We made a PC Gamer Indie zine! Read it for free here

Blame Wes Fenlon. Our features editor casually floated the idea "Hey, why don't we do an indie zine?"

For those who aren't familiar: zines are small-circulation hobbyist publications, often photocopied, black-and-white, and distributed free or for a token amount. I thought it sounded like a perfect fit for the Indie section, which, like zines, is motivated by a scrappy love of things that not enough people care about.

And that's why I spent over a month trying to evoke the lo-fi qualities of zines remembered from the 1990s, only working with MS Paint instead of a library photocopier. Thanks are due to the artists who contributed (Brianna Lei, Nathalie Lawhead, Sam McKenzie, and Michael Fitzhywel), as well as the writers who either wrote something bespoke or whose existing articles were repurposed.

You can read the pdf in the embed below, but in the true spirit of the zine, why not download it, print it out, staple it together (poorly), and read it on real paper?

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.