Blogroll

Freelance Year One; In Retrospect

Spider

The end of last year was the lowest point of my life so far (and it was almost entirely my fault, sorry M), but set this year up perfectly for a single golden question; could I survive and thrive as a freelance writer? The braggadocio-saturated answer was, thankfully, ‘yes, you cowardly arse; why didn’t you do this five years ago?’ [more...]

Interview: Matt Woodley of Domark, on Championship Manager and Football Manager.

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For the “Making Ofs” I do for PC Gamer, I always interview too many people. After Miles Jacobsen proved not as forthcoming as I’d hoped, for legal reasons, he recommended I talk to Matt Woodley, who has always worked with the series. And I did. [more...]

Creative Assembly Interview: Huge Retrospective

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This was an 10,000 word interview on 10/8/2011 conducted for a feature written for PC Gamer; it covers the entire history of Creative Assembly. We used so little of it, I’m putting the rest up here for kicks. [more...]

How Starcraft beat Chess: Blizzard looks back on the world’s best strategy game.

Starcraft 1

With Battle.net, Diablo and WOW behind them, it’s probably fair to suggest that PC Gamers have probably spent more millions of hours on Blizzard’s games than any other company’s. With the upcoming release of StarCraft II we spent an hour chatting to three team leads of the original game, now all working inside Blizzard on StarCraft II. They are Frank Pierce, the executive vice-president in charge of product development (he oversees all the new games), Bob Finch, the lead software engineer on (he makes the engines and decides on game features), and Sam Didier, Senior Art Director (he makes the world look o-so-pretty). In line with their history of fantasy roleplay, if anyone fancies LARPing this, Frank Pierce’s voice suggests a paternally-growling Tauren, Bob Finch is an tinkering Gnome alchemist, and Sam Didier is some sort of excitable Goblin with ten tonnes of hi-ex strapped to his endlessly-whirring noggin. [more...]

Modding Skyrim: understanding what modders want

Skryim - Standing Stone

This is an interview with the anonymous modder Vorians, who’s worked on the Unique Landscapes and Better Cities mods for The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. I was interviewing him to talk about Skyrim for this piece on What Modder’s Want for Gamespy, but he didn’t reply in time, so I’ve posted it here. [more...]