In issue 257, Shaun Bebbington answered some questions about his time at Retro Gamer magazine
Retro Gamer is for me a long way in the past now. One may be wondering how come I've stopped writing for RG? It may seem to some people that (when I stopped writing for RG) I was trying to diss other people's work and big up my own. That was Chris Boyo's opinion anyway back around 2006 or so, when I was no longer being published by the then Imagine Publishing printed matter periodical.
For those of you who have procured issue 257 of the aforementioned publication, you may have enjoyed the look back at the history of said magazine, and likely skimmed over the Q&A which features yours truly. In any case, it was truncated from my original answers, which were sent to me via email to answer at my leisure (except for the deadline). I guess the old saying that behind every good writer is a great editor shines true here. Either Martyn Carroll (who sent me the questions to answer), or Darran Jones (who is the current editor of Retro Gamer) cut out a lot of the guff, primarily for space but to better fit into the feature, which is presented in an A5 sized booklet.
I thought I'd publish here the full unedited Q&A (including my usual typos and grammatical mistakes) as it may be of interest to you, dear reader, or provide more context. So, without further ado, here is Martyn's questions and my not so sequent answers.
- Can you sum up what it was like working on Retro Gamer as a staff writer?
Shaun Bebbington: Retro Gamer was my first office job and I didn’t go to University as, I suspect, many or most of the people at Live Publishing did. There were things that I didn’t know about nor how to do. Office politics is one thing that I didn’t know about, and triangulating one’s sources was something that I didn’t know how to do, as two examples.
It was pretty good at the start, though I didn’t and still don’t drive, so getting to a place called Adlington in Cheshire wasn’t so easy as there was no direct public transportation route from Crewe. I somehow made it work in the beginning, but as Matt Mabe lived in Sandbach, and he was kind enough to pick me up from Sandbach station which simplified the journey.
Things started to go down hill quickly as I was out of my depth. I wasn't a gamer. Not really. I was much more interested in hardware and non-entertainment software, and had a passing interest in programming, but people were still making software for many of the 8-bit machines that I loved and grew up with, so I wanted to write about those new games.
Although I was only there for nine months, and most people don’t know that I contributed anything to Retro Gamer, I have had a small but significant influence on the magazine and I think retro gaming in general in this sense: that people now take new software for these antiquated 8-bit machines much more seriously, especially entertainment software.
- Which of your features are you most proud of?
SB: Due to the back story and insane deadline, working full time for Social Services and breaking the limitations of Windows Notepad on my Windows 98SE PC, it is the feature in issue two about Commodore computers and the companies history.
I was asked to write 10 pages, more than I’ve ever written before or since for any publication, and I was paid £500 for it, more than I’ve been paid for any freelance before or since. Martyn gave me a deadline of several weeks. This became two weeks as Retro Gamer issue one had done really well, and the intended quarterly publication was going monthly because no one knew how much money you could make from retro gaming nerds I guess. This was an all waking hours job, and some of the work had to be re-written because Notepad couldn’t save that many characters and I didn’t realise its limitations. I had to start using Microsoft WordPad to finish the feature, and I discovered something called "Rich Text Format" too. It was very lucky that I had already been reading up about the history of Commodore Computers for a number of years before hand, otherwise I wouldn’t have made that insane deadline at all.
- What's your favourite anecdote from your time on the mag?
SB: The brightest pub in the world was not far from the office. This pub was so bright that the owners thought it was necessary to have all of the lights switched on even on the most sunny of sunny days. We’d often go for a quick half and some food, and Dan Whitehead was about the funniest person in the company. So no specific stories, just some good memories.
Tony was another funny guy, but lacked the intelligence of Dan, so he didn’t know it. He was a bit of an alpha male as I remember, and would say some random nonsense to make himself look good, and he didn’t seem to know what he was talking about much of the time. I was unorganised, but him trying to organise anything was something to watch. He also got his 15 minutes of fame by being interviewed on some Satellite TV show or something about the magazine. I wisely stayed out of the way as I probably would have said all of the wrong things.
- What are your thoughts on RG still in print 20 years on?
SB: It’s pretty amazing - even to me - that there are still printed matter computering magazines in 2024, but I guess if you are a retro gamer, you don’t want to be reading PDFs or something, you want a physical periodical that informs and delights in equal measures. Retro Gamer must be doing some of that.
- Finally, no-one believes me, so can you confirm to readers that a lot of your in-house features were indeed written on a Commodore 128?
SB: Of course. I had a Commodore 128, with GEOS, well it was the Click Here Software’s Wheels upgrade, a CMD FD-2000 and Commodore 1581 disk drive. Oh, and a CMD RAMLink and SuperCPU. Because of Commodore’s over-engineered way its computers would talk to its disk drive, and read from/write to the disk media (a legacy of Chuck Peddle from the Commodore PET), it meant that a Commodore C64, or even a VIC-20 could read and write MS-Dos formatted 3.5” disks. I could write my articles on a VIC-20 if I wanted to, and yes there would have been a simple word processor to do that. In fact I think I still have a VIC-20 word processor.
Clearly the C128, with its 80 columns screen and fast serial bus, along with some GEOS tools like geoDos, meant that I could write my articles in geoWrite and transfer them to my PC, and back again. And despite the comments at the time, GEOS did have a spell checker. What caught me out, and again this shows how out of my depth I was, was that I trusted the Windows spell check without proofing my own work. I had no strategies to proof my own work then, something which took me some time to learn how to do. As I recall, Andre Baune’s name was "corrected" by Microsoft’s spell checker to Buchane. I made a lot of junior mistakes like that back then, much to Martyn's frustration I suspect. Thankfully, I'm not a writer anymore, nor have any aspirations to be one again.
As a side note, some of the above answers were interspersed with a conversation I had with Martyn via Facebook Messenger when finally published in RG (I will not be publishing said conversation). In the Messenger conversation, I provided some context around who made RG a success. I know, because I was there, that it was Martyn and Matt Mabe (Art Editor) who were driving the magazine. I, like all of the freelancers, were just along for the ride, even though many people, including many of the freelancers, tried to claim RG as their own, and tried to say it was because of them that the magazine was a success.
One might notice in this Q&A that I didn't have a lot to say to this question "What are your thoughts on RG still in print 20 years on?" I don't often think about the magazine, nor that time in my life. The only real thing of substance I had to say is that I think printed matter computer magazines shouldn't exist in 2024.
I have held the assumption that RG isn't the sort of magazine that would interest someone like me, and I haven't purchased an issue, until 257 at least, for many years. And reading through issue 257 to some degree, I know now that it isn't a magazine for me at all. It is reflective of its readership, so I suspect that it had a very different reader 18 or 20 years ago than now. Not that I'm trying to diss RG to big up my own work of course, as Chris Boyo might think. As for a magazine (or in this case a fanzine) I would 100% recommend, it has to be FREEZE64 available at freeze64.com.
Finally, more keen eyed readers may know that, although I have no aspirations to be a writer again, I have been published since 2020 in Popular Retro; this wasn't to kick start a career in writing, but simply as a favour to Retro Games Ltd and to other people who have helped me out over the years. I may be published again, but only on that basis, or as one may have guessed, the occasional blog post here.
