40 MCV 11/09/09
WWW.MCVUK.COM
GAMES MEDIA AWARDS THE FINALISTS
RISING STAR
Neon Kelly (Videogamer.com)
Samuel Roberts (X360)
Matthew Pellett (Xbox World 360)
Chris McMahon (GamesTM)
Graham Smith (PC Gamer)
Mike Channell (Official Xbox Magazine)
Neon studied journalism at City University in London and has written for a number of publications, including The Observer, Filmstar and Time Out Guides. He is also a regular contributor to Little White Lies, a bimonthly film magazine. Neon joined the VideoGamer.com team in August 2008 and currently serves as the site’s previews editor. When not attending press events or lagging behind on deadlines, Neon can be heard presenting the VideoGamer.com podcast and occasionally telling people that yes, it is his real name. His favourite game is Monkey Island II.
Roberts joined the industry at the age of 18, two and a half years ago. Since then he has started to grow facial hair and ambitiously tried to climb the games media ladder without dying on his arse. Being a staff writer at Imagine was his first fulltime job; two promotions later, he reckons that working in Subway wouldn’t have been quite as hilarious or creatively challenging.
Matthew first appeared in Future Publishing’s fine pages dressed as various Nintendo characters during the NGC days of ‘I’m The Best’. After discovering the ability to put words on paper in an order that seemed vaguely interesting, he successfully negotiated a series of gruelling cross-country challenges known as Virgin trains to join Xbox World 360 in July 2007. Originally responsible for the cover disc, he now shares his time between writing, coercing others into recording podcasts and crying over his inability to boost his Gamerscore when playing debug code.
Born and raised in Liverpool, McMahon’s first games job was as a tester for Sony. After subjecting his colleagues to two years of horrible crooning on SingStar he tried his hand at games journalism and found work on GamesTM. During his year’s tenure on the magazine he has travelled the globe, met some fantastic, friendly people and even some celebrities… well, Coolio at least. He tells us he is both ecstatic and humbled to have been nominated as Rising Star – an accolade that would have seemed a pipe dream to him mere years ago.
Graham Smith decided he wanted to be a games journalist aged 11, accomplished it by joining PC Gamer in 2005 when he was 20, and has been complacent ever since. His upwardly mobile career path has taken him from the ranks of disc editor to the staggering heights of still being the disc editor, but also writing and editing as well. His present job title is, like an inscrutable dog, unknowable. Outside of PC Gamer, he’s written for other magazines Edge, PC Format and PC Plus. He once stayed awake to play games for 48 hours, suffered erectile dysfunction in Second Life, and a games designer recently described him as being “sufficiently hairy to look the same either way up”.
Mike Channell joined the Official Xbox 360 Magazine team almost exactly a year ago as reviews editor, having started his games writing career on technology magazine PC Format. In addition to politely wrangling review code he’s presented what now amounts to a terrifying number of the weekly OXM Report videos that are delivered to Xbox Live users’ consoles. He has no pets, unless something under the pile of rubbish on his desk has recently become sentient, and lives in beautiful Maida Vale, which he describes as “like living in a Richard Curtis movie, only nobody is desperately trying to get me into bed”.
REGIONAL GAMES COLUMNIST
Ross Wilkinson (Press Association)
Dave Cook (The Scotsman)
Steven Fox (Metro)
Dan Slingsby (Games Addict)
Ian Crump (Southern Daily Echo)
Wilkinson says his work and family life have well and truly merged in recent times. His twoyear-old daughter is an admirable animal-saving Wonder Pet player, while his wife is the boss on Boom Blox. Ross says the best thing about his job is being able to encourage family, friends and regional readers to seek out the same kind of buzz he gets from genre and generation defining titles – something he’s been doing all his life. At school he proclaimed Kick Off 2 was “the best game in the world ever…” – 20 years later he’s a ‘serious’ journalist doing much the same thing in print.
Active in Scottish games media for four years, Dave Cook helped devise and launch the country’s very first dedicated gaming publication SquareGo, where he was features editor for two years, before leaving in August 2009 to re-join the team at national gaming site Ace Gamez. Founder and managing director of Ink Media, a costeffective PR consultancy for indie developers, Dave is fast becoming Scotland’s ‘go-to’ guy for local developers seeking media support without the budgets of their triple-a brethren. A jack of all trades by nature, Dave’s column in national newspaper The Scotsman is just one of his many regular outlets.
Fox has been writing weekly games reviews and occasional games features for Metro since 2006. A lettings agent during the day, Fox crams in as much game time as he can at lunch times, evenings and weekends.
Slingsby launched Games Addict more than three years ago and it now appears in 16 regional newspapers. He’s faced challenges of late – not least of which is trying to convince newspaper editors of the merits of subscribing to a weekly videogames review column in a recession. Dan Slingsby has been involved with the video games industry for more than 20 years, managing and editing various games-related magazines at EMAP, Future Publishing, Highbury Entertainment and Imagine Publishing. He now now runs DNA Publishing, a syndication agency. Games Addict is its flagship column and he hopes to sign up many more newspapers over the next 12 months as the economy improves.
In 2007 Ian Crump was tasked by one of the largest distributors of regional news in the south to help them reach out to the ever-growing gaming community across Hampshire and Dorset. Since then their gaming coverage has gone from strength-to-strength by including not just Crump’s reviews but news, competitions, charts, interviews, information on downloads and more. The feedback from both the public and the industry alike has been very strong, guaranteeing gaming as a staple part of The Southern Daily Echo newspaper. Its much-praised website has also become a vital tool to further expand the coverage by including trailers and more content.