The Wil Overton (Super Play) interview
If you’re reading this I’m going to assume you already know who Wil Overton is. Because I don’t know why else you’d be here... But in case you need a quick refresher.
Wil came to prominence as the illustrator behind Super Play Magazine’s 47 anime inspired front covers
Was part of the team behind Anime-UK magazine and did a bunch of stuff there
Wrote for various Future Publishing magazines including Super Play, Edge, Official PlayStation and GamesMaster
Went on to work the dev side at Rare before going freelance…
You can find his official website here. But if it’s inside stories and random facts about Super Play magazine you’re after keeping reading. Oh, and you can read the proper article here.
Let’s start at the start. Anime / Manga was still very niche (outside Japan) in the 80s and 90s. How did you first come across it and what inspired you to start illustrating in that style?
I tend to always cite finding some art books for Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in a Forbidden Planet bookshop in London in the mid ‘80s, for making me first think about animation from Japan - even though I’d, unknowingly, been watching it on TV for years with shows like Marine Boy and the western version of Gatchaman - Battle of the Planets. However, the real blow-my-mind moment, and realisation that there was, literally, tons of this stuff to discover, came when I found a Japanese bookshop that carried anime magazines like Animage and Newtype.
Trying to draw in that style really didn’t come along until I found fellow anime fans Helen McCarthy and Steve Kyte and the idea came up of trying to turn their fanzine - Anime UK - into a proper newsstand magazine. At that time I was working as a graphic designer with no real intentions of ever being an illustrator; I loved drawing but never really thought I had the chops to do it for a living.
But after we struggled with decent reproduction of images for the mag - this was 1990/91 with computer desktop publishing still very much in its infancy - I started to redraw existing stuff into easily reproducible black and white linework along with a few original pieces. I would also do the front cover while Steve Kyte, who was - and still is - a far better and more experienced artist than me, would do the back. Suddenly, I was pretending to be an anime-style illustrator.
How did your gig illustrating Super Play covers come about, and what was that monthly process like? Were you given advance notice? Proper briefs? Or were you basically left alone to bang out a cover with minimal instructions?
Super Play came directly off the back of Anime UK. Launch editor Matt Bielby wanted the mag to have a Japanese focus - a good idea as it allowed the magazine to cover far more stuff than just the way-behind UK releases. They’d done mock-ups of covers using existing illustrations from art books and magazines they’d found, but when he discovered some issues of Anime UK he got in touch and asked if I’d be up for doing an original cover for the first issue. By then I’d had a Japanese Super Famicom for a while and was a big import game fan so I jumped at the chance. The first cover seemed to go down well and they asked me back for #2 and it just carried on from there. Eventually, as I was also doing the Anime-UK page design (and dipping a toe in computer desktop publishing), they asked if I fancied actually working full-time on Super Play, but for that first year I was just freelancing the covers.
Yes, there would be a brief, in that they’d have a specific game or idea in mind and maybe a quick scribble if it was something specific. But other than that I would come up with a few roughs, trying to leave space for cover lines etc., and then just get on with it. I’d do the linework on paper and when it was inked I’d get it transferred onto a sheet of acetate and paint it on the back like an animation cel, which seemed, to me, the best way of trying to achieve an authentic look.
Super Play is one of the mostly fondly remembered magazines from the 16bit era. Why do you think it has such a strong (ongoing) fanbase?
I think probably because it had such a strong identity. Sure, not everyone would be a fan of the Japanese angle, but if it clicked for you I’d like to think you would have stuck with it. I’ve chatted to many folks over the years who cite Super Play as their entry point into that world, whether it’s exposure to games they wouldn’t have read about elsewhere, the animation, culture, or even just a desire to draw with that aesthetic. It’s a lovely feeling, knowing that I might have had the tiniest part in putting something in front of someone that they grew to love. I had the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time.
You provided all 47 cover illustrations for the magazine - how did the magazine, its culture, and the industry change during that time?
47 issues isn’t that big a run in the grand scheme of things and it didn’t seem that long, but the Super Nintendo was beginning to wane, and despite me championing the magazine’s cause the management at Future felt that it was better to shut Super Play down rather than trying to transition it into an N64 title. The industry might have been growing and changing - well, moving more towards 3D - but I don’t think Super Play changed that much during its run. While readers may have been more familiar with the delights of Japanese pop culture by 1996 it was still far from being a mainstream thing. Come to think of it, it probably would have been pretty easy to start doing a Super PlayStation mag (and now I want to know what that looks like).
At some point you also started writing for Super Play as well, how did that come about? Were you pushed into it or did you jump in when given the opportunity?
I think the mists of time have somewhat inflated how much writing I did for Super Play and other mags during my time at Future. I’ve never thought of myself as a writer but I’d done some work for Manga Mania - a UK Dark Horse-published manga anthology magazine - and early on in Super Play’s run I was asked if I could come up with an article that explored the links between anime and games. So, I guess, eventually, I got cemented in some folks’ minds as someone who could write stuff as well and I’d get asked to do the odd thing here and there.
All the Future mags used an internal freelance system where writers could boost their income doing reviews and articles for mags other than their own and I ended up writing stuff for the likes of Edge, Official PlayStation, GamesMaster and even technology mag T3. The biggest thing I ever did is probably the first half of N64 Mag’s infamous Ocarina of Time review. I got to go out to Germany with a load of other mags and play as much as I could in a day. Magazine designers rarely got to go on games mag journalist jollies so it was great to be asked.
How intense was the competition among rival magazines and publishers back in those days? Were there clear Future / EMAP / Paragon Publishing camps or was there a broader comradery in the UK industry?
There was obviously an interest in if your mag was doing better or worse than the competition, and we’d keep an eye on any exclusives other magazines had managed to snag, but any time you met rival magazine staff from another company - which, admittedly, wasn’t that often for me - I can’t say that there was any ill will. Sometimes I’d get annoyed if another mag made a joke of something they obviously didn’t understand, but I don’t remember it being any more serious than that. We did have a rather childish ritual later on in N64’s life where we’d ‘spine’ rival mags; literally breaking the spine of the mag by whacking it as hard as you could on a desk edge (sorry mag collectors), but it was all in good fun. Probably.
What about import magazines from the US and Japan? I assume Super Play was all over Weekly Famitsu to try and get ahead of the news.
Edge had a ‘man in Japan’ who wrote about Western news for magazines like Login and would often also translate the latest relevant news from Famitsu for Super Play and send over pages for images. We didn’t get all the Japanese magazines each month, but I’d semi-regularly buy some for myself and always try to keep an eye on what was coming up. I’m pretty sure that by the time Super Play was out, Future was making inroads into the US, so it was easier for us to call on someone over there for info and set up interviews etc.
What do you miss about the industry back then, and what would you happily leave behind?
I miss being part of that small team that, every 20 days or so, could wander into the newsagents and see on the shelves what they’d achieved that month. You didn’t really have time to hang around or labour over anything too much. By the time I got to games development, that month had stretched out to years and the amount of people involved had grown exponentially. It was far trickier to keep focus on the whole picture and a lot harder to get things started in the first place. I definitely found that frustrating on more than one occasion.
On the whole Super Play and N64 Magazine were left alone by the suits at Future so we did, pretty much, what we wanted. Apart from trying to balance wanting to make the best thing you could with the logistics of getting a magazine out every 3 weeks - something we struggled with on N64 in the early days - those years kinda flew by and I really enjoyed them. The only thing that made me think about moving on was the thought that I wanted to do more on the illustration side.
What’s something I should ask you about?
How I almost left Rare to go back to Future and help Mark Green launch NGamer.
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Forgotten Worlds magazine #2 and #3 are currently in the works. More details soon.
