Sep 2009 C&VG Rignall Interview
Posted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 4:20 pm
The Zzap Rrap
http://t.zzap64.co.uk/zzap-rrap/
Excellent stuff. This will stir chaos on the RetroGamer board, harhar!And yes, the poor ol' Amstrad was sadness personified.
First up, can you give us a quick rundown of your career highlights and tell us what you've been doing for the past decade?
Probably the biggest thing I've done in the US was launching IGN.com. When I arrived at Future in 1997 (then called Imagine Publishing), there was a staff of about 9 people creating a bunch of different web sites about the PlayStation, Dreamcast and whatnot.
We consolidated them all into a network called IGN and thanks to a rather creative affiliate program where we linked to about a billion fan sites, IGN became the 20th biggest site on the web and had about 100 editorial staff. We all thought we were going to be billionaires, but the dot-com bubble burst and the value of our paper money was not worth the paper it was written on.
Fortunately the site survived, and it's still going strong today. Since then I've worked with some big corporations on their web sites/marketing (great money, not-so-fun-work) such as Walmart and Dell, before rejoining Future a couple of years ago as Editorial Director to launch its new US Custom Publishing Division...