30
under 30 2024
SPOTLIGHT
JAKE TUCKER Jake Tucker, Editorial Director at the PC
Gaming Show, tells Vince Pavey all about his varied career, and how there’s still space for anyone to be successful in games journalism as long as they be nice and work hard
You were part of the 2015 cohort of the MCV/ DEVELOP 30 Under 30. How did it feel to be recognised for your hard work? Honestly, I was 26 and knew basically nothing. I’d done something cool with a decent group of people with VideoBrains, a series of monthly events that was a bit like TedX but for video games, but I was still pretty aimless outside of that. I had imposter syndrome and it came as a surprise, although it was cool to be recognised. Outside of VideoBrains I got lucky enough to work on a few things that other people had already structured and visualised, and I pretty much stuck to a mantra of being nice and working hard until I actually had knowledge I could apply to things.
How has your life changed since then? I launched NME Gaming in 2021 and got to do some really cool interviews with people as part of the Boss Level series. I planned out everything on that: from how it looked to how we’d do the interviews and make it look nice on the page, and people reacted really well. This made me feel pretty enthusiastic about building big cool things, and I’ve been doing that ever since. Now I am the Editorial Director of the PC Gaming Show. This means I help developers show off their games to the world, and do a lot of travelling around talking about unannounced games which is probably the biggest, coolest thing I can think of.
I never thought this was something I’d be good at - making The PC Gaming Show was a totally different skillset to where I was back in 2015, but I feel like a kid in a sweetshop most of the time. That analogy only works if you think of new content about games as sweets, but I stand by it.
On a personal level, do you think awards are important? Not really. I think it’s always nice to be nominated, but I’ve always been a big fan of just telling people you appreciate their work all year round. Some people get a kick out of awards, and I love going to awards ceremonies and celebrating people’s work, but for me the work has always been its own reward, so I’m just happy to be keeping busy.
You were at MCV for nine months back in the Future Publishing days, and were at Develop even before that. Did the 30 Under 30 come up during the interviews?
A few months after the 30 Under 30 nomination someone reached out and asked me to write news for Develop on a freelance basis. Then, the publisher at the time asked me to meet him for breakfast one morning and told me he had good news and bad news. The bad news was there was no more budget for me to write news for Develop, the good news was they needed someone to edit their B2B esports website and they wanted that person to be me.
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30 under 30 2024
Photo by Dominic Preston
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