ONM – Tired Old Hack

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” →

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” →