Retro spotlight: Teresa Maughan and videogame magazines

Published on 18 July 2024 by Andrew Owen (7 minutes)

In 1983 Teresa Maughan graduated from the University of Reading with a bachelor of science honors degree in Psychology and Zoology. She wanted to work in television, but she ended up becoming one of the most significant contributors to the UK magazine publishing industry, in particular in computers and video games.

“I basically wanted David Attenborough’s job — and even wrote him a letter, asking him how he got into it. I actually got a really nice handwritten note back from his home address, but still ended up in magazines,” she told Eurogamer.

She knew she wanted to work in the creative industry and applied for various advertising jobs, all of which she was turned down for. She eventually got a job with a Sinclair QL magazine and taught herself how to program in BASIC. But they went bust less than six weeks after she joined. She used her redundancy payment to buy a sewing machine, but never made anything with it.

“Why am I a magazine publisher? Is it because I love magazines? No. It’s because I had a tiny success back in 1967 selling a hippy magazine on London’s fashionable King’s Road.” —Felix Dennis

Felix Dennis got his start in publishing by selling Australian counterculture magazine “Oz” in the UK. He had the bright idea to let a group of school children edit issue 28 of which resulted in the longest trial under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. In the mid-1970s he set up Sportscene Specialist Press to cash in on the martial arts craze with launch title “Kung Fu Monthly”. In the 1980s he saw that the microcomputer craze was the next big thing and in 1984 launched “Your 64” and “Your Spectrum” for the two most popular machines in the UK at the time, the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. He would eventually turn Sportscene into Dennis Publishing, a multi-million pound business with men’s magazine Maxim as its crown jewel.

Teresa’s story converged with Dennis’s when she joined “Your 64” as production editor. It and its sister publication were based in an old shop that may once have been owned by Ringo Starr on Rathbone Place, not far from London’s Oxford Street. The last time I was there in the 2010s it was a branch of Subway. In her first weeks she was asked if she could come back a week later as they hadn’t yet fired the person she was replacing. In the meantime, she practiced on the Commodore 64 in her shared flat. But her stint on “Your 64” was short-lived and she soon transitioned to “Your Spectrum” or “YS”.

During its initial run, “YS” is what Teresa (affectionately known as T’zer in the magazine) would term “quite boring” like its competitor “Sinclair User”. Games were present, but it included lots of features on programming and hardware projects (my kind of thing). She was more interested in games (her favorite of the era was “Prince of Persia”). In 1986 the magazine rebranded as “Your Sinclair” with more of an emphasis on games and Teresa as deputy editor. In 1987, at the age of 24, she took over as editor and stayed until 1989.

After the rebrand, “YS” took inspiration from other teenage magazines. “We took the view that our audience liked games, but that didn’t mean they were nerds. As soon as we took that stance, we asked what else they’d be interested in, and as our readers were predominately teenage boys, we concluded that there should be more toilet humor,” she told Eurogamer. After she stepped down, “YS” ended up aping “Viz”, which she felt was the wrong move for the magazine.

During her time in charge she maintained strict editorial independence, often to the consternation of the advertising department, who could lose whole accounts if a game was given a bad review. She was also one of the pioneers of the cover tape: in September 1987 the magazine included a full version of “Arkanoid” clone “Batty” ahead of its official commercial release.

“In reality, I did anything and everything,” she said. That included posing in a Marjorie Proops inspired outfit for an agony aunt column. Her abiding memories of “YS” are “laughing like a drain for four years solid, listening to Snouty and Berkmann swap jokes continuously—some of them were actually funny, dressing up in ridiculous outfits in the name of work, young boys asking me to sign their T-shirts (and other things!) at the Earl’s Court games shows – I could never understand why, as I didn’t feel famous, wondering whether Duncan MacDonald was going to show up for work or whether he was out on one of his ‘jaunts’, and ‘Hold My Hand Very Tightly’ – nobody croons like David Wilson.”

Teresa was at Dennis publishing from 1985 until 1993. She was publishing director. She was on the management board. She oversaw the consumer games division (with a £1 million annual turnover). She managed the business side of six newsstand videogames and computer magazines and a weekly soccer magazine for the teenage market. She ran a division of 42 editorial, advertising, production and marketing staff. And she had operational responsibility for Dennis Oneshots, which produced one-off pop and poster magazines and books.

In 1989, Dennis was in negotiations to sell Your Sinclair to Bath-based Future Publishing. Staff including Teresa were given the option to relocate. Many accepted the offer, but she liked living in London. So she stepped down as editor before the move and launched multi-format videogames magazine Zero which won two Magazine of the Year awards and ran until 1992. As early as 1991 she could see the market for a dedicated PC games magazine. But other board members disagreed, and it would be another two years until the launch of PC Zone (which was eventually also sold to Future).

Between 1993 and 2000 she had the first three of her four children. She continued her career in journalism, editing Dennis’s “Mohammed Ali: The Glory Years”, doing a stint of production on “Linux User” magazine, and launching and packaging the now forgotten “Star Pets” magazine. “It was aimed at girls and all about celebrities and their pets and pop,” she said. Outside of work, from 2002 to 2016 she volunteered as a school governor.

From 1998 until 2009 she worked at Pure Publishing as publishing director and editorial director. Its clients included Dennis Publishing, BBC Worldwide, The Tree Council and the Royal Horticultural Society. Her book credits from this period include one on getting started in modeling and unofficial books on Christina Aguilera and pop groups All Saints, Five and Steps.

She then made the common career move for journalists into public relations. From 2009 to 2013 she was head of communications for Waverley Borough Council where among other things she was responsible for web content, electronic newsletters and social media.

In 2013 she joined The Pirbright Institute, part of the UK government’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) as head of communications. In 2020 her team of four had to deal with the fallout of a prominent conspiracy theorist posting a false allegation on Twitter that the institute had been granted a patent for “the coronavirus” in 2018.

In reality the patent was for a vaccine for a different coronavirus that affects chickens. Mentions on social media went from 711 in the previous six months to 191,000 in the same period. Staff were harassed while they were working with Oxford University and Public Health England to test a potential Covid-19 vaccine. YouTube took down videos sharing misinformation about the institute, but Facebook and Twitter declined to act. “We’d never experienced anything quite like that. Some of the commentary was quite vicious. Calling us murderers, that type of thing,” Teresa told the BBC.

Since 2022, Teresa has worked for the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affair Affairs (Defra) where she is now the head of external communications and she has been a STEM Ambassador since 2014. On LinkedIn, she lists her causes as animal welfare, children, education, health, science and technology.

This article is developed from a short profile that I originally published in 2011 that was stolen in its entirety by Goodreads. I was inspired to revisit and update it after seeing a recent interview with Teresa that I felt would have benefited from a little more research prior to recording.