It was there, with no network (files were shared via floppy discs), two phone lines, and under a leaking roof, that the first MCV team was assembled. “We were in a really dreadful temporary office in the back of nowhere which looked over a toxic waste dump,” recalls Carter. Less than a month after leaving CTW, Dinsey, Carter and Moreham moved into MCV’s first office in Arlesey, Bedfordshire which Dinsey later referred to, with some justification, as the ‘Bedfordshire shithole’. I knew that he was ambitious, and we knew there were things we could do outside of putting together a weekly magazine – as difficult as that would be.” “We didn’t even have a full colour magazine” says Carter, who jumped at the chance to join Dinsey when he made his plans known. In addition, despite some involvement in the incumbent UK industry event ECTS (European Computer Trade Show), there seemed to be little interest from CTW’s owners in broadening the brand. “I loved working there and they were lovely people,” but, says Carter, CTW was suffering from a sense of inertia at being unchallenged in the market for so long. Lisa Foster (now Carter) and Alex Jarvis (now Moreham), CTWs deputy editor and sales manager respectively, were the first to jump ship. “I probably wouldn’t have gone with MCV,” admits Dinsey, who aside from a name change, got everything he wanted to launch the new industry publication, including many of the team that had helped him establish CTW in the years previously. The company had launched its own trade magazine at home, Markt für Computer & Videospiele, and was keen to export it to the UK, which it insisted would retain the original publication’s name, albeit translated into English. Unbeknownst to CTW, Dinsey had been approached by German publisher Computec Media, which in 1998 was looking to foreign shores after its successful listing on Hamburg’s Stock Exchange. “I decided it was time for me to launch my own media company.” However, despite securing CTW’s position at the heart of the UK games industry, in the midst of the drama of the FIFA World Cup in June 1998, Dinsey unexpectedly handed in his notice. Over the next ten years, Dinsey built up CTW to be a formidable champion of the UK games industry, overseeing a period that stretched from the tail end of 8-Bit era to the cultural singularity that heralded the arrival of the Sony PlayStation. “Greg however advised me to hang in there, because I had the best job in the world … and I did.” “Which was really scary,” recalls Dinsey. Within two years Ingham had moved on, joining disruptive new magazine publisher Future as its managing director, having seen enough in his 21-year old protégé to bequeath him the CTW editorship. “If I’d known it was about computers, I probably wouldn’t have applied,” he says. He applied, met its editor Greg Ingham, and despite having next to no knowledge or interest in gaming, secured a job as CTW’s trainee reporter. Launched two years previously, Computer Trade Weekly was never among them, but Dinsey did spy an ad for CTW that piqued his interest. It was while working at the famed advertising agency McCann Erickson in 1986 that Dinsey, then 19, would busily devour any trade magazine that crossed his desk titles such as Marketing Week, Broadcast and Music Week. To be fair, this was back in the days when computer and video games were largely marketed to and for children, which, unlike most that went on to write about them for a living, the ambitious business-minded Dinsey certainly wasn’t. For someone who spent ten years editing one video games industry publication to then launch another to compete with it, it’s remarkable that Stuart Dinsey would embark on a long career championing video games without much of a care for them.
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