Still making the cops look dumb
Hello, visitor!
Greetings! I'm Rob and welcome to my website.
Once upon a time I wrote and wrote about videogames and had a brief moment in the sun, these days I'm a little too tired and disabled for 'proper' work but still enjoy myself by keeping an occasional digest of videogames that interest me and excite me, writing about things I like, doodling pictures inspired by eighties home computer games box art and very, very occasionally breaking cover to write about the business and culture around videogames.
My pronouns are he/him or they/them.
Websites
I have a couple of websites that you can explore and where you can read more from me.
Punching Robots Club. My blog and home for regular thoughts, doodles, recommendations and nonsense.
Bobbins' Ye Olde Tomb Of Videogames is a link digest (as regular as I can make it) covering small games, remakes and the likes. For free, obviously.
Interests
I'm a lot more limited in what I can do these days, thanks to the joys of wonky health, but I enjoy rummaging through UK archive TV, can often be caught watching old (and often tat) films - early SF and horror are my particular faves but I'll watch anything, really.
I've been struggling with books in recent years due to a completely shot attention span but found I can still dig deep into comics. Personal faves? Magnus, Robot Fighter, Hellboy, a whole ruck of 2000ad stuff, Dr Who and of course, my perennial favourite, Dan Dare.
I enjoy videogame zines and small publications and, in case you don't already know, absolutely love Unwinnable especially. I play a lot of videogames. A lot.
Want to get in touch?
I try not to do Twitter these days because it's a hellscape but you can still find me elsewhere.
Mastodon I love Mastodon, it's not perfect but it's a really nice social media experience and plenty of my favourite people are there too. Been there since 2016 now and still finding it most relaxing. Masto is my main social media.
Instagram I mainly use Insta for posting art on these days seens as it's now functionally useless for what I signed up for originally. Still, I post fairly regularly.
I'll be honest, I rarely (if ever) read any DMs so that's not really a good way of getting hold of me on any service.
You can email me at robremakes@virginmedia.com though and I'm sure I'll get round to reading it reasonably promptly.
So much videogame nonsense
I've had a fairly storied, and incredibly fortunate, run in videogames. I've ran Retroremakes which for a long time was the number one destination on the internet for news on homebrew game remakes. We had so much lovely press over the years, ran some amazingly successful competitions, got an absolute ruck of accessible games made and out into the world. It kept running for so long thanks to the most amazing community and fellow admins but all things come to an end. I'm still so proud of everything we achieved.
Whilst running Retroremakes, I also kept Mersey Remakes going which was home for my own remake attempts. I took a pop at Kokotoni Wilf, Android One and a few others. I was never the best but had fun and saw my work land on coverdisks from PC Zone and Retrogamer Magazine, and other places I can't really remember.
For a brief period, I ran xnPlay, a prominent blog covering Xbox Live Indie Games. There's a lot there I should have done better but you live and learn, sometimes the hard way. Regardless, I was able to bring more attention to a bunch of fantastic games and get them snuck into a few other places too - including the now defunct but at the time extremely popular indiegames website.
I'm most well known for a sequence of Yak-inspired arena shooters I put out under the Bagfull Of Wrong and Future Of Videogames labels. Gosh, they travelled pretty far! I had my work shown at multiple Eurogamer Expo exhibitions, Game City and Game City Nights and also at GDC where my work was used to entice other people to build games using the same tools. It was all quite a wild ride, I had so much lovely press, so much help and support, got to work with some industry legends, made a silly amount of best of and end of year lists, featured in the book 250 Indie Games You Must Play Before You Die and very nearly managed a console release but life got between me and that happening.
An absolutely wild ride and one I still consider myself lucky to have had go so well.
I have given talks and sat on panels at Game City, Game City Nights, Eurogamer Expo and more covering remakes, accessibility and more.
I have wrote so, so many words about videogames over the years. Predominantly on my old Mersey Remakes blog but later on Take This Machine, a blog I dedicated to writing about things I found tremendous in videogames. I have wrote extensively on the business and culture of videogames, on abuse in games and how to make the place less of a nightmare to exist in. For a number of years I was a featured blogger on Gamasutra, one of the more prominent industry sites at the time, I've been published on Polygon, Eurogamer, quoted and referenced on so many more sites and magazines including Edge Magazine and The Guardian and been called "The Godzilla Of Grumbling" by videogame retail site MCV.
I still enjoy my yearly IGF duties where I get to rummage through an exciting bunch of videogames so as to try and nudge people to give the developers a nice prize and stuff.
I'm still not sure how any of this happened. I went on videogames by mistake.