Zzap!64 · Issue 1 (May 1985) · Commodore 64 software
Newsfield's C64 magazine put its reviewers' own faces — painted, reacting — next to their scores, turning criticism into a matter of personality rather than authority.
Zzap!64 was released on 11 April 1985 with a May cover date, launched by Newsfield as a sister publication to Crash and covering Commodore machines, principally the C64. The inaugural team was editor Chris Anderson, software editor Bob Wade, freelance writer Steve Cooke — who arrived from the recently folded Personal Computer Games — and reviewers Gary Penn and Julian Rignall, both of whom got their jobs after placing as finalists in a video game competition, which is a hiring process the industry has never quite managed to repeat. Its most durable innovation was the review format. Rather than presenting criticism as an impersonal institutional verdict, Zzap!64 attached the reviewers' own faces to their opinions — rendered artistically by in-house artists Oliver Frey and Mark Kendrick, and drawn to express each reviewer's reaction to the game in question. The reader therefore did not simply learn that a game scored well; they learned that Julian liked it and Gary did not, and could calibrate accordingly. The magazine's early life was not without friction: the editorial office was in Yeovil, over 120 miles from Newsfield's base in Ludlow, and when the team was relocated to cut costs, Anderson and Wade left rather than move.
Inventing the personality-driven review, decades before YouTube did it again
The painted reviewer faces look like a whimsical layout flourish and are actually a substantive editorial position. By attaching a specific human being — with a known personality, known tastes, and a visible reaction — to every score, Zzap!64 was arguing that a review is not a measurement but an opinion, and that the reader's job is to work out whose opinions are useful to them.
That is precisely the model that dominates games criticism today, when audiences follow individual critics and personalities rather than mastheads. Zzap!64 arrived at it in 1985, on paper, using an airbrush, because a magazine with three reviewers had no way of pretending to be an institution and sensibly decided not to try.
Gary Penn and Julian Rignall were recruited as reviewers because they were exceptionally good at playing games — finalists in a competition — rather than because they were writers. That is an almost perfect illustration of how young the field was in 1985: the qualification for the job did not exist yet, so the magazine substituted the nearest available proxy, which was demonstrable expertise at the thing.
It also happened to work. Rignall in particular became one of the most influential British games journalists of his generation, and the model of the critic-as-expert-player rather than critic-as-professional-writer shaped the tone of the British magazine scene for years. The competition-finalist hire is a joke about the industry's youth, and it is also, on the evidence, a defensible recruitment strategy.