The Retro Gaming Guy

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I’m trying to become an established science fiction author. You may have guessed from the title of the site. In some darker moods I imagine the ideal moment for that was twenty five years ago. After all, I was young, had ambitions to be a novelist, and was working as a writer (an actual writer!) in the computer games industry. I’m even famous, if your definition of fame is fairly flexible. Not even what used to be disparagingly called ‘internet famous’, but over the years I’ve been in maybe a dozen or so local newspaper articles.

They fall into two categories. One is the Star Trek fan film series Intrepid which I’ve been doing as a hobby with my friends since 2003. In 2006 there was going to be no more TV Star Trek, with the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise and that fact led to newspapers discovering fan efforts. That led to us. The Guardian interviewed us and ran this: Fans boldly go on after axeing of Star Trek There were quite a few others. We’re still going and showrunner Nick Cook regularly gets interviewed by fan film sites and is always generous enough to name-drop me.

The other is DMA Design. I was on the cover of the Evening Telegraph, along with the rest of the team, for the game Uniracers in 1995. And then retro got to be cool and my involvement in Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings meant being in a modest amount of demand. If Nick gets regularly interviewed about Intrepid, I get regularly interviewed about DMA Design. Podcasts, web sites, The Guardian again – for a video interview no less – and an invite to talk at the 2018 Play Expo in front of an audience. It was even filmed, if you’re really bored with an hour to spare. DMA talk on You Tube

(There’s an even bigger thing coming along, which I can’t talk about yet.)

By any measure the retro games stuff is a bigger thing for me, which leads to an awkward conclusion: I’m better known for something the further in the past it was! My fame, such as it is, seems rooted quite firmly in the previous century. How do I become an established writer when I’m the retro games guy?

Hard work I guess.

Time to make up a proper plan.