Kieron Gillen's workblog

 
             

   
 
 

4/28/2004

 
"In April of 2001, Oskar Skog finally let his disaffection with the PC Gamer (UK) Forum get the better of him, and went off to create his own. That creation, State, still thrives today. If you're reading this then I believe you may be aware of it.

One day on that forum, the creator spoke a word, and that word was "newsletter". Oh, how the forum laughed and called Oskar names, saying that it was a silly idea that would never work. But Oskar, never one to give up on an idea, produced Issue 0 of his newsletter, almost conspiratorially. The newsletter was called StateMagazine.

It was such a weird thing. At the time the prose seemed, in our arrogance, to be the best ever written about gaming. Hell, some of it almost was. Part of it was random gibbering, and I hold my hands up to at least some of that. Looking back, StateMagazine made everyone involved feel important. We felt involved, we felt like we were really saying something. One of the vagaries of youth perhaps, but we certainly said enough to get noticed... and you only had to look at the sendlist to realise that journalists, developers and publishers were at the very least receiving our irregular email extravaganza; whether or not they read it is a secret they can keep to themselves."


The legendary StateMags finally get an archive of its own. For those who weren't around circa then, StateMag was the finest ground-level games criticism the UK produced in its period and, in the words of none less than Develop Magazine's Owain Bennelack, was on the edge of something genuinely new.

A fair chunk was rubbish. A chunk significant enough to respect was genuinely groundbreaking. All was done with a correct and noble heart.

I'll go through it eventually and link directly to some articles I'm particularly fond of, but you should browse immediately. On average, the early issues are more pretentious, the later issues more like what the State site grew into. I prefer the early-mid period, when Tim Edwards - who I hired on the strength of his work - was doing things like describing what it was like to go down on his girlfriend while she played on her GBA.

Except - y'know - not as tacky as that makes it sound. Rather tacky in a good way.

Sticky.



 

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