About Pete

petepixel-7217917Pete Davison has been writing about games both professionally and for pleasure for as long as he can remember. His earliest reviews were published in UK-based Atari magazine Page 6 (later New Atari User) and, following a work experience stint on now-defunct PC gaming magazine PC Zone (during which he wrote a review of the non-3D-accelerated version of Virtua Fighter PC and the captions for the screenshots in the “On-Line” section) went on to contribute semi-regularly to both PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine.

More recently, you’ll have seen Pete’s work in several places across the Internet. After leaving his former career of classroom teaching to pursue video games journalism full-time, Pete has had work published on GamePro, GOG.com, Games Are Evil, What They Play, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and Nintendo Life.

A longstanding love for Japanese video games is what spurred Pete on to develop MoeGamer. He believes strongly that modern Japanese interactive entertainment is an underappreciated and underexplored aspect of the games business as a whole, and hopes to help redress the balance in his own small way — a process he started with regular JRPG and visual novel columns at Games Are Evil (now being republished right here), and subsequently continued with a regular Japanese gaming column at USgamer and a stint as editor on Rice Digital.

MoeGamer is a personal passion project designed to fill what he believes to be an important niche that is underserved by mainstream publications. He hopes you enjoy it… and share that enjoyment with your friends and family.

Further reading

Pete’s most recent work for commercial gaming sites can be found on Rice Digital and the official Evercade blog.

A little further back, you’ll find more of his work on Rolling Stone’s now-defunct gaming site Glixel, where he wrote previews for Dontnod’s Vampyr and Cyanide’s Call of Cthulhuand Nintendo Life, where he reviewed Prison Princess for Nintendo Switch.

Pete’s past work from USgamer — barring communal pieces from the whole staff — can be found here. (USgamer is no longer online, so the surviving articles are archived on VG247.)

Of particular note on USgamer were his weekly Japanese gaming column JPgamer and his board game column BOARDgamer. Further long-form material can be found in his coverage of the Eurogamer Expo/EGX in 2013, an event he covered single-handedly for USgamer.

Pete was Inside Network’s resident reviewer for a little over a year. He reviewed Facebook games over at Inside Social Games and mobile (iOS and Android) games and apps at Inside Mobile Apps, both subsequently folded into AdWeek’s SocialTimes blog network. He also compiled a weekly report for Inside Network’s metrics service AppData.

In 2011, Pete covered the daily news for the legendary GamePro. Both the site and magazine sadly died a death at the end of November 2011, but a number of his articles can still be found on its sister site PC World.

Pete also wrote two preview features of the then-upcoming Xbox 360 game Crackdown 2 for longstanding gaming mega-site IGN. Preparing these articles involved a visit to the developer, some hands-on time with the game and interviewing key members of the team.

Ruffian’s Hell & High Times With Crackdown 2
Putting the Craic in Crackdown 2

And in the early days of GOG.com, back when it was still called Good Old Games, Pete produced a number of promotional pieces for the site on various “hidden gems” in the digital distributor’s catalogue. Due to GOG.com’s site restructure, these articles come courtesy of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Hidden Gem of the Week: MDK
Hidden Gem of the Week: In Cold Blood
Hidden Gem of the Week: Runaway – A Road Adventure
Hidden Gem of the Week: Septerra Core
Hidden Gem of the Week: Earth 2150 Trilogy
Hidden Gem of the Week: Painkiller
Hidden Gem of the Week: Simon the Sorcerer
Hidden Gem of the Week: Rise of the Triad

Finally, Pete also wrote a selection of “parental advice” articles giving people the lowdown on a variety of popular online communities that kids might want to get themselves involved with. What They Play was purchased by IGN and then closed down, so these links come courtesy of archive.org’s Wayback Machine where possible:

Get the Facts on Kongregate
Get the Facts on Guild Wars
Get the Facts on Gaia Online
Get the Facts on Club Penguin
Get the Facts on NeoPets
Get the Facts on MapleStory
Get the Facts on RuneScape

4 thoughts on “About Pete”

    1. I’d say look into visual novels, and perhaps games with visual novel-style storytelling if and when you decide you want a bit if gameplay with your narrative.

      I’ve covered a whole bunch on this site over the years, but check the Cover Game features in the top menu for Fate/stay night, Grisaia, Nekopara, Ne no Kami and Our World is Ended for some great examples of visual novels.

  1. Hello, Pete! I like your articles. I am posting here as a test because I can’t seem to get comments to show up on another of your articles.

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