Matt Fox

Matt Fox was born on 4 July 1972, the same year that the iconic `bat & ball’ video game Pong was created. Matt is the middle child of three brothers, and was introduced to computers and computer gaming from an early age, thanks to his father Michal, who worked for Britain’s biggest computer company ICL (International Computers Limited).

Games were an important part of growing up in the Fox family house. Sunday lunches were invariably followed by marathon board-game sessions, the family TV set had a baffling number of wires trailing from it leading to an array of early computer systems, bicycles and plastic guns littered the garden, and neighbourhood friends came and went as if the house were a hippy commune.

In the 1980s Matt was one of millions of boys swept up in the Dungeons & Dragons craze and was also one of the very first users of the internet, dialling up through the phone line to play the online role-playing game MUD – but it wasn’t until 2000 that, while reading his battered copy of the Time Out film guide, he was suddenly seized by the notion that there ought to be such a guide for video games too. It seemed to him almost an injustice that with hundreds of millions of gamers around the world, no one had thought to write one. Such was his conviction that there and then he took a pad of paper to the local park, laid down on a rug and wrote two reviews (Tetris and Streets Of Rage).

Over the next six years, while making a success of his business Spacefund (which aims to teach space science in a fun, fresh way to primary school children),.Matt would continue to add reviews to his ever-growing `project’… The Video Games Guide. He very much hopes that you get as much pleasure from reading it as he had researching and writing it.