in consumer journalism. He joined from Dennis Publishing, where as well as writing for the magazine that spawned it, he’d helped to establish the Computer & Video Games website, which had become well known for breaking its fair share of industry news ahead of even
GI.biz. Future were so impressed that they happily took Dennis’s games magazines off its hands in order to acquire it – sans Minkley – closing the world’s oldest games magazine in the process.
We’ll be looking at MCV’s most iconic and controversial covers in our 1,000th issue. This will certainly be among them.
MCV’S EXCELLENCE ADVENTURE One of the reasons for leaving CTW in 1998, Lisa Carter maintains, was to establish brands in markets aligned with and away from games that could be broadened into industry events. Given the increasing threats to print media from a growing online audience, together with far-from-assured digital revenues, it was a strategy that made perfect sense. Ironically, it was to be CTW that got there first with the CTW People Awards: “A proper bloody party - the games industry can outdrink film stars any day of the week,” Rob Fahey is quoted as saying after the last one them in 2001. That’s not to suggest MCV’s Industry Excellence
Awards, which debuted in 2003, weren’t any less rowdy. Neil Long – who succeeded Johnny Minkley as editor – recalls his first MCV Award experience a year later, where he witnessed a senior executive pinning Stuart Dinsey up against a wall demanding to know why his company had been overlooked. “Getting Best Publisher, Best Developer, those awards were so important to those companies” says Long. “And it was absolute carnage at the end of the evening. Apocalyptic, really.” Even more infamous were the
Games Media Awards, which started in 2007 and ran until 2016. The thinking behind them was that as Intent considered itself something of a neutral party, distinct from
20 | MCV/DEVELOP September 2023
the likes of Future, Dennis and Imagine, celebrating the games media made sense. Especially so given how popular the media categories of the MCV Industry Excellence Awards had become. “It was very much Dave Roberts’ idea,” recalls Lisa
Carter. “He worked on it with Caroline Miller and all the big companies – Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo EA, Ubisoft – all supported it. And it ran really well for a few years, until Grainger Games Came on board as a sponsor.”
“Within 20 minutes of them arriving they were caught in the toilets doing a load of coke”
Grainger Games was a retailer originating in the
north of England, looking to make an impact on the wider games industry. It had a reputation for what Carter euphemistically calls ‘hard partying’ and to keep its representatives in check, the plan was to promise an exclusive interview upon their arrival in London that, it was hoped, would keep them sober on the train down from Newcastle. It didn’t work. “Within 20 minutes of them arriving they were caught in the toilets doing a load of coke,” recalls Carter. “It just got worse from there.” Employing dwarfs and scantily-clad models to hand
out awards was bad enough, but reportedly flicking branded condoms into people’s food and roundly
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