During his first USAF deployment, he picked up a PC Gamer magazine for the long ride across the pond. He quickly decided that writing about games would be far more awesome than getting shot at, so after the Air Force, he went to college for a creative writing degree. He freelanced for Maximum PC magazine and was EiC for PC Gamer’s “Build Your Own Gaming PC!” before joining PC Gamer full-time in San Francisco. These days, you can spot Chris questionably defending Far Cry 2 as the best PC gamer ever made, and raging when backstabbed in Team Fortress 2. Outside of gaming, he loves Tang Soo Do, Jujitsu, Karate and Jean Claude Van Damme. He also partakes of Wisconsin-sharp cheddar cheese.

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 horse-obsessed rural township of Highland, MI (the first American city to have a high school equestrian team), 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 (Pandemic, Battlestar Galactica, Arkham Horror), Esquire magazine, Czech lager, and the Detroit Red Wings. His favorite keyboard shortcut is Alt + Tab.

But Gavin isn’t just a player killer. Despite his bloodlust, he can often can be found sharing puppy-eyed moments in Maple Story or cuddling up with one of many plushies on his desk.

When he got his first PC in 1995, he started with FIFA ’96. Soon afterwards, he realised he probably needed help when it came to picking which games to buy, and turned to the venerable PC Gamer. From there, it was a misspent youth of Half-Life, Half-Life modding, writing for Half-Life fansites, fighting with a Counter-Strike clan, and running up an enormous phone bill on dial-up internet.

He dropped out of university in 2005 to do what he’d always wanted to: write for PC Gamer. Today, he’s Deputy Editor of its UK edition.

After cutting his teeth on games such as Tie Fighter and Monkey Island, Greg started his own clan called the Sith Mercenaries and learned level editing for Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. First-person shooters are his beat but also enjoys strategy and burritos. He acts in films and commercials, and is happiest owning the noobs with his insta-gib Unreal 2K4 skills.

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.

When Logan is not playing Tornado Jockey, violent shooters or Mass Effect 2 for the umpteenth time in a desperate bid to not kill everybody, he tweets, plays the keytar, and hangs out with his friends Lexington and Tabasco.

After majoring in Journalism at New Jersey’s Rutgers College, he wandered the countryside searching for shelter until PC Gamer offered him a coveted position as an indentured servant. Lucas leapt at the chance, and now spends his days cavorting through the Fields of Justice in League of Legends, sniping Evan and Chris in the noggins via Team Fortress 2, and smack-talking at Josh for no apparent reason.

He then spent most of high school with his face buried in either some sort of book or all sorts of games. And that’s when it hit him: “I could write about games, like, for money and stuff!” Then he went back to reading and gaming for the next four years. Come freshman year of college, though, he tried his hand at freelancing. Eventually he was published by fine, upstanding publications like Maximum PC, GamesRadar, Joystiq, GameSpy, and ultimately, gloriously, PC Gamer.

When he’s not replaying Deus Ex for the 27th time or shouting Zeno Clash’s praises to all who will listen, Nathan spends his time listening to vaguely folkish alterna-prog rock, coming up with ideas for stories that’ll never be published, beating Chris black-and-blue in kickboxing matches, and getting his arms horrifically maimed by Chris in Jiu-Jitsu matches. If you wish, you can follow his occasionally sane ramblings on Twitter @Vahn16.

It started with the Dragon 32, then the Amiga 500. Owen might have started playing rubbish games on rubbish computers but how was he to know any better? He was only a few years old at the time and his older brothers picked the machines alright?

Owen loves playing co-op games, welding doors and healing people, but he also loves realistic war sims where bullets feel scary. He lists Team Fortress 2, ARMA II, Starcraft II, and any other game with 2/II in the title as his favourite PC games of the moment. He seems to think most games-related tat is ‘awesome’, especially if it’s soft and huggable. He is Welsh.

He’s recently joined PCGamer.com as Web Editor. His aim is to make the website into the ultimate resource for PC gaming on the whole of the internets. How is he doing? Send any suggestions to owen.hill@futurenet.com, or add [PCG] Bop to your Steam friends list. We’re all friends here right?

You can view all of Owen’s posts here.

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.

You can view all of his posts here.

With such savvy career-planning, it’s little wonder that Rob is now a prolific freelancer for a number of gaming publications, a columnist and news writer for PC Gamer, and the host of the Three Moves Ahead strategy podcast. He divides his time between strategy games, racing games, shooters, and console sports games. He’s making a heroic effort to befriend the noble RPG and flight sim, but trust takes time. He lives in Cambridge with his too-smart and too-patient girlfriend.

He loves to be hugged, and to hug back. Relax ladies. Tim is married, and lives with his wife, and two cats in Bath.

After endangering his high school education by playing too much Little Big Adventure and making Duke Nukem 3D levels, endangering his A-levels by playing too much Blood and making Quake 2 levels, and endangering his degree by playing too much Deus Ex and making Morrowind mods, he was relieved to find all of this actually helped him get a job. He now gets to write about games and gaming culture for the PC Gamer web and print editions, and has never looked back. Except when asked to write a bio, at which point you apparently get his life goddamn story.

You can view all of Tom’s posts here.

 
 
 
 

It wasn’t always thus. For several years he was a freelance videogames journalist, which was OK in a jetting-around-the-world, having-other-people-buy-your-drinks kind of way. Before that he worked on various Future magazines, doing various things. Before that he went to Hull and back to get his English degree, and liked it so much he stayed for the MA. He likes cats. His hobbies include creative writing and C++. He is currently writing his own compiled programming language. Creatively. His dream game would be ‘Alexander the Great vs Cthulhu: the Battle for Atlantis Begins’.

After studying illustration at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and making web-stuff at GamesRadar for over four years, Tyler is elated to be further exploring new media with the exciting launch of PC Gamer Digital. He also plays the harmonica poorly, and is not above vandalizing the desks of Red Wings fans.