The Mark Green interview
I had a monthly ritual back in the mid 2000s. When a new issues of NGamer dropped I’d spend a Friday evening watching the covered-mounted promo DVD. This was before YouTube was really a thing, and social media barely existed. So these DVDs were the only real opportunity to see the latest games in action.
Looking back, it seems like we have collective amnesia about the Nintendo Wii / DS era and how ground breaking it was. Mark Green remembers - he was the editor of NGamer magazine throughout much of this era. So it was a real privilege to interview him, and talk shop about Nintendo, social media, the early days of broadband, and how that impacted the monthly production cycle.
You can read the article here. But if you want to get into the nitty gritty Mark’s unedited answer are below.
Can you start by giving us some background on your history in the publishing industry? How did you get started, where did you work?
“I think my story’s similar to a lot of my peers. I landed in games magazines mostly by luck and accident. I trained to be a teacher but was terrible at it, and I realised at the end of my final year at university that I was going to have to find a job doing... something. I’d grown up *obsessed* with games magazines - Your Sinclair, Crash, C&VG, ACE, Amiga Power, N64 Magazine - but hadn’t given a single thought to a career in games magazines.
“Then in mid-1998, I happened to see a job ad on the Future Publishing website for a Staff Writer on a new magazine, which turned out to be Arcade, a new multiformat magazine. Somehow I got the job (one of the interview questions was genuinely ‘What’s your fastest Mario Kart time?’). And suddenly I was working alongside my magazine heroes - Matt Bielby, Rich Pelley, Robin Alway and more. It was surreal and amazing.
“Much as I loved working on Arcade, my true love was N64 Magazine. A few months in Tim Weaver gave me a freelance assignment to write an import review of 64 Trump Collection (probably the Nintendo 64’s least well-known game). I remember riding the bus home clutching the freelance commission, with the N64 Magazine logo at the top, like it was the golden ticket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
“My 64 Trump Collection review was *terrible*, but those poor innocents at N64 Magazine still poached me as a Staff Writer a few months later, and I got to work directly with Andrea Ball, Tim Weaver and the rest of the amazing crew. I became Features Editor, then Deputy Editor. Finally I clawed my way up to be Acting Editor for 3 (count ‘em!) whole issues before Tim retook the reins when the mag became NGC.
“I left Future in 2002 to work at Nintendo’s European HQ in Germany, then left in 2004 to freelance for loads of different magazines. Then in 2006 I rejoined Future as Editor of NGamer.”
You were the launch editor for NGamer in 2006, having previously worked on N64 and NGC. Did you think the Wii and the DS were going to be as big as they were (coming after the modest sales of the N64 and Gamecube)?
“Well, the mighty Tony Mott of EDGE fame was the real launch editor for NGamer. Tony and Art Editor Paul Tysall did the majority of the great work crafting the first issue (plus Super Play/N64 legend Wil Overton drew the little team of characters for the different mag sections). I just threw in the occasional idea - like footnotes, which were inspired by growing up reading a lot of Terry Pratchett.*
“I got the easy job of taking over from issue 2. Even today, I have to pinch myself that I got to be a games magazine editor at all, let alone on a mag that continued the lineage of NGC, N64 and Super Play.
“I remember being very excited about the Wii - it felt like every developer and game was trying something new with the Wii Remote. But I don’t think anyone predicted how the Wii in particular would explode into the mainstream. I remember writing the Ed’s intro for the October 2007 issue, trying to convey in 3 tiny paragraphs the scale of the news that Wii had just rocketed to become the world’s best-selling console. With that and the whole Nintendogs/Brain Training mania, and Nicole Kidman and Patrick Stewart popping up in DS TV ads, it was hard to keep up sometimes.”
*I got to meet and interview Terry Pratchett not long after joining Future. I saw him yell at someone not to touch his hat.
The internet was starting to get serious in the mid 2000s, did NGamer have a dedicated online strategy at the time. Was there any attempt to link the print and online aspects?
“Not massively. The online stuff was pretty much handled elsewhere at Future Towers. Someone somewhere had the job of uploading some of our articles and screenshots to the Future website. I remember there being some friction when they’d upload them *before we even published the magazine*, thereby ruining whatever magazine exclusive we’d carefully negotiated and planned.
“We had a neat little forum where some of our readers would hang out, so that was fun to browse and occasionally contribute to.
“By and large, the internet felt like a huge beast of a competitor, beating us to news, previews and reviews of just about everything. I felt like I wanted to make NGamer a kind of ‘roundup of everything’ - filling it with quirky Nintendo fandom in the World of Nintendo section, cramming news tidbits into the News Blast, doing lots of import previews and reviews (upholding the tradition of NGC/N64/Super Play). So rather than competing with the internet, we were hopefully catching you up on lots of internet things you might have missed. Like, er, someone drawing a NES on an Etch-A-Sketch. You know, the important stuff.”
I recently found one of the cover mounted discs that came with the magazine - which reminded me that this was all before we had YouTube, Broadband, etc. Can you tell us a little about the monthly production process - how hands on were you and the team with the contents? How important were they to the magazine’s overall package?
“They were hard work to be honest. We had to dream up the things we filmed, plus source the trailers and record game footage. And it was all on us to make time for it all - we had to squeeze it in between making the actual magazine.
“We did have fun filming the video bits, in the Future studio that was in another office a few streets away in Bath. I remember the one where we all tried to play multiplayer Virtual Console games we hadn’t played before - just wandering around visibly not having a clue what we were doing. Also the fluke where I managed to do the Wii Bowling 91-pins trick first try, and we left in my surprised reaction.
“At the time I wasn’t a big fan of the DVDs, because our readers couldn’t actually play the DVD on the Wii. So I didn’t think they had much value for readers, especially because YouTube was already out there with all the trailers and game footage. So I kept campaigning to get rid of them and replace them with a gift - I thought it was much more Nintendo-y to give away stickers, transfers, that sort of thing. Eventually my publisher relented.
“I think our readership figures did start to creep up after... but I checked out some of the footage on YouTube today with fresh eyes, and what the hell was I thinking? The DVDs are brilliant! I’d forgotten the joint Virtual Console commentaries from Matthew Castle and Martin Kitts - they’re great. I’m amazed how much we did - reviews, Virtual Console, features... how did we find the time?!”
Looking back, I think people forget what an innovative era in gaming the Wii and DS were. What do you attribute that too, and will we ever see another era like it? It seems the industry is playing it very safe these days (no pun intended).
“I think there are always people out there thinking about new ways to innovate in games hardware, so I’m sure we’ll continue to see bursts of new ideas. But just me personally, I tend to be more interested in innovation *within* games. I’m always looking for the new gameplay mechanic or visual technique or world design that makes my tummy jump - whether it takes advantage of new hardware, or works within existing hardware. The barriers to entry for games creators have crumbled, so I love that we get to play and enjoy a far wider and more inclusive range of games these days, and see fresh and interesting ideas all the time.”
Who did you see as the audience for NGamer magazine? Between them the Wii and DS had huge market reach and very different audiences.
“I think a survey we ran put the average age of our readers at 22 years old. I can’t remember how that broke down more granularly, but I suspect our audience was much more the dedicated Nintendo gamers rather than fully representative of the very wide audience the Wii and DS attracted.
“We tried to treat Wii and DS equally but I had a sense that handheld users were less likely to buy a specialist magazine like ours, so Wii was always at the front of my mind when it came to what to cover in NGamer. I loved DS though - the sheer variety of DS games was astonishing. Weirdly the DS game that stands out the most is Zendoku, because I genuinely almost fainted playing the blow-out-the-candle-using-the-microphone two-player minigame against Matthew Castle.
“I think the main thing was that we wanted NGamer to capture and bottle that special brand of Nintendo magic. So we were for anyone who got excited seeing a real-world church that looked a bit like the Temple of Time in Zelda, or someone playing a flute-and-beatbox version of the Mario theme. We just wanted anyone who loved Nintendo to feel they had a similarly fanatical (and hopefully funny) friend in our magazine. And boy did we cram a lot into those pages - shout out to our talented art bods Paul Tysall, Kim Bissix and Andy McGregor.”
There was a retro section in NGamer (aligned with the Virtual Console). How important do you think the Virtual Console was in helping to transform Retro Gaming from a small niche into something much bigger?
“Aw yes, I loved that retro section! There’s this thread of retrogaming running throughout my career - starting with the retro article I wrote for Arcade, through to some weird regular feature in GamesMaster where I was driving a retro bus or something, to editing Mark Hardisty’s A Gremlin In The Works book more recently. So Virtual Console gave us the perfect excuse to have some meaty retro coverage with loads of lovely pixel art. We named it GOAL IN!! after the end-of-level message in Taito’s joyful Rainbow Islands.
“I think the rise of retro is probably mostly due to the people who grew up playing old games now being old enough to run or influence companies. Probably a similar story with comic books, anime and so on.”
What do you miss about the industry as it was back then and what don’t you miss? Are you still involved?
“I left NGamer after issue 19 in 2008, and I was pretty burnt out. I moved away from Bath not long after, and there was a year or so where I think I barely touched a games console. By 2011 I was back doing occasional freelance for Nintendo Gamer, Edge and others, but all my full-time jobs were outside the games industry.
“Then last year I joined Unity as a technical writer, so I’ve managed to claw my way back into the games industry once again! Unity is full of former games studio people with a collective CV of just about every game you've ever heard of, so my job is simultaneously completely intimidating and incredibly exciting.
“I don’t miss angry calls from publishers because we scored things 84% instead of 90%, or having to negotiate for game access and exclusives (which I’m way too introverted and anxious to be any good at).
“I don’t miss the deadlines. Most magazines seemed to work late to meet their print deadline, and I wanted us to get issues out without crashing our evenings. But to achieve that I think I overplanned the issues too much, which probably sucked some of the joy out of everything. I didn’t really learn how to be a non-annoying manager and team leader until much later, so I’m super grateful to my team for putting up with me for 2 years.
“I miss the team and I coming up with silly creative things like the Mario Galaxy globe, replacing game character’s heads with Mii faces, or doing team photoshoots on a Bath tourist bus or in a salt cave.
“I miss being able to pay homage to the magazines I grew up with - like the ‘competition on every page’ in our Christmas issue and dressing up as Santa, which was a direct tribute to Your Sinclair magazine doing the same thing.
“And I miss reading and watching my favourite ever magazine come together every month (in large part due to the keeping-things-together skills of Chrissy Williams, our amazing Production Editor). My job was incredibly easy because we had such a talented team. I hope NGamer brought a little bit of joy into people’s lives. Even if we probably ruined it all by accidentally making the spine of issue 7 blue instead of red.”
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Read the associated article on NGamer magazine
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