Thanks very much again, mate, for coming on.
I really appreciate you doing that for me today and for our
listeners. So I really appreciate it mate.
But you're you're out. You're out in Canada.
Is that right? Yeah, that's right.
I moved here around 15 years ago now.
All right. And how's life there?
Yeah, life here is excellent. Oh, that's fantastic.
Very good. Are you out?
Are you out in the sticks or we're in the city areas?
No, we're in Montreal. We're in the, it's actually a
nice kind of balance because I mean, Montreal is very towny and
feel, I don't know if you know the city at all, but like it's,
it was never a city. It was like a bunch of towns and
the towns just kind of grew into each other as they started
calling it the city. But it still has that kind of
like small town feel, even though you're a big city and
yourself, like, are you? You're not Japanese evidence.
I'm not, I'm not Japanese now, far from a mate.
My my son qualifies for that. My wife certainly, but not me.
No, I'm Australian mate, so, but been living here for 11 years
now, so and I've been enjoying it.
But yeah, yeah, I, I came here because of my wife and wanted to
just try something new, something different and have a
bit of, a bit of a change, sea change, as I say, and it brought
me here so. But yeah, I'm much happier for
it, to be honest. I I really enjoy living here,
even though Australia is a wonderful country.
I love living there. It's just, yeah, it's just
culturally very different, very interesting.
So many. It's got a very deep and rich
long history as well. So you've got so many different
places to go and check out. And I would, I would imagine
Canada has something very similar, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. I mean, it's a huge country.
But surprisingly though, like, you know, I don't know if this
happens to you once you move somewhere, it's just kind of
like the urge to visit around you and do the do like the
touristy things around you just kind of goes away.
So there's so there is so much around us, but we just never go
and do it. Now if we when we go on
vacation, we always get the other places away from Canada.
So it's huge amounts of Canada. We've just never explored.
Right. Well, I got the opposite.
Like in Australia, I never really had the urge to travel
anywhere. But since I came to Japan, I
wanted to see everything. So I'm still West.
This year we're going to go down to Kyoto and Kobe and Osaka.
I've been to Osaka before, but not I've been to Kobe once at
the airport, but I haven't. I've never been to Kyoto.
And that's one of the most historical places that everyone
goes to when they travel to Japan.
So have you been to Japan at all night?
I did go when I was young. I was maybe like 10 or 11 when
we went. So like I remember it, but not
perfectly. And we just, we just stopped up
for a couple days. We were flying, I was living in
Saudi Arabia at the time and we were flying to the West Coast of
the States, but we're going round like we've stopped up in
Japan and then went over to the States.
So we stopped up for a couple days in Tokyo.
We took the, took a ride on the bullet train.
That was the that's the only kind of big thing I remember
about it is riding on the bullet train.
That was. Just for sure, yeah.
Yeah. Apart from that, it was just
visiting Tokyo. But I don't have AI, don't have
a lot of memories about it. Yeah, that's a long time ago,
mate. Yeah.
What, what brought you to the UK then?
Because obviously you, you you had to travel to the UK in order
to launch your, you know, very prosperous and long career at
Gangs Workshop. What actually brought you to the
UK? So my mom is British so I'm a
dual British U.S. citizen and my parents I was born in the US but
my parents moved to the UK when I was one year old so mostly I
grew up in the UK. Wow, OK, that's excellent.
So you're very, very multi national, mate, very multi
national, international. That's excellent.
Set life experiences travelling and living in different
countries. You mentioned Saudi Arabia.
What was that like to live in Saudi Arabia?
Because I know I know someone, one of the other Youtubers I
know he lives there and he's been living there for quite a
long time. What was what was the experience
like living there? So my parents moved there when I
was like 9 years old, I guess. And as a kid, it was fantastic.
Like, I absolutely loved it as a kid because it's just, you know,
there's sunny weather and there's a swimming pool and
there's beaches nearby and school finishes at 1:30 in the
afternoon because the afternoons get so hot.
Like schools finish early. So as a kid, like, I absolutely
loved it. And my parents stayed there for
like more than 10 years. They sent me back to the UK, to
boarding school in the UK when I was as soon as I was old enough
to go to boarding school. So then I'd go back, you know,
I'd go back to the UK for school and then go back to visit the,
the family and the, and the vacations, which was still like,
it was great. Like going to vacations to these
sunny beaches every vacation. And then I really got into scuba
diving as well. And Saudi Arabia is the best
place in the world for scuba diving.
You know, people talk about other countries, but what the
difference with Saudi Arabia is it doesn't have much of A
tourist industry. So the reefs are completely
untouched. So you get this fabulous diving
which is not kind of over saturated with with tourist
divers. So the diving was amazing.
My first job, I got a job working at a private beach that
was owned by a school. So we'd have groups of kids
every week would take a group of school kids down to the beach,
teach them how to windsurf and teach them how to kayak.
So like, it was like the most fun job in the world.
And then the Gulf War broke out and that kind of like, put an
end to all of that. The the beach that I was working
at closed down. So I was kind of sitting around
doing nothing. So things kind of started going
downhill from there. Yeah.
I think there's a it was a lot of change in just how people
felt about being there as well. You know, I mean, well, we were
there. I had a friend who got injured
in a scud attack. If you remember the scud
missiles, it was not badly injured, it just it shook the
building he was in which caused the painting to fall off his
wall and painting landed on his head and split his head open.
But that was that was the the entire injury from the Hulk of
war. But you know, it just became
like a less fun place to live. And also I think as I grew up,
as I grew older, starting to realize like the the kind of
cultural oppression there is there, which I didn't care about
at all as a little kid. But you know, once you get
older, you start to realize. And so, yeah, the whole family
left shortly after that. Yeah.
I came back to go to university in the UK.
No. Interesting.
What did you study in university mate?
Out of curiosity? Philosophy, right.
Wonderful. OK, well, yeah, we had some
obviously interest in it then. And you had to choose something.
So did you really? Did you have a really good
knowledge of what you would want to do when you left university
or was it just? Nope, I had absolutely no idea
at all. I didn't really have any idea
going into university what I wanted to do with university or
anything at all with my entire life.
So philosophy, like I think the main reason that I chose
philosophy, like I was interested in it, but mostly it
just had easier entry qualifications than other
degrees. Yeah.
So it was kind of like a little bit of an easy option for me.
And it had a reputation as well for being like an easy degree,
right? That was kind of like AI mean.
I did have a genuine interest in it and I did, yeah, I did do
some work during those three years and learned some stuff,
but it was still a pretty easy time.
Yeah, good man. That's great.
And then obviously you left university and then you must
have discovered war gaming at some point because you're in the
heartland of of gangs workshop then in the UK.
When did you actually first come across miniatures and and just
tabletop gaming? So started, so it was while we
were living in Saudi Arabia that I had some buddies from the
States who played Dungeons Dragons, right?
Which was like, it was, I mean, it was not well known at the
time, but it was much more well known in the US than it was in
the UK. So it was kind of like my, it
was my American friends kind of import.
And that was like my first introduction to to gaming and my
first introduction to miniatures as well.
And my first minis that I got were Dungeons and Dragons minis.
The very first one was just that.
It was literally like a mini I found lying in the street.
I have no idea where it came from or what happened to it.
It was just it was there and up. And I think it was like a Lord
of the Rings Gandalf mini. It was like a little wizard.
And I think, you know, I was really hooked from that point.
You know, even like as a little kid, like my one little mini,
I'd spend hours just like playing with it, you know, like
holding it. And there's this wonderful
tactile pleasure that you get from minis right where you want
to, you know, if there's a mini there, like if you just put
minis on some minis on the table and somebody walks into the
room, they're going to go over and they're going to pick them
up and they're going to start, you know, just moving in the
back in their hands and looking at them.
And it's just a wonderful, like pleasurable physical things.
And then, you know, I came back to when I was at boarding
school, that's where I discovered Warhammer for the
first time. So I had a friend there who was
playing the 1st edition of Warhammer playing, I say, I
don't think we ever actually played it.
We just, you know, would talk about it and read the army books
and read White Dwarf articles and dream about one day owning
enough minis to be able to play a game.
But I don't think we ever played first edition.
Second edition, I think was probably the first time I played
second edition. I don't, if you remember, had
these like cardboard cut out, like stand like little standees
that you could use instead of the minis.
So I think my very first game of Warhammer ever was second
edition with those like little cut out.
There was some dwarves. There was some slang, I think,
Right. I think there was there was a
little scenario where you played like a group of dwarf miners, if
I remember right, fighting against some slang in the
jungles of last year or something like that.
Yeah. Yeah, I think you might.
Be. Right, I think.
That was my first epic game and my first minis from there.
Like I had a little collection of Warhammer minis, but my first
kind of like armies. Do you remember they are the old
Prince August molds? Like you could buy these rubber
molds that you could cast your own minis at home.
Get like a little saucepan that you melt the lead on your stove.
And so I had a few of these Prince August molds and I had an
army of elven arches and Wizards on one hand against this kind of
rat tag assortment of skeletons and orcs on the other side.
It's my first kind of real war games with these little bands of
random miscellaneous Prince August cast miniatures.
We we kind of made ourselves and then we had nowhere to play.
So we played in the garage when my dad was out at work.
So the car was out. Oh no, my dad was still in.
He wasn't out of work. He was still in Saudi Arabia.
Not right. When were the, Yeah, I don't
know, when my mum was out shopping or whatever, When the
car was not in the garage. Yeah, with the drawer on the
garage floor would use chalk to draw out the like the tabletop.
We had no terrain, we didn't have a table big enough to play.
So just play on the floor in the garage with like chalk drawn
trees, armies of unpainted homemade home cast miniatures
and that's how we play. I don't think we ever actually
played a full game there even like with kind of set everything
out and we'd play a turn or two and then something would happen.
You know, we'd have to go for dinner or I'd have to go back to
school because we'd just be, you know, we'd play at the the
weekends and then I'd get to Sunday evening and Sunday
evening I'd be shipped back off to boarding school again.
So that was my first my first games.
Wonderful. Stephen, you actually mentioned
there too something you were a big part of later on, but you
mentioned White Dwarf magazine. Can you remember what first
issue you picked up? I think my first issue was
actually if I remember right it was a best of they used to do
like best of White Dwarf articles and best of White dwarf
scenarios. I can't remember which one it
was. I'm not.
Yeah, I'm not 100% sure I remember.
So it was certainly the first article I really remember well
was I think it was from Best Of, but I'm not 100% sure about
that. It was a Lord of the Rings
scenario for Warhammer. It was fighting Ministerith
fighting the Battle of Ministerith for Warhammer.
I think it would have been for first edition Warhammer as well
if I remember right. OK.
And that that was kind of it was very aspirational for us.
I think we you had this kind of the the two armies.
You had the, the, the kind of good side army that was, looked
like it was collectible. There was like not a huge amount
of minis required. And then you had the the hordes
attacking it, and you needed like 500 minis to be able to
represent this, you know, that this scenario was kind of like a
really sort of accurate representation of the Battle of
Ministers. Right.
And so we never even came close to to playing that, but I
remember it being a kind of like, it was very aspirational,
like Wow, wouldn't it be great to be able to play this one day,
to be able to have this horde of minis that would be required to
play it? That was sort of that's the
earliest memory I have. And then after that, I mean,
what Dwarf at the time was very much like it was a role-playing
gaming magazine, right? It wasn't.
It was just by chance that I remember that that Warhammer
article was in one of the first issues that I had.
So I was into like a lot of other gaming at the time, you
know, RPGs and all kinds of gaming.
I remember there was a lot of Golden Heroes.
I would buy White Dwarf issues that had Golden Heroes articles
in it because Golden Heroes was a game, you know, we were
playing at school at the time. Dungeons and Dragons, of course.
I remember a lot of early Dungeons and Dragons articles
there, advice for Dungeon Masters.
You know, a lot of that, a lot of those early issues kind of
really a still dungeon master to the day.
Yeah. A lot of those early issues kind
of redefined my dungeon mastering style.
Yeah. A lot of a lot of influence that
those had. So.
And it was very kind of scattered.
You know, I wasn't, I didn't go and buy it every month.
It was really like if I had enough money, if I had to pocket
money to spare and there was an article that you know, there was
something interesting in that issue, then I'd go and get it.
It wasn't a regular thing. And I was up until the early,
the earliest ones that probably around the 40s in terms of
number. And then that would be like on
and off I'd get issues probably up until into the the early
hundreds. I kind of mostly stopped for a
long time. Then, like as it became more
Games Workshop Game, sorry, Games Workshop magazine, you
know, it came that that transition happened over time,
that it just became like a Warhammer magazine.
I kind of read it less and less though.
I was playing, you know, I had Warhammer.
I would play from time to time. Like it was not a main part of
my kind of gaming diet at that point.
Yeah, OK. That's that's fascinating.
So what was the clincher? What what sort of brought you
back into like picking up White Dwarf, reading it and then being
and then just falling in love with Gangs Workshop?
University, absolutely. Like I remember very
specifically, it was my like first or second day at
university and I walked past someone's room.
We were playing. We were staying in these, you
know, big, like, halls of residence.
And I walked past, walking along my corridor, past somebody's
room and saw his army, like, laid out on his desk in his
room. I was kind of like a reason to
say hi. I was like, hi, You play war
games. It was like, yeah.
And we kind of became best buddies.
And I went out that week and bought myself an army, right?
He was like, you know, I had my like, I'd get my money at the
start of the term. So at the start of the first day
of term, you had like all this money that had to last.
You like the next like 3 or 4? Months.
Oh man, that's that's a, that's a that's a mistake.
Yeah, absolutely. Right.
So I had all this money and I went out and bought myself an
army and then, you know, had no money for the rest of the 3-4
months. But yeah, it was.
Alex Scott, I don't know if you remember Alex Scott.
He was, he worked on the Citadel Journal.
He was one of the writers for the Citadel Journal.
So yeah, he came and joined me at Games Workshop.
So that was like years later he came to work for for GW as well,
but that was it. Yeah.
Then we became war gaming buddies at university and then
found a few other like war gamers and that would be like a
little thing. We were the war gaming group at
the at university. Wow.
OK. And that's what kind of really
brought me back into it, right? I mean, brought me back into I
was never completely out of it. It was always there.
Yeah. But that was the point that it
really kind of became, you know, when I started like Banquet Wolf
freedom more regularly and started building up armies and
started like doing the the Warhammer hobby like people do
it these days. Yeah.
So obviously you rediscovered, you know, Wahama through Scott,
and then you started getting, you bought an army and which was
probably a good portion of your yearly salary.
And then what sort of drove you to going to the next step of
actually applying to work for Games Workshop?
So it's going to come back to that question you asked earlier.
Did I have any idea what I wanted to do when I left
university and I needed a job and I my first job was in
retail, right? I was working at the Stain
store, which is just outside of just outside of London.
And I mean, Staines is honestly a pretty accurate description of
the place where it is. That name doesn't sound very
nice, is it? Isn't it not very popular
clothing store or something? Yeah, I hope I'm not offending
anyone from Stains. I don't think so.
The people I met from Stains, generally, we're not.
Yeah, we're not big fans of the place.
Yeah, But still, it was a lovely little store and we had like a
lot of lovely regulars would come in.
But yeah, it was. It was purely because I needed,
when working in a Games Workshop store looked like it would be
kind of fun thing to do. And it kind of was, you know,
like you had some retail work to do.
But a big part of the day was just painting minis and showing
kids how to paint minis and playing games.
And, you know, it was, it's, it's not a bad job at all.
It's, it was a fairly entertaining way to spend the
time that I spent there. And then that's what led to my,
to the, the opportunity in the studio.
So it was while I was there, I heard about, you know, the role
on Dwarf. So this was the time that it was
right when White Dwarf was about to become fat, as they said.
So at the time they were about to like add in all these extra
pages that they added in and they added in the card section.
So they were looking for more staff to help fill these extra
pages. You know, there was all this
extra content that would be needed.
So they were looking for staff to kind of help fill those extra
pages. And so heard about that like
along the Grapevine and applied. And that was, I know it was
super fun just applying and going for the interview.
You know, like I'm sure you never remember when you're when
you're when you're young and you see all these names in the pages
of White Dwarf and they become, you know, like your your heroes
and your idols. And it is Rick Priestley and
Addy Chambers and all these kind of greats, these legends now of
the industry. So I got to go up to the studio
and spend the day at the studio and meet some of these people.
And, you know, kind of John Blanche won this past while
you're sitting like having a chat with Jake Thornton.
And it's like, wow. Yeah.
And they offered me the job. So it's one fun little story
there because I think there was one thing that came up multiple
times during the day. I think it was like the little
thing that kind of gave me the edge that kind of got my foot in
the door. My only job before I'd worked
for Games Workshop was working at this beach in Saudi Arabia.
And, you know, I'd left because of the outbreak of the Gulf War.
And they had a question on the application form, last
employment and reason for leaving last employment.
So in that reason for leaving, I'd written outbreak of war.
So I think this was like, you know, this was it was a cool
kind of conversation started, you know, like everyone I talked
to was like, tell me about this outbreak of war being your
reason for leaving your last job.
That was my like little thing that I think kind of got me in
the door there. Yeah, would raise a few
eyebrows. And yeah, like I said, good
conversation point. Who were the people that
interviewed you when you got to Nottingham?
So started with I think it was Jake and Robin was kind of the
first round. Yeah.
So Robin was still technically editor at the time I think, but
about to move into being studio manager and Jake was about to
take over as being editor. Then I did a like a kind of
little round table with the whole White Dwarf team.
So there would have been 80 would have been there.
Gav, Ian interviewed with some of the production stuff as well.
So, Lindsay, do you know Lindsay Rick's?
No, Rick's wife. Yeah, yeah, She did a lot of
like the editorial work, so maybe some of the other
production stuff as well. I can't.
I don't even remember now. There was the guy, what's his
name? He was one of the production
managers. He did all the maps as well.
I don't know, get his name. Yeah, he's not a well known
name. Yeah.
And then, but then I actually turned the job down when they
offered it to me. Oh, really?
So yeah, I went up and went through all of that.
And at the end they offered me the job.
And I was living in London at the time and I had my girlfriend
down in London. I had some other things going
on. I had a band that I was really
into, like doing things with my band.
And I kind of felt like it was, I wasn't ready to give up my
life in London at that point. And it was just a few months
later that I reconsidered. So a few months later is like,
actually, maybe that was a bad idea, turning them down.
Maybe, you know, I should have said yes.
So I wrote back and said I noticed that there was an
advertisement in White Dwarf at that point looking for writers.
So it's kind of odd. Looks like they haven't filled
the posts yet if they're still advertising.
Yeah, I wrote back and said I kind of changed my mind.
And very luckily for me, they they agreed to take me the
second time. That's good mate, because I
think most, I think you know, from personal experience, I
think in most cases if you knock them back the first time, they
won't pick you up the second time, you know what I mean?
I think that's not just. Yeah, yeah.
Those companies, if you knock them back the first time,
they're a bit hesitant to take you on because they don't know
whether you're really committed or whatever.
You know that's that's. Yeah, yeah.
So I mean that was yeah. So, you know, all credit to to
Robin and Jake there for taking me that second time.
But I think, you know, honestly, like it's, it's tough finding
people to work in the studio. I mean, I went through we still
we hired several more writers while I was there.
And so I was kind of like on the fringe involved in the process.
And the problem is like, you know, if you advertise for a
post like the writer on White Dwarf, you will get so many
applications from people that have absolutely no
qualifications or, you know, who are absolutely not suited to the
job at all. So it is, it's tough to find, to
find people. And also like, I mean, the pay
was really low. So finding people that have
something to be able to to offer and are willing to accept the
level of pay that they that that was available there is also, you
know, it was challenging. Did they?
Pay better so. Did they pay better than stains
at all or not? No, I actually took a pay cut
going from stains, working in the stains in retail to working
as a right run dwarf. I think I took maybe like a £500
pay cut, pay cut, something like that.
Right, right. The the difference was it stains
because I was at at London, there was like a they took into
account living expenses and London is more expensive than
Nottingham. So I was like on a higher kind
of like salary band because I was living in London.
So I actually took a pay cut. I don't remember exactly how
much it was. It was, I certainly started on
under £10,000 a year. Like it was a four figure
salary, which, you know, even taking into account inflation
was, you know, was minimum minimum wage kind of jobs.
And we wouldn't. It wasn't the lowest because I
know the figure painters the like the heavy metal team got
paid even less than us. That's me.
That's. What I got?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
You were working at the average metal team.
Yeah, yeah. I remember you and I remember a
few other guys. I never actually talked to you
over in the White Dwarf team, but you were sort of on the side
there and. Oh, wow.
Yeah. You know Dave Perry.
You know Dave? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He lives in Japan here. Yeah, I follow him on Facebook
and kind of. Yeah, yeah, we got to meet a
couple of years ago, last year I think it was.
We got to meet up and play some games and hang out and all that
kind of stuff. So yeah, we, he's going to come
up here at one point and play some old, old, like old hang out
with me. So he's keen to do that.
But yeah, he's still, he's still, he's now getting back
into figure painting. He's getting back into gaming
and all that kind of stuff now, which is really good.
But I've, you know, I've got like John Wigley.
I know he's married to a Japanese lady and he comes.
Here and. There's a quite a few actually,
there's quite a few people that that are associated with Gangs
Workshop back in that time who actually either live in Japan,
live in Japan, or they're married Japanese women or
whatever, vice versa. And yeah, there's some kind of
connection here, which is quite, quite odd, but yeah, it's quite
good at the same time. Yeah, absolutely.
Facebook friends with Dave and get constantly bombarded with
endless photos of his lunch. That's kind of his thing, I
suppose, because of whatever he's eating.
Hamburgers. Yeah.
He's always eating like, you know, he's always eating like
really great looking stuff. I'm always like he's.
In good shape. He's in good shape.
So he must, he must work out or something because with all that
stuff he's eating and drinking that, yeah, he's still in good
shape now for his age. But yeah, no, that's good, mate.
Yeah, So. And in AD of course sends his
regards, he said, Oh yeah, you're interviewing,
interviewing Steve. He's a really good bloke.
He said. So that's really nice.
And I said, oh, you should get in touch.
Yeah, it'd be good. Yeah, ADI kind of lost most of
the team I kind of stayed in contact with.
Yeah, good. We went our separate ways, but
not really. ADI didn't.
I didn't hear anything at all. But I think the first thing I
saw about AD was, no, it wasn't your podcast.
Or is that Tom? Film Deck.
Yeah, that's the one. He did an interview for Film
Deck, and that was the first time I'd seen anything about him
in years. But yeah, he was.
We used to jam together sometimes.
Yeah, he was saying that. I noticed you got some guitars
behind you, but you said you're a very good bass player.
So yeah, we used to, it was fun, but just, I remember one time we
booked a little studio, just the two of us to have some, you
know, a space to play and spent an afternoon just him drumming
and me playing on bass and that was it, just the the two of us
jamming away. It was fun.
Oh, that's good, mate. Yeah, I heard, I heard from 82
that there were quite a few other people there at the studio
who also played instruments and you had some kind of music, you
know, trio or what have you going on there.
So that's nice, isn't it? So yeah, we'll get, yeah, yeah.
And it's all about war gaming and painting miniatures.
We'll do other things and have other interests.
So it's nice we'll have a musical kind of bond together.
It was that and the rock climbing that was the other
thing that happened a lot in the studio.
Right. There was some like Little Rock
climbing. There were a few Little Rock
climbing clans, but it was kind of quite a popular pastime.
Yeah, I saw Mike McVeigh and I think Richard Wright.
No talk about going rock climbing or something like that.
So yeah, I remember that when I was there.
But anyway, I'm looking to go for a quick break because we're
almost out of this Zoom limit time, but we'll kick back.
We can talk more about your time at at the studio and other
things you progressed on within your career, but we'll be back
in just a moment. Well, let's let's go back to
when you're at the studio now you've you've landed your dream
job, I hope at, at the White Dwarf team as one of the editors
and writers of the White Dwarf magazine.
But I think I think most people would know you and associate
yourself and your name, especially with the Necromander
articles. Would that be a fair call?
Yeah, I mean there are two things that people kind of like
still when people still remember.
There are two things that people remember is 1 the Necromander
articles, the whole Papa Steve thing, and the other is that one
article, the the secret Diary, I forget which issue it was now
issued 200 and something very early, 2 hundreds.
I wrote that. So it was actually, that was
interesting how the article came about because I started writing
it literally like as a diary on my desk and Jake walked past
behind me one day and saw it and he was like, oh, we should turn
that into an article. And then I just kind of like,
you do what started it and didn't finish it and other
things to priority. And I stopped working on the
Army I was working on and stopped writing the article that
started writing. And it all just kind of fell
aside for months. And then a few months later, we
were doing the the staff tournament and we needed to do
some coverage for the staff tournament.
And I don't know if it was Jake that suggested it or if I
brought it. I don't remember where the idea
came from, but it was like, hey, that article you started those
months ago, have I do that for the the staff tournament, you
know, will be a little bit more interesting than just doing the,
you know, the kind of very dry newsroom style article that the
that we'd usually done for those kinds of things.
So yeah, that became our grand tournament, grand tournament,
staff grand tournament kind of coverage article.
Was that the secret diary? And that's still, I think it's
still probably my favorite article I did on Dwarf and very
often gets when when people remember things from from those
days, it comes up often. I think what was really great
about that article and what people remember about it was,
well, probably how I mean, it was.
It was a real account, right? There was kind of, there was
nothing polished about it. There was really like me
starting something and getting bored of it and then restarting
it months later. But more than that, it was, you
know, I was not a great miniature painter, right?
That was a very kind of functional miniature painter.
But I still got to have my army showing in the pages of White
Dwarf. And it was for most people that
just never seen like an ordinary army, right?
Like what you see is this kind of very aspirational heavy metal
standard, or even when you go into the stores, you see the
cabinets, which were all kind of a very high standard painting.
And it was really like for a lot of people, it was kind of seeing
that you don't have to paint like that, right?
You can, you can just paint in a very ordinary way and it'll
still look great and still, you know, you can have fun with it.
And I think that's the thing that people most remember from
it, right? It's just that kind of like
seeing and, and, and an ordinary looking army in White Dwarf.
So that really stands out. That was like, I think one of my
favorite things. And the whole the whole papasti
thing was a little bit strange because I was actually never
like a huge fan of Necromunda to be honest.
Oh, really? OK.
Like I really, the law was fantastic and the minis were
fantastic, but just the game itself.
So I think the a big part of playing war games for me is the
spectacle. It's just, you know, having like
two big armies fully painted spectacular scenery, just
creating this kind of the the experience of it.
And Necromonda is kind of the antithesis of that, right?
Like if you see a well played Necromonda game, half the time
you can't even see the miniatures because it's so much
about like moving and positioning and hiding your
miniatures. You know, it's difficult to tell
the difference between like a table full of Necromonda terrain
on its own and the game being played.
It's like go and find all the mini as a hit.
So it didn't really engage me on that kind of like spectacle
level like, you know, like the big games did.
I still enjoyed it. You know, I still, I still liked
it. You know, it's a kind of
tactical game. It was, you know, it was
fantastically well done, but it was never kind of my favorite
game. It just happened that I fell
into being like the Necromander person on the team.
It was mostly because the time I joined was I joined just as
Necromundo was launching. And so of course the point that
the game is launching, everyone in the studio has been playing
it for months already because you know, they're play testing
it and then they're, you know, they're playing it the writing
articles before it launches. And then by the time the game
launches, everybody's moved on to something else.
But for me, it was still like the new thing, you know, I'd
never seen it before, I'd never played it before.
So I was a little bit more excited about it than the rest
of the team. So those early Necromundo
articles fell on me to do. I think the first one, the very
first one I did was what you mean the Outlanders preview or
the Outlanders launch article? And again, there I think it was,
you know. It was kind of given to me
because I was a little bit more excited about Necromundo and at
the time it was just supposed to be or the mandate was kind of
due. It's a news release.
It's just, it's a, it's an extended news article to talk
about this release. But I wanted to do something a
bit more fun with it rather than just doing kind of a new, a try
sort of press release style. So I kind of like started
writing it from this, you know, from this kind of first person
perspective in putting a little bit more narrative into it,
presenting it in a little bit more of a fun way.
And then the the name that was, I mean, that was the name of my
gang at the time. You know, I had that the lap
gang. It was again, I can't remember
who who came up with it. I don't think it was my own.
I don't think I came up with the the idea that the Papa thing it
was the gang was almost all Jews at the start.
Like I was kind of just experimenting with different
gang types. And I've made a gang that almost
exclusively started with Jews. And so there was like Jews and
then there was like this was the little back story for the game.
The, the, the leader of the gang was the, the, the dad and he had
this like little clan of his, his kids.
So it was like Papa and Papa Steve and then the Burger Boys
was the name of the gang after this scenery piece.
So it made like a, a piece of scenery out of a couple Coke
bottles and some corrugated cardboard.
And there was something I got from an old, old issue of White
Dwarf. It was from something I'd seen
in a, a Judge Dredd article in White Dwarf like years before,
but literally it taken the the top and the bottom from a Coke
bottle and cut them off, which to make like burger buns.
And then there was a couple, some corrugated cardboard to be
the burger in the middle and painted it and dripped some PBA
glue and painted that yellow and red to be kind of must.
And it became like the burger bar.
So that was like my little scenery piece I used in all my
battles. So as that's where the they
became the burger boys and that was the birth of papacy from the
burger boys. And it just kind of just kind of
stuck. Everyone seemed to like it.
The, the only person that didn't like it was John Blanche because
I used, I replaced my profile picture with a crop from a piece
of John Blanche artwork. And he was he, John was always
kind of very sensitive about how artwork in general got used.
You know, he things had to be kind of cropped correctly and,
you know, used in a respectful way.
So I remember him coming down when when I first, when I first
had that that little crop, I was kind of like, what's going on
here? How come?
You know, because it's taken from a bigger piece of artwork.
But evidently Jake managed to convince him because we ended up
using it. So yeah, that's how that's how
Papa Steve was born. Wow, there you go.
Excellent bit of legacy there. And yeah, I'm sure people would
would be interested to know your thoughts about Nick or Amanda
not being your favorite game. So am I to presume that
Warhammer was your favorite game?
Like as a spectacle kind of thing on the tabletop?
Can that be right? Yeah.
I mean, Fantasy Battle was absolutely.
That was my reason for playing. 40K was great as well.
The guy was very much into 40K, but Fantasy Battle, I think was
the the IT was the archetype of the spectacle game, right?
You know, these big blocks of units.
I mean, that's how I always imagined a war game should look
like. Yeah, that was always, that was
what did it for me. Epic.
I played quite a lot of epic as well.
I think the thing about Epic for me was my girlfriend at the time
would play Epic with me. It was the one Games Workshop
game that she was she wasn't really into, but she was, you
know, accepting enough of that. She would play games.
She had an Eldar army, had had my for my Epic squad army.
So we would play 40K against each other.
Yeah. But yeah, Warhammer Fantasy
Battle was the that was the one for me.
Nice mate. That's great.
Yeah, well, that's well, that's good.
You got to play. But Epic too, because I was
talking to AD of course, in our live stream yesterday and we
have a great love and passion for Epic.
It was the game that sort of introduced us to mass battles on
table tops because the like I'm I wasn't a student like you had
a massive amount of money at the start of the year to spend and
splash on an army for myself Wahama.
So it was very difficult to buy a Wahama fantasy army, but Epic
was a very affordable way to get into a mass tabletop game from
Games Workshop. And what a what a great system
it was too. And it still is.
Yeah, so actually my very first battle report on White Dwarf was
against AD and it was an Epic battle report.
I think it was probably the last battle report we did for that
edition of Epic. So that was my my my
introduction to battle reports. I think I remember I had Eldar.
I think AD had Chaos. Honestly I don't remember a lot
about that game apart from I Lost.
Right, I have to go after going to look at that because I really
want to find that battle report now that that doesn't ring a
bell with me. But I'm now really curious as to
what that was. So I have to go and try to track
it down mate. Yeah, would have been the early
190's, like 192 or 193 around there.
Yeah. The only other thing I remember
about that one, that was my first ever painted mini that
appeared in the magazine was in that battle report.
There was the, I don't know what had happened to the Eldar army,
but it had various minis missing.
Like there were units that were not quite complete.
So just to play the game, I had to go in and paint up a few
extra minis to round it out. If you look very, very carefully
in some of the photos, you can tell some of the minis, you
know, are a little bit less well painted than the rest of their
unit. And that's the, that's my ones
in there have to be. You have to look hard to find
them though, because they're so small.
Yeah, that's nice. And the sudden they did a new
edition of Epic while I was there, which was that was Andy
and Jervis worked on that that that never really grabbed me
that I'm not sure if that was like second or third edition or
what edition it was. Epic four third.
Edition, right? Yeah.
It didn't really grab me. I think there were.
I think Andy and Jervis kind of acknowledged that, you know,
during the course of shortly after the release of the game
that, you know, a lot of people found it too too gamey, too
gamified, too kind of abstract, that it was more about the rules
and about the tabletop experience.
There was, I remember there was one very specific thing that
bothered me about it, which was that I really loved the Flyer
miniatures. Some of my favorite epic
miniatures were the Flyers that they did, like they did these
fantastic little bombers and or you know, planes and you didn't
get to put them on the tabletop. Those flyer rules for that
edition was they sat on the side of the table and then when you
did an attack with them, you kind of moved them across the
table and then you took them off the table again.
And that was kind of a little pet peeve of mine.
It was like, you know, like I was saying earlier, what I like
about the games is creating the spectacle, having like a table
cup full of miniatures and having like your favorite
miniatures out on the table. So it was kind of really, really
greated me that I would then have miniatures just sitting on
the side and not playing. So, you know, it's kind of, I
think people's criticism of that edition I found kind of very
valid. And it was certainly not my
favorite edition either. I think the I also just it was
epic as well. Just because they're so you
know, that they're so small. What makes spectacle there is
having the big minis, having the Titans on there.
So I think really where Epic became more interesting was when
you had lots of those big, when it was less focused on large
units of infantry, but when you had those kind of big,
impressive Titans and those bring about the battlefield.
Interesting. Yeah, I think, I think 3rd
edition was kind of like Marmite.
I think either you loved it or hated it, and I think there was
not so many people in between. I've never actually tried it and
I just know without even trying it I haven't playing it.
I just don't think it has the same essence that second edition
has and the same things, the same qualities that 2nd edition
gave me. So but I will give it a go.
I will give it a go and give it a good shot and just see, you
know, at the end what I really feel about it.
But I know from one of the guys on a discord, another Canadian
actually, he actually squares by.
He absolutely loves it. So, but I don't think he ever
played second edition. I think 3rd edition was his
first kind of experience playing Epic.
So that's interesting. But let's go, let's go back to a
game that you do really feel passionate about, and that's
Warhammer. And what kind of armies did you,
what was your first army you collected by the way, that you
bought when you're in university?
Undead all. Right.
So at the time they had like this kind of undead army in a
box kit. It was like all plastic, which
was, you know, very uncommon at the time.
And the reason I got it was very simply because it was the
cheapest army you could get, because you could, you could buy
this box set and you know, it was kind of like at a discount
because it was in the box. And again, there wasn't a lot of
that at the time. And it was all plastic, which
made it much cheaper. So it started off by going down
to the, the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street was where I bought
it, I think. Not the Virgin game store, not
the Megastore, the Virgin Game store.
And I bought 2 boxes of this undead army in a box and then
got them back and realized half the plastic was missing in each
of the boxes. So went back to the store and
they gave me two more whole boxes.
Oh wow. I had like 2 full boxes, +2 half
boxes. And they were also super quick
and easy to paint. Yeah.
So that was nice as well. You know, skeletons are like
spray paint them white ink wash painting the weapons.
That was it. That was that was good enough
for the skeletons. So yeah, that was my that was my
first kind of real army. And then over time experimented
with pretty much everything had a empire army.
I was very fond of dwarfs historically.
Have frequently gone back to dwarfs.
Chaos as well. Frequently gone back to Chaos.
Wood Elves has always been a favorite as well.
Yep. Wood elves?
Wood elves was like wood elves when Gary Morley did his wood
elves sculpts. I think he did the range for
what was it, 5th edition I guess 4th or 5th edition?
4th edition, right? And those remain to this day
like my, some of my favorite minis.
I think I mean by anything Gary Morley does, anything the Perry
twins do is like for me, that's like their style, their
aesthetic, That's what kind of grabs me.
So the Perry's, their empire range is just incredible.
And I think those two ranges, the Perry's Empire, Empire minis
and Gary's Woodall's, those are the two that I could never get
enough of. Those two ranges.
Dwarfs is more kind of they're, you know, I like to play with
dwarfs because they're, they're simple and easy to play with.
You just sit there and shoot them until they get close enough
and then smash them when they get close.
And you know, you don't have to think too much.
Kind of fits my play style nicely, yeah.
But in terms of many, it's the the Empire and the Willows of
the two that historically have really, really appealed to me.
If you if you can hear a screaming Boblin in the
background, that's my son downstairs being tickled by his
mother. So apologies for that.
We both have kids, me and Steve, and we both like I'm this is
we're recording now at 9:30 and my son is just having a bit of a
tickle session with his mother. And your, your little hobbits
are running around too, aren't they mate?
In the background so. Yeah, I can hear them just
getting up now, so. Yeah, you are Papa after all.
Goblets as well. That's my other Yeah, the other
army, the goblin army that I did for the that one article.
But yeah, that was the only time I ever played with goblins and
that. How did that happen?
I honestly can't remember. I thought, oh, yeah, of course
it was because there was a new goblin range being worked on at
the time. So, you know, and that was
exactly, like I say in the article, exactly how it
happened. You know, whenever you see
something new and shiny, that's what you want to collect.
And so, you know, we're seeing some new shiny orcs and goblins
around in the studio and thinking, oh, I'm going to have
to build the goblin army now. And then regretting it from the
reality of painting up a whole army of goblins sets in.
Yeah, mate. Yep, Yep, exactly.
But yeah, it's, it's probably the great atmosphere to be in
working in the steer. You're always sort of turning
your head to the next new thing that's coming out and the stuff
that's coming out of the the foundry and everything.
So yeah, that's, that's a wonderful time.
Do you actually have any of those armies still in your
collection? Yeah.
So it's interesting like that. So really just like the past few
months, six months or so, six months to a year, I've been kind
of getting back into it a little bit, sort of discovering the
online communities that there are around the games and digging
out some of my old minis. The past, since moving to
Canada, for the longest time I didn't really play much.
There was a little group when I was working at Ubisoft, there
was a little 4 DK group there. I play occasional games there,
but my main gaming the past 10-15 years has been other
tabletop games playing a lot of manifold.
But just this kind of past year or so I've been digging out some
of the the old miniature cases and just seeing what's in there.
Nice man. So I still have a pretty pretty
decent dwarf collection. I've been rediscovering that.
Forgotten about found a few. I haven't got the whole enough
for a whole army, but there's some handfuls of wood elf, some
of my favorite wood elf minis, some of my, you know, the better
painted ones that I've kept more recently it's been more 40K,
right? I bought the Leviathan box last
year, which is the first time I've bought any 40K in over a
decade. Yeah.
Yeah, and it's such a fantastic box.
Really like, you know, I'm I can't say I'm a huge fan of the
the rules, the 10th edition rules go more inclined to just
do something like either playing very simplified 40K rules or
playing one page. One page rules work very well as
well. But the mini is just you know,
they're the the quality is just it's astounding these days.
I mean, really like, I love the the the minis that we have in
the Leviathan box. So we have been painting those
up very slowly, but the chipping away at that.
Oh. That's good, mate.
Yeah, it's good to get into my meeting.
Still active in the hobby. That's nice.
My oldest kid So not long ago, my oldest kid completely none
ironically, when we were walking back from school, turns to me
and goes. Have you ever heard of a game
called Warhammer? And I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah.
So we get home, and that was kind of the trigger for it all,
you know, literally went down to the basement to find some old
White Dwarf magazines and started training, you know,
showing my picture in some of the magazines.
And then of course, he goes back to school the next day and he's
like, my dad wrote Warhammer, like, OK, not exactly.
So that kind of like brought me back.
That was kind of the the catalyst to, to rediscovering
things. Don't play a lot.
I'll play occasionally with my with my kid, but that's OK.
It's fun still just painting and playing with the minis and
trying to convince my old Malifu buddy to to start playing some
Warhammer or Warhammer 40K with me.
But he doesn't want to get, he doesn't want to to take the the
pocketbook impact that would, you know, that's required.
So if we're going to play, I'm going to have to have two armies
for, you know, I'm going to be providing all the menus that
we'll probably get round to it at some point.
You can always do Necromundo. Yeah, I mean, the Necromunda
minis are very, you know, they're very interesting.
You know, the the new ranges I could certainly see.
Yeah. But yeah, I don't, I don't need
to start collecting another range, though.
I think I'm I'm spending enough as it is.
No, that's fair enough right now, Steve, You.
Yeah, of course. Your time.
How? How?
Actually, how long were you employed at Games Workshop
before you decided to part ways? So I did, I remember I did four
games days starting in retail. So I think it was probably like
one in retail and the somewhere between three and four years
that I worked in retail and Dwarf.
I think Dwarf was about maybe 2 1/2 close to three years.
And then but then after I left White Dwarf, I ended up coming.
It was my next job, in fact was coming back to work on Warhammer
Online. Oh, right.
So that was, it was actually a joint production between Games
Workshop and Climax. So I was employed by Climax, but
we were still working very closely with the Games Workshop
team. I mean, Robin was Robin Dews
was, I'm not sure this title was like general manager of the, you
know, the whole thing. All right.
So I still had kind of, you know, daily contact with Robin
and Jake and Mark from White Dwarf had both also gone to work
at on Warhammer Online after they left.
So. It's a little bit of a reunion
of the the old Dwarf team, and this is the so this is the first
version of Warhammer Online, of course.
So a lot of people don't know that there were two Warhammer
Online games. There was one made by climax and
then that got cancelled after a few years and then it got re
picked up again by mythic people that made dark age of Camelot.
But that so that version we were working on was very much kind of
very much more inspired by Warhammer fantasy role play.
So the, the eventual Warhammer Online, the one that that
launched the age of reckoning was it was kind of like this
realm versus realm. You played the different races.
It was, it had a very kind of Warhammer fantasy battle feel to
it where you know, you had your, your faction, dark elves or orcs
or whatever. The, the original version was
very fantasy role play inspired. So you played like in the
Empire, a little band of adventurers uncovering the dark
secrets that lay beneath the cities and mountains of the
Empire. And that was, I mean, it was
fantastic at the start. I think it was very similar in a
way to what happened when I went on, when I started on Dwarf.
So, so just going back a little bit again to the dwarf days.
I mean, when I started, we had like a ridiculous amount of
creative freedom. You know, we really, we were a
bunch of passionate gamers just playing games and writing about
them. You know, we, we were aware that
we had a job which was selling miniatures, right?
The ultimately, but at the same time that was never really
pushed on us, right? You know, we were very
independent. The studio was very independent.
And we, we would have a little pitch meeting at the start of
each month. We would together, the White
Dwarf team, we would kind of pitch the articles we wanted to
do that month. If there were specific things
that had to be done, then, you know, Jake and AD would kind of
like say, you know, we have to do this, we have to do this.
Any ideas what we do with those? But we've really had a huge
amount of creative freedom. I think it really shows as well,
you know, those those issues that kind of one night is into
the early 2 hundreds. Obviously I'm very biased, but I
think even trying to look objectively, I think those were
some of the best issues of White Dwarf have ever been published,
right? Because I think that, you know,
that authenticity, that genuineness about it does just,
you know, being a bunch of passionate gamers really shone
through. And then at some point, you
know, in the, the early 2 hundreds, the upper management
of the studio, of the studio of the company started cottoning on
to the fact that, you know, US son dwarf and the studio in
general were just kind of like doing our own thing.
And I mean, you, you probably know more about that period than
I do because, you know, you've talked to to all the people
about that transition, but that upper management started coming
in and being a bit more controlling and having more
impact. So the immediate impact for us,
of course, was Jake being moved off, you know, Jake being moved
on to other responsibilities and being replaced by at well, at
the time this even before Paul Sawyer came in, there was a
managing editor came in. Chris.
Chris Colston. Oh, yeah.
Chris. Yeah, yeah.
So he came in as managing editor, right.
So he wasn't involved in kind of the creative side, but he was
kind of technically our boss and then and responsible for the
production side. But yeah, increasingly it
became, you know, that that freedom started to be eroded and
the, you know, the magazine magazine became less fun to work
on. So I think everyone that was
there at that time was gone within a year.
Either quit, you know, me, Mark, Jake soon after, or they moved
into game development. Thomas moved into game
development. Gabby and the 80 was the only
person who stuck it out, who was kind of like transitioned into
even ADI. Don't think he lasted long on
again. You probably know more than me.
You've talked to him. I'm not sure how long he lasted
on once Paul took over his editor.
Not long after, I think he got moved.
I think he moved on just as soon as he took the helm as editor.
He moved on from there and wanted to do something else.
So yeah. But it was intense.
You know that working on Dwarf was intense.
It was like you had these four week schedules and as soon as
you were done with for one or straight into the crunch for the
next, you know, there wasn't. So there was AI mean there was a
high turnover rate on on tour. Anyway, I'm drifting up the
whammer online, but whammer online was very much the same
kind of experience. Like when we started, we had a
huge amount of creative freedom, right?
We were just kind of making we wanted to do and doing what we
wanted to do. And you know, I was working, I
was given initially my mandate. My first mandate was the magic
system. And I had a blast doing that.
It was just kind of like making up spells and writing
descriptions of them. And we had hundreds of magic
spells. So it's just, you know, creating
names and effects and descriptions for hundreds of
magic spells. And it was really fun.
It was super cool. But then again, over time,
people started realizing that yeah, this there was a game that
had to be made here. And making AI mean making an MMO
is hard, really hard. Especially we were, we were
super inexperienced, not just in the design team.
I mean, me, Mark and Jake would never worked on a video game
before, let alone an MMO. Yeah, across the company.
I mean, very few people had worked on Mmos before.
Robin, of course, who was in charge of the whole enterprise,
had never worked on a video game before.
I don't think. And I think Robin is a marvelous
manager. I mean, really one of the the
best managers I've ever worked with.
You know, I, I don't have enough praise for Robin as a manager,
but to make an MMO when you've have no experience doing that
kind of thing was really, you know, it was, it was inevitable
that, that, that it was not going to work.
That title. I mean, whatever the kind of,
whatever the, the precise reasons that it was cancelled
for, you know, the, whatever the problems were that month, the
reason that was given for it being cancelled, it would never
have worked with the, the team we had and the scope that we
were looking for and the, the resources and time available.
If it hadn't been cancelled then it would have been cancelled
later after more millions had been spent.
So I think it was the right decision in hindsight, still
very painful. You know, I think that's one of
the big things I've learned over my career is not to get attached
to things. But at the time I hadn't learned
that lesson. So, you know, I think like, and
like many of us, we were very passionate about what we were
doing and very attached to it and very personally invested in
it. So to have that cancelled and to
lose like years of work was extremely painful at the time.
But a very good lesson, you know, a very good lesson about
not getting attached to, to your work or, or finding the right
level of attachment. You know, you need a level of
personal involvement to, to do these kinds of things.
But, you know, you need to also keep that level of detachment so
that when it does get taken away from you, it's not, you know,
it's not too devastating. Yeah, I bet mate, I bet.
Yeah. So that's interesting.
That's well, interesting on in the side that all you guys were
introduced or working for a games company when you've never
had any experience with creating an MMO or any other computer
game for that matter. And then yeah, yeah, on a, on a
Women of Prayer, hoping that everything will be OK and it
actually used something to be produced at the end.
So it's very interesting learning that, but we'll have to
go. Sorry.
Quick. Ad Break.
But when we come back, we're going to talk more about your
involvement with the computer game industry and what you're
doing right now. You've just announced something
very exciting recently on Instagram and we can just talk
about that when we come back in just a moment.
So let's let's get into the the let's get into the game
development side of things because after you departed on
sadly, the fail project with Warhammer Online.
Where did that take you there mate, From there.
So there I'm I did a little bit of studying in and around that
period of time. I went back to university for a
few years, studied computer science, but then my next job
after Warhammer Online, I moved. I moved to Paris right on a whim
really. AI was really into salsa dancing
at the time and I heard there was a big salsa scene in Paris.
So I went over originally with a plan of just staying for a few
months. Like I had a little bit of money
aside, didn't have anything in particular to do.
So moved over to Paris and then fell in love with the city.
So looked for a job there and got the, got the job in the
small indie studio Monte Cristo, Monte Cristo Multimedia, Monte
Cristo Entertainment. I don't remember.
I spent a few years in Paris working in some different
smaller indie studios there. Met my wife there.
And then after a few years there, they started there was
some, the, the, the video games industry was not doing so well
at that point. You know, they were in, in
Paris. So the the studio I was working
for closed down and the next job that I found was in Canada.
So I originally I applied for a job in at Ubisoft in Vancouver
and interviewed for a role at Ubisoft Vancouver and then they
offered me a different role in Montreal and decided to accept
that and moved over here 15 years ago and haven't really
looked back since. Love Canada.
Love Montreal. I'm very settled here now
working. So the past 15 years has been
working in AAA, which I mean, it's it's Groundhog Day, right?
Working in AAA, you come in every day and you do that's a,
that's a little bit unfair for me to say it like that because
there's been, I had some great projects and had some great
times and met some great people in, you know, my 15 years in
AAA. But at the same time it's like
it's very, it's very much the same thing each time.
And that kind of gets, it gets monotonous, it gets frustrating.
So I mean, 15 years is a long time to be doing a AAA.
Can I ask what AAA? Can I ask what AAA is?
Sorry. AAA What do the AAA's the 3A
stand for? Budget high budget high.
I don't know what they are this it's, you know, big budget, big
team, blockbuster games. It's the the Call of Duty is the
Assassin's Creed, the. AAA title.
OK, now I get.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The triple the AAA's actually
stand for something, but one of the A's is high budget, one of
them is like. Just money.
High, high, high ratings as well.
Like I think technically to be AAA you need to be like, you
know, 80% or 90% plus rating, you know, review ratings or I
don't remember. So, yeah, after 15 years of
doing that, I mean, you're probably aware as well that the
past few years have not been good for the AAA industry, the
AAA video game industry. There's been a lot of
redundancies, a lot of canceled projects.
You know, there was this huge boom during the pandemic when
video games became like, you know, because everyone was just
sitting at home playing video games all the time.
So it was this huge boom in the industry.
And then as soon as the pandemic ended, people started going out
and doing other things and. Covering the world.
Boom. Yeah, the boom collapsed, Yeah.
So the past years of past couple of years have not been kind to
the the big video game industry. So there's a lot of
redundancies, a lot of cancelled projects.
I left the Ubisoft close to two years ago now to move to another
big another big video game company idos the most well known
for Tomb Raider, Deus Ex Few other kind of big titles went
there just looking for something different and really found just
more of the same. So last year I decided enough is
enough. It's time to do something
different than just packed all that in and left to do my own
thing, which in this case is making a video game about Welsh
mythology in the Welsh language. So, you know, a little bit
niche, but you know, it's something I'm, I'm passionate
about and something I, I feel I can get a little little bit more
personally invested in. So doing that, like normally
doing that as a solo dev, I'm the the only full time person,
but I have a little team of freelancers around me, Gav, Gav
Thorpe. Oh, great.
I've been working with Gav again, which has been really
nice. Nice, something with the the
narrative and the the right thing for the game.
So that's, I mean, Gav's a lovely guy as well.
I don't know if you talked to him yet.
Is he getting on your podcast? Not yet.
So it's a date mate. We need to get that.
We need to get that sorted out. Yeah, I mean, he's a very busy
guy as well, so, you know, good luck tying him down.
I mean, he's an absolutely lovely guy.
And you know, it's a really pleasure to be to be working
with Megan after all these years.
And we actually were involved in the project together, but not
directly some years back. For Honor do you know For Honor
like the sword fighting? Ubisoft's big sword fighting,
axe fighting like battle game? Never heard of it, no.
Sorry, check it, check it out. You might, you know Forerunner.
Is it forerunner? For Honor.
For Honor, I apologize. I do.
For Honor. I've never played it, but that
came out quite some time ago I think For the Xbox I think it
wasn't it. Probably across all platforms.
All platforms, right? So Gav was, he was working on
the lore for that. Like he wrote all the kind of,
he wrote like the big lore Bible for the game I was actually away
on. He came over to Montreal for a
bit, but I was away on parental leave.
But when he came over, so we didn't meet up during that time.
But, you know, I'm sure I was working with his lore Bible when
that when I came back on the project.
But yeah, that's, that's been fun working with him again and,
you know, a little team of other freelancers.
So yeah, that's, that's my, that's kind of my current
passion project. Yeah, it's kind of, I'll give
you the whole story of how that came about a lot of.
Stories too, man, because I was going to say my next question
would be like, have you ever been to Wales?
But obviously you have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So a little, kind of a little. OK, I'll get back to White Dwarf
in a second because it kind of very, very tangentially ties
back into White Dwarf and I'll get there in a second.
So my mother, I've always known there's Welsh connections in my
family, right? My mother's name is Bronwyn.
My grandmother is Gwen. Gwen Jones, which is like, Gwen
Jones is like, you know, it's as Welsh as you can get.
Yeah, that's right. So, you know, it's kind of like
there's an awareness that there's Welshness, you know,
that there's a Welsh influence there.
But my family never identified as Welsh, right?
They're all very firmly British. Like my mother was very British.
My, my grandmother Gwen Jones was like, she was never Welsh.
She was British, not so much as a hint of a Welsh accent.
Certainly never heard them speaking Welsh.
Yeah. But then last year, my little
girl was doing a school project on the family.
We were, I was helping her out. We were researching our family
tree and our family ancestry and all kind of my old relatives
were sending over photos and old newspaper clippings and all
kinds of stuff. And I started finding Welsh in
there. Like there were newspaper
articles written in the Welsh language and on the back of
family photos, it was Welsh language writing just kind of,
OK, this is interesting, you know.
So I started looking into it and found that in fact, my, my
family, my mother's side is like up until my grandparents
generation were very firmly Welsh, you know, they were Welsh
language speakers. They were my, a fun one.
I found my great, great, great grandfather was the first person
to ever sing the Welsh national anthem in North Wales.
And so like it was a core part of the family identity up until
my, my grandparents generation, and then it just kind of stopped
there. So from my grandparents
generation onwards, it became instead of being Welsh
identifying Welsh speaking, it became British identifying
English speaking. So I started researching this
more and started discovering, you know, the history behind all
of this and the reasons behind all of this and this kind of
your cultural suppression and linguistic suppression that
happened to to the Welsh people and the Welsh language, you
know, up until well into the the 20th century.
And at the same time this was happening, I was, you know,
starting work on my own game and looking for, you know, ideas and
watching what to do with this. For various reasons.
I knew I wanted to make a fantasy game, but I mean,
fantasy is a it's a super over saturated market, right?
I mean, it's hard to find an interesting original twist on
the fantasy genre. So I was looking at the history
of various and just looking for inspiration, looking at the
history of the the genre, looking at the history of Lord
of the Rings and Game of Thrones and Harry Potter and Warhammer
as well. Like the, you know, the, how
does the, the lore of Warhammer fit into the, the history of
the, you know, the modern fantasy genre and Dungeons and
Dragons and all of these different, you know, branches of
the fantasy genre. As I dealt, as I, as I went
further and further back in history, I kept finding this
references to this one book, the Mabinogian.
And what was interesting about that was, I mean, I'm a hardcore
fantasy nerd, right? You know, it's the what as a
right to for Games Workshop. You know, you don't get much
more hardcore fantasy nerd than that.
And I heard of the Mabinogian, you know, imagine it's the same
thing as I imagine, you know, you're you're probably a pretty
hardcore fantasy nerd as well. And they were just saying like
you just mentioned, like it's I try to.
Hard that actually say about I tell my wife I'm not a nerd.
She always calls me out for Taku and I say no, no, no, I'm not a
Taku. I'm just like painting
miniatures, you know? I remember when I was working at
Ubisoft and we had our little 40K40K group at Ubisoft, when we
were playing 40K games, the other devs used to come by the
door and they just lean around the door and they go nerds, you
know? You know, you're like, yeah,
when when game developers are shouting nerd at you, you're
like, you're at the pinnacle of the pyramid of.
Neriosity There's levels you know you have to climb to ascend
to to get to the nerddom. So anyway, it was like, there
was this interesting question there of why have I never heard
of this book before? You know, it's like it's, it's
clearly being like a hugely influential, important work in
the, the development of the fantasy journal.
But why have I never heard of this?
And so I started researching the Mapinogian and it's history and
the reasons why it's not more widely known and discovering
that there was this big overlap with my own family history and
the reasons that I was not aware of, you know, the, the, the
Welshness of my own family history, which is the fact that
the Mapinogian was written in Welsh.
It's a Welsh book and there's been this historic suppression
of Welsh culture. It's not that simple.
Of course, you know, the reasons are complex and you know, I'm
not a professional historian, so, you know, I'm not qualified
to go into the details of it. But it's clear that at the heart
is the fact that it's a Welsh text.
So I think when these two things came together at the same time,
this, you know, discovery of the Mapenagi and then just how
influential a text it is. And you know, like all every
fantasy trope you can think of from Dragons and Wizards and
magic swords and rings of invisibility, you know, the
magic ring of invisibility, capes of invisibility, you know,
you get all over the place and battles against hordes of undead
armies. All these fantasy tropes.
The first time you find these things in writing is in the
Mabinogian, right? So it's like it's in a very real
sense, you could consider it the first work of, of fantasy
literature kind of lost my line of thinking there a little bit.
It's when I discovered these kind of two things.
This, you know, the, the, how powerful and influential the
Mabanoggan was and the fact that it, you know, it's not more
widely acknowledged and discovering, you know, how
ingrained my own family identity was with, with Welsh and the
Welsh language and the Welsh culture.
Those two things kind of coming together at that point was kind
of like, OK, this is this is what I need to do, right?
This is a what I want to do with, you know, my own project.
On the one hand, have an opportunity to present these
stories and, you know, present the, the Mavenoggian to a wider
audience. Of course in Wales it's very
well known, you know, as any Welsh person, they've heard of
the Mavenoggian of course. But the outside of Wales,
outside of academia in any case, it's really not well known at
all. So kind of bring a little bit of
exposure to to to Welsh myths and legends and the stories of
the Mabinogian and at the same time kind of just pay tribute to
my own family heritage. And these generations before
where, you know, their Welsh identity was so important, was
such an important part of, you know, that heritage.
And then, you know, it was sad to have to to have discovered
that and then to see that literally over the course of a
single generation just dissolve. So absolutely.
So just kind of reconnect with that family history as well.
So for, you know, for those reasons, I started making a game
about the, the, the Tales from the Mavanaghian, the which is
the, you know, the title of the game.
Yeah, wonderful man. I saw your trailer on Instagram
and yeah, it's very impressive visually impressive.
I like the Welsh language of course as well and you know it's
really nice. So it you've you've definitely
nailed down the theme and I think it's going to be very
popular. Well, hopefully with a lot of
people in Wales, but across the world of course as well.
Because I think it's again, it's like, like you say, it's like an
untapped part of fantasy literature that maybe a lot of
people don't know about. I'd certainly didn't know about
that book and I had no nothing. I know Owen Stayton.
I've sort of got you onto Owen Stayton's work as well because
he talks a lot of, he tells a lot of tales about Welsh
folklore. And so I thought I'd put you in
contact with him because he'd be a perfect person to talk to, at
least if you just wanted somebody to, to just, you know,
bounce ideas off or what have you about Wales and you know,
the Welsh folklore because he knows it by heart.
But yeah, it sounds like a really interesting project.
And I just want to wish you all the best with a mate.
And we'll keep in touch with its its progression and see how it
evolves. And I'm glad that you have a
great team of freelancers behind you in in part of this.
And yeah, mate, look, we'll just keep, keep in touch with what
happens, what happens with it. I'll, I'll leave some links here
for you, for your social media so people can actually go and
see the trailer. Is it actually on YouTube as
well? Steve.
He's. Trying, Yeah, it's on YouTube,
Yeah, I'll send you all the links.
So it's there's YouTube. There's an account for the game
on X there's my personal Instagram that I'm using more
for just kind of like whammer stuff, the Instagram at the
moment, but occasionally posting game stuff there as well, plus
the steam pages up of course already.
So you know, wish lists on Steam are always appreciated.
I was going to say about the this tangential reference back
to White Dwarf as well. Oh yes, play too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was my my first my
like. My interest for the Welsh
language actually started on White Dwarf.
I remember very specifically it was a battle report against
twice. I was playing a wood elf army
and looking for inspiration for names and kind of, you know,
there's a big Celtic influence on, on, on the wood of, on the,
in the wood of lore. And I borrowed a Welsh language
dictionary from Nigel Stillman to look for influences for
names. So I remember that very clear
that that was my first introduction to the Welsh
language. And the what was interesting was
so I, I used kind of various Welsh words to influence the
names of the characters. And then I got a letter, a fan
letter after the article got published from a, a kid in
Wales. I assume it was a kid.
I don't know how make you, I don't know how old he was, wrote
like a kid saying that it was really nice to see like the
Welsh language being used and correcting, correcting some of
my words that, you know, I hadn't, I hadn't spelled
correctly. I hadn't kind of grammatic,
well, not grammatically correct, my usage of them.
And I remember feeling just very touched that there was no e-mail
at the time, right. Like, if you if you wanted to
write to us, it was like you had to get down and write the letter
and then go to the post office and spend it.
And, you know, it was, it was, you know, an investment of time
and effort. And it was very touching to see
someone caring that much about their language and their culture
to, you know, to write in and and to say that it was
appreciated. And yeah.
So that, I mean, that's always stuck with me.
And, you know, it, it would be too strong to say that that
letter led to me, you know, years later making a game in the
Welsh language. But it certainly, you know, as I
started getting into this project, it was, you know, I
remembered it. I remembered the impact that it
had. So if that kids out there, if
you remember writing to me 25 odd years ago about that White
Dwarf battle report, you know, I'd love for me to hear from you
again, say thanks for that letter.
You know it, it meant something. Yeah, wonderful, mate.
I hope you get to reconnect with that, that young fella out there
in Wales somewhere. And that's the beauty of the
Internet, because we can all reconnect like we're doing now.
Like, you know, I, I saw you, I saw you at the studio, I saw you
walking. I think you lived in an
apartment block just up the road from where I was living.
But we never got to spoke. Good.
Got to speak to each other. But now here we are, you know,
all these years later, mate. And yes.
It's really a pleasure. Steve, it's been a great
pleasure of mine to talk to you mate.
You're a fascinating guy and you live you've, you've LED a very
rich life and it's just nice to see you doing something you
really care and passionate about in your job.
And you're doing your dream project.
And I hope that people can go and check out what you're doing,
get behind it and send their support any way they can.
And let's hope we can see this game come to fruition in the
near future. Thank you so much.
Thanks for inviting me on. It's really been a pleasure
talking to you. Now a pleasure of all mine.
Thank you Steve again for your time today.