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When you worked in games journalism in the late-nineties and early 2000s, you spent a lot of time thinking about wacky feature ideas. The grind of magazine production was extremely familiar by this point. You had your news, your previews and your reviews - they all ticked along in a predictable manner, so it was your features that really gave you the chance to break out a little bit and explore games in new and interesting ways. This was the era of the lad mags, after all, and the likes of Loaded and FHM were changing the way magazines spoke to their readers and presented subject matter. It was okay to have a laugh, it was okay to pretend you were Hunter S Thompson. I mean obviously no one ever actually read Hunter S Thompson, that would have been awful. But we knew enough to pretend. Also, there was money in publishing back then. Companies actually paid for adverts and people actually bought magazines. It was crazy. So there I was in Bath, working for Future Publishing as associate editor on DC-UK, the company's Dreamcast magazine. We were just three issues in, the console was doing okay, and we had a decent feature budget. That gave us free reign to do daft stuff. And so that is exactly what we did.
Here is an example. The game Sega Bass Fishing had just come out. This was a really fun fishing simulation (a popular genre at the time), which came with a dedicated fishing rod peripheral. You got to fish in a series of picturesque locations, while a brilliant pop soundtrack played and an over-enthusiastic commentator vocally assessed everything you caught. "Ooh a tiddler," he'd shout. How we laughed as we wasted hours of valuable magazine production time trying to out fish each other.
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