set to attend ECTS in London on September 6th. Just a few days before, CTW had
found itself under new ownership, with Highbury House picking up the veteran trade title for a reported £5 million. For Dinsey, who had quit just a few weeks before, it meant there was to be no payout on the shares he once had. On the plus side, any semblance of loyalty for his former employer was gone. The downside was, at that time, Highbury House was seen by many to be the only serious competitor to a Future Publishing that, in
the decade since Greg Ingham had taken
charge, had become dominant in the video game space. “It was an emotional time” says Dinsey, who despite
the many occasions he’d walked into the halls at Olympia, was immediately overawed at seeing a vast CTW logo stretched across the glass at one end of the Grand Hall. Underneath it boasted of being ‘The World’s No.1’. “We had a tiny little stand in piss alley and we walked in going ‘Oh my god. What have we done?’”
CTW had the high ground at ECTS 1998
MAXIM IMPACT Back on CTW, staff writer Samantha Loveday, who had been editorial assistant under Dinsey and Carter, was meeting the newly-assembled team brought in to to replace CTW defectors. The new editor, while an experienced journalist, had very little games industry experience and few of the precious industry contacts that Dinsey had accumulated in his ten years at the helm. Despite this, Loveday insists, CTW got back on its feet, learnt quickly, and the two magazines slugged it out for the top stories like the heavyweights they were. Trading blows that might land one week, but were countered the next, with no clear advantage
between the two. Regardless of how swiftly
CTW got back onto its feet, MCV had certainly bloodied
its nose. However, it wasn’t until early in 1999 that the Computec-backed title felt established. For Lisa Carter,
it was around the time that MCV moved out of Arlesey into a new Hertford office, which was indicative of the
18 | MCV/DEVELOP September 2023 With Dinsey increasingly involved in looking to new
markets, Carter took over the editorship of MCV in the spring of 1999, making her one of the only women editors working in games editorial at a time when magazines such as Loaded and FHM were at their insidious peak. (This was the year that Loaded’s photoshoot with Gail Porter was projected onto the Houses of Parliament without her prior knowledge or consent). Inevitably, Carter found herself having to deal with executives that only wanted to deal with Dinsey, who would tell them politely but firmly who they should be talking to. “I got a lot of pats on the head; ‘Well done you, being editor’.”
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT Towards the end of 1999, the team that had done so much to establish CTW started to make good on the ambition that had compelled them to leave, which was to establish not just MCV, but a range of titles across a number of markets. First came the monthly magazine Develop, which
had been run since 1996 as an email newsletter for game creators, programmers and artists by Bastion. Owain Bennallack, who seems to have been the most traumatised by his time in the Arlesey office, had since turned to freelancing, but was tempted back into the fold as the glossy new magazine’s first editor.
confidence Germany had in MCV and in the UK market as a whole, with plans being laid that would lead to the launch of new consumer titles, PlayStation World and PC Gameplay, based out of Harrow.
Lisa Carter ready to take on the world as MCV’s new editor
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