Category: Personal collection

My 25 favourite ONM articles

Published on by Chris ScullionLeave a comment
Header image shamelessly stolen from Nintendo Life

My games journalism career started on 2 May 2006 when I joined the Official Nintendo Magazine (ONM) as a Staff Writer.

In 2009 I was promoted to Games Editor, which basically meant I was in charge of deciding which games should get covered, figuring out how many pages they should get and contacting the publishers and PRs to get review code.

ONM issue 5
The first issue of ONM I ever worked on: Issue 5, July 2006

I eventually left ONM after six fantastic years to work on the Nintendo Gamer site, but continued to work for the mag on a freelance basis, providing reviews and features and occasionally appearing on the ONM podcast.

Given that these six years covered the entirety of the hugely successful Wii’s run – and the vast majority of that of the DS – it’s probably no surprise that most of my Twitter followers (or at least those who like voting in Twitter polls) have been with me since the ONM days.

These days, the magazine is no more: it closed down in October 2014. The website was wiped too, meaning unless you want to go trawling through archive.org you’re going to struggle to find any ONM articles online.

Before the mag closed down, I accessed its content database and downloaded PDFs of almost every article I’d written: as many of my reviews, previews, news items, guides, letters pages and features as I could get my hands on. I needed to keep hold of some sort of tangible evidence of those six years.

The result is a folder (along with a backup folder on an external drive) consisting of 1051 articles, coming in at over 5GB in size, all containing the words I wrote for the publication that meant so much to me.

Now, much as I’d love to just upload all 5GB and share it with the world, the reality is that Future Publishing still owns the copyright to everything that was created under its roof. It’s issued takedowns to other sites for posting old magazine articles in the past, and I’m not a fan of going to lots of effort to do something only to have it undone.

In December 2018, though, I reached out to Future to ask if I could put together a sort of ONM Advent Calendar on Twitter where each day contained one of my favourite articles from my time at the magazine. They generously gave me permission to republish 24 old articles, which I duly did.

You can only do so much on Twitter, though, and I’d have loved to have said more about each of the articles. So, here they are again, along with more detailed ‘liner notes’. And, just to bring things up to a round 25, I’m also adding my Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 reviews (which Future had also previously given me permission to republish on Tired Old Hack).

My time at Official Nintendo Magazine remains one of my highlights of my life. Hopefully these 25 articles, all written by yours truly, go some way to explaining why it was such a fun and rewarding time. Continue reading “My 25 favourite ONM articles” →

My 100 best (and worst) ONM headline jokes

Published on by Chris Scullion5 Comments
ONM issue 5, the first I appeared in
ONM issue 5, the first I appeared in

My six years at the Official Nintendo Magazine were (at the time of writing at least) the best six years of my career.

There were plenty of reasons for this: it was my first major job, it was the job I’d always wanted to do, and there was a massive reader base who regularly communicated with me (many of them still do to this day).

One of the main reasons, though, was that I always had the freedom to tell bad jokes.

I’ve told bad jokes all my life, but usually people at school and uni would groan and walk away. ONM was my chance to tell bad jokes to tens of thousands of people who were less tempted to bail because they’d already paid £3.99 for the privilege. Mwa haaaa.

Recently I was going through my ONM archives and I started chuckling at some of my worst jokes, many of which I’d forgotten over the years. It got me in a nostalgic mood, so I’ve decided to share said nostalgia with you.

I’m going to run a series of articles based on my time at ONM, sharing my favourite ‘funny’ moments. In the future these will include my best screenshot captions and my best review quotes.

Today though, I’m sharing 100 of my headline jokes – be it the headlines themselves or (most often) the snarky one-liners under the game name in previews and reviews. Continue reading “My 100 best (and worst) ONM headline jokes” →

10 years as a games journalist – my most memorable moments

Published on by Chris Scullion11 Comments

On 2 May 2006, I joined Official Nintendo Magazine as a Staff Writer.

After a quick glance at my calendar, I have determined that today is therefore my 10th anniversary as a video games journalist (or critic, or writer or whatever you want to call it: I still don’t really know myself).

My first ever ONM review: a shit DS racing game. The glory days
My first ever ONM review. They got better, honest

Over the past decade I’ve loved every minute of working for ONM, then Nintendo Gamer, then CVG and finally as a freelancer.

And now I’ve got Tired Old Hack, which gives me more freedom to write what I want than I’ve ever had. In short, it’s been a bloody good 10 years.

With that in mind, although games are usually the main focus when I write, I hope you don’t mind if I make today’s article about my own career.

Here are 20 of my favourite memories as a games journalist over the past decade. These are not all of them, not by a long shot: they’re just the ones that stand out at this very moment. Continue reading “10 years as a games journalist – my most memorable moments” →

My first Miyamoto interview from 2007

Published on by Chris Scullion3 Comments

I’ve interviewed a number of game developers and other personalities over the years. Of them all, two stand out as personal favourites: Suda 51 and Shigeru Miyamoto.

I’ll cover my first Suda 51 interview in a later article, but for now let me focus on Miyamoto.

Me and Miyamoto
Plot twist: I was wearing trousers, he wasn’t

If you’ve got any sort of gaming knowledge, you know that Miyamoto is, quite simply, the man. If you don’t have any sort of gaming knowledge, I think you’ve ended up here by mistake, probably because you were searching for “Emma Watson upskirt” and Google brought you here because of this sentence. In which case stick around, you sick bastard, you might learn something.

Miyamoto is the single most influential video game creator and developer of all time. People will argue with this. Those people are wrong. Don’t fight them, pity them.

I’ve actually interviewed Miyamoto twice, and both were special for different reasons. The second time was in person, and led to the photo you see above, so naturally it was special for that reason alone: a one-on-one chat with the man whose work shaped my childhood and, ultimately, my career and life. Continue reading “My first Miyamoto interview from 2007” →