Chris Bieniek interview. From VG&CE to Tips & Tricks

I recently spoke to Chris Bieniek about his time editing video game magazines throughout the 90s.

The associated article is here, and mostly talks about his stint at VG&CE magazine, and how that publication eventually morphed into VideoGames - The Ultimate Gaming magazine.

That’s all fine and good. But Chris has had an illustrious career, and would spend the second half of the decade overseeing Tips & Tricks magazine, watching the internet slowly cannibalise print media, and amassing plenty of industry stories. Here’s the full interview, covering all the above, and more.

Let’s start with some background. I read that you started at VG&CE with a review in 1989. How did that come about, and how did you go from freelance reviews to a full time role at the magazine.

“I was a big fan of video-game magazines in the early '80s. Electronic Games, Joystik, Electronic Fun...I bought and read them all. But they were all discontinued, some of them after only a year or two. When the NES started to catch on, I went to the newsstand, fully expecting to see new game magazines. And there weren't any, for a pretty long time.”

“Eventually I found a magazine called Computer Play, which was primarily about PC games, but they did a little bit of NES coverage. There was a small ad in the back that said they were looking for contributors. I wasn't a professional writer, but I was reasonably intelligent and I knew a lot about games, so I wrote a couple of NES reviews and sent them in. I got a phone call saying they liked my samples, and they wanted to know if I was available to review PC games. I told them I was, of course, but I was much more interested in arcade and console games. I didn't even own a decent PC with a good graphics card.”

“Then the first issue of Video Games & Computer Entertainment (VG&CE) magazine came out. If I hadn't seen the ad in Computer Play, it would never have occurred to me to reach out to VG&CE and offer my services...and getting a good response from Computer Play gave me the confidence to approach another magazine that wasn't openly soliciting contributions. I immediately sent Andy Eddy a package with some NES game reviews I had written, and he sent back a contract stating that they were going to publish one of them. It was as simple as that.”

“Before long, they started sending me games to review, and I continued to look for ways to ingratiate myself with them. I got to meet Andy in person when he came to Chicago for an arcade expo, and I flew out to Vegas for the Winter Consumer Electronics Show one year, at my own expense, to demonstrate that I was serious about the work. Of course, the CES was held in Chicago every summer, so I'd go to those as well...I even threw a party one year and invited them over to my house! Eventually, when Donn Nauert left the magazine for a job in game development, I was hired as his replacement and I moved to California.”

What was the office environment like when you went in-house in 1992? The office was in Beverly Hills right? Which is a far cry from Chicago. Was it palm trees and long boozy lunches or overflowing ashtrays, long hours and stinky, cramped offices?

“The offices were nice, actually...and yeah, there were palm trees everywhere! The magazine's mailing address was 9171 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, but that was the publisher's headquarters, where the company mailroom was. When I started, I worked in the 9100 building on the corner of Wilshire and Doheny Drive. It just looked like a typical office inside, but with a Neo•Geo arcade cabinet in the hallway. We shared offices with a bunch of other magazines from the same publisher, like Trading Cards, Rip, PC Laptop and a couple others.”

What can you tell us about the relationship between magazines and video game publishers in the early 90s? It feels like everything is very carefully stage-managed by PR these days. I assume things were more loose and organic back in the day.

“I don't know if it was all that different; we still had to go through PR reps to get access to what we needed. I always wanted a direct line of communication to the people who actually made the games, but that was a rare privilege. We had good relationships with most of the game companies, I'd say.”

“Working for the publisher of Hustler Magazine in Beverly Hills did help us a lot, though. There was a pretty famous restaurant directly across the street, Kate Mantilini, and we liked to go there for lunch with people who came to visit the offices. The game publishers, the PR reps, they loved that place, because there would often be a celebrity at the next table, you know. And we would send them home with copies of Hustler products, if they were interested in that sort of thing.”

By the time you joined VG&CE in 1992 there were several competing magazines on newsstands, and it seemed like VG&CE was losing market share to titles like EGM and GamePro. Was there an awareness, internally, that the consumer market was changing and the magazine needed to change, and were the staff open to that?

“When I joined the in-house staff, I tried to implement changes as soon as I found my footing—not necessarily because of what the competition was doing, but because I knew what I wanted as a reader and a fan of video games. VG&CE didn't even have a monthly video-game previews section, which is kind of hard to believe, in retrospect. I managed to convince Andy that we needed one, and I put it together by myself, every month.”

“I did recognise that there was a problem with the way the magazine looked, but I was not experienced or knowledgeable enough to be able to articulate what the problem was. We had talented, qualified, hardworking art directors, but the magazine also had a budget for creating custom artwork... and they used that money to hire artists to render their own interpretations, let's say, of specific video games, for our covers and article headers.”

“A lot of people love that kind of stuff, that ‘1980s Computer Game Box’ art style... but I felt like we were getting too far away from the source material, especially for games that were developed in Japan. I thought, you know, if we're going to keep using this art, we should give the artists more reference, so they can see what the game looks like, what the characters look like, what the colors should be. So I started making VHS tapes to show them the games they were illustrating.”

“We had a cover that was supposed to be Ryu from Street Fighter throwing a fireball. And the artist was talented, but nobody ever showed him what the Hadoken looked like. So he came in with this painting of Ryu throwing a fireball overhand, like a baseball pitcher. I begged for it to be changed, but there was no time; all he could do was to draw the palm of Ryu's other hand underneath the fireball. And it went out like that. Hey, I tried!”

Andy Eddy left VG&CE at some point, and the magazine was relaunched as VideoGames - The Ultimate Gaming Magazine, with you eventually becoming the editor. What was the mood like internally while all this was going on? When did you step into the editor role? And who was making those decisions about the magazine’s broader direction?

“There was some confusion over the leadership and the direction the magazine would take. But I just kept on trying to do the best work I could do under the circumstances. Mike Davila moved up to take Andy's position as Executive Editor, but Chris Gore was installed above him as Editor in Chief, a title that had never been used on VG&CE before. Less than a year later, Mike was moved over to run a separate magazine called Computer Player, and I became Executive Editor of VideoGames. But Gore was still in charge of everything and made all the decisions. Eventually, I was taken off VideoGames and put in charge of another spinoff magazine called Tips & Tricks.”

I know you weren’t a fan of the magazine’s new direction, but did the move help with sales and circulation, or was it all too little too late?

“I seem to remember there was a spike in sales at first. But there was no brand loyalty anymore; sales went up and down depending on which game was on the cover.”

Your time at VideoGames aligned with the arrival of the 32 bit generation. Which was basically the wild west of console releases - everything from the Atari Jaguar and Neo Geo CD to the PlaysStation. How did you rate the chances of different consoles at the time and assign them coverage.

“That's not an easy question for me personally, because I never had any interest in the state of the industry or the relative merits of different platforms. I liked games; I didn't care about hardware specs or sales figures or any of the business end of it. It's baffling to me that people continue to debate about stuff like that online. I think that's part of the reason why Tips & Tricks became so successful—we didn't talk about the game company presidents and their marketing plans, we talked about how to beat a game and how to get more enjoyment out of it.”

What about Arnie Katz (and his fanzine column). Did anyone appreciate how influential the column would be in inspiring a new generation of writers. Or was Arnie basically left alone to do his thing?

“It sounds like you mean Fandango, his column about video-game fanzines, but he was better known for his Inside Gaming monthly column at the time.”

“As I mentioned, I was a fan of the original Electronic Games and it was absolutely a great honour to have my name appear in a magazine with his. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to work in the same offices with Arnie, Bill Kunkel and Joyce Worley during the VG&CE days. And they left VG&CE to restart Electronic Games just a few months after I moved out to California.”

“I was once interviewed by somebody who asked me about Arnie, Joyce and Bill, and how VG&CE was affected by them leaving when they did. And I said something I regret, something that may have been misinterpreted. It came out sounding like I was downplaying their contributions to the magazine, when really all I was trying to do was to make sure that Andy and Mike (and Lee Pappas and Donn Nauert) got credit for their involvement.”

“Sometime after that, I ran into Arnie at the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, and we had a nice little chat about the old days. And at one point during the conversation, he said to me, ‘You know, I designed that magazine’. He went on to explain how VG&CE wasn't shaped slowly over time by the various editors who worked in the Flynt building—rather, Arnie had written up a detailed document that outlined the magazine's editorial direction, what the recurring columns would be, who the authors would be, how many pages would be allocated to each feature, all of it. It suddenly dawned on me that the reason he was telling me this might have been because he'd read that interview, and he wanted to make sure that I knew he was much more than just a ‘freelance contributor’, as I had so carelessly described him. I don't know for sure that he saw it, but I just felt so ashamed of myself. Plus, he couldn't have been nicer—I almost wish he had yelled at me instead.”

What about the internet, when did that start to make its presence felt in the magazine industry? The first (very basic) websites started to spring up in the mid 90s.

“For me, personally, it was not as early as you might think. By the mid-'90s, my main job was Tips & Tricks magazine...and as you may know, news and previews were not our primary focus. A lot of people seem to believe that the Internet - and websites like gamefaqs.com in particular - rang the death knell for Tips & Tricks. But the truth is that we happily coexisted for 15 years.”

“GameFAQs was actually a valuable resource for us, especially as we learned how to look through ROM data for cheats. And the owner, Jeff Veasey, was very kind to us on two separate occasions when I asked to have posts removed from his message boards (because Tips & Tricks writers had leaked confidential info there). The Internet lit a fire under us, really - we tried very hard to make sure every issue had valuable information that couldn't be found online.”

“I can tell you a funny story, though. This was when I really knew our days were numbered. I was at the E3 expo in 2006, and a Nintendo rep invited me to a press conference that was going to take place that evening, after the show closed. There was no previous announcement that I knew of, it all seemed very hush-hush. So I went to sit in this big auditorium, they dimmed the lights and showed the first trailer for Super Smash Bros. Brawl on a big screen. Everybody freaked out when they revealed that Snake from Metal Gear Solid was going to be in the game, but for me, the biggest announcement was Meta Knight. My son's a huge Kirby fan, and he LOVES Meta Knight; he just thinks Meta Knight is the coolest. I couldn't wait to tell him the news. Anyway, after the trailer, there was a Q&A session, and as I was taking notes, I saw a few guys in the audience with their laptops open, typing away. You can probably see where I'm going with this.”

“When the press conference ended, I got in my car and drove straight home. I walked in the front door, went up to my son's room and said, ‘You're not gonna believe this’. And I'll never forget his reply. He said, ‘I know, Meta Knight! It's awesome’!”

“You have to understand, I lived only about 20 minutes away from the convention centre - this was less than an hour after the game was first revealed to anybody! And he got the information from the Internet before I could tell him in person. That was a shock. My son was pretty well known at his school for breaking the latest video game news; everybody knew that his dad worked for a video game magazine. Now all his friends could get that information themselves, for free, even sooner. I wasn't even thinking about what that meant for my job, my career - at that moment, I felt like a younger, hipper dad had somehow broken into my house and started parenting my child while I was at work!”

I’ve read elsewhere that Larry Flynt Publishing was known for doing things as cheap as possible. Did you feel the magazines had the resources and support needed to succeed?

“I have no idea where you might have read that, but it's pretty far from the truth. VG&CE was a fairly expensive magazine to produce. When I joined the in-house staff, all of the console-game screen shots in the magazine were taken with a Sony Video printer that required expensive ink ribbons and photo paper. The materials cost us about $1 U.S. to take just one screen shot, whether it ended up being used in the magazine or not! (That's the equivalent of about $2.25 in today's currency.)”

“I do remember them cutting corners with the paper stock; some issues seemed to have covers that were as thin as the inner pages, which is why it can be hard to find copies in good condition nowadays. But LFP was good about mostly everything else; we had good facilities, good equipment, good production.”

“Actually, when Tips & Tricks became my main gig, I took it upon myself to cut some costs that I thought were superfluous. VG&CE had some unnecessary expenses, like a Japanese tutor for the staff, a lot of business meals, and the artwork budget I mentioned. We had plenty of official art coming from the game publishers; I didn't see a need to pay someone to paint a cover. In fact, a lot of our covers were custom images made by the game publishers just for us, because they were so happy to get cover placement. I think being frugal helped to keep us profitable for 150 consecutive issues. And because my bosses knew that I was being careful with expenses, it was a lot easier to get approvals when we really needed new equipment or whatever.”

With the benefit of hindsight, is there anything VG&CE (or the management) could have done differently to remain competitive as the industry changed throughout the 90s?

“I'm sure there are lots of things that would have helped. I actually think it was a smart decision to separate the PC game coverage into another magazine; ultimately, Computer Player outlived VideoGames by more than a year. But the way you worded this question (and question #4) is curious; you seem to think VG&CE failed because the "industry changed," and I don't know that I agree. VG&CE was the leading game magazine in its very early days; in terms of appeal, it was overtaken by GamePro and EGM because one catered to younger kids and the other was much more comprehensive. (Maybe you were referring to the magazine industry and not the game industry?)”

“Actually, if there's one thing that most people don't know about video-game magazines, it's the advertising side of things. For example, VG&CE had a very good ad sales guy named Jeffrey Eisenberg; he worked for a company that was run by his father, Jay Eisenberg. Well, EGM hired Jeffrey away from us. Jay then took over ad sales for VG&CE. It was literally a Don Arden/Sharon Osbourne situation, where Jeff broke away from his father and started his own company; now they were competing against each other. And I think it's fair to say that the elder Eisenberg didn't have the drive, the momentum or the success that his son was having at that point in his career.”

“Ad sales is a super-cutthroat business; these people would travel all over the country, wining and dining the game publishers and talking absolute shit about their competitors. And the number of pages in each issue of a magazine was mostly determined by the number of ads that were sold. So at the end of the day, if you go to the newsstand with five bucks in your hand, one magazine is 200 pages and another is 350 pages, of COURSE you're gonna buy the bigger book. At that point, nobody cared if you had better writers, or nicer layouts, or more timely information. Size mattered. And that's something that's never brought up in discussions about old video-game magazines. Having a good ad salesperson directly impacted the appeal of your magazine at the newsstand (because of the page count), and it directly impacted your reputation within the games industry (because of the shit-talking).”

And finally, what’s something I should ask you about?

“I dunno; I suppose you should ask me about Tips & Tricks magazine! But that might need to be a whole separate interview.”

***

Read the article proper - From VG&CE to VideoGames - the Ultimate Gaming magazine…