Stuart Campbell (video game journalist)
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Stuart Campbell is a Scottish computer games writer and journalist.
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[edit] Career
He was the UK's National Videogames Champion in 1988 (having previously won the Scottish title), and a member of the UK's winning European Videogame Championship team in Paris in 1990.[citation needed] Using the prize money from the first two competitions, he started an independent videogames fanzine called "Between Planets", which ran irregularly for approximately a year, achieving a three-figure circulation in and around Campbell's home city of Edinburgh and attracting the attention of magazine publisher Future.[citation needed]
He subsequently joined Future as a professional journalist, and wrote as a freelancer for the ZX Spectrum magazine Your Sinclair in the early 1990s, and as a full-time staff writer on Amiga games magazine Amiga Power from 1991 to 1994, serving as its acting editor for 10 issues between June 1993 and April 1994 after then-editor Linda Barker was taken seriously ill. He has also written on various non-gaming-related subjects for dozens of other publications, including newspapers The Guardian and the Daily Mirror, science-fiction journal SFX, soccer publication Total Football, style magazines The Face and Esquire, Comedy Review, and Wired, who described him in January 1996 as "Britain's number one authority on computer and video games".[citation needed]
[edit] Acclaim
Other accolades have included being dubbed "Britain's best games journalist" by long-running technology website Need To Know in April 1999,[citation needed] and - perhaps not unrelatedly - "Despicable... universally hated by the games industry." by developer Jez San in trade magazine MCV in October 2002.)[citation needed]
[edit] Later years
Campbell became known, particularly at Amiga Power, for his "harsh" review scores, giving the game International Rugby Challenge a mark of 2% (and infamously comparing it to various real-world atrocities, bringing threats of legal action from the publisher's solicitors[citation needed]), and on one occasion, when reviewing Socket: Time Dominator for Sega Zone, 0%.[citation needed] Along with the other writers on Amiga Power, he was particularly unimpressed by the idea that a game would be given a high review score in exchange for the publisher taking out advertising in the magazine, or by the other promotional gifts and perks (such as lavish foreign trips ostensibly for the purposes of previewing) which were and are commonly given to compliant reviewers.[citation needed] On a number of occasions, Amiga Power detailed in print the attempts of publishers to influence game reviews, naming the parties involved, a practice which led to several companies (including US Gold and Team 17) withdrawing review copies and refusing to speak to the magazine.[citation needed] (More detailed information on these incidents can be found on the AP2 website under the heading "Dissent".)
After leaving Amiga Power, he became Development Manager at video game developer Sensible Software during 1994 and 1995, overseeing the development of the chart-topping games Cannon Fodder 2 (for which he also designed most of the levels) and Sensible World Of Soccer. In addition, he has created a number of original freeware video games for various formats, the most recent of which was a pinball simulation game for the PC themed on the Sex Pistols 1977 album and film The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, which can be downloaded from his website.
He returned to the pages of Amiga Power as a freelance contributor during its final few months and wrote several more reviews and features. He later wrote extensively for Teletext's video games magazine Digitiser (as well as its short-lived online successor Digiworld), and was Features Editor of the video games trade magazine CTW until its closure in 2002.
Campbell is politically active on issues including civil liberties and copyright law (which he believes is unfairly and impractically biased against the consumer). He also founded the campaigning group FairPlay, which led a controversial week-long boycott of game purchasing in late 2002, in protest at the artificially high prices of games. The campaign reached millions of consumers, via its own website and coverage in dozens of media outlets, and during the period of the boycott retail chain GAME suffered a sharp drop-off in sales and saw its share price collapse by a staggering 80%.[citation needed] In 2003, FairPlay switched its attentions to the slot machine industry, and succeeded in changing the UK law governing cheating by such gambling machines.[citation needed]
More recently, his writing has broadened to the area of travel, exploring and documenting unusual locations in the UK such as the "ghost villages" of Imber, Tyneham and Bangour, and the derelict 19th-century Birnbeck Pier in Weston-super-Mare. A number of these articles have subsequently been taken up for publication in the book "Weird England", due to be published by Sterling Publishing in early 2007.
He is also currently writing freelance articles for the retrogaming magazine Retro Gamer, mainly covering the histories of long running game series, such as Bubble Bobble and Defender.
He lives in Bath, England.
[edit] More controversy
Issue 32 of Amiga Power was originally to be published with a picture of a poppy representing the game Cannon Fodder, reviewed that month. However, the Daily Star noticed the cover in an advert in another newspaper and saw the use of the poppy to illustrate a computer war game as an insult to those who had died in the war. [1] The Royal British Legion objected to the use of the poppy as well, which they saw as their "trademark", and consequently filed a lawsuit against the magazine, Sensible Software and even Amiga Corporation themselves, demanding an apology and a promise that the poppy would not be used in any promotions of the game. The game artwork and magazine cover were both hastily censored by their publishers, without the assent or knowledge of the magazine's staff or the game's developers.[citation needed]
In the magazine, Campbell had written the supposedly throwaway comment "Old soldiers? I wish them all dead" (in fact a line taken from a song by The Wonder Stuff, on their album Construction for the Modern Idiot) in response to the Legion's actions, which the Star and the Legion took particular offence to.[citation needed]
On the AP2 website, regarding the issue, Campbell wrote the following:
| “ | Freedom of speech, eh? Let's hope no one went to the trouble of dying for it, or anything.
The furore surrounding CF was symptomatic of one of the less attractive national traits of the British - the kneejerk reaction, regardless of the facts. The facts here are that Cannon Fodder was - in the admittedly narrow surroundings of the world of computer games - probably the most sensitive addressing of the issue of war ever seen. From the individually-named soldiers in the graves and the roll-call of the fallen after every level to the poignant connotations of the title itself, it's in fact, ironically, the only game I can ever recall to treat its protagonists as anything other than cannon fodder. That no one bothered to notice that, even with the assistance of the instruction manual, is perhaps the saddest and certainly the most infuriating aspect of the entire episode. |
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