Cover art for Issue 01, above, was produced by Jack Kirby Crosby. You can see his marvellous portfolio here.
A defiant, new Australian magazine designed to explore videogames and how they impact broader culture
It’s been a brutal time for video games. Industry wide layoffs, studios shutting down. And games writing has seen the same issues. We’ve watched on as our favourite websites disappear or transform into AI slop factories.Solid reporting and storytelling have been backed into a corner. There’s fewer and fewer ways for video game fans to connect with deep, thoughtful and informative work about video games. AI and collapsing revenue models make good work near impossible to fund or publish. It feels bleak. It feels like there's no light at the end of this very dark tunnel.But we don’t want to give up.We want to CONTINUE
THE DREAM
We want to create a magazine that sits at the intersection between the incredible art and design in A Profound Waste of Time and the essay and reportage found in literary magazines, like The Monthly or The New Yorker.CONTINUE is comfortable celebrating video games through beautifully illustrated feature stories, but also secure enough to critique how they’re made via robust reporting and long form storytelling.We would love to focus on Australian games and Australian developers, but commit to chasing the most important stories in games, regardless of location.
Why a magazine?
We love games magazines. We really miss games magazines. We believe there’s space for an Australian-made games magazine to cover local issues and speak to a savvy audience, hungry to be part of the conversation.And we want CONTINUE to function like a memory card.CONTINUE is preservation. It's video game journalism without corporate overlords. We don’t have to worry about SEO or clicks or AI plagiarising our work.We're creating something tangible you can hold, something eye-wateringly beautiful you can get excited about buying, something that you can't wait to open when you receive it in the mail. We want to stuff it full of art that you could cut out and chuck on your bedroom wall, or frame for above your office desk. We want it to be lasting.We want to make a magazine because we know what they mean — we grew up reading them, too.
Who are we?
Jackson Ryan
Jackson Ryan works as an investigative journalist, and has won awards for his reporting of issues in both science integrity and video game business practice. As a freelancer his games writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper and more. His first story was in PC Powerplay, and he can still read it — because it was in print! Unfortunately, it's not very good. Fortunately, he has learnt a lot in 12 years.
Who are we?
Mark Serrels
Mark Serrels is an award-winning journalist and Editorial Director with 20 years of experience editing magazines and websites like the Official Nintendo Magazine and Australian 360. He ran the Australian edition of Kotaku for over five years and oversaw the culture desk at CNET for four years. He’s currently the Editorial Director of CHOICE, a consumer advocacy group with over 200,000 paying subscribers.