Mike Gerrard
Your Sinclair's adventure column
The columnist at the centre of the British adventure scene's correspondence — running arguments with the authors he reviewed, and championing a genre the rest of the magazine had moved on from.
Mike Gerrard wrote Your Sinclair’s adventure pages and appears in 81 issues of the magazines held here — more than almost any programmer. YS introduced him as an “adventure addict… already well-known for his adventure” writing, and recorded him vowing “to champion the cause of Spectrum adventurers everywhere”.
Fast facts
- Column: the adventure section of Your Sinclair.
- Beat: commercial adventures, Quilled adventures, and the readers stuck in both.
- Named in: 81 issues of this library’s British magazines, across 204 pages of the Spectrum press — more than Raffaele Cecco at 44 or Jon Ritman at 78.
A column is a conversation
The adventure column was not a review page with a different subject. It was correspondence, and reading a run of them shows a community, not an audience.
A single issue carries readers asking how to get past the ice monster, other readers answering, the columnist adjudicating, and named correspondents recurring month after month — Pat Spencer in Ballymun, Stephen Parker submerged in Seabase Delta, “a middle-aged mum losing her sanity” somewhere. Solutions arrive as reversed text so your eye cannot spoil the puzzle by accident.
Gerrard’s relationship with John Wilson — the Rochdale Balrog — is the clearest case. Wilson is simultaneously an author Gerrard reviews, a correspondent who writes in, and an antagonist in a running joke. One issue has the column chanting “One Rochdale Balrog… there’s only one Rochdale Balrog” at a rival reader. Another records Wilson correcting Gerrard about who did a free ferry-ride in a game first, with Gerrard conceding that “the only reason I couldn’t remember was because I didn’t get that far”.
No modern outlet has that relationship with the people it covers, and the reason is scale. The whole British adventure scene fitted inside one man’s postbag.
Championing a dying form
The vow to “champion the cause of Spectrum adventurers” reads differently once you know the chronology. By the late eighties adventures were commercially finished — the shops wanted arcade games, the big publishers had left, and the genre survived on the Quill, mail order and labels like Zenobi.
A magazine that kept paying for adventure pages through that was making an editorial choice against its own commercial interest, and the columnist was the person arguing for it internally. The pages are, in effect, a subsidy for a community, and the community outlasted the magazine.
Why he matters
Gerrard is the columnist as infrastructure — the counterpart to Derek Brewster at CRASH, and evidence that the eighties games press was not a marketing channel with reviews attached.
He also matters to how this Vault is built. Almost everything recoverable about the amateur adventure scene — who wrote what, who argued with whom, what people were stuck on — exists because two columnists printed their post for a decade. The programmers are recorded in credit boxes; the scene is recorded in columns.