict, in fact. 

All of which begs the question, would Future consider a similar proposition for PC Zone? I’ve long thought about reaching out to someone at the company to find out, but there are two things holding me back. One is the fact that neither Crash, Zzap! or Amtix compete with anything Future publishes. Nor are Crash and Zzap! likely to be selling in the kinds of numbers to compel Future to take a direct interest. PC Zone probably wouldn’t either, but it would be hard to convince the suits that a resurrected PC Zone, regardless of how it was pitched, would not be a threat to PC Gamer, which has in the years since Zone closed has become a massive global brand.

The other thing is that there are still people at Future that maintain a seething hatred for PC Zone. One of the aforementioned suits is filled by someone who, during his last issue as the editor of PC Gamer, had his legacy soiled by losing out to PC Zone on the biggest exclusive of his reign, that of breaking Half-Life 2 to the masses. I doubt he’s let that one go.

As an aside, I went for an interview at Future some years ago (for the PC Gamer editor position, as it happens – hey, I needed a job!) and one of the guys interrogating me (whose comedy name I won’t repeat), took great pride in explaining his part in cutting PC Zone’s budget to the bone and eventually having the magazine closed. Had it not been for the other guy (whose name I don’t recall), being more interested in my suitability rather than endlessly gloating, I would have got up and left. It was no surprise to me later on that I didn’t get the job. A good thing for Gamer, as after that performance I would have enjoyed enacting some small measure of reputational revenge before inevitably being sacked.

So, yeah, PC Zone’s print restoration seems unlikely at best.

Which bothers me, not just because Zone was and could again be great (in a Crash-esque, non-PC Gamer-threatening way), but because gaming websites have evolved to become so tiresome these past few years. Even on the decent sites like Eurogamer, the ads that would in the past nag at your periphery are now front and centre, and the content when you eventually get to it just seems increasingly shallow to me; human-engineered (and increasingly AI-engineered) to chase today’s trending keywords and court the machine eye of search and social algorithms.

It has long been thus, but it seems to me that even the gaming sites that haven’t lost their voice to SEO-speak have become a chore to navigate and difficult to enjoy. Maybe I’m just getting old and nostalgic for print, but I’m starting to get to the stage when I’d much rather pay for quality gaming content that’s easy on the eye. And the arse, of course.

If there is a possibility of there being two PC gaming mags again, only a “spiritual successor” to PC Zone is ever going to be feasible, which is probably for the best. It would mean the people behind it would have the freedom to make something fresh and innovative, rather than try to recreate a publication whose best days are behind it. Who knows, maybe the likes of a PC Zine or Zero PC just needs someone to make it happen. If that someone is you, get in touch. I’d love to help out, even if it’s just by rearranging the shelves in Tesco.

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In the autumn of 1994, a boisterous American PR man thrust his way into the Zone basement on Bolsover Street. Clutched in his hands was a large box; nestled inside was the future of gaming. 

Or not

The box contained an early production model of a VR headset. The story itself is probably apocryphal - it appeared in Zone a couple of years after the event - but it gives a flavour of the Wild West atmosphere in PC gaming tech at the time. 

In 1994 there were no mass market 3D accelerator cards. It wasn't obvious that the future of PC gaming - all gaming - would boil down to 'more polygons - but faster!'. In this context perhaps VR was the next big thing. After all, various flavours of VR had been cropping up in pop culture for decades - surely the future of gaming was virtual?

Reality

Of course contemporary PCs came nowhere close to matching fictional depictions of fully realised virtual worlds; but there were competing strands of development that might point the way. Doom had chainsawed into the world just in time for Christmas 1993 and set a new standard for realism and immersion in PC gaming (no, really). More crucially, Doom was cool - Doom was fashionable - Doom was something you wanted to play, talk about and show off to your mates. Doom wasn't even in proper 3d, using clever tricks to convince the player there was depth and height, but it was fast, and the screen bobbed as you walked. In a 2020 interview Charlie Brooker noted of an Alpha build seen in the Zone office: to contemporary eyes "it looked real".

If Doom showed the way for immersion in 1993, perhaps the 'interactive movie' boom was indicative of what visuals would look like in the VR future. The 7th Guest - a haunted house themed adventure that mixed live action clips with pre-rendered backgrounds - wasn't the first interactive movie, but it was certainly the splashiest. Lathered with a big budget, it came with a whiff of controversy and a '15' rating from the BBFC. The first-person perspective drew you into the action, the violence and horror themes indicated that this wasn't kids’ stuff - this was ‘quality’ entertainment for proper grown-ups. It was also terrible to play - slow, clunky and cliched - but nothing that came on so many CDs could be wholly bad, right?

Perhaps then VR in 1994 wasn't as crazy an idea as it first appears. Doom had created a believable world in a puny 320x200 resolution, CD-ROMs could hold a staggering amount of data and the futuristic Pentium processor was starting to appear at more mainstream friendly price points. Surely Doom in VR would be a slam dunk - the next generation of CD-ROM stored, Pentium powered, high budget ‘Dooms’ would be a perfect match for the new VR tech.

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1994 

We kick off in April (Issue 13) with a recruiting ad in the Bulletin for 'Knightmare', a then popular children’s TV game show. For kids of the 70s and 80s, Knightmare was one of our formative introductions to what VR could mean. Players were plonked into a virtual world and sent on a Hobbit-like quest to retrieve The Important Thing from The Bad Place. Ironically this ground-breaking use of CGI and green screen was forced on the show’s producers by an incredibly tight budget. It was far from realistic, but it was very compelling and felt like 'The Future'.  

June (Issue 15) brings another Bulletin piece, this time trailing the VictorMaxx CyberMaxx (yup) VR goggles. Due for release in September, and boasting 'depixelization technology' , this revolutionary gadget would plug directly into your VGA port for instant VR action. If this sounds too good to be true, it absolutely was.

September (Issue 18) rolls around and the Cybermaxx remains resolutely unreleased - but this is a bumper month for picking VR shrapnel out of the Bulletin section. Heralding the age of headsets that may “change the games industry forever”, we get a trail for Forte's confidently named 'VFX1', a brief mention of the 'Astounding 2001 VR Video Visor' (a product that is never mentioned again) and, most bizarrely, a large box-out on the 'Aura Interactor Vest'; a wearable tech that promises to pummel the victim with sonic punches every time they get shot in Doom. Although the Aura sounds (and indeed is) both pointless and awful, it was one of the most successful 'VR' products of the 90s and 00s (an admittedly low bar) and can still be found on Amazon today.

Finally we reach October (Issue 19) and the focus issue for the second episode of the podcast - Phil's overview of impending VR tech. Before we reach Phil though, there is one more piece on VR in the monthly Bulletin. Optimistically titled 'VR a reality for Christmas' this modest box-out once again trails the 'VFX1' headset. Costing £650, it will launch in November and support Doom right out of the box - One of these things turned out to be almost true.

And so onwards into Phil's VR feature - and it is an honest and reliable summation of the state of VR to this point. VR has suffered from a "yawning gap between real life and fiction" he writes "all flash and bravado up front" with "very little technology" to back it up. He treads a fine line between realism and hope (and, naturally, a desire not to piss off too many vendors). "VR is now on the backburner as far as the mainstream is concerned" he notes; the right tech could change that but, crucially, "needs to be affordable". 

Phil covers four pieces of tech: the CyberMaxx, the VFX1, the 'Interactor Vest' and the truly weird 'Logitech Cyberman' - which looks like a pair of well-armed breasts. Of the two helmets, the CyberMaxx looks like a better bet. Armed with a “high resolution”, modular design for easy upgrading and, most importantly, a sub £400 retail price, this could be the product that brings VR gaming into the home. The overall tone is cautious though and the ending downbeat. VR could well end up being a “blind alley” with “no mass market appeal”. Bullfrog is updating Magic Carpet to work with VR and ID have suggested some support in future titles, but these are scraps at best. In the podcast Phil notes that the tone of the piece was informed by things that were "not current selling products, but prospective products", the "tech wasn't there" and was woefully "underpowered". Although he isn’t quite so blunt in print, it is clear to the reader that this might be great, but the tech is not there yet.

The following issue (20) brings a competition to win a CyberMaxx headset (the RRP has quietly leapt by £100 since the previous issue) and coins the wonderful phrase 'virtual nookie simulators' - though I doubt even those could have saved the CyberMaxx.

December (Issue 21) brings the year to a close with another VR competition - this one offering a VFX1 headset courtesy of 'Future Zone' - opening with the doom scented words: “There can be no doubt that VR is THE hot property for 1995”. Of course this is essentially ad-copy - but I think most Zone readers of the time would have expressed surprise that there was no doubt. Ironically it would turn out that 'Future Zone' was a much hotter property than VR in 1995, finding itself bought out, merged and rebranded as 'Electronics Boutique' (remember them?) by the end of the year.

1995  

The year of VR opened ominously, with the January issue of Zone (22) carrying nothing at all on the subject. This changed in the next issue with a head-to-head review of the two main competitors - the Forte VFX1 and CyberMaxx. Oddly both headsets receive respectable scores (74% for the Forte, 66% for the CyberMaxx) despite the body of the review having almost nothing good to say about them. Praise is reserved for the ‘Cyberpuck’ controller bundled with the Forte which, despite looking like a terribly disappointing dildo, was both practical and functional. The same cannot be said for the headsets themselves. The CyberMaxx sounds particularly dire - it comes bundled with System Shock which “actually looks pretty terrible” being “very dark” with “unreadable text” - selecting key commands is “nigh on impossible”. The reviewer lists all these concerns and concludes, gloomily, “but that's VR for you”. In the end “neither of them” is recommended - but the review concludes with a slightly upbeat note that maybe the next versions will be cheaper and better.

And so ends the story of VR in Zone. 

Well, almost - but the next issue brings the first whiff of what will actually capture the mainstream this year. “A new Graphics Standard?” coyly asks a headline in the Bulletin of Issue 24. The article is about the forthcoming ‘3D accelerator board’ from Creative Labs. Living here in our comfortable future world it seems almost unbelievable that there was a time when the GPU wasn’t the single most important component in any gaming system. Up until this point the vast majority of tech talk in Zone had been focused on CPUs and peripherals - the future was Pentiums and CD-ROM drives. Games were more power hungry, and that power came from the CPU. But the rise of the PlayStation had a profound impact on how PC gamers saw their machines. Sure, a PlayStation couldn’t handle Civilization 2 or Elite 2 - complex, multi-faceted games for grown-ups… but it could chuck zillions of awesome polygons onto the screen at once in Wipeout - something your sad, grey old PC sitting on its lonely desk could only dream of.  

VR bubbled up sporadically in subsequent issues. Issue 26 carried a piece trailing the ‘i-glasses’ from Virtual i.O, promising graphics which were ‘very impressive indeed’ and priced at less than £200. Unsurprisingly the promised ‘review next issue’ never materialised. Issue 27 carried a small box-out on the VFX1 claiming Forte had upped the resolution and “made it even better” (come on Zone - you’re better than this). Issue 31 had yet another side bar on the Forte. The resolution has been upped again, the price had come down to £700 and, most crucially, it was about to actually go on sale in the UK (yep - it’s October in the Year of VR and the most lauded headset still hasn’t shipped yet).

And so we reached November 1995, Issue 32, and another review of the Forte VFX1. This time the review has two scores. 85% and a ‘Recommended’ award if you have £600 to fritter on tat, 40% if you don’t. The VFX1 is “hefty, very well made, sexy” and “loads better than anything else we’ve seen” - but when everything else you’ve seen is garbage, that's lukewarm praise indeed. The review delves into usability this time, noting that turning around in a shooter requires actually moving your body, which wraps the cable around the player, forcing them to spin like a top to untangle. Many games are technically supported, but very few provide a true stereo image that the helmet requires to do its job well. Descent is one, but of course your processor is doing double work creating two images at once, so performance takes a mighty dip.

The VFX1 returns once more in the following issue (33), making it onto the Christmas gift buyers guide (Zone, by this point, knows no shame). The same issue also has a competition to win a VFX1 - which we can only assume is the review copy being given away.

Before we leave 1995, it's worth taking a look at some of the games that came out that year. Or rather, it's worth taking a look at their names. If VR headsets were something that existed largely theoretically, games that had ‘Actua’ or ‘Virtua’ or ‘Virtual’ existed numerously and tediously. There appears to be an almost direct correlation between the scope of the game and its ability to live up to its quasi-VR billing. Virtual Pool, Virtua Chess and Actua Soccer know exactly what they are doing, stick to their brief, and earn their VR sobriquet (Virtual Pool does a decent job of simulating a room with a pool table in it, but disappointingly doesn’t immerse you in plush velvet and fag ends). On the other end of the scale, games like Cyberbykes: Shadow Racer VR (in which you are a titular CyberByker who must ride their armed motorcycle to save the world from the WTO) are so utterly appalling that the only explanation for their awfulness must be that they were designed to be used with a primitive VR helmet and somehow the plug on that was pulled at the last minute when those helmets failed to sell. Reviewing the game in Issue 31, Charlie Brooker worries that the game looks so awful it may have “broken something forever” inside his PC.

And so, the year of VR ends. A few disappointing pieces of tech, a handful of games with ‘VR’ in the name and not much else. 

1996

By 1996 it was clear the direction that PC hardware was going to take. Issue 35 carried a loving three-page spread from David "uberfragmeister" McCandless and David Mathieson covering the simmering 'format war' brewing between Creative (of SoundBlaster fame), Matrox (dredge that name from your memory) and Trident (the fuck?). At the time it appeared there would be competing hardware standards, each offering different features and publisher support. But buried within the article are references to 'APIs', ‘Windows 95’ and something called “Direct3D'' from Microsoft. Happily the clunking fist of Gates would force standardisation on the manufacturers within a year, to the delight of consumers everywhere. The format war that nobody wanted failed to happen and 3d accelerator cards sold by the shovel load. 

In Issue 37 a piece in Bulletin heralds the arrival of the 'PowerVR chipset' from Videologic. This was purely a 3d accelerator chip, but it is interesting to note that the term 'VR' still carried some pulling power, even if it was being applied to tech that had already killed off interest in VR headsets. By Issue 42 the Playstation-isation of the PC reached its logical conclusion, with a piece on how to turn your PC from a box on a desk in a spare room, into the focal point of your living room. The tech still wasn't quite there, and I don't think the authors of the article expected anyone to chuck away their TV and VCR for a monitor with side mounted speakers, but the message was clear: your shiny Pentium, with dedicated graphics board and CD-ROM drive, was more than a match for the PlayStation. The gaming PC, as we know it today, had arrived.

Oh yes - there was sod all about VR in the magazine. Nothing. 

1997 

VR had one last hurrah in the 90s - thanks to the troublingly named 'CyberBoy', reviewed in Issue 48. Clocking in with an impressive score of 89% these active shutter glasses weren't 'VR' as we would understand it, but were probably the most sensible way to enhance your gaming experience if you already had a decent processor, 3d accelerator and sound card. But the review made clear these were only "worth shelling out for if you haven't got something more life-enhancing” to spend your money on. This might be the best compromise between visuals and 'VR' you would find in 1997, but they were hardly essential. 

Later in the year issue 51 carried a damning repudiation of VR tech to that point. "The graphics are absolutely dire" and "the resolution is disgustingly low", if this is ”reality...give us all a ticket back to fantasy land". The VFX1 was "the best of a bad lot" but, like all the others "has disappeared without a trace". The article ends on a hopeful note, citing the 'CyberBoy' as a "worthy alternative" to VR - although the conclusion that DirectX might have saved VR through standardisation sounds like wishful thinking. A standard driver architecture definitely helped 3d acceleration enter the mainstream - but it would have done nothing to improve the low fidelity headsets on offer. 

2009

VR disappeared from the Zone radar for more than a decade until a piece in the Christmas 2009 issue (214) on the rise of 3d gaming. Focusing on Nvidia’s forthcoming 3d Vision tech (nope - me neither) we’re enthusiastically led through a world where “3d in the home will be led by gamers”. It is worth noting that we’re talking about 3d rather than VR in the strictest sense here. Active shutter glasses that work seamlessly with your existing monitor and GPU setup are the order of the day, with the 3d overlay coming from glasses and drivers rather than a headset mounted display. Throughout the article there is a great deal of excitement about how 3d improves immersion - some improbable assertions that 3d actually makes textures look better and, naturally, a comparison to the difference between seeing a picture of a ‘pretty girl’ and then ‘seeing her in completely lifelike 3d’. Outside of subscribers to ‘Enthusiastic Masturbator’ magazine though, it is again hard to see who this tech is really aimed at. Like the VR of the 90s it’s not clear whose gaming experience will be markedly improved by the tech. Nvidia 3d enjoyed some developer and, unsurprisingly, a lot of driver support for a couple of years but this appears to have started to dry up in 2011 and is long forgotten now.

2023

Of course today we know better. What were those rubes in the 90s thinking - with their 14.4k modems and laughable CRT screens! Even their telly wasn't 24 hour - the jerks. VR? What were they thinking?

And yet, VR today still isn't quite there. It has the resolution now, sure and the bulky cabling has gone away. But it still isn't clear quite what VR is for and the 'killer app' is yet to appear.

There may be an uncomfortable reality that VRs really shines in unsexy genres. Simulators are the obvious market - Microsoft Flight Simulator enjoyed a popular renaissance during 2020 (no doubt helped by the fact that most of us couldn't fly anywhere in real life) - and any game that involves sitting down and looking around a bit (Forza, Train Simulator) should work well with the tech. On the other hand, games like Hitman 3 work appallingly badly in VR - turning Agent 47 from the world's coolest assassin into a blundering maniac who leaves his hapless victims embedded upside down in the furniture. If VR were an essential component of Fortnite or GTA Online, the landscape would look very different, but it isn’t and so VR remains either an untapped resource or a curious sideshow - your call.

If...

So what would a contemporary PC Zone make of the state of VR now? 90s Zone would be falling over itself to take a gander at the new tech, spurred on by zestful exuberance and acerbic anarchy. David McCandless would be devastated by the lack of Deathmatch in Half Life Alyx, but Paul Presley would be inseparable from his Microsoft Flight Sim world and Charlie Brooker would be miserably pounding the streets of Cyberpunk 2077 cloaking his childlike delight behind a veil of scatological misery.

2000s Zone would take a more considered view, producing a think piece from Rhianna Pratchett on VR in RPGs, a NeverQuest where Steve Hill smashes his fist into a wall whilst lost in a loot dungeon and maybe even a Looking Back article on how Zone had covered VR over the years.

An Ending

PC Zone trod a very tight path through VR. It approached the possibility of VR with enthusiasm, sure, but overall gave an honest summation of the shortcomings whilst holding out the possibility that future iterations of the tech could be better. Of course it was also a magazine that needed to pay the bills and fill the pages - so the PR pieces dutifully went into Bulletin, the competition pages talked up the brilliance of the dodgy tech that could be won, but ultimately the editorial was pretty sound. 

Ultimately the processing power simply wasn't there for VR to be anything other than a low-res mess in the 90s. But, considering that the minimum requirements for the VFX1 helmet were a 386 and just 20kb of memory to load the drivers, it is remarkable that these headsets worked at all. They may have been crap - but they were a genuine attempt to deliver a new kind of experience to gamers and what’s wrong with that?

All right, all right, simmer down. I've gathered you all here so that we can finally sort out the pressing question of 'who was the finest contributor to PC Zone' in its storied history.

Easy, Richie Shoemaker.

Now, you'll all have your own opinion, of course, and generally that will be 'Charlie Brooker'. No shame in that, the boy done well. From scrawling the CEX logo on the back of a fag packet to running a global media empire, he's certainly the highest profile ex-Zoner. And yes, he is very funny, very talented. Yes, he has written for 'proper' things like The Guardian. Channel Four, Netflix. Collaborated with Chris Morris. Like a Bronte heroine he appears to have married well and sired an appropriate number of heirs. And yes, he seems like a genuinely lovely chap who, Clooney like, is ageing very handsomely.

Bastard.

However, I don't come here tonight to fete Brooker, but praise MacDonald. Duncan MacDonald, aka Mr Cursor, aka Duncan Donaldo, aka Lord Scumland.

Mr Cursor? He's the one who ate cockroaches and wrote about daytime telly?

‘Yes!’ In a limited fashion and yet 'No!' in a much wider sense. You see, Mr Cursor was just one part of Duncan's output, and you would be forgiven (as this ten-year-old reader did) for not linking the two of them together.

You're still unconvinced, that's ok. Come, take my arm, and let us stroll together through the PC Zone archive; you can make up your own mind.

Get on with it.

Duncan Macdonald's career with Dennis publishing began on Your Sinclair magazine in the late 80s. Teresa Maughan, at that time YS editor, recalled he wasn't the "type of person" you would normally hire, being, in her words, "completely crazy". His colleagues at Zone were more circumspect, noting that he was a “very, very smart” and “very pleasant guy” who “burned bright”. However you choose to define him, his writing was direct, engaging, often whimsical and usually extremely funny. There is a real sense of hundreds of ideas bubbling just below the surface; that the act of writing simply gives them a semblance of order as they come tumbling forth.

Let’s look at some examples, starting with PC Zone issue #1.

Christ, this is going to be a lengthy article…

“Seeing as this is my first column and this is the first issue of PC Zone, I suppose introductions are in order… but they’ll have to wait”. So opened the first Mr Cursor (‘He’s afraid of his PC’) an appropriate introduction to the writing of Duncan MacDonald, whose style can be distilled into four humours:

1)      A lengthy, digressive introduction that usually (but not always) leads back to the thing he should be talking about.

2)      A slightly improbable conceit usually involving a journey, childhood memory, or conversation with

3)      A larger than life set of characters, ranging from the benign ‘old lady on the tube’ to a psychotic National Lottery obsessive who extorts him for protection money.

4)      A tenuous link to something Donald was interested in (sometimes games, often TV, occasionally maths or programming).

Here, ‘the conceit’ is an improbable trip to the Dordogne with an ‘art group’ in the back of the (unspokenly dodgy) tutor’s camper van. ‘The tenuous link’ is Mr Cursor painting three pictures of DOS errors whilst the rest of the class paint landscapes. The ‘digressive introduction’ is the column itself, but he does loop back in the final paragraph to end with a welcome.

Unusually, this first column doesn’t feature many other characters, but it does mark the first appearance of ‘Angela’, here a nude artists model. Is this the same ‘Angela’ (artist, recovering heroin addict) who would later turn up as the ‘old colleague’ and love interest of his South Coast Diaries? I hope so.

Having any link to computing at all scores this column quite highly on the ‘Mr Cursor gaming relevancy’ scale (it should be noted that this is a logarithmic scale and the scores tend to cluster around zero), but that is sort of the point.

The notion of writing about ‘being afraid’ of the PC was unnecessarily self-limiting. This first column does include a paragraph imploring readers to write in with their own tales of fear, “let’s all be wimps together”, but the request was never repeated.

In a way it is surprising that it took until issue #5 for Mr Cursor to dispense with talking about computers or gaming entirely (“waiting for my PC to be mended” being the cover story). Issue #6 marked the start of the ‘He’s afraid of his PC’ tagline being amended (with an ‘&’ or a ‘*’ noting another thing he feared that month). By issue #13 ‘afraid of his PC’ had been consigned to the bin, with a monthly fear taking its place.

Issue #13 is worth dwelling on because it neatly illustrates why Zone was held in such high esteem. It was funny, always, but also clever. The Cursor column opens with a quote from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis before segueing into a paragraph about Doom over LAN. You wouldn’t find that in PC Gamer.

Throughout his tenure on the magazine, Duncan’s Mr Cursor column attracted a steady stream of hate mail, usually asking why this idiot was being given a voice when he knew nothing about gaming. The editorial line held firm that the Cursor character was designed to be ignorant and somewhat hapless, but regular readers, even those who didn’t know it was Duncan, understood the deep knowledge behind the persona.

Issue #14’s Cursor is a case in point. In this flight of fantasy Duncan imagines a game developer ‘Super Group’ (like Band Aid) who would each bring the best element of their game into a notional mega game which would give the player a fully explorable universe inside their Pentium. The laundry list of developers and games tells the audience that this person knows their stuff. The wrap-around story, about octopuses and whether or not they have orgasms, shows a writer who is absolutely confident in their mastery of the medium.

Issue #18 sees Mr Cursor time travel to the distant world of 2023 (oh) where he speaks to ‘Bob’ about the future of gaming. It turns out the future of gaming sounds very much like Eve Online (which will go down well with certain members of this parish). Another little reminder that Duncan knew what he was talking about.

You really need a subheading here.

Phew! Yes, thanks. I’ve been reading a lot of Duncan’s stuff and I think it’s rubbed off a bit.

Here, have another one.

You’re too kind. Mr Cursor is such an iconic figure in the Zone pantheon that it’s easy to forget that most of Duncan’s output was reviews, previews and features.

The traditional review format might not seem like fertile ground for a writer like him; after all, there is a clear structure and set of expected outcomes. A good review should tell the reader about the game; how it plays, looks, and feels. How does it compare to other games? And then there should be a score - a single number that boils the experience down into something mundanely quantifiable.

And here we really see Duncan deploy his talents to the full, because each review is an experiment with the form. True, there are shared commonalities (most notably the ubiquitous, rambling intro) but they run from film scripts to dole diaries, via multiple choice exam papers and, in the case of Comanche 3, a three-page description of a press junket to Florida with no real discussion of the actual game.

That said, there were a handful of more ‘standard’ reviews, and these were reserved for games that Duncan really, really liked. Take Dune 2, his very first review back in issue #1. Ok, he does spend the first few paragraphs pondering why, given how much time and effort goes into making a movie, anyone would piss it all up the wall by casting Sting. Once that is dealt with, we are treated to four pages of comprehensive, in depth analysis, going into great detail about the game, the style and how to play it. And why? Because Duncan didn’t know how to categorise it, but knew that he loved it.

Other games to receive similar treatment were Transport Tycoon (a “gloriously hi-resolution, isometric orgasmo blast from the planet Boing”, remarkable for being “created by a team of two”) and Flight Simulator 5 (because he’d managed to land a real Cessna “first time” after playing Flight Simulator 4 and was now a full paid-up member of the Church of Propeller).

Overall though, he eschewed “condescending, boring and explainy bits for simpletons” because he trusted his audience. This confidence allowed him to review F1 Grand Prix Manager “from the viewpoint of a pretend Frank Williams… and an imaginary friend called Tufty”, and to summarise AH-64D Longbow as “ A completely and utterly spanky helicopter doofer”.

“But all this is irrelevant”

If this makes Duncan sound self-indulgent, or even arrogant, then I have steered you wrong. He understood his style wasn’t for everyone, but also understood that most readers bought Zone for entertainment rather than to flick through a beige set of ratings. His review of Top Gun in issue #37 includes two made-up letters (granted they are printed under the sub-heading ‘Boring bastard’) urging Zone to “take these childish ramblings and condense them into some form of coherent perspective”. Ultimately, of course, Duncan went on being Duncan. But there is a tacit admission that he gets both sides of the argument.

Away from fictitious battles with the readership, Duncan was an extremely kind reviewer. Comparatively few of his reviews carried a low score and, when they did, he didn’t relish sticking the boot into a crap game. Generally, reviewers delight in a bad review, because it’s easy to be entertaining whilst demolishing a turd-box. Duncan didn’t do this, instead finding creative ways to express his disappointment.

Summing up the long forgotten ‘Interstate 76’ (a sort of proto GTA) he wrote “I hate having to give a lowish score because originality really should be rewarded”. He concluded “How about we applaud Interstate 76? I’ll clap first” before exhorting the readership to join in.

When a game was truly beyond the pale, like the dreadful ‘Hard Drivin’ 2’ he resorted to a made up ‘Dole Diary’ in which the hapless protagonist spent most of their giro down at  Happy Shopper before dropping their last £13 on the game. The experience is so awful that they have been driven to suicide five days later. It is indicative of his style that a bad game experience doesn’t focus on shit-kicking the developers, but the disappointment of the player.

He sounds great. You’ve convinced me. Gosh, is that the time…

But we haven’t even touched on Culky yet! Or his ‘don’t play the Lottery’ algorithm (26,000 years to win £461,000 at a cost of £1,352,500). Or his short-lived marriage to Pamela Anderson (she liked the New Kent Road flyover and “Tesco at Elephant and Castle” apparently).

Ok, skipping forward. Duncan was a stalwart contributor to Zone until suddenly he wasn’t. His final review appeared in issue #52 (‘Speedster’ – “a disappointing racing game with no sense of speed”) and the last Cursor was in issue #54. This ended with an inspiring claim that he was moving to Pitcairn, a fool proof plan as there were “no jobs” meaning he could live on the beach, signing on in perpetuity.

The truth, of course, was more banal. Duncan did move, but to Worthing, not Pitcairn. And he did sign on but, as anyone who has had that pleasure will tell you, unpaid agricultural labour on Pitcairn may have been preferable.

The South Coast Diaries

In retrospect there had long been signs in Duncan’s work that something like this was in the offing. In issue #44 he talks about the council flat in “the crappy South London tower block where I live in squalor” trapped in a “continual search for methods of making cash from not much actual work”. A few issues earlier the prospect of a visit from ‘Suzie’ had sent him into a cleaning frenzy, which had necessitated multiple trips to Londis to acquire the requisite amount of bleach. A few issues later still he laments that he hasn’t owned a Hoover for three years, but a Hoover costs the same as a Nintendo 64 so… no contest, really.

The Diaries were originally commissioned by David McCandless and published on the now defunct Seethru website in 2001 as part of the ‘world building’ for the TV show ‘Attachments’ (which also featured contributions from Paul Lakin, Steve Hill and Charlie Brooker). His book of the same name was completed in 2003 and almost went to publication, before being canned at the last minute by its publisher. The version available now was compiled by his sister Vici and released in August 2020.

I won’t spoilt the content for you (if you’ve read this far, but haven’t read the book then rush out immediately and get a copy, I’ll be here when you get back) other than to say it begins with Duncan being turfed out of his flat off the Old Kent Road and finding himself adrift in Hastings (really he was in Worthing, but the rest is fairly autobiographical) with £18 in his pocket, no possessions and nowhere to sleep that night.

If that sounds horrible depressing, then it is. But the book is shot through with Duncan’s irrepressible optimism and the cast of characters, with one notable exception, are an appealing bunch of oddballs, chancers, drunks and druggies trying to live life as best they can on the forgotten rungs of society. ‘Angela’ emerges fully formed here as the love interest and the scenes with her are, to this soppy reader at least, genuinely tender and heartful.

In reality, the main antagonist in the book is the British state. In the issue #17 podcast (Episode 2) it is noted that it is a shame "such a hugely talented guy should fall through the cracks", but I would contend that he didn't fall into a crack but rather was dispassionately shoved into a box labelled 'workshy dole scum' and routinely dehumanised by a vindictive system designed to heap more misery on the shoulders of those least able to bear it.

The Return of Mr Cursor

Mr Cursor reappears in the 10th birthday celebration edition of Zone by way of a letter mailed from “Tristan da Cunha”, where he has been living for three years (if one thing is for certain, it’s that Duncan owned an atlas). “Getting to Pitcairn used up all the money I had” he writes “having arrived, I now wanted to leave”. Swapping ‘Worthing’ for ‘Pitcairn’ makes this fully autobiographical.

This revival ran intermittently for the rest of 2003, and consisted of a short story, told in five episodes, charting his escape from Tristan and eventual involvement in a plot to lure obnoxious American teen gamers to Sierra Leone so they could be murdered. As you can imagine, it hasn’t aged as well as his other writing, being too firmly rooted in one conceit which feels a little queasy in 2023.

The final Cursor was printed in issue #200. He is still “penniless” and living in “Hastings” which is “a complete shithole”. The odds are “50/50 you’ll be stabbed in the eye on any given day” so he “stays inside month after month” playing Pirates! Gold. It’s a bleak setup, but the rest of the column, where he imagines playing “Pirates! Gold Plus Online Odyssey” from inside a climate controlled GameSphere, with David Hasselhoff as his faithful boson, is excellent. The imagination is still firing, the prose clear and engaging as ever – even seemingly cut off from the world of PC gaming, he still knew what made it tick.

On dole beach with Lord Scumland

That Cursor marks the end of Duncan’s published work but there is one final strand, Twitter. He appears to have started several handles, but the main one was @LordScumland which began in May 2011. Here he finally locates himself in Worthing (which, according to his ‘Guide to the South Coast’ in the Diaries, is a step up from Hastings) and has acquired a PlayStation, blender, spider plant and dog.

No MacDonald output would be complete without ‘characters’ and they’re here too, including “the mad Polish woman” (who lives below him and occasionally hammers on his door in the early hours) and the obliquely sinister ‘Russians’ who are perpetually fighting in the street. There is no mention of ‘Angela’, but I hope she popped round occasionally.

His Twitter feed is a wonderful reprise of some of the stuff that made Mr Cursor shine. He begins with the conceit of a ‘19th Century Words Club’ but soon deviates from this to whatever happens to take his fancy. Whilst playing Skyrim he accidentally falls “off a cliff while trying to catch a butterfly" thereby earning “possibly the most effete death in videogame history”. His love of MasterChef leads to him programming a “random MasterChef recipe generator” which throws up such gems as "Octopus beak stuffed with large claw", "Flavoured bone" and “Egg”.

After a trip to America with ‘Rupert’ “a bloke I’ve known since I was a kid” and an attempt to feed his dog chicory (“Could you not soak the chicory in salt? Then he would happily eat it”) the feed goes silent in September 2012. And that is the end of that.

“I’ll try to end on a positive note, which is hard”

I wanted to finish in Duncan’s own words (the sub-heading above is from his review of Silent Thunder), but I don’t think his own assessment (“a lazy, scrounging, hedonistic tosser”) does him justice.

It’s clear from his writing that he wasn't an early rising, clean cut go-getter but, put in an environment where he was allowed to be himself, he excelled. Not only that, his format breaking style, "that irreverent side” which “rubbed off on everyone else on the magazine", blazed a path for other writers, not least Charlie Brooker, who would continue his tradition of submitting reviews dressed up as letters to maiden aunts, terrible poems, court cases and other sundry surrealism.

Theoretically, the world of 2023 should open countless opportunities for writers like Duncan. Want to write a rambling stream of consciousness about rearing cockroaches for food? Go right ahead! No one will stop you. But the reality is that no one can make a living from it anymore. Between the ever-churning content, SEO and clickbait, nobody is going to pay for a four-page game review that spends a third of its run time talking about Sting. And that’s a real shame, because I’d rather read one of those than a thousand on Steam.

Duncan died in 2017, but then a strange thing happened. In December 2019 his original Twitter account (@scumland) tweeted “If you see me on the beach in Worthing, come and say hello”. There are a couple of explanations for this, but the one I like to believe is that someone who loved him, and missed him, popped it on there as a tribute. And why not, if you find yourself on Worthing beach, raise your glass, can or cone and say “hello” to the memory of an excellent writer.

And, because originality really should be rewarded, how about we applaud Duncan MacDonald?

I’ll clap first.

Thanks for reading PC ZONE LIVES! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

As many will be aware, this year marks the 30th since the first issue of PC Zone appeared on the nation’s newsstands. Until very recently however, no one could be sure when precisely the mag was first squeezed out. The assumption was that it must have been during March 1993, since the first issue was, of course, the April issue, and as all magazine readers know, the streetdate is always a good few weeks after going to press. It was probably a Thursday – PC Zone always went out on what we now call “the new Friday” – but we just didn’t know which one.

Anyway, the mystery of when PC Zone was born has just been solved, thanks to the investigations of a top bloke called Paul Monaghan. As well as the editor of Pixel Addict magazine, Paul is one of the hosts of the Maximum Power Up podcast and a huge fan of Dennis Publishing’s games mags (all games mags, to be fair). Paul was scouring through his back issues of Game Zone magazine – the console-focused precursor of PC Zone – and found this rather splendid house ad:

Seems a bit odd to be hammering on console games in a console mag that very few serious PC games players would have read; but there we have it in black, white and a tasetful splash of pink: PC Zone’s birthday is March 4th. Yes, a Thursday. (No Limit was no.1 in the charts, if you we’re wondering. )

It was apt that the ad came to light just this past weekend at The PC Zone Classic, an event held in London to celebrate, belatedly, PC Zone’s landmark birthday – and to which Paul was cordially invited.

He wasn’t the only one, of course, with anyone and everyone who had half a connection to Zone invited to attend. Former editors, writers, designers, ad sales staff, plus friends and foes from other titles came in their dozens. Most looking rather greyer since last they were together, but who all seemed genuinely thrilled to be out after dark without having to worry about picking up their teenage offspring from the local police station.

I won’t bore you with how the evening went, but there was a lot of “Oooh, you haven’t changed a bit!” and, “Is that Charlie Brooker over there looking like someone pissed on his shoes?” Instead, let me post a few choice pics courtesy of some of the few attendees who could be bothered to get their phones out.

In that last one above you’ll recognise one or two faces, I’m sure. The guy on the right however is not former PC Zone editor John Davison. (John couldn’t make it, unfortunately.) They do look quite similar, don’t they? But, no, that’s Chris Morphy-Godber, an honourary PC Zone Team member on account of the fact he will be contributing to this blog on occasion. He is one of the biggest PC Zone nerds you’ll ever encounter and a very good writer in that he can effortlessly adopt the rambling stream-of-consciousness style that Zone was famous for. Don’t worry, you will see evidence of it soon enough.

So, happy birthday PC Zone, thanks for reading then and now, welcome Chris and, as ever, fuck PC Gamer!

A more traditional podcast format for the sixth episode of PC Zone Lives, where instead of trying – and often failing – to get a virtual room full of people to remember a very specific time in PC Zone history, your amiable host goes through one person’s entire Zone-infused CV.

For this first audio Oi!, Richie chats with Vici MacDonald, a freelance designer who worked on the very first issues of PC Zone and who later oversaw the extensive 1998 redesign that saw PC Zone reclaim its rightful spot at the top of the UK PC games mag hit parade.

As well as her time as a globetrotting music journalist on Smash Hits, Vici remembers the life of her celebrated brother Duncan MacDonald - PC Zone’s immortal Mr. Cursor and legend of both Your Sinclair and Zero. Duncan sadly died in 2017, but not before writing South Coast Diaries, which Vici helped publish and you should absolutely read if you were ever a fan of Duncan’s work.

Note: If you’re yet to read South Coast Diaries, you may experience one or two minor spoilers during the episode, but none that should diminish your enjoyment of the book when you inevitably get around to reading it. Which you will, won’t you!

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PC Zone was the UK’s first games-only PC magazine. You know this because, (a) we don’t shut up about it, and, (b) it was plastered above the masthead when the first issue was delivered way back in March 1993 (so it must be true).

But, did you also know that PC Zone was conceived as early as 1991? You’ll know this because Your Sinclair and Zero legend Teresa Maughan talks about the difficult gestation and much more besides in this episode of PC Zone Lives.

Also joining Richie Shoemaker to remember PC Zone in utero are launch editor Paul Lakin and art editor Duncan Hemphill, both veterans of PCZ precursor Game Zone magazine.

Completing the line-up is PC Zone’s long-serving publisher Tim Ponting, who after being lured away from Zero to work on a “proper magazine”, took over from the Mother of PC Zone when she snuck off to have real babies soon after the magazine had its arse smacked.

If you need to remind of yourself of just what a beautiful baby the launch issue of PC Zone turned out to be, check out archive.org.

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More stories from beyond the games at pczonelives.co.uk