As threatened, I will be posting unsolicited scans from my magazine career as the fancy takes me on this blogwallplace as the years roll by.

I consider myself very lucky to have been at the height of my influence and journalistic freedom back when woodpulp-based magazines were A) bought in large numbers by gamers, B) numerous enough to allow for real character and experimentation. When I was a kid, mags like Crash and Your Sinclair were bursting with daft gags, comic strips, puzzles and all the other features which should be a mainstay of all consumer magazines, but which have been outlawed for most of this century, on the dumb presumption that gamers no longer possess a sense of humour – presumably laughter being shellshocked out of the typical gamer’s system by all those years of mindless blammo in CoD and co.

But when I ran Total Game Boy/Advance magazine at the turn of the millennium, I was still playing by 90s rules, and filled the pages with fun features, ridiculous non-sequiturs and, frankly, tripe. I can’t pretend it was wholly successful – as the decision to close the mag because it never reliably delivered the correct amount of profit sort of suggests. But I do know that it was well-loved by the dozen or so thousand readers who did keep coming back for more.

Dr. Shrew, Marvin McFly, Mona Lisa’s Gallery, Osmondle the Frog – the rights all still belong to Paragon Publishing, or its inheritors, but I was proud to be their boss at the time.

It’s a bit shocking, looking back, to see how many errors got through – CHECK OUT THOSE WIDOWS & ORPHANS!* – and to recall just how late in life I really managed to understand the difference between “its” and “it’s”. But as you may already be aware, I have no shame. Therefore, to kick us off, here’s a totally spurious boxout from a game I believe was called ‘Santa Claus Jr’, from Total Advance 36 circa 2002…

And then there was SATIRE! In TA21, circa 2001…

And I’ll leave you with a couple of extracts from our time-travelling heroes… Someone really should bring the rodent back for a new regeneration…

* It’s a Production Editor thing, really. Google should be to the top right, there, look.