NEWS A MOMENT WALLWITH...

A quick chat with the founder of Ninty Media

SHOWING OFF COOL RETRO-THEMED STUFF THAT’S GOING ON

» SwitchPlayerwas a bigger success than anticipated, initially running for 69 issues.

» Wil Overton is just one of the many great artists that contribute to Ninty Media’s publications.

Witha passion for print and a history of handheld gaming, Paul Murphy has gone from magazines like Vitamag and Switch Player to creating the retro-focussed GameBook and GameBook Color (which, for full disclosure, our own Nick Thorpe contributed to). We took the time to catch up and find out more about his work so far, as well as what’s next for his independent publishing house.

How did you start off with The Vita Lounge and Vitamag, Paul?

I left school and didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, so I ended up working at McDonald’s. Fifteen years later, being a store manager, I was going mad – I was getting good money for it, but I had no quality of life. We’d started fostering and me and my wife had a conversation, and I left, so I was a stay-at-home dad to a degree. I couldn’t command a monopoly on the TV, but I could sit with my family and play a handheld so I bought myself a Vita. I started looking around for games to buy, news and stuff like that and there wasn’t anything. So I created The Vita Lounge as a hobby, and very quickly the site started amassing quite an amount of traffic because nobody else was covering it. I’ve always had a love for magazines, so I kind of transformed what we did on the web into a magazine. A lot of people bought into the idea of it, but obviously our budget was incredibly tiny, the print costs and the shipping costs amounted to around about 75% of the entire budget.