The big one for me when I was on MCV was the launch of Microsoft and Xbox into the gaming space. Which sounds ridiculous to say now because as far as a lot of people are concerned Microsoft has always had a presence in gaming, but back then it was Sony all the way. Seeing the Microsoft marketing machine whirring into life and all the behind-the-scenes stuff and seeing the impact and then Sony’s reaction to that was for a long time the really big stories that we worked on. Samantha Loveday, MCV 2000-2005
The most exciting thing that was happening when I was there was that the Xbox 360 launched in December 2005, the Wii launched Christmas 2006, and then the PS3 launched in March 2007. So three huge hardware launches! The 360 really took the initiative from PS2 in that generation and the guys at Microsoft were really on board with MCV. We had someone big from Microsoft in the mag pretty much every other week. It was great. They were really good to talk to and obviously wanted to get the industry on side because they’re relatively new. They kept saying ‘first mover advantage’ and it obviously worked out that way. Neil Long, MCV 2004-2008
...Then the Wii arrived and it just absolutely dominated for the first year and a half. It was such a phenomenon. It’s easy to forget how big the Wii was looking back. But you know, you had the Queen playing Wii Tennis, you had Wii Fit and this £70 pound peripheral that was constantly number one, and you had all these new casual games that were quite refreshing. Nintendo
42 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2025
was doing loads of different stuff in terms of how it marketed itself. The Wii was completely different to anything we’d seen before. Neil Long, MCV 2004-2008
The MCV cover story that meant the most to me was printed in March 2009. A UK government campaign called Change4Life – ostensibly promoting a healthy and active lifestyle amongst young people – issued a launch ad in women’s lifestyle magazines, aimed at parents. That ad was an image of a zombie-fied child with a PlayStation controller in his hands, staring blankly at a screen, under the slogan: ‘RISK AN EARLY DEATH, JUST DO NOTHING.’ Something about it felt off, and unjustly targeted at games.
With a bit of digging we discovered that Change4Life
had secured some... interesting commercial links with a number of global junk food giants, each of whom were ‘supporting’ the campaign. We also discovered that the same courtesy hadn’t been offered to any games companies, including Nintendo. (Ninty’s biggest game at the time was Wii Sports – hardly promoting a sedentary lifestyle.) Conclusion: In league with fatty and sugary food conglomerates, the video games industry had been hung out to dry. Little old MCV went on the offensive, calling out
Change4Life, attacking its connections to McDonald’s et al, and loudly encouraging the video games industry to “fight back”. We even filed a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (and used every word of it as fodder in the next MCV magazine!).
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