Julian Rignall got into games magazines by being very good at games. In the summer of 1983, aged 18, he won the final of Computer and Video Games’ Arcade Games Championship at Xenon, a nightclub in Piccadilly, and took home a Galaga arcade machine. Two years later he was one of the two reviewers on the first issue of ZZAP!64, and over the next decade he edited ZZAP!, Computer and Video Games and Mean Machines. Readers knew him as “Jaz”.
The arcade champion
Computer and Video Games introduced its new champion in September 1983. He was English, but lived with his parents in Llangeitho in Dyfed, where he had become fluent in Welsh. Television reception there was so poor that he spent much of his spare time on video games instead, a twenty-mile trip away on the Royal Pier at Aberystwyth. An average day there, the magazine said, began with “a couple of hours on the Defender machine just to get warmed up”. In the final each player had ten minutes on a brand-new machine, and he scored 73,100. He was studying for his A levels and wanted to design arcade cabinets, “and perhaps even the games themselves”.
The magazine used him as an expert from then on. In January 1984 he gave C&VG‘s readers tips on Pole Position, and Personal Computer Games printed his guide to Defender and his tips for Joust, on which it said he had scored 10,117,050 on the Atari. He was also one of the five finalists in Personal Computer Games’ contest to find Britain’s best games player.
ZZAP!64
When Personal Computer Games closed in 1985 and its editor, Chris Anderson, started ZZAP!64 for Newsfield, he hired two of that contest’s finalists as reviewers: Gary Penn and Rignall, “the Computer and Video Games arcade champion of 1983, and the nation’s top scorer on Defender”. Issue 1, dated May 1985, listed the pair as “Joystick junkies”. The same issue held a contest between the three reviewers over Impossible Mission to find the first ZZAP! high-score champion, and Rignall won.
He remembered the change of life in Edge in 2001. After buying a game every couple of months, he was now “on a magazine with a library of six or seven hundred Commodore 64 games. I just could not believe it — and I was being paid for it, too. For months and months, I was going to work at ten in the morning, and wouldn’t leave until two or three at night. Me and Gary would just sit and play games. Our text was very raw at the start, but we were eager to learn.”
ZZAP! printed three reviewers’ separate opinions on every game, so readers came to know each reviewer’s taste. Rignall also wrote features: in October 1985, alongside the review of Monty on the Run, he interviewed its composer, Rob Hubbard, about how he wrote music for the C64.
He became editor with the December 1987 issue, “taking the hot-seat for the first time”, after Roger Kean, Gary Penn and Ciaran Brennan. He edited the magazine until the summer of 1988; the August 1988 issue, headed “A change of management”, named Gordon Houghton as editor. Houghton, who had joined as a staff writer in February 1988, told Retro Gamer in 2005 that Rignall’s “enthusiasm for his job was infectious, and shone through everything he wrote”, and that “his word was final on reviews, but he never got heavy about it”; when Houghton and Paul Glancey wanted to give Arkanoid a Sizzler, “Jaz flatly refused”. The same article says Rignall “suddenly departed after issue 39”, the July 1988 issue, and that he, Gary Penn, Ciaran Brennan and later Steve Jarratt “all left after falling out with the management team”.
Computer and Video Games
Rignall went to EMAP’s Computer and Video Games, the magazine that had crowned him champion. Its August 1988 issue welcomed two “new writers of exceptional talent”: “Julian Rignall ex-Editor of Zzapp and Steve Jarret ex-Editor of Crash”. By January 1989 the masthead listed him as deputy editor under Eugene Lacey, and from the September 1989 issue as editor. By late 1990 he was managing editor. He was still competing, too: in October 1990 Mean Machines introduced him as captain of the UK Video Game Team, “which won the European Championship title last year and the World Title this year”, and C&VG’s high-score tables carried his own entries, such as 12,870,000 on Life Force.
Mean Machines and Nintendo Magazine System
In July 1990, by the magazine’s own account, Rignall, the artist Gary Harrod and EMAP’s publisher Graham Taylor met at the Studio Café in Farringdon to plan a console magazine. Rignall and Harrod made a dummy “Issue 0” to persuade EMAP to fund it. Mean Machines launched in October 1990 with Rignall as its editor. It covered only Sega and Nintendo machines: the PC Engine and Amstrad’s GX4000 were in the original plan but dropped for lack of room. He was still editor in August 1992.
In October 1992 EMAP launched Nintendo Magazine System, with Rignall as managing editor. It was one half of Mean Machines, which issue 24 (September 1992) announced was splitting into separate Nintendo and Sega magazines.
Virgin and IGN
Rignall later moved to the United States and into the games industry itself. In October 1995 Edge quoted “Virgin IE’s Julian Rignall”, then at Virgin Interactive Entertainment, one of several industry figures giving advice to readers who wanted to work in games. According to Wikipedia, he joined Virgin in Irvine, California, in 1994 as vice-president of design, and in 1997 joined the Imagine Games Network (IGN) in San Francisco as editorial director, staying until 2002. Wikipedia also lists him from 2013 as editorial lead of USgamer.
Sources
- Computer and Video Games issue 23, September 1983: “Meet the Champion”, the 1983 Arcade Games Championship.
- Computer and Video Games issue 27, January 1984: Rignall’s Pole Position tips.
- Personal Computer Games issue 14, January 1985, and issue 15, February 1985: Rignall’s Defender guide and Joust tips.
- ZZAP!64 issue 1, May 1985: masthead (“Joystick junkies”); “How Zzap was born”, on the reviewers’ backgrounds and the Personal Computer Games contest; the Impossible Mission high-score challenge.
- ZZAP!64 issue 6, October 1985, pp. 16–17: “Turn the Music Up”, Rignall’s piece on Rob Hubbard.
- ZZAP!64 issue 32, December 1987: contents, “Taking the hot-seat for the first time, Julian Rignall”.
- ZZAP!64 issue 40, August 1988: editorial, “A change of management”; masthead with Gordon Houghton as editor.
- Retro Gamer issue 14 (2005): history of ZZAP!64, with Gordon Houghton’s recollections and Rignall’s departure after issue 39.
- Computer and Video Games issue 82, August 1988 (welcome to Rignall and Steve Jarratt); January 1989 (masthead, deputy editor); September 1989 (masthead, editor); November 1990 and January 1991 (managing editor); high-score tables, 1990.
- Mean Machines issue 1, October 1990 (“Who’s Who?”); issue 2, November 1990 (masthead, editor); issue 15, December 1991 (the magazine’s history and “Issue 0”); issue 23, August 1992 (masthead); issue 24, September 1992, p. 7 (editorial announcing the split).
- Nintendo Magazine System issue 1, October 1992: masthead, managing editor.
- Edge issue 88, September 2000: retrospective quoting Edge issue 25 (October 1995) on “Virgin IE’s Julian Rignall”.
- Edge issue 102, October 2001: “The Magazine Game”, Rignall on joining ZZAP!64.
- Wikipedia, “Julian Rignall” (web, secondary): date of birth; Virgin Interactive (1994–1997); IGN (1997–2002); USgamer (from 2013). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Rignall