MAGAZINE CRAFT JULIAN RIGNALL

With a knack for quickly identifying and reacting to shifts and patterns in games media, much in the same way he did when notching up videogame high scores, Julian Rignall launched some of the most prominent and successful gaming magazines in the UK. We chat to him about his career, his mags and being a videogame influencer decades before the term was ever coined

- Stuart Hunt

What is the first videogame you remember playing, Julian?

It was Pong in Woolworths in late 1976. I walked into the shop with my mum and headed over to the electronics counter. At that point calculators were still kind of new and any kind of tech was cool. This one visit though they had a Pong machine hooked up to a TV and there were a couple of kids playing on it. It blew me away. When the kids got dragged away by their parents, I jumped on it and thought it was the greatest thing ever.

When did you first become aware of home computers?

So that was very late-1976. My brother was into electronics, so he used to get the Maplin catalogue. I used to flick through it, and I saw an advert for these very early computer kits. I think one came with a Space Invaders-type game, so that was when I became aware of computers and games. In 1980, my school got a couple of PET computers and immediately kids began messing about with them. I remember someone got hold of Nightmare Park, which is a sort of mini text-based game, and this simple horse-race betting game where the horses were pi symbols.

And arcade games, when did you discover those?

I discovered arcade games at around the same time. I’d already seen Space Invaders on a family holiday in 1979. In 1980, I found Asteroids and was beginning to get good at that – that’s when I realised that I was pretty good at playing these electronic games. At that time the industry was also starting to take off, with the launch of early computer mags like CVG.

Were you buying computer mags at the time?