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I'm sad to announce that Dan Whitehead, a name that will be familiar to regular Eurogamer readers as one of our most prolific contributors, has decided to draw his 20-year career as a games reviewer to a close - and with it his decade-long association with our site.Though never a full-time member of staff, Dan has written for Eurogamer for longer than any of the current team save Bertie Purchese, and is synonymous with our game reviews. His archive of 968 articles contains no less than 692 reviews; it begins, in March 2006, with a review of Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure ("You can't fault the presentation and all important street vibe, but you can fault the feeble level design, fudged controls and lousy camera") and ends this month with his verdict on Just Cause 3 ("a Roger Moore-era Bond movie as directed by Robert Rodriguez"). In that time, the man known to some of you as "Dead Space Dan" since one of his most famous (or infamous) reviews has contributed as much as any team member, past or present, to our reputation as a tough but fair and clear-headed reviewing site.
Dan is one of the unsung heroes of UK games journalism. He has been writing about games professionally since the early 1990s; in a recent article, he reminisced about scoring his first game reviews in the October 1991 issue of Amiga Computing. "Now, I was getting every game for free, and got to wax lyrical about them in print to boot," he wrote. "If by 'wax lyrical' you mean 'rip off Your Sinclair's irreverent style very badly', of course." Typical modesty from this private, hardworking wordsmith of the old school, who has never been one to seek the limelight (I can see him wincing at the very existence of this piece) or let showiness get in the way of clarity. As a reviewer, he is amazingly professional, prolific, lucid and thorough, with an enviable ability to get straight to the heart of any game, and to deal with it fairly on its own terms.
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