Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe: The Prequel

So, hopefully-not-just-a-one-off BBC Four videogaming special Gameswipe, hosted by loveable curmudgeon Charlie Brooker is broadcast tomorrow night (or tonight, by the time you probably read this). In the pre-show bumph, Brooker has mentioned how he “started [his] writing career penning video game reviews, so Gameswipe effectively sees [him] coming full-circle: it’s evolution in reverse basically”.

Well, what with the BrokenTV office having recently been refurbished with a huge Ikea bookcase – large enough to hold our massive collection of magazines, pointless minutiae fans – we’ve been able to pick out a few choice articles from Charlie Brooker’s time at PC Zone magazine. And, because we’re a caring, sharing kind of blog (oh, and because we hope Dennis Publishing are kind of ‘okay’ with this sort of thing), we’re going to put a few scans of them online over the next few days. Not because we’re trying to take a whole Daily Telegraph MP Pay Scandal approach to this, dragging out an idea as long as it’ll go, but rather because our scanner is really, really slow.

First up: July 1997, and what might possibly be Charlie Brooker’s first published article about telly.

Click for bigger. Ah, you all know how thumbnails work, don’t you?

And while we’ve got the magazine to hand, his preview of slightly disappointing Hudson-em-up Atomic Bomberman.

  
Again, click for bigger. Though if you think we’d be expecting you to read the text from those images, you underestimated just how stupid we really are.

For anyone who might stumble over some issues at a car boot sale, mid-to-late-90s PC Zone was (and still is) a brilliant read. Writers included Charlie Brooker (who also did a monthly cartoon strip called The Cybertwats, and not very good Peter Bagge tribute Late Developers), Your Sinclair/Zero legend Duncan MacDonald, David McCandless, Patrick McCarthy, demented genius ‘Culky’ and several others. Never have a series of game reviews stating “well, you’ll need an extra 8MB of memory if you want to run it through Windows 95” been so entertaining.

 

More tomorrow, crappy scanner permitting.