RICHIE SHOEMAKER

PC Zone is one of those magazines that fans still champion long after its closure, and Richie Shoemaker's five years on its staff make him a familiar face to many of them. We learn about his start in games media, how he launched a single-game magazine that outlasted many more mainstream titles, and why he's recently returned to print magazines

- Nick Thorpe

How did you first find an interest in games?

Like a lot of people of my generation, I suppose just being blown away by this amazing kind of space-age technology that allowed you to press buttons and move things on the screen, and just being absolutely amazed by it, like it was witchcraft. I still think it's witchcraft, I still don't understand it. As my dad was blown away by rock and roll, I was blown away by videogames.

What kinds of games did you find yourself drawn to?

Pretty much anything, I suppose. I played all those really early arcade games. I think the ones that I really loved were vector stuff, so Asteroids, and then Battlezone, and I suppose that directly leads into my favourite game from the early Eighties, and still my favourite to this day, which would be Elite. That was a stunning game - it totally blew me away, the scope of that game.

So was writing something you always had an interest in?

Well, no. Even though I kind of had pretensions of writing as a teenager, it never crossed my mind that you could have a career writing about games until I actually applied for a job. Saying that, when I did apply to join PC Zone, the way I thought about it was, “I don't have any experience and I don’t have any qualifications.” I mean, I barely scraped the equivalent of a GCSE in English, no journalism experience, no nothing. So when I applied for the job, I thought, “I've got to do something different here.” What I did was I went into PowerPoint, the amazing PowerPoint, and designed a magazine incorporating my CV. I was very proud of it at the time, I've still got a copy actually, it’s bloody awful. Anyhow, it got me an interview.

How did the working environment on the magazine compare to your expectations?