The Paul Glancey interview

Paul Glancey is one of the unsung heroes of the 16bit era. Starting out with ZZAP!64 he would go on to write and edit for CVG before launching MegaTech in 1991, the world’s first dedicated Mega Drive magazine.

I spoke to Paul about MegaTech earlier in the year, and you can read the feature here. But that involved a whole lot of editing to get the article in shape, so here are Paul’s original words about his time in the industry, the rise and fall of Sega, and why he doesn’t think much of Sonic these days.

Okay, original article here. Interview below.

Let’s start with a nice easy one. How did you first get involved in games journalism? You started at ZZAP!64, right?

I’d been mad on video games since Pong and had graduated from a ZX81 at age 11 to a Spectrum to a Commodore 64. All the way through I’d voraciously consumed computer magazines like Your Computer, Computer and Video Games (CVG), Crash and ZZAP! 64. It was insane. I carried at least one magazine with me everywhere I went. I would read them over and over.

I had various part-time gamey jobs when I was a teenager – working on the computer games counter at WH Smith, helping run ‘Word Processing With BBC Micros’ community training – but of course the real dream was to write for one of these magazines. Crash and ZZAP!'s writing staff were all fairly young guys and both mags would occasionally advertise for readers to apply to join the team if any of the current staff ever left. 

I think I was 18 when I first applied to join the ZZAP! 64 team. I was lucky enough to get an interview with Ciaran Brennan who was editing the mag at the time, and had lunch with the team, but I was gutted when I eventually found out I hadn’t got the job. 

A few months later though, I got another call from The Julian Rignall, asking if I would come down for another interview because another staff writer job was opening up. I couldn’t believe my luck when I went down to Ludlow just before Christmas 1987 and got the job. Over the course of the next year I had an incredible time learning the mag business at Newsfield Publications, making friends, playing games, and having reviews published under my little Oli Frey cartoon head in ZZAP! 64. Quite an honour.

How did you make the jump to EMAP and CVG / Mean Machines?

Almost a year on, Julian had left ZZAP! 64 (and Newsfield publishing) to work for EMAP in London, as the deputy editor of Computer and Video Games (CVG) under the esteemed Eugene Lacey. As it turned out, CVG’s staff writer, Matt Bielby, was leaving the mag, leaving shoes that I was invited to fill. 

As with ZZAP!, it was great fun, but hard work. The CVG editorial team was tiny – Eugene, Julian and myself plus some teenage freelancers and columnists like Keith Campbell who had written the adventure games console since 1981, and Tony Takoushi who ran the Mean Machines console column.

Eugene left the mag the following summer and Graeme Taylor, of Sinclair User, took over the editorship. He and Julian effectively relaunched CVG and, as more and more game developers and publishers were turning their attention from C64, Spectrum and Amstrad titles to Nintendo and Sega games, Julian took over and enlarged the Mean Machines column. We had previously covered two or three NES or Master System games per month, but as the import scene was taking off we were soon covering more Japanese PC Engine and Mega Drive titles. Many of our readers had long aspired to getting that ‘arcade experience at home’ so they were super-excited about owning near-arcade-perfect console games like R-Type and Afterburner.

Was EMAP (publishing) as enthusiastic about the emerging home console market as the readers and staff writers?

To see whether there was an audience for a console only magazine, Julian and Graeme got the CVG team to freelance on ‘The Computer and Video Games Complete Guide To Consoles’ in their spare time. When The Complete Guide sold out, all the evidence suggested the time was right and Mean Machines magazine was born. Julian moved off CVG (to launch Mean Machines) and I took over as associate editor at CVG.

Considering these were pretty popular mags, the editorial teams were under-staffed and we were all running on youthful enthusiasm and crisps. CVG had a team of three writers at the time, myself and two young lads called Richard Leadbetter and Rob Swan, covering the whole gamut of 8bit and 16bit computer, as well as console titles. 

Squashed next to us in our small office, Julian initially only had one writer under him, Matt Regan. When a new console title came in both teams would review the same actual cartridge, so It wasn’t unusual for the CVG team to help out with occasional comments or even whole reviews in Mean Machines.

Apart from that, and sitting right next to the Mean Machines team, and playing their console games, and sharing a flat with Gary Harrod and going over to Southend to play coin-ops at Mr B’s with Julian, I never got that involved with Mean Machines. I think I only ever had one little reviewer cartoon, which was for Wrestle War on Mega Drive.

What was the initial pitch for MegaTech and how difficult was it getting the magazine launched? It was the first Mega Drive specific UK gaming magazine, right?

The initial pitch was me sitting in the back of a cab with Julian on the way to a press visit at Mirrorsoft in London and saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we make a Mega Drive mag’? Actually, I think I originally proposed a Mega Drive tips magazine, if you can believe that. I loved playing tips and for some reason I thought a mag full of guides, maps and cheats was the way to go. That idea didn’t last long though.

Anyway, this was in mid 1991. Virgin Mastertronic was handling all the Sega hardware and software in the UK and were making a pretty good job of it. With no official release for the PC Engine, and the Super NES still off on the horizon, the Mega Drive was THE hot console at the time. 

Mag publishers always have to think in terms of how many advertisers they could sell pages to, because “pages pay wages”, and the expectation was that there would be loads of official games coming that would need lovely full-colour, full-page ads in MegaTech. I must admit I was really just thinking of indulging my enthusiasm for the console and getting away from CVG, which was doing my head in, frankly, covering all those platforms.

Graeme Taylor, who by now was CVG’s and Mean Machines’ Publisher, took us out for lunch to discuss it and we talked about testing the market with another Complete Guide To Consoles, but in the form of a Complete Guide To Mega Drive. I was supposed to work on my own to get this done over the course of a couple of months.

What was that process like, getting the Complete Guide to Mega Drive out the door? 

It was a nightmare. I think the original idea was that we would just re-run lightly-edited review copy from Mean Machines to fill the mag, but that didn’t really fit the format, so I’m pretty sure I wrote most of it myself. To complicate matters, for much of the time I had no computer to write on and no art director to work out how the mag would look. 

With no more than about two weeks before the print deadline, I managed to get an old computer and started writing features and reviews of every Mega Drive game we knew of. Then, with about a week to go, I was joined by Jeff Zie, who was an art director from a London creative agency, not really a magazine guy. He would join me in the evenings after his day job, to lay out the copy I had written and typeset. 

We didn’t have Apple Macs at the time so (the magazine layout and design) was very old-fashioned - running paper galleys of type from a 1200dpi laser printer through a waxer, then sticking them onto page layout boards. This is why the style of the mag was pretty basic, and so different from the other Complete Guides. I was only 22 and felt completely overwhelmed by the whole thing. We had to wing it.

Anyway, The Complete Guide To Mega Drive shipped and it sold OK, not as well as the other Guides, but I think the company was already bought into the idea of going with a Mega Drive mag whatever happened.

Was the MegaTech launch easier? 

When we finally got going on MegaTech, there was me and Jeff and I nabbed a lad called Mark Patterson from Commodore User’s editorial team to be the deputy editor. Unlike a normal magazine launch, we had no properly worked-up dummy issue to refer to, and The Complete Guide To Mega Drive wasn’t much of a prototype. Apart from keeping some of the same typefaces, we practically started from scratch. 

We were throwing all kinds of ideas around, but we tried to stick with some kind of tone that was more high-tech than, say, Mean Machines, and a bit more expensive-looking too. Well, we had a glossy cover and the mag was perfect-bound rather than stapled together. 

We were going big on the whole desktop publishing thing, with Apple Macs, Quark XPress, Photoshop and a cutting-edge video frame grabber for screenshots. I fancied the idea of getting a program called Ray Dream Designer (made by Pixar at the time I think), so we could make our own 3D-rendered cover images every month. I had no idea how impractical that was. When we had to put a cover together towards the end of the schedule we had nothing. Luckily, we happened to be visiting some graphics repro company in Acton and we saw they had a sort of CG image of an American Football player that we put on the first cover.

The content of the magazine was a very familiar mix of news, reviews, tips and previews. The visual style ranged widely over the first few issues though. The reviewer's pictures varied from weird geometric faces that looked like they came from a Soviet cartoon about robots, to images we pinched from Japanese Manga. By issue 3 I think we’d managed to work out how to use the video grabber, and we’d got Ace Consoles in Carnaby Street to make us up a Mega Drive-to-Component cable, so we could capture sharper screenshots than the fuzzy composite video ones we started off with. It still wasn’t perfect but at least it let us get images that didn’t have a big PAUSED message across the middle, and we could do nifty annotated playing tips images and maps made of comped-together screenshots. 

From there on the design settled down and we kind of got an idea of how to make the mag from month to month. It was still a hell of a lot of work though, and we’d often do 12-hour days and weekends. It was a major breakthrough when I bought a coffee maker and a little stereo boombox to keep us going through the night.

The magazine's skull logo has a very Metalheadz / Goldie / Drum n Bass vibe, what's the story behind it? It seems to pre-date Goldie's record label by a couple of years. 

I wanted the mag to have a kind of cool, "secret club" feel to it so I asked Jeff to come up with a logo that would fit. The first couple were not right. Graeme remarked that the first one “looked like a bee”, so that got the push. The next one Jeff called ‘The Mega-Bat’, because it was based on the letter M. It was a bit spindly though, not very punchy. Jeff’s next one was an M on top and a T on the bottom, shaped to look like the eyes and teeth of a skull. This was the winner.

The guy from head office was worried that a skull on every front cover made MegaTech look a bit… well… ‘National Socialist’. I had to promise to try to give the tone of the mag a very liberal slant.

Looking back at MegaTech there seems to be a real effort to cover more obscure and interesting games than rival publications, was that always the intention? 

Do you think so? If I had a strategy I can’t remember what it was. Apart from trying to fill the review pages with something worth talking about. We just covered whatever we could get our hands on as early as possible. We might have covered a few more import games than Mean Machines did, but then they were multi-format so they had more choice.

What was the relationship like between CVG, Mean Machines and MegaTech, were you all sitting side by side in the same offices, was their professional rivalry?

Fine really. Well, they both had a much more substantial readership (I think MegaTech peaked at around 45,000 sales per month), but those mags all had a slightly different personality, so I don’t think we ever thought of them as direct competitors. Sega-specific publications like Sega Pro, or Mega Drive-focussed titles like Mega became more of a direct concern because we were all fighting over the same audience and advertisers.

As far as fighting over things like exclusive reviews, I don’t remember many of those. I think there was a slightly heated discussion about who got first dibs on Quackshot, of all things. If a game came in at just the right time for your deadline you might get the exclusive by default. 

Looking at the Sega vs Nintendo battles of the early 90s, it seems like Sega peaked around Christmas 92/93, and the momentum began to shift after that, what's your take on the era, and the sudden rush of new systems from around 1993.

Virgin Mastertronic’s marketing nous had got the Mega Drive into a really strong position by the end of 1992. I mean who could forget the excitement around Sonic 2’s day? And their TV advertising was really memorable - the Cyber-Razor Cut ad, and all that. It was like early versions of what Sony did for PlayStation a few years later.

Until the Super NES came along the Mega Drive was the de facto solution to any players’ need for an arcade experience at home; Super Hang On, Altered Beast, Super Monaco GP - all Sega’s own coin-op titles, and then you had masterpieces like Ghouls ’n Ghosts and Strider from Capcom. When the Super NES arrived, its software started to go beyond that arcade experience, and at the time it was clearly a superior machine with quite a few superior games.

At the time though, I definitely championed Sonic over Mario. Sonic definitely sold the Mega Drive and a lot of copies of the magazine as well.

And on that note, what was the internal view around the Mega CD, and Sega's chances as the industry began to shift?

Well, as soon as the Super NES came along everyone thought that Sega probably had some technical catching up to do. All those amazing Super NES games, like Mario Kart and Pilot Wings, that were built off the Mode 7 graphics hardware were visually striking at the time, but they were also brilliantly playable. 

I was initially excited about the Mega-CD because the whole multimedia/CD-ROM thing was kicking off across the industry and there was that promise of bigger and better games to come. But it never really came off. It was so expensive, and I think the only games that came anywhere close to using the hardware in an exciting way were a couple of Core Design’s games, like Thunderhawk. 

The sprite scaling and rotation… I guess the Batmobile chase in Batman Returns put it to good use, but not much else did, and we could probably have had something similar with no extra hardware at all. I used to wonder if it would have made any difference if Sega had used the Mega-CD to make enhanced versions of all those AM2 scaling coin-ops like OutRun and PowerDrift, but I guess by then they’d already had their day anyway. And It was hard to see those full-motion-video games like Night Trap as anything other than expensive novelties at best.

There were a few unique Mega-CD experiences to be had, but, looking back, the Mega-CD made it look like Sega execs had given up on the Mega Drive prematurely, like they thought it could have nothing left to offer in its standalone form. A bit silly really, in retrospect. You could expunge the Mega-CD and all of the other add-ons from the timeline, so Sega just goes from Mega Drive to Saturn, and it would probably have made very little difference to the players.

MegaTech was acquired by a new publisher in 1993. What happened at that point, and where did that leave you?

Thankfully I’d already left the mag some months before that happened. It’s obviously a bit gutting to have your creation sold off to someone like (Hugh) Gollner (of Maverick Magazines publishing fame), when you knew he would just kill it off to benefit Sega Mega Drive Advanced Gaming. Mind you, by then MegaTech wasn’t the same mag that I’d left anyway.

Looking back at one of the reader surveys, I noticed there was a whole bit about cover gifts on magazines. Did these freebies distort the market and what were the politics around sales and giveaways vs content.

We rarely had the budget for them so they were never a big part of our plan. I’m not even sure why we’d bother asking about them in a reader survey! We did the skull badge back in the early days, which was nice, and a tips book and a Street Fighter poster I think, but not much else. Mean Machines had nifty things like the Jaz figurine, and the Street Fighter VHS video, which had Julian and Gary Harrod, who was the office SF2 master, showing you how to play. People went mad for that.

Who was it who used to give away mini novels based on the characters from Streets of Rage and stuff like that? Was that Sega Pro? They always seemed lame at the time, but looking back now I bet a lot of kids enjoyed getting them as freebies.

What are your favourite memories from that era and what do you miss?

We started it over 30 years ago now, and I miss having the freedom and the youthful energy to make a magazine like MegaTech. You couldn’t do it now. I definitely couldn’t. And I’m sure a lot of people would disagree but to me a lot of the Mega Drive games haven't aged that well, so I haven’t dug out the Mega Drive/Mega CD combo for a few years now. Nowadays, Sonic really annoys me, the way he loses all his rings whenever he touches anything and you feel like you have to start the level again to get the right ending, or the cool bonus game.

I did miss the people until Ed ‘Pinky’ Lomas (the regular MegaTech tips contributor who became a CVG staff writer) recently got in touch to invite the whole EMAP gang of that era to a weekly online Quake session. I wouldn’t say I was a champion, but I’ve still got it, or some of it. Not as much as Richard Leadbetter or ‘The_Tominator’, but some things will never change.

Read the original MegaTech article here.