MAGAZINE CRAFT

STEVE JARRATT

Whether it was in the Newsfield office in Ludlow or Future Publishing in Bath, Steve Jarratt spent years reporting on the gaming scene as it went through its most dramatic changes. We join him to look back on a career that includes many beloved and enduring titles, from Zzap!64 and Commodore Format, to Edge and the Official UK PlayStation Magazine

Words by Nick Thorpe

THEN

After joining Newsfield to work on Zzap!64 in the Eighties, Steve had a brief stint at EMAP before moving to Future, where he’d spend over 20 years working on titles such as ACE, Amiga Format, S: The Sega Magazine, Total!, T3 and more.

NOW

Steve has been working on gaming books for Bitmap Books in recent years, and although he says that he’s “winding down and gradually sliding into retirement” there’s still at least one coming down the line for 2026.

Was writing something you’d aspired to do, coming out of school, Steve?

I got a bunch of O levels at school, but I wasn’t really thinking about a career at all. I fell into chemistry because I quite like the sciences, and we had a really nice chemistry book. Because I was in the West Midlands, we were surrounded by industry, and I eventually got a job at a company called British Industrial Plastics. So I was, for eight or nine years, studying to be an industrial chemist – I got a degree in chemistry. A few years later, I was introduced to the ZX Spectrum by a friend at work. I just remember going around his house, and we were playing with the flight sim game, which I think was called Flight Simulator, and I just thought, “This is it. This is absolutely the future.”

It kind of felt like a real lightbulb moment.

Not long after that, I got a Commodore 64 and started buying Zzap!, because that was the best C64 magazine. They had a bunch of people there including, Julian Rignall, Gary Penn and Gary Liddon. Gary Liddon left after about a dozen issues, 18 issues or something. And they asked the readers if they could fill Liddon’s shoes. I thought, “I’ll apply for the job, and if I’m lucky, I’ll get to go to the offices, meet Roger Kean, Oliver Frey, meet Jaz and Gary.” I completely forgot about it – months and months went by, and I got called in for an interview and I had to go in and review Codemasters’ BMX Simulator, which I wasn’t expecting to do. I finally met Oli Frey, saw some of his artwork and where he worked. Did it, I forgot about it, and again more time passed.

Everybody was in their late-teens or early 20s, so their desks were covered in bits of paper, cigarettes and ashtrays, empty cans of pop, joypads, just detritus everywhere

STEVE JARRATT

I think, according to legend, I was the third on the list. They had one guy who took the job and wasn’t very good, another guy turned them down, and so yay, third is best, right? So I took the job. Well, they offered it to me, and I went, “Oh my god, what am I going to do?” But it coincided with me being made redundant from the chemical company, so I kind of went, “OK, well, there you go. That’s ody was in te-teens or their desks in bits of ttes and pty cans of , just detritus fate making your decision for you.” So I took the job and moved to Ludlow and worked on Zzap! for about 14 months.

How did you find the adjustment to your new career?

It was just fantastic. Newsfield was operating from the middle of Ludlow, above a Yates’s Wine Lodge or whatever it was, and I think they had three floors in this big sort of townhouse, and we were on the second or third. It was fairly open plan, great big desks and shelves and shelves [of games]. There was just stuff everywhere, basically – there were broken joypads, working joypads and monitors, dozens of C64s and bits of drives and boxes of cassettes and disks, and joypads everywhere. Everybody was in their late-teens or early 20s, so their desks were covered in bits of paper, cigarettes and ashtrays, empty cans of pop, joypads, just detritus everywhere. But it was just brilliant because it felt really exciting – quite skin of your teeth; I can imagine how some people feel as a startup, it had that slightly ramshackle feel to it. But I was sitting there going, “They are paying me to play videogames, this is the best job ever.” It absolutely was, because as I went through my career and went up the ranks, it was never so much fun as when I could just sit there with a new game. They’d give it to me, I might get two a day or whatever, and I’d sit and play them for hours and then spend the afternoon writing them up. It was just fantastic.