Lewis Packwood Features

All the stuff I wrote about video games in 2023

It’s good to take stock at the end of a hectic year. As a freelancer, I don’t get a yearly review, so writing these annual posts is my way of looking back and evaluating how things have been going. And 2023 has been pretty good, all told.

I’ve written dozens of articles for Edge, The Guardian, Time Extension and Retro Gamer, spent several months doing news for WhyNow Gaming, and contributed to the magazines Game Informer, Amiga Addict and Debug for the first time. And most excitingly of all, my first book was published in the form of Curious Video Game Machines. In short, I’ve been very, very busy.

Curious Video Game Machines

Technically I didn’t write Curious Video Game Machines in 2023 – I finished the initial draft back in 2022, and all I did this year was make a few final edits and approve changes to the cover, before spending an agonising few months waiting for it to be printed.

The book was finally released in November, and since then I’ve been attempting to make people aware of its existence through non-stop promotion. Among other things, I went on the BBC Radio York breakfast show (which you can listen to here), I appeared on the Retro Asylum podcast, I was interviewed for Retro Gamer (you can see the resulting article in issue 254) and I gave a talk about the book at The Cave in Gloucestershire, the wonderful retro gaming museum run by RMC Retro. The talk will be on YouTube at some point in the future, but in the meantime you can see a snippet of it in this video from Ctrl-Alt-Rees, where he explains how he fixed up his wonderful old Atari consoles to bring along to the show.

So far, the book sales seem to be going well. In fact, my publisher – White Owl – announced that Curious Video Game Machines is their bestselling book of 2023!

Next up is the US launch in January – it will be interesting to see how Curious Video Game Machines performs in the States. And the promotion will continue with a few more things I’ve got lined up in the New Year…

Edge

I’ve been lucky enough to write a ton of stuff for the wonderful Edge magazine over the past 12 months, including my first feature article for them – ‘Augmented Development’, all about the use of artificial intelligence by game studios. [Edit: I just realised this was in fact my second feature for Edge – I forgot about the feature on video game preservation from 2022!] In fact, I’ve written eight features for Edge this year, which I’ve listed below:

  • Time Extend: Alone in the Dark (issue 393)
  • Feature: The Shape of Things to Come (issue 390)
  • The Making Of… A Space for the Unbound (issue 389)
  • Feature: Play the movie (issue 387)
  • Studio Profile: Triband Games (issue 387)
  • Studio Profile: Wadjet Eye (issue 382)
  • The Making Of… Citizen Sleeper (issue 381)
  • Feature: Augmented Development (issue 381)

My favourite was ‘The Shape of Things to Come’, where I interviewed various games-industry luminaries about their predictions for the future as part of Edge’s 30th anniversary issue. I remember buying the very first issue of Edge back in 1993, so to be a part of its 30th anniversary celebrations was very special.

In addition to the above named features, I’ve written quite a number of anonymous articles for Edge over the year, including three previews, one review and seven ‘Knowledge’ articles – two of which were the lead pieces.

The Guardian

I spent a long time over the summer writing previews of upcoming games for The Guardian, which gave me the chance to speak to the developers behind titles like Sword of the Sea, Still Wakes the Deep and Cocoon. Chatting with developers is probably my favourite part of the job, so this was a fantastic assignment.

I did quite a few features, too, including a retrospective on the Nintendo Famicom to celebrate its 40th anniversary. But the one that people seemed to love the most (and which I thoroughly enjoyed writing), was the story of Sky Skipper, an incredibly rare Nintendo arcade machine that was lovingly restored by a team of dedicated collectors.

Here’s a full list of my articles for The Guardian this year:

Retro Gamer

I only wrote a handful of articles for Retro Gamer in 2023, but The Weird World of Atari 2600 Accessories was one of my favourites from the whole year. It was a tough one to do – tracking down information about strange and rare accessories for this console was difficult, and finding images I had the rights to use took forever. But the resulting article looks fantastic, all done in the style of an old Atari catalogue. The art ed really knocked it out of the park on this one.

I also had a lot of fun chatting with Raph Koster, who worked as a creative director on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies – he has some tremendous stories. Definitely track down that interview if you can.

Here’s the full list of articles I did for Retro Gamer in 2023:

  • In The Chair With Raph Koster (issue 254)
  • Ultimate Guide: Katamari Damacy (issue 252)
  • Ultimate Guide: Gran Turismo (issue 250)
  • The Weird World of Atari 2600 Accessories (issue 245)

Time Extension

I was pleased to see that over the past couple of weeks, no fewer than three of my articles for Time Extension have been republished as part of their ‘Best of 2023‘ list. My feature on the making of the 1990s BattleTech Centers was apparently one of the most read articles on the site this year, and it really is a fascinating story. These arcade pods were way ahead of their time, featuring multiple screens, immersive controls and online battles back when the World Wide Web was barely a thing.

I also scored a bit of a coup by getting Sam Barlow to talk for the first time about Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun, which he spent years working on before it was unceremoniously cancelled by Square Enix. And the story of BMX XXX is a real eye-opener.

WhyNow Gaming

I was incredibly sad to hear of the closure of Wireframe magazine right at the start of 2023. I wrote numerous reviews and features for this indie-focused mag over the years, and it was a really superb publication.

However, Wireframe lives on, after a fashion. The arts and culture site WhyNow bought the rights to the Wireframe name and back catalogue, and relaunched it as a new site called WhyNow Gaming, helmed by former Wireframe editor Ryan Lambie.

I bumped into Ryan at WASD in April, and he asked for some help pulling together news articles for the new site. The upshot is that between April and November, I wrote over 250 articles for WhyNow Gaming, all of which you can find here. Most of them were fairly short news stories, although I’ve listed some of the more substantial reviews, previews and features below.

Some of my best memories were actually from the slow news days, when I got to write things like a retrospective on the weird PS2 game Gregory Horror Show. But there was definitely plenty of excitement at times, like with the whole Unity ‘Runtime Fee’ saga, which seemed to offer a new twist every day.

Sadly, I’m no longer doing the news round: WhyNow made some cuts in November, and decided to merge their gaming content into the Film Stories website, where Ryan continues to write daily news stories. It’s not clear what will happen to the existing WhyNow Gaming site, which hasn’t been updated since the start of November.

Debug

This year saw the launch of a new indie-focused magazine in the form of Debug, and the editor asked me to review the wonderful Cocoon for issue 3, which I was more than pleased to do (it really is a fantastic game, easily one of the best of the year). It’s so heartening to see new games magazines launching!

Amiga Addict

While writing the Retro Gamer feature on the Weird World of Atari Accessories, I stumbled across the story behind the Guru Meditation Error – the error message you used to get on old Amiga computers. It’s all linked to an Atari accessory that Amiga made in its early days, called the Joyboard.

I decided to write up the story for Amiga Addict magazine, which also gave me the chance to have a chat with Ian Bogost, who created the Guru Meditation game for the Joyboard a few years ago. I love these strange old retro-gaming tales!

Rock Paper Shotgun

Just the one article for Rock Paper Shotgun this year, but it’s a good one: Why the mysterious love affair between video games and giant elevators may begin with Akira.

If you ever wondered where those giant diagonal lifts came from, now you know.

Game Informer

Here’s another first for 2023: I wrote my first feature for the US magazine Game Informer, and it was all about the brilliant Immortality, one of my favourite games of 2022.

Creative Bloq

Yet another first – I penned several video-game-related features for the art and design website Creative Bloq this year, which you can see below:

L’Atelier Insights

And finally, I wrote another couple of Insight pieces for l’Atelier: one on the evolution of AI development tools, and the other on the ways that the arcade is making a comeback through retro-themed venues and virtual reality.

Phew, that’s a big list! And if you want to discover more things I’ve written, you can take a look at some previous years below:

All that’s left is to wish you a very happy New Year, and I look forward to seeing you back here in 2024!

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