Kieron Gillen

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Kieron Gillen is a British computer games and music journalist, as well as a comic book author, who has worked for a lengthy list of publications, including PC Gamer UK, The Escapist, Amiga Power, Wired, The Guardian newspaper (where he wrote the first long-form videogame review in a mainstream newspaper [1]), Edge, Games Developer, Develop, MCV, Gamesmaster and PC Format, among others. Gillen is notable for his manifesto for New Games Journalism, more simply the model of new journalism applied to videogames journalism. Gillen is a fan of the work of videogame developer Warren Spector writing positive pieces on Spector's games, most notably the Ion Storm produced games Deus Ex and Thief: Deadly Shadows. This stemmed largely from Gillen's love of the now-defunct Looking Glass Studios, where Spector also worked.

In 2000, Gillen became the first-ever videogames journalist to receive an award from the Periodical Publishers Association, for New Specialist Consumer Journalist.

Gillen has also been invited as a guest speaker at games-industry conferences [2] [3].

Gillen's career also focuses on the comics he writes for both online and in print; he has worked for Warhammer Monthly and Chaos League.

Gillen also originated the phrase 'robo-crazy' during an interview for a video games satellite channel. He has admitted that he does not know why.

Since 2003, Gillen has collaborated with artist Jamie McKelvie on a comic strip for the official Playstation Magazine UK, entitled Save Point.

His current project, described by Gillen as "my first real comic" [4], is another collaboration with McKelvie, the pop-music urban fantasy Phonogram. Veteran comics writer Warren Ellis has dubbed it "one of the few truly essential comics of 2006" [5]. Animator James Harvey has dubbed it 'the unmistakable handiwork of quite a nice chap actually', although further critics have stated that 'anyone who thinks like [that] deserves to be chinned on sight'. Despite this the first issue, published by Image Comics, went on sale in August 2006 and the series will run for six issues. The creators hope to follow with more Phonogram stories later, if sales are strong on the first series.