The First Boss
Some FINAL WORDS on MCV reaching its milestone issue from its FIRST BOSS…
G
iven we are constantly reminded what a fast-moving industry games is, MCV hitting 1,000 printed editions is a remarkable achievement.
Issue 1 arrived at ECTS in September 1998 and duly fought a
three and a half year war with then-leader Computer Trade Weekly - which Lisa Carter, then Foster, and I had just left to launch the new title. My company Intent Media eventually acquired CTW and subsumed it into MCV in March 2002. Since then MCV has stood unchallenged as our much-thumbed trade rag. Okay it went monthly a few years back and not-quite-monthly
more recently, but it has made it to 1,000 issues and plaudits to owner Datateam for getting to this historic issue despite difficult industry economics. Historic? Yep. Issues date all the way back to a business fuelled by Playstation 1, N64, a declining Sega and sturdy PC (pre Steam). They are to be cherished and will only become more valuable as an insight into UK entertainment culture as the years pass. Dear old CTW lasted from 1984 to 2002, passing 40 years since launch just a few weeks ago. That is history. This is history. Games are history. Don’t throw away your old issues! When MCV arrived, games were finally being half-accepted by that snooty lot over at movies and music. Indeed the first BAFTAs arrived in late ‘98 too, but they were a dreadful affair, forcing black tie on us chimney sweeps and, apart from rightly acclaiming Goldeneye 007 and Gran Turismo, all sorts of uncommercial rubbish got a prize because they couldn’t say the word ‘Games’ yet and went with BAFTA Interactive instead. Ceremony of Innocence by Real World Multimedia won two masks. Nobody cared then, let alone now.
Stuart Dinsey, executive chairman at Curve Games and MCV’s founder
“MCV loved screaming headlines about retail, new formats, new hires, retail, pictures of drunk execs, celebs holding a controller. And maybe a bit more retail. Anyone remember retail?”
50 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2025
At the other end of the scale, your friendly neighbourhood MCV was a weekly must-read, happy with its ‘90s fringe and T-shirt. Our editorial strategy back in the day was all about making the industry feel at home. We reported in a space nobody else did: trade. We didn’t do game reviews. Everyone else did. Weekly MCV loved screaming headlines about retail, new formats,
new hires, retail, pictures of drunk execs, celebs holding a controller. And maybe a bit more retail. Anyone remember retail? To be in the know, to be entertained or angered, you had to read
MCV. Everything we did was underpinned by making people want to rip open the plastic when we thudded onto people’s desks. It was heavy, it carried a lot of words. And a lot of ads. There was such a lack of trade news that for years, the US,
Europe and beyond would look to the UK for info. In print. About a week after everyone else.
Now news is instant and everyone is a journalist. Quite right too, no gatekeepers. I read daily newsletters that scrape headlines and tell me what’s going on – plus insight services like GameDiscover. Others feed on Reddit, Discord, Twitch, LinkedIn, YouTube and that increasingly geriatric gang known as websites. The industry will always love MCV, although its time as a printed mag will surely come to an end at some point. Sad. Inevitable. I sold Intent Media and left in 2013, then went uber-digital with new indie games publisher Curve. But I will always love every single MCV ever made, the legacy it has left, the stories it ran, the people it covered, the history it documented. Your history. Cherish it. x
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