One of Vicky’s biggest achievements this time around was securing our first print magazine cover. We’ve been on the cover of a couple of industry trade magazines (anyone remember the cover of Develop years ago?) but this was our first consumer games magazine. This was a really big thing for us and a clear sign that we’d stepped up in the eyes of editors and readers around the world, and could now command the ultimate bit of promotional space for our latest game. Vicky dealt with the editors of this print magazine in good faith, and we traded a “World Exclusive Preview” of Multiwinia for the cover of their mag. A pretty good deal all around, and great news for us. We set to work and hired our graphics freelancer Morten to do a cover for us, and the results are awesome – even in this incomplete state. Imagine how cool and striking it would have been to see this in the shops.
Sadly, it was not to be. We came so close this time, but in the end the magazine changed their minds pretty late in the day and put something else on the cover instead. We really did everything right – we had the deal in writing, we spent a whole day with their writer showing him the game and talking with him, but in the end it’s up to the magazine to make the final call. We won’t go too far into messy details, but some sort of “editorial mixup” was involved, and you can read into that however you want.
We were a little bit upset by this, to say the least. Losing the cover was disappointing, but the far bigger problem was that we’d given them this one week long world exclusive period, so all the other print magazine coverage had been timed to come out a week later at least. Over the last few years we’ve built some strong relationships with certain games mags, particularly in the UK, and we’ve come to respect their writers and editors to a large degree, and this time around we told them they’d have to wait before they could print anything because of this exclusive. They were of course totally professional about it. But to have traded in some of that good will in order to get this magazine cover, then to lose that cover, leaves a nasty taste in all of our mouths.
But it’s reminded us why we respected those other games magazines and their teams so much – throughout this whole experience they’ve been very understanding of our decisions and totally professional – the kind of journo’s we love dealing with. And in Future we will certainly be dealing with them first.
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