THE
F MCV STORY
Richie Shoemaker charts the history of the UK’s longest-running games industry magazine. Yes, this one!
or someone who spent ten years editing one video games industry publication to then
launch another to compete with it, it’s remarkable that Stuart Dinsey would embark on a long career championing video games without much of a care for them. To be fair, this was back in the days when computer and video games were largely marketed to and for children, which, unlike most that went on to write about them for a living, the ambitious business-minded Dinsey certainly wasn’t. It was while working at the famed
advertising agency McCann Erickson in 1986 that Dinsey, then 19, would busily devour any trade magazine that crossed his desk; titles such as Marketing Week, Broadcast and Music Week. Launched two years previously, Computer Trade Weekly was never among them, but Dinsey did spy an ad for CTW that piqued his interest. He applied, met its editor Greg Ingham, and despite having next to no knowledge or interest in gaming, secured a job as CTW’s trainee reporter. “If I’d known it was about computers, I probably wouldn’t have applied,” he says. Within two years Ingham had moved
on, joining disruptive new magazine publisher Future as its managing director, having seen enough in his 21-year- old protégé to bequeath him the CTW editorship. “Which was really scary,” recalls Dinsey. “Greg however advised me to hang in there, because I had the best job in the world. And I did.” Over the next ten years,
Dinsey built up CTW to be a formidable champion of the UK games industry, overseeing a period that stretched from the tail end of 8-bit era to the cultural singularity that heralded the arrival of the Sony PlayStation. However,
16 | MCV/DEVELOP September 2023
despite securing CTW’s position at the heart of the UK games industry, in the midst of the drama of the FIFA World Cup in June 1998, Dinsey unexpectedly handed in his notice. “I decided it was time for me to launch my own media company.”
THE THREE EXITEERS Unbeknownst to CTW, Dinsey had been approached by German publisher Computec Media, which in 1998 was looking to foreign shores after its successful listing on Hamburg’s Stock Exchange. The company had launched its own trade magazine at home, Markt für Computer & Videospiele, and was keen to export it to the UK, which it insisted would retain the original publication’s name, albeit translated into English. “I probably wouldn’t have gone with
MCV,” admits Dinsey, who aside from a name change, got everything he wanted to launch the new industry publication, including many of the team that had helped him establish CTW in the years previously. Lisa Foster (now Carter) and Alex Jarvis (now Moreham), CTWs deputy editor and sales manager respectively, were the first to jump ship. “I loved working there and they
The proud father
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