Critic, Editor, Editorial Director · Zzap!64, Computer and Video Games, Mean Machines, IGN · 8-bit / 16-bit · British
A national arcade champion turned games journalist, Rignall brought genuine expertise and infectious enthusiasm to Zzap!64 and Mean Machines, helping transform British games writing from detached reportage into passionate advocacy by people who could actually play.
Julian Rignall came to games journalism from the other side of the joystick. As a teenager in the early 1980s he held UK and world record high scores on Defender, Pole Position, and Crossfire, and in 1983 he won Computer and Video Games magazine's UK Video Arcade Game Championship, beating more than 500 of the country's best arcade players. He was, in the most literal sense, one of the finest players in Britain before he ever wrote about a game. That credibility defined his career. In 1985 Chris Anderson, formerly of Personal Computer Games, recruited him to the launch team of Newsfield's Commodore 64 magazine Zzap!64, where his gameplaying prowess became part of the magazine's identity — readers challenged the reviewers in the monthly Zzap! Challenge, and Rignall kept winning. He was promoted to editor in December 1987, holding the post until issue 39 in August 1988. His skill was notorious enough that Andrew Braybrook wrote "anti Julian Rignall" code into Uridium specifically to stop him from beating it. In 1988 Rignall joined EMAP's Computer and Video Games, and upon becoming editor he redirected the magazine away from the fading 8-bit microcomputer scene and toward the emerging Japanese consoles — a call that proved prescient. In 1990, recognising the console market had grown large enough to sustain a dedicated publication, he launched Mean Machines, covering the Super NES and Mega Drive. It became the largest-selling multi-platform magazine in the United Kingdom and remains one of the most fondly remembered publications of the era. Rignall's broader significance lies in what he and his contemporaries did to the tone of games writing. Before them, gaming magazines often felt staffed by journalists who covered games because it was an emerging beat; Rignall's generation were players first, and they wrote about games in enthusiastic, knowledgeable, obsessive terms that readers recognised as their own. In 1997 he moved to San Francisco to join IGN as editorial director, leading the network's expansion to market leadership — carrying his approach from print into the online era that would supplant it.