UK:Resistance

How Gary Cutlack turned a Sega blog into a career. Sort of…

UK:Resistance (UK:R) ran for 15 years. The internet’s #1 destination for Sega fandom was launched in 1996 and continued on until 2011.

During that time the site’s content, mood, and layers of irony fluctuated wildly. Often coinciding with Sega’s corporate fortunes.

But it’s the late ‘00s’ version - from 2006 to 2010 - that I remember best. Back then I was a daily visitor; checking in for posts about Dreamcast spirals, booth babes, Sonic tat, and the correct way to take photos of Outrun. You know, the important things.

Gary Cutlack, AKA Commander Zorg, was the man running things behind the scenes. A blogger who managed to turn his Sega obsession into a writing career, a small online empire, and a large cheque from a doomed venture capital operation. Which, if you’re reading this, you probably already know. 

But that was all a long, long time ago. These days Gary leads a quiet life in the country and is blissfully unaware of anything to do with modern gaming. Which is probably just as well. The UK:Resistance ‘tone’ isn’t particularly compatible with modern sensibilities. A fact he was happy to acknowledge when I tracked him down for the following interview.

Let’s start with a simple one - why Sega? What is it that drew you to the company and inspired you to start a dedicated news site about it?

I was an 80s Commodore 64 kid, so I should've naturally graduated to an Amiga, but instead fell in love with the look of the Mega Drive and its promise of "High Definition Graphics - Stereo Sound." I think it was the headphone socket and volume slider that really sold me.

The creation of the site was embarrassingly impromptu and not even my idea. A chap I chatted with about Sega games on the early internet (Jon M, UK:R co-founder), suggested we start a Sega gaming site. I laughed at how impossible that would obviously be for normal people who'd only had the internet for six months, but he sent me an example HTML file and maybe three instructions and we... started doing it. 

If he'd suggested forming a synthpop duo or opening a drum & bass bar in Ibiza I'd have probably agreed to that too. I emailed him a list of five or six ideas of names for it, and he chose UK:Resistance with no further discussion and made the first logo. Again, I was amazed; people can just make logos?! None of it would've happened had Jon not just done it all there and then and set me off.

UK:Resistance launched way back in 1996, right? What are your memories of the Internet back then? It was still very much in its formative stages at that point. 

I don't remember it being particularly compulsive. Like, I certainly didn't turn my computer on every day in 1996 to look at the internet, as there wasn't the 24/7 content fire-tornado you see today and I had to run the extension lead from the bedroom to the kitchen. It seemed a perfectly fine and very worthy achievement to write 50 words a week and check your emails every Wednesday; a theory I've since resurrected to serve as the backbone of my current freelance career.

UK:Resistance got you a writing gig with Sega Saturn Magazine. When did you join the magazine, and what was the experience like (especially given Sega’s struggles with the Saturn)? 

I joined the magazine in May of 1997. I was an entirely clueless country boy thrust into the city and publishing world. Editor Rich Leadbetter taught me about house styles, the importance of taking good screenshots, everything really.

Ironically, the Saturn's poor performance in the UK was [the reason] we ended up covering all sorts of bonkers imported games we'd never have touched had there been a burgeoning PAL release schedule full of EA and Acclaim games. I mean, I spent the best part of three months doing nothing but previews and reviews of Radiant Silvergun and playing Quake at lunch time on the work Macs. Happy days.

It's tough looking back, though, because I was staggeringly shy in "real life" and found being in an office full of talented, gregarious people very hard. I loved writing more than anything and that part of me was a rampant show-off, but I'd routinely be petrified of someone actually talking to me in the office. I once had to phone Sega's PR man to ask a question about cheat codes or something mundane. It took me three days to psyche myself up to do it.

What happened after Sega Saturn Magazine? Did you continue to work in the industry while maintaining the site as a side hustle, or were you looking for work beyond gaming media?

Yes, I remained employable as a writer, thanks again to Rich, who moved over to Computec Media to launch (PlayStation magazine) PSW. He asked me to join as a staff writer in late 1999.

So I spent the bulk of the Dreamcast era writing about PS1 games for a job and watching PS2 emerge and crush Sega into blue dust. I think the UK:R site was updated sporadically during this time, perhaps with a year or two off here and there; although the existential horror of the forum sustained the brand, if not the sanity of its users.

Shiny Media purchased UK:Resistance (and your other blog - Idiot Toys) back in 2007. How did that come about? UK:R never seemed like an obvious Venture Capital acquisition? What was the fallout of their bankruptcy?

One of their staff members was a fan, and I think she basically convinced them to get me in. I think they wanted to acquire page views, and at that time UK:R (and Idiot Toys) was doing well and they must've had the idea that they'd sell masses of gaming ads on it and it was worth buying purely on that level. What's odd is that they eventually gave the domain back to me in lieu of wages owed, so I took it all back in the space of a couple of years. Then didn't really do anything else with it…

The fallout for me was minimal, and in fact probably for the best; I'd convinced them to let me work entirely remotely - how innovative for 2007! - and moved to the countryside, so when they went bust I shrugged it off and became properly freelance.

On that note, you were really pumping out the content there at one point, how did you manage to keep up the pace for so long?

I think I just liked showing off. Being oppressively mega-shy in real life meant the only showing off I could do was online, so I did. I regret not throwing myself into it more, really. I never read or responded to the comments, as I assumed everyone hated everything.

Looking back, some of the UK:R content is very much ‘of its time’, and the language and attitudes wouldn’t necessarily go over today. Do you feel that gaming media has lost some of that early energy and personality as the stakes have become bigger? That it’s been scrubbed of anything that might upset the money.

That is slightly regrettable and I often wonder if I'm due a retrospective cancellation, but there's plenty of room for personality in writing without being mean. "People are nicer nowadays" is really not that bad a problem to have, even if they're only pretending. I don't consume gaming media any more, but suspect today's writers are so busy churning it out they have little time to make their words funnier, lest someone else take their job by doing it five per cent quicker, ten per cent safer, and for free.

At what point did you realise you had to put an end to the websites? By the end there it felt like UK:R was ready to collapse under its own irony.

I think it was perhaps a mistake to get a few other people in to write updates. Not because they weren't good, but because it went from being 100% me and what I think and like and know to be the truth and my legacy online CV, to just another site I read with mild interest. I sort of accidentally shoved responsibility away and it wasn't my thing any more, so stopping it was way too easy.

I nearly started it up again for a laugh during pandemic lockdown, though, with the idea of doing some 'Making Of' updates to tell the story of how it came to be and so on, perhaps combined with Animal Crossing screenshots and apologies to people. But I didn't.

Is there anything Sega could have done to change the company’s fortunes and stay in the hardware industry, or were they always doomed?

Sega DID do exactly what it needed to; it made the Dreamcast! Dreamcast righted all previous wrongs and was innovative and perfect and amazing, and I routinely become very sad indeed thinking about how it was shunned. I also get sad thinking about how everyone dumped their Dreamcast stuff on me when it was cancelled, and how I sold/donated it all away instead of renting a shipping container and keeping it all boxed and pristine for the me of now.

It really isn't Sega's fault when it makes something as perfect as Dreamcast and people don't get it. It's the people that went wrong and doomed themselves to infinite grey war gaming, not Sega.

Are you still involved or keeping tabs on gaming stuff these days, or did 15 years of UK:R burn you out forever?

If I told you how little I know about modern games you'd think I was exaggerating for comic effect. After my Xbox 360 expired in about 2009 I didn't play anything until I bought a 3DS for Animal Crossing in 2013. Then I bought a Switch for Animal Crossing in 2020. Those and a handful of phone games are it, save the odd educational retrogaming session on the Mega Drive and Dreamcast with my kid.

The site still lives on as a moment in time. But at some point you’ll probably forget to renew the domain name. How do you feel about that temporary nature of internet content, and the fact something you spent 15 years of your life working on will only live on as a vague memory?

Well, I am getting quite old, and I do look around me and think, "Shall I throw that away now, or leave it for the kids to dump after I'm dead?" so I'm OK with the idea that everything will have to disappear at some point. At domain-renewal time of year I always think this time I won't bother and save myself ten quid, but then I know the domain will get bought by some link-arbitrage scam nonsense, and that's no way for it to go.

Oh, I had the idea of maybe gradually deleting it myself over time as a joke! Like, next year I make the banner image break, then the year after all the letter Hs disappear, then it goes black and white in 2028 and the links stop working in 2031, and so on. Decomposing in real time, like.

Anything else I should ask you or that you’d like to add?

[Below are Gary’s own questions and his responses]
….

What was the worst consequence of anything you wrote? - I was bizarrely untouchable for the most part; print media colleagues who started blogs back when it was the done thing were often told to stop, but no one really tried to intervene with me. The hairiest thing was the boyfriend of a gamer girl phoning the office, threatening me with the police, I think. By that time I'd stopped being so shy of the telephone and gave him a pretty firm list of reasons why that wouldn't matter. Nothing came of it.

Also I've since heard that the PR man for Gizmondo got very angry, but wasn't sure who I was at the time. The only post I deleted, I think, was one suggesting murdering the developers of the 50 Cent game. It was quietly pointed out by a concerned boss that it might be best binned on purely legal grounds. I agreed with that and was grateful for the input. 

Do you actually worry about a retrospective cancellation? - Well I don't really have any employers right now, so unless I can be cancelled from entering the local supermarket or having an active electricity supply to my home I don't see what harm it could do. I am ready to apologise, though, if anyone wants or feels they need one or even a clarification as to what the subtext was.

What did people not understand? - That the core of UKR was the positive posts. It was not the "cynical gaming blog" of an angry man, it was supposed to highlight the best things while encouraging people to be realistic about the worst. Also, I didn't call myself "Commander Zorg" because I was trying to remain anonymous; I just needed a name for Blogger. I always assumed everyone knew who I was.

….

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