Stuart Campbell (journalist)

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Stuart Campbell
Circumstances
Occupation	Video game journalist
Notable credit(s)	Your Sinclair, Amiga Power, Sega Zone, Digitiser
Official website

Stuart Campbell is a Scottish freelance journalist with a special interest in video games, and a video game developer.

1 Career
2 FairPlay
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Career

Stuart Campbell was winner of the UK's National Videogames Championship ZX Spectrum category^[1] in 1988 (having previously won the Scottish title earlier the same year, and a member of the UK's winning European Videogame Championship team in Paris in late 1989.^[2] Using the prize money from the first two competitions, he started an independent videogames fanzine called Between Planets,^[3] which ran irregularly for approximately a year. After the fanzine came to the attention of Future Publishing, he joined the company as a full-time staff writer on Amiga games magazine Amiga Power from January 1991 to May 1994, subsequently being promoted to various positions, culminating with serving as its editor for 10 issues between June 1993 and April 1994. He also wrote on a freelance basis for many of the company's other publications, including Your Sinclair. In 1991 he compiled the Your Sinclair official top 100, a list of what was considered to be the best ZX Spectrum games.

Campbell became known, particularly at Amiga Power, for his uncompromising review scores. One such instance was when he awarded the game International Rugby Challenge a mark of 2%, in one of several reviews which attracted attempted lawsuits from aggrieved publishers,^[4] on this occasion due in part to the game's being compared unfavourably to a number of real-life atrocities and disasters. On another occasion, writing for the magazine Sega Zone, he gave Socket: Time Dominator the lowest score possible, 0%.

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 U.S. Gold and Team 17) withdrawing review copies and refusing to speak to the magazine.^[5]

After leaving Amiga Power, he became Development Manager at video game developer Sensible Software during 1994 and 1995, ^[6] overseeing the development of Cannon Fodder 2 (designing all of its 72 levels, excepting approximately 10 which were implemented by Campbell based on original concepts by successful entrants to a competition run by Amiga Power and Sensible World Of Soccer. ^[7] Both games achieved a No.1 placing in the All Formats charts. In addition, he has created a number of original freeware video games for various formats. ^[8]

He returned to the pages of Amiga Power as a freelance contributor during its final few months, writing several more reviews and features. He later wrote for Teletext's videogames section Digitiser from 1996 to 2001 (as well as its short-lived online successor Digiworld), and was Features Editor of the videogames trade magazine CTW (Computer Trade Weekly) until its closure in 2002. He was also a resident gaming expert on the BBC technology television programme "Don't Read The Manual", appearing on most episodes of the show in 2001 and 2002.

He has also written on non-gaming-related subjects for various other publications ,^[9] including newspapers The Guardian and the Daily Mirror, science-fiction journal SFX, soccer publication Total Football, style magazines The Face and Esquire, comedy monthly Comedy Review, the technology magazine Wired (which described him as "the UK's foremost authority on computer and video games" - p91, February 1996 issue) and the long-running email newsletter Need To Know, which called him "Britain's best games journalist".^[10]

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 appear, amongst work by other authors, in a book collection entitled "Weird England" ^[11], edited by Matt Lake.

He now produces regular freelance articles for Imagine Publishing's retrogaming magazine Retro Gamer, mainly concerned with long-running popular game series such as Bubble Bobble and Defender. As such, the magazine describe him as their resident historian.^[12] He also produces original features for his own subscription-supported website.

[edit] FairPlay

Campbell is often reported as being a founding member of the campaigning group FairPlay.^[13] According to the group themselves, Campbell did not instigate or devise of the campaign, although some of his quotes were used to illustrate their point.^[14] FairPlay's campaign led a controversial week-long boycott of game purchasing in late 2002, in protest at what it regarded as the artificially high prices of games. FairPlay claimed that during the period of the boycott retail chain GAME suffered a sharp drop-off in sales and saw its share price collapse by 80%.^[15]

In 2003, FairPlay switched its attentions to the slot machine industry, and after several months of campaigning, attracting significant coverage in the broadsheet press.^[16]^[17] As a spokesman for FairPlay, Campbell explained how the majority of fruit machines had a pre-set limits on pay-outs.^[18] The campaign succeeded in getting a small sticker added to the glass of the machine but didn't actually get any laws changed despite the campaign declaring the opposite,^[19].