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30


under 30 2024


SPOTLIGHT


What’s the one thing you had to learn to deal with starting out in games that is no longer the case today?


Tony Warriner: Cassette tape reliability and cigarette ash getting into our keyboards were real problems back in the day. There’s two!


Richie Shoemaker: Oh god, the smoking. I’d given up for two years when I joined, and within a few weeks on staff I was chaining death cigarettes at my desk.


Catherine Channon: Unwanted sexual advances. Thankfully the industry has moved to a place where the tolerance levels for that kind of conduct behavior is lower and the availability of support for employees higher.


Simon Byron: Poverty. Back then, there were very few opportunities to write about games for a living, so they paid junior positions the bare minimum. During my early days at EMAP, I was so short of cash that my mum would drive up from Bournemouth with a suitcase full of ready meals so I could eat now and again. There was genuinely one day when I didn’t have the 70p Tube fare I needed to get to work. It made me focus on career progression very quickly, that is for sure.


What should young people in the games industry focus on today that you never had to worry about when you were first climbing the ladder?


Gina Jackson: The big one is definitely generative AI. It’s already having an impact on the industry, and that influence is only going to grow. We need to have conversations about how we use it, whether and how we should control or regulate it, and what role it should play. Ignoring or vilifying it isn’t the answer.


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Simon Byron: The main difference now is you’re no longer isolated from random people directly critiquing your work. When I started, the only way people could interact with the magazine was by sending letters in. So if, hypothetically, some idiot was to write into the magazine I was a staff writer on calling me rubbish then, hypothetically, given it was the staff writer’s job to read through and type up correspondence from our readers, the only person who would see it would be me and I would hypothetically put it straight into the fucking bin and not think about it again until recalling it in a weird feature about old people in the games industry.


Gina Jackson: When I started out, I didn’t even have email or a mobile until mid-way through my time at Ocean Software, my third job. Before that, we used bulletin boards, faxes, messengers, and landline phone calls. Today, everything happens over email and social media. While it’s made communication faster, it’s not always better. Worrying if someone will discover you’re a woman working in games development always carries a level of jeopardy. The threats may have died down for me but the expectation of them hasn’t.


Catherine Channon: 30 years ago the industry was smaller, everyone knew everyone else and it was easy to build meaningful connections. That’s changed but my network has and remains one of my strongest assets. Investing time in people, particularly those that align with your values regardless of where, how or in what capacity you meet them can be rewarding in ways you can’t possibly imagine.


Mario Kroll: Cancel culture is easy to run afoul of and perpetually shifting. There are so many channels for promotion that it’s hard to be sure which are the right ones.


30 under 30 2024


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