If you have been as young and passionate about video games as I have been, and if you have spent part of your youth daydreaming about being able to work on your video game, then you are able to understand the rest of this story.
In 1999 Ubisoft was the first large video game company to open in Milan, Italy. Before that, working in the video game industry was less than common. Prior to 1999 there were some video game companies, some of them also quite well-known (In Milan we had and we still have Milestone, responsible for many famous racing titles) but it was not a career path that people could easily follow. For example, back then we had no school teaching you anything about video games. Today we are not certainly surrounded by big video game studios, but the possibility of following a career path in the video game industry it’s now a concrete possibility, not just a dream, and here and there we have a lot of Indie team growing up and new ones appearing every year. Also, there’s a lot of people with the holy flame burning in their chest, guiding them against any adversity, especially amongst the youngest, that are reaching out important objectives against all odds, working hard and never giving up. The first example that comes to my mind is Fortuna Imperatore (Axel fox), a young woman who worked really hard during the day to sustain herself, and again at night, to work on her video game, Freud’s bone. Back then though, working in the video game industry was more a dream than anything else. In 1999 in Italy, and even more before that, if you told someone that you were a game designer, you could not hope for anything else than empty stares. The word “Designer” is well-known in Italy, and really appreciated by everyone. It means that you are working in the fashion industry, or inventing incredible chassis for important car or bike manufacturer, or that you work in the interior design field. But if you tried to put the prefix “Game” to the suffix “Designer”, then it was a short circuit. I once had to repeat that I was a game designer three time, to a landowner who was asking me which kind of job I was doing (they always prefer to rent houses to people with solid jobs, makes them feel more comfortable and relaxed). After three time I said that I was a game designer and the guy did not understood, I simply said “designer”, and he finally nodded with a satisfied expression and smile large a mile. If by now you pictured how it was back then, you can imagine how poorly present were the video game magazine produced outside our country. If video games were quite niche, then it’s easy to guess how niche of a niche was a video game magazine, and how an English magazine was the niche of a niche of a…well, you’ve got the idea. Still, because life always find a way, people were asking for two famous magazine, Edge and Famitsu, and if you keep asking well enough, then there will always be someone willing to farm some gold coin on you. Famitsu was like the holy grail of them all. No one of us back then ever understood a single thing out of what it was written on the magazine, but Japan was the sacred place of all the good things existing in the world for us, so all the images were automatically beautiful, and all the Kanji looked perfectly legit. We were so much infatuated with Famitsu that even a game like Magic Beast Warrior PS1 (Gokuu Densetsu), just to give you an idea, was looking good (Yes, I have it). Also, you must consider something super simple. During the era of the Nes or the Master System, the Super Nintendo or the Megadrive till whole the 3D0 or PS1 era, video games in Italy were either imported, or officially arriving 1 year after their normal release in Japan. So, when any of us had the opportunity to get a copy of Edge or Famitsu, for us it was like peeking into the future. To buy any of those two magazines, we had to go in the center of Milan, in a newsagent shop just in front of “La Scala square” (the place is still there of course). And this is where the second big problem was kicking in. We were all broke. Still too young for a job and not wealthy enough to receive from our parents, enough money on a weekly basis, to being able to afford to spend something like 20000 lire on a video game magazine.
This forced diet of foreign video game magazine made us grow up with an insane appetite for all those magazines. we grew up like truffle pigs. We were able to smell the presence of a foreign magazine 5km away from us, even if buried thirty feet underground.
When I’ve started working at Ubisoft in 1999, Edge and Famitsu were still highly regarded magazines, and finding them in Italy was still not super easy. You couldn’t simply go down the street to the nearest newsagent in the neighborhood and hope to find them. Fortunately, in Ubisoft, we had an official subscription for Edge. We had only Edge at that time because there was no way to convince the managing director that we needed also Famitsu. We were all juniors designers and junior in life, and still didn't have enough credibility to prove it was a legitimate request and not the desire of a video game nerd (which is exactly how people were seeing us back then). “You cannot read Japanese, so there’s no point to spend money on that” was saying our managing director, and we didn’t no how to argue back. All we said it was sounding like a feeble excuse.
At that time our game design lead was Benoit Macon (colleague and friend), who now works in Ninja Theory. He had the “royal” rights to be the first one reading Edge, when it was finally arriving in the office. The magazine was on his desk and of course, being him the lead with no previous experience, we were just staring at the cover, trying to imaging all the cool things we could have found inside. He enjoyed making us “suffer” pranking us that he hadn't finished reading it yet and, that there were some absolutely amazing things in it, and that it was a great shame we couldn't see what it was yet. Then, out of nowhere, and in the most disparate moments, perhaps when we were concentrated working on some the of Rayman GBC, he would throw the magazine in the open space, right in the middle of our desks. Within half a second the studio was transformed into a pit of people who throwing themselves on the ground to be the first one to claim Edge, regardless of the abrasions, or the computer wires and screens that were invariably pulled off involuntarily and ended up dropping half a desk on the floor, causing terrible noises, disturbing everyone in the office. And so, when the storm was over, the glorious winner, the one who had managed to claim the magazine first, quietly returned to his place, under the disapproving eyes of the entire studio, especially of all of the programmers, who believed we were caveman’s.
It’s for this reason that I wil never be grateful enough to Chris Schilling for the call we had together with him and Grant Kirkhope, about the “Making of Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle”. Being on Edge was another dream come true. Thanks a lot for that!
Davide
The 25th anniversary of Edge (with Mario on the cover) and the Making Of Mario+Rabbids Kingdom battle