DAN CURLEY

In the early Nineties, Dan was a TV regular as the European Sega Champion. Over the decades that followed, he'd head into development, write gargantuan guides, break big news stories and help to guide a beloved magazine's final issues. We catch up with him to relive the ups and downs of a sometimes tempestuous career

- Words by Nick Thorpe

You were a well-known name before you'd ever written for a magazine, because you were the UK and later European Sega champion. How did that come about?

I saw a piece in Sega Power saying that there was a double decker bus being driven around the country where you just go on and have a go. So I just entered and, you know, won Manchester, won the UK, won Europe. However, I was a published videogame reviewer before that happened. When I was about 13 years old, I sent a review into – it was either Teletext or Ceefax. This was pre-Biffo, pre-Digitiser. I sent a few reviews in, but eventually they picked one and put it on and it was for Vigilante on the Master System. It wasn't professional, but that was my first ever attempt at writing about videogames.

So was writing something that you were naturally drawn to as a kid?

Not necessarily writing itself. I made a bit of a dog's dinner of my GCSEs in school because I was too much of a videogame addict, I didn't even get a GCSE in English. What happened was, I used to write my own game reviews in my textbook. So rather than writing the essays that we were given, I'd just write reviews of my own games, and then I would show these reviews to all my mates. But I wrote a letter to CVG when I was about 13, asking them for some help, and it got in Yob's mailbag, and because I was really poor – I couldn't write for toffee – they just took the piss, basically. When I won the European Sega Championships, that's when lots of doors opened, including Sega Power, where I started my career.

So that was freelance, and you were only 15 when you started doing that, right?