#29 - Am I great enough to leave behind a legacy?

Standing outside the school gate as I wait to pick-up my daughter, I hear a phrase for the second time in my life.

“That man has a penis on his t-shirt!” says a woman in a shocked, whisper-concerned tone.

I immediately know this is about me, for I heard the exact same shock in someone’s voice a few months ago in Brighton.

Let’s get this straight. I’m not walking around, to a school of all places, with a penis printed on my t-shirt. This is in fact a shirt depicting the lovable shell with shoes on, Marcel.

I could perhaps understand someone mistaking the little guy for a croissant, but not a penis. Uncultured swines!

Anyway, for this woman (and the other who gasped outside the Churchill Square Shopping Centre in Brighton) I’ll perhaps live on in her mind as the penis man. Not really the legacy I was hoping for. I was just trying to look cool.

Strap yourself in, as it’s self-reflection time. Some family health issues recently have made me think a lot about myself. Who am I? What am I? How do people see me? Am I achieving what I am capable of? Should I be striving for more? Can I be great? Does everyone think like this?

I did warn you.

I honestly can’t remember where I wrote this or if I just said it in an off-hand comment on a podcast, but I care a lot about my legacy and previously said something like: “My wish in life is to be remembered for doing something great.” Not exactly Orwell, is it, but I think you get the idea.

Obviously there’s my family, who I love and hope do great things - that goes without saying - but I personally felt I was on the path to being someone in games media. Not necessarily one of the greatest voices of all time, but someone who built something that would be remembered and loved.

In short, I wanted a plaque outside the office building in Croydon from which much of VideoGamer.com was built - you know, like the ones that show Jane Austen lived in a building at one point in her life. I wanted to be looked back on like Jane Austen is, but for video game websites. Greatness was made here! 100% comparable things.

Rather self-important isn’t it? I guess it is, but I was proud of what I’d accomplished - born into a very working class family where for my mum and her siblings education was second to working, with historic and present ties to the circus industry. By rights, I should have grown up part of a two-person strongman team, performing great feats of balancing and strength in front of crowds who mostly turned up to see someone who copied a performer who did well on Britain's Got Talent one year.

Yet, here I was, winning awards for a website about video games. And then it all came crashing down. VideoGamer.com is a husk now, a lot of the work the team and I did back in the day is now gone forever, and I expect its memory is tarnished for good. 

I tried to make my mark elsewhere, with leading roles on VG247 and Eurogamer, pushing new ideas to help those sites stay popular and relevant in a new era of the internet, but we’re not living in a great time for companies valuing vision and long-term strategy. So I eventually found myself without a job, my biggest successes a distant memory. Was that all I had in me? 80+ job applications later without a single interview had me convinced that my time was over. A relic, my chance missed.

Yet I carry on. I’ve got Respec, started with fellow games industry veteran Alex Donaldson, a new video games website attempting to thrive in a world where little is. Will it be my legacy? Maybe, it’s too early to say. Maybe this blog will be my life’s most everlasting work. I think not.

I have dreams that my in-progress children’s book will be published, get a movie deal, and I’ll end up writing the screenplay and then cashing million dollar cheques for each sequel and spin-off. That would be amazing (even just the first part would be!). But I’m just a decent writer when compared to the best, able to knock around a few sentences into some mild fun, but a book? Not sure.

24 years on from entering games media and the world of work, I think there are other ways to be remembered well, anyway. Yes, a large part of me now just wants to be thought of and remembered as a great person. A great friend, a great boss, a great dad, husband, colleague, neighbour. I am the binfluencer on our road, and sort the bins for our elderly neighbour, so that's something.

Maybe that’s a bit defeatist, or being a realist - you decide - but after big business destroying pretty much every major project I’ve been involved with as an adult it’s hard to keep aiming for the stars. We can’t all be true greats.

I’ll still try, though. I better get cracking on finishing the book.

One of the downsides to working in games media is having a real lack of your own time. While I was getting into the groove with Resident Evil Requiem, I’ve had to put it on the backburner to use every moment of free-time to play games I’m reviewing. One of these is spectacularly good, and the other is decent enough, so it might not seem like much of a hardship, but it’s quite tiring to have no say in how you spend time with your main interest in life.

This newsletter was mostly about my desire to be brilliant, but I’ve been doing plenty of other stuff. I’ll have a think about some other bits and pieces and round them up in the quick reviews below. I’m a critic, too, you see.

Things I can review:

• The Love Hypothesis (Prime): We watch a lot of romcoms in this house, so I’m well positioned to judge them as they arrive on streaming, seemingly a new one every couple of weeks. The Love Hypothesis sounded pretty bad (man and woman agree to fake date in order to convince others that they are in a happy relationship), the pair being research scientists. Cue awkwardness and probable looking down on people in the scientific field, because hey, they are hardly book executives or whatever most people do for work in films. And yet, it works. Great performances by the leads, top notch side characters, and strong chemistry. 9 genetically altered mice out of 10 people you know from things but can't say what.
• Rubicon squash (supermarkets): Not a great deal to say about this, other than Rubicon has released a range of squashes. If you’re American, Google what squash is. As for how these taste: pretty good. It’s decent squash. 7 parts squash out of 10 parts water.
• International Football break (most big leagues): International football is rubbish isn’t it? I love watching football, but unless it’s the actual World Cup of Euros, give me Premier League football every day of the week. Roll on October 10 so I can begin being miserable about Spurs once again.