Critic, Reviewer · Amiga Power · 16-bit · Scottish
The most controversial games journalist Britain ever produced — an Amiga Power reviewer famous for savage, uncompromising verdicts, and respected by his peers as one of the sharpest critical minds the medium has had.
Stuart Campbell moved to Bath in 1991 to work as a staff writer for Amiga Power, and quickly became the most divisive figure in British games journalism. Contributing from January 1991 to May 1994 and deputising as editor for ten issues between June 1993 and April 1994, he built a reputation on reviews of a bluntness that the games press had never previously permitted itself — and that much of its readership was not prepared for. Amiga Power operated on a principle that was radical at the time: that a review score should mean what it said, that 50% was genuinely average, and that publishers were not entitled to favourable coverage. Campbell embodied this more aggressively than anyone. His most notorious verdict awarded International Rugby Challenge two marks out of a hundred in 1993, accompanied by the observation that the Bosnian War was "not nearly as bad" — a line that captures both the savagery of his prose and the provocateur's instinct that made him so contentious. Yet the caricature of Campbell as a mere destroyer misses what his defenders have always insisted upon. He wrote at length and with real affection about games he loved, championing Rainbow Islands and Sensible Soccer and compiling careful top-100 lists, and his harshness was applied consistently rather than capriciously. Those who have assessed his work generally conclude that he was scrupulously fair and pragmatic, and that what animated the anger was a refusal to accept mediocrity from a medium he believed capable of far more. His peers held him in extraordinary regard. Kieron Gillen called him "the world's sharpest critic of arcade games"; the newsletter Need to Know named him "Britain's Best Games Journalist"; Wired described him as "the UK's foremost authority on computer and video games." Rock, Paper, Shotgun observed in 2007 that he remained the most controversial journalist the UK had ever produced — noting that a great many people hated him, "which is always a sign you're doing something right." He later left games for other work, but his influence on the honesty and ambition of British games criticism has long outlasted his career in it.