store in the country, that all these store managers would have ripped open their copies with GONE in their face. What was supposed to be a shock was obviously upsetting people. GAME went into administration a week later, but it was certainly a moment where we wondered if we had done the right thing. Christopher Dring, MCV 2007-2016
We were there throughout GamerGate and no matter what was thrown at us we had each other’s back, working hard and pumping out this weekly mag. It was wonderful. The pay was shit but I was young and didn’t really care about that. We had a great team and we did a great job and I loved the camaraderie. As it was just hilarious. I’ve never laughed so much in my life. There was a proper newsroom vibe. Certainly, the veneer of professionalism you had to put on was true to an extent in that we cared a lot about that mag and we had incredible pride in what we were putting out. But at the same time we were a bunch of young blokes larking about. I’ll never work anywhere like it ever again. Ben Parfitt, MCV & Develop 2005-2016
more perfect to represent the coming together of the industry that year. Katharine Castle, MCV & Develop 2016-2017
It’s really hard to explain how widely-read MCV was in the UK industry. There were only a couple – yes, I mean two – games industry websites in the world at the start, and they were pretty small. Print-wise, Edge was adjacent to the industry, for a while there was CTW, and there was us. So everyone – thousands in the UK who you’d see at those parties and trade shows – read the same thing. There must be a thousand times the noise out there now, and I’m not exaggerating. Whereas MCV was literally part of the infrastructure of the business in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Owain Bennallack, MCV & Develop 1998-2008
E3 2017 was a particularly great moment - Marie and I were holding down the fort back home on a mag deadline the Wednesday of E3 week, but we were really strapped for what to put on the cover. The big platform holder conferences had left us a little underwhelmed, but in a moment of pure serendipity, that was the year Mario & Rabbids was announced during Ubisoft’s press conference, and the photograph of Shigeru Miyamoto and Yves Guillemot cheering and bearing their blaster arms together couldn’t have been
44 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2025
Being a weekly magazine, there was no let-up. Everything would build to Tuesday and getting the mag to print, then Wednesday morning you had to hit the ground running on the next issue. This also meant you had to be organised and think about features two or three issues ahead so you had everything you needed to get started after each deadline. Sometimes the mag was 60 pages, and that was tough enough, but when it went up to 100 or 120 pages, that was a lot of articles to research, write, proof, lay out, proof again, correct and approve in just five days. James Batchelor, MCV & Develop 2008-2016
Some weeks, MCV sent ripples – even the occasional shockwave – across the games industry. Most weeks, it was not a bad read. Every week, it was made by a team of passionate and creative kids, who got to write words and pay the rent off of it.
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