In 1994, Craig got so lost in Frontier: Elite II that a summer went by without his noticing. Returning to school, real life seemed dull and boring in comparison. Also more stabby. This was the important bit. He decided games could save him from developing the nasty habit of using his head as a blunt force instrument.
Through Half-Life, then Thief and System Shock 2, he discovered his genre of choice in the amazing action games that popped up on the PC in the late ‘90s. Padding through corridors, whacking away at aliens/guards/screeching psychic monkeys, he was hooked on the dark sci-fi and cyberpunk worlds that the PC did so well.
After reading about these in PC Gamer, he boldly proclaimed it was the only magazine he ever wanted to work for. It’s about his platform of choice, written by people he respects (and John Walker), and through some incredible luck he was given a job. He’s currently responsible for making sarcastic and mean comments, killing our wonderful community members in vicious Team Fortress 2 battles, writing about games, and making kissy face with developers.
A devout follower of PC gaming, Dan’s been gaming almost exclusively on the PC since the mid 1990s, and has been building and upgrading his own rigs since 1999. He counts X-COM: UFO Defense (AKA Enemy Unknown) and the original Fallout as his favorite experiences of all time – if he can someday play a role in convincing a developer to create an updated strategy X-COM game, he will consider his life well-spent.
Nowadays he plays a bit of everything (shooters, RPGs and action) but specializes in strategy games like Civilization IV, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander and StarCraft 2. He’s a big fan of story in games, and he gets totally sucked into grand sci-fi adventures like Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 3, but finds nonsensical, Michael Bay-esque plots like Modern Warfare 2’s off-putting. He’s been known to play a few MMOs as well, with stints in City of Heroes and World of Warcraft under his belt.
As a well-rounded nerd, Dan also has an encyclopedic knowledge of Simpsons, Star Wars and Star Trek trivia. His crowning achievement, though, is setting the office record for consuming Carls Jr. Ultimate Cheeseburgers (five), though has since retired from competitive eating.
Erik Belsaas achieved fame interning for PC Gamer during 2010. Born and raised in the Black Hills of South Dakota, USA, he learned DOS before learning how to walk, and has fond early memories of Reader Rabbit, Commander Keen, and Duke Nukem. It wasn’t too long before with the assistance of his dad, Erik built his first computer, and truly fell in love with PC gaming. Fast forward a few years and a high school diploma, he applied for and got accepted into an internship with PC Gamer. It was here that Editor Josh Augustine introduced Erik to his true love, Azeroth, with whom he now enjoys a steady relationship, that he feels could really go somewhere.
Besides World of Warcraft, Erik indulges in Team Fortress 2, League of Legends, Splinter Cell, among many other games. In his free time, he enjoys benchmarking, getting coffee for others, reviewing terrible games, and long hikes through the woods. His ultimate career would have him reviewing nothing but games based on Disney Channel shows, and breaking out into song and dance without warning.
Evan Lahti is Senior Editor at PC Gamer. His gaming specialties are shooters, racing, military simulation, and postmodern Chilean first-person brawlers. His favorite recent games are ArmA 2, Team Fortress 2, Torchlight, Demigod and Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II. Evan counts Starsiege: Tribes, MechCommander, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, and Team Fortress Classic as the most influential experiences of his gaming development.
More than anything, Evan values the PC’s world of varied communities: to Evan, machinima directors, speed-runners, military sim roleplayers, and obscure Doom mod message boards (like Chex Quest) are precious subcultures that don’t exist anywhere else in gaming. Evan is especially drawn to co-op and emergent experiences, which explains his penchant for falling out of helicopters. Evan co-hosts a podcast about ArmA 2, the Armacast.
Raised in the tofu-mining town of Highland, MI, Evan abandoned his training to become an international fencing champion and started a Counter-Strike clan. Only his ability to yell loudly into a microphone propelled him to the latter. Evan studied Print Journalism at North Central College in Naperville, IL.
Outside of gaming, Evan likes longboarding, fencing, gaming music, board games, Dungeons & Dragons, Esquire magazine, lager, and the Detroit Red Wings. His favorite keyboard shortcut is Alt + Tab.
The first game Jaz McDougall ever played was Donkey Kong, where he learned that throwing barrels at contracters impresses the ladies, and that hammers are all powerful. His first PC game was Monkey Island 2, where he learned that brains are better than being undead. He invented the MMO while staring off into the middle distance after playing the tutorial for System Shock 2.
Jaz started his writing career aged 19, when he wrote a fantasy novel about a viking lady fighting a wizard lady. Aged 22, he won a PC Gamer competition by writing about his worst holiday ever, which was a five hundred page epic about the time he helped a viking lady kill a wizard lady. It made his cats famous. He had no idea that you could write about games for money until Craig told him. Jaz started freelancing for the mag the following year. His first review was The Last Remnant in PCG 202, and it took him four goes.
He now works the news-o-mill on the PC Gamer blog, and also painstakingly converts sheaves of papyrus into motorised electro-words. His favourite and most-played TF2 class is the Pyro (although he wishes it was the Soldier). He lives in Bath with his two cats, hamster, and wife.
Josh likes people. More specifically, he likes to backstab them repeatedly in every online game out there. He believes that victory is sweeter when it’s caused someone to cry out in anger or weep on their keyboard, which is why he spends as much time as possible in MMOs and head-to-head multiplayer games. He’s been playing World of Warcraft obsessively since release and would challenge anyone to a comparison of total time /played in-game, but also has love for all the massively multiplayer goodness out there. He’s pretty sure EVE Online is man’s most spontaneously creative invention and can’t wait to see what its players cook up next. But it’s not all kill or be killed, Josh has a softer story-loving side—fostered by early LucasArts adventure games like Monkey Island, his favorite game series of all time—that recently compelled him to replay Dragon Age three times to compose a story he was completely happy with. He loves to play co-op with friends and family, especially if they’re significantly better at the game than he is. Josh was editor for the first two issues of World of Warcraft Official Magazine, which he continues to contribute to, but he’s always been a Coconut Monkey at heart.
Logan Decker is the Editor-in-Chief of PC Gamer (US Edition). Raised in Sunnyvale, California, only miles away from what is today the headquarters of Apple, his parents sacrificed to buy him an expensive Apple II+ computer with the understanding that computers were the future, and that those who mastered them would become fabulously wealthy and admired the world over. They were, of course, prescient, but their visions sadly did not apply to their son, who could have cared less about programming and instead spent his youth conquering Britannia in his pajamas.
Logan did, eventually, go on to get a real job as a nerd-in-residence at Maximum PC, and joined PC Gamer as Senior Editor in 2006, wherein “Senior” meant “hardware guy.” The people upstairs must have seen some editorial talent in Mr. Decker, as he was surely not promoted to Editor-in-Chief on the basis of his aim, strategic thinking in StarCraft, or cool in the face of zombie attack.
Rich started his gaming life by ‘playing’ MS Paint for six months while he couldn’t work out how to install Tomb Raider. Then he did figure out how to install Tomb Raider and played that instead. It was much better.
Following the revelation that PC games were more fun than basic drawing programs, he spent New Year’s Eve 1997 playing Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat. Around this time came the simultaneous revelation that PC Gamer was better than other written things, so he read that too, learning all about angry houses and things also in the game.
After that, he lost his heart to Planetside, Counter-Strike, and Deus Ex, playing through the latter so many times that he sometimes wakes up screaming “GREASY GREASY GREASELS!” The only way past this deep-seated psychological issue was to pester Tim so hard that he relented and gave him a job.
Rich is a Staff Writer for the magazine and website, he’s convinced PC Gamer saved his life once during a particularly turbulent flight aged 13, and his best ever k/d score is 24/3.
Hailing from the Midwest, Robert has been with PC Gamer since 2010. An armchair entomologist, he’s secretly engineering an army of giant antlions—if only he could find Gordon Freeman’s lost bag of pheromones.
When he’s not planning global insectoid dominion, Robert enjoys the snail pace of strategy games like Civ IV and Sins of a Solar Empire. There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a half day’s work be crushed by your massive fleet and epic capital ships. If a seventeen hour game is out of the question, Robert kicks things into molasses gear with the break-neck RPG dialogue trees of BioWare and Bethesda fame. With over one-thousand hours logged and a hand collected virtual library of every book in Cyrodiil, Robert is a walking strategy guide for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
There are times when Robert has to interact with others. In such cases, Left 4 Dead vanilla or 2 are his games of choice. What better way to express your antisocial tendencies than to vomit on your friends and loved-ones; although, a nice round of Boong-Ga Boong-Ga is always nice too.
The first game Jaz McDougall ever played was Donkey Kong, where he learned that throwing barrels at contracters impresses the ladies, and that hammers are all powerful. His first PC game was Monkey Island 2, where he learned that brains are better than being undead. He invented the MMO while staring off into the middle distance after playing the tutorial for System Shock 2.
Rich started his gaming life by ‘playing’ MS Paint for six months while he couldn’t work out how to install Tomb Raider. Then he did figure out how to install Tomb Raider and played that instead. It was much better.
