Steve McGill

Steve McGill and You Couldn't Possibly Want To Print This Shite Productions proudly presents:

TRAGIC: THE GATHERING

Act 1. Scene 1.

[Steve smiles with broad Joker like grin. His eyes are red, glazed and stupid - a consequence of illegal substance intoxication - the look is tinged with a hint of an expression of amused malevolence. He picks up a mini-disc recorder and dictates a voicemail to his friend JonathAn]

Steve: JonathAn! I've being evading paying my television license for the past three months. It's a practise I've been trying hard to stop. On the other hand I might have paid the license fee and, merely for the sake of cheap entertainment, am trying to do the following bad things to you; bullshit you , lie to you, cheat you, have a go at you, con you, poke fun at you, annoy you etc. Take your pick from the paranoia basket and check it out my chum. Whichever you pick you might just be wrong. How will you know? Ha ha ha. You won't. And I will. Once again, victory for the boy from Syracuse. Anyway. JonathAn. Onto the point of this message...

[ The phone rings. Steve stops the tape recorder and answers the phone. It is the wife of his syphilitic dinosaur scrotum collecting friend with whom he has been having illicit post midnight discussions concerning the historical, cultural and socio-political impact of the concept review in the period 1992-96. The clock over Steve's shoulder displays the time as one minute past midnight. The calendar shows that it is Doomsday's Eve ]

Steve: Hello.

Wife: Steve! It's me. You just made a continuity error in the square bracket part of this script. What are you doing?

Steve: Hello me! I'm dictating a voicemail for my friend JonathAn.

Wife: Who's JonathAn?

Steve: JonathAn, the chap from Amiga Power I told you about last week. The guy who believes that concept reviews are what made Amiga Power better than the competition.

Wife: Oh yes. Of course. How could I forget. Do you think he read the 1996 Which Report on concept reviews during the period of the hesiodic theogony?

Steve: How could he? If he had, he wouldn't have dared write what he wrote about the concept review and Amiga Power's relationship to it.

Wife: Hmm. You'll have to remind me of what he wrote again.

Steve: In AP2 he said that concept reviews were one of the main defining elements separating AP from its idiot competitors. He justified it further by saying that few had the imagination to attempt such things, and significantly fewer the basic writing skills necessary to pull them off successfully.

Wife: Hmm. Modest chap then.

Steve: Come on, you know that modesty is an unknown concept among Future bods past and present.

Wife: Hold on. You're a Future bod. Or at least, you were.

Steve: Yes. But, I'm the most modest person I know. That exempts me.

Wife: [ Stutteringly ] True enough. Don't get me wrong. I didn't mean to imply anything. Stop being so paranoid.

Steve: I'm not being paranoid. And let's not run through that tired old script about them being out to get me either.

Wife: Okay. They got you long ago. Everyone knows that. Amiga Power knows that. I know that. Everyone knows that. How well did you know JonathAn?

Steve: Enough to know that he wouldn't like section 3 in the Which Report.

Wife: Was that section three with the exploded boxout which featured a pie chart with step by by step illustrations caricaturing the changing facial expressions, cranial stress levels and brain capillary blood pressure readings of average readers during exposure to a concept review. Or, section 3 which convincingly argued that the N in Nash could be proved, using the theories of blood brain barrier osmosis, fluid hydro-statics, and free radical di-nucleotide oxygenation to mean precisely nothing with a capital N?

Steve: No.

Wife: What. You're not trying to tell me that JonathAn would accept that the average concept review written by an idiot caused apoplectic haematoma with internal haemorrhaging and subcutaneous cranial fracture in readers exposed to them?

Steve: Of course he would. He knows that it's true. He would also tell you that Amiga Power did not write average concept reviews. That Amiga Power was written by post modern demi-gods protecting all that is just, true, honourable, worthwhile etc in the videogame product industry.

Wife: You wrote for Amiga Power.

Steve: My divine status has nothing to do with Amiga Power.

Wife: You sound ashamed.

Steve: Not ashamed. Innocent. Anyway, we're drifting from the subject. What concerns me regarding section three is the effect it will have on JonathAn when exposed to its findings.

Wife: From your description last week, he sounds as if he should be okay.

Steve: In a real person I'd have to agree. But JonathAn is not real. He is a free, photographically unfriendly, fundamentally narcissistic etc. spirit - a complete and utter one hundred percent apostate of the virtues of absolute truth and absolute hypocrisy during the process of information dissemination.* That's why I think that the findings might have a catastrophic effect upon him.

Wife: In what way? Will he spontaneously combust? Collapse and die? Teleport to another dimension?

Steve: No. But, when he discovers the repercussions behind the symptoms suffered by exposees, it might just shatter his internal reality construct and catapult him into the temporal world of the mundane and the ordinary etc. He may experience the world as ordinary mortals do.

Wife: Oh no. What a horrible fate for a mighty being. Wait a minute, I haven't read the symptoms part of the section. What symptoms?

Steve: Well. Aside from the apoplectic haematoma with internal haemorrhaging and subcutaneous cranial fracture, those exposed to an Amiga Power concept review can expect to suffer exponential ego growth, megalomaniacal delusions, reality drifts, and aural hallucinations telling them they are the son of god with a divine right to disseminate information in the form of concept reviews.

Wife: My god. It's terrible. Something should be done to stop them.

Steve: First time round something was done. And I did it. By the looks of current developments, it hasn't been enough.

Wife: First time round?

Steve: While working for the Sinister Clandestine Agency Network, we isolated symptom sufferers and tracked down the source of the maladies to Amiga Power. By the time we were one hundred per cent sure it was Amiga Power and Amiga Power only that was responsible, the magazine had already published 28 issues and was in the process of publishing a 29th.

Wife: What did you do about it. Shut them down?

Steve: We couldn't just shut them down. Britain is a fiscally rich entrepreneurial free market democracy that relies on the unfettered movement of trade goods and product supporting media. If we'd shut them down it would have cost too much economically and sociologically to silence their honourable paymasters and publishers. Instead, I infiltrated the magazine and quickly gained the trust of its editorial team. From this position of trust I observed and documented at first hand their, behaviour, customs, beliefs and philosophy on life, Amiga games, the universe etc. It was as illuminating as it was terrifying. I grew to fear for the stability of the English speaking nations.

Wife: So why did you move to Amiga Format?

Steve: I realised that exposure to the team was having the same effect on me that exposure to AP concept reviews had on receptive readers. My daily supra-extra extra-supra beta-blockers, serotonin inducers and self administered dopamine boosters were powerless to protect me. I had to leave to preserve my spirit, soul and sense of well being etc.

Wife: But why Amiga Format. It's a world known fact that Amiga Format hated Amiga Power more or less from birth in the same way that a muddy dull swamp rock hates a comet.

Steve: Exactly. Influential members of SCAN reckoned that the best way of combating the threat would be the destabilisation of their collective ego. The theory ran that collective ego instability might be enough to weaken the effect of individual concept reviews.

Wife: Destabilisation?

Steve: Much like the shaking of a wasp trapped in a jar, we found that the abuse and exploitation of Amiga Format house ads disproportionately angered Amiga Power staff out of all context. Especially when you let it slip to them that negligible effort had been put in to the production of the offending ads - in other words, we let them think we only sort of cared about annoying them.

Wife: Did it work?

Steve: Completely and utterly. But only in its ability to dilute the effects of concept review exposure.

Wife: I don't follow.

Steve: Studies of exposure showed that hospitalisation and mental atrophy occurred after three exposures. Operation Horsey Ad ensured that from the moment of its implementation, it took four exposures before hospitalisation was needed. It helped us buy time.

Wife: Time to do what? Surely you were putting yourself in danger? Surely you were putting yourself in the firing line for abuse and concept exposure?

Steve: Abuse. Yes. Danger. Know. Their petty snipes and acrimoniously libellous outpourings only helped deflect from and diminish the potency of their concept reviews. By a bizarre twist of fate, some of them even turned out to be mildly humorous and thus nullified their potential for promoting mental atrophy.

Wife: So what did you do with the extra time?

Steve: The only thing we could do. We threw all our efforts into the big one. The go all the way aaeeiigh super super cheesebomber of perfidiousness and deviousness.

Wife: [ Looks frightened and terrified as significance of aaeeiighh super super cheesebomber dawns on her ] You don't mean...

Steve: Yes. That's right. The complete destruction and collapse of the Amiga market so that it was no longer able to support Amiga games only magazines.

Wife: But you couldn't do something that big overnight. The planning must have been meticulous.

Steve: It was. But what made it easier to implement was the decision by the top brass at SCAN to manipulate Amiga Power into thinking that somehow their dissemination of concept propaganda had been responsible for the whole malaise. Ie. we encouraged them to hyper believe in the mega inflated importance they attached to their game marking and review system.

Wife: But surely a collapsed Amiga market would mean a huge loss of revenue throughout retail and wholesale in Britain. Surely it was bad for game development and freedom of creativity in game production?

Steve: It was and is. The country's paying the price for the driving game and beat-em-up epidemic that's currently ravaging the land. The only upside is that it's very difficult to do a concept review on Playstation Ridge Rave Destruction Racer XXIX.

Wife: So why do it if the consequences were so restrictive?

Steve: You had to look at the alternatives.

Wife: Which were?

Steve: Total and utter collapse of the NHS, psychiatric medicine, and the infrastructure that allows a manipulated free market economy to operate beneficially for the privileged few. The hospitals would have been unable to cope with the vast influx of new patients. Doctors, nurses and hospital staff would have been on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion. Jesus. It very nearly happened anyway. It could have bankrupted the country and led to social democracy. Why do you think there are so many Care in the Community patients currently prowling the streets? The psychiatric wards are still brimming with Amiga Power concept review exposees. There's no room for any other kind of mentally ill sufferer anywhere in the country.

Wife: Sounds like a big issue to me. Why didn't you just wipe them out. Kill them, silence them, anything but what you did?

Steve: One of the more disturbing findings of the early concept review exposures was that many of the sufferers were mis-diagnosed and treated for their physiological symptoms only. Due to their present mental predilection they are able to conceive of and reproduce concept reviews every bit as potent as those written during the Stuart Campbell and Jonathon Davies eras. God only knows how many victims of the Matt Bielby Golden Era, The Mark Ramshaw era, and the Linda Barker era are still walking about on the streets unchallenged and unrecognised for the dangerous fanatics they really are.

Wife: That doesn't mean what I think it means?

Steve: It means exactly what you think it means. We couldn't kill them off because...

Wife: ... because for every Amiga Power staffer wiped out, you could go out on to the street right this minute and randomly pick six people who'd be just as good at their job. My god. Thank heavens the Amiga is dead.

[ There is an uncomfortable silence for approximately one minute. The consequences of AP2 have begun to dawn on them ]

Both: LORD PRESERVE US! THE WORLD IS NO LONGER SAFE. THEY'RE GOING ONTO THE WEB WITH AP2. DEATH TO THE INTERNET.

[ The music from the end of the War of the Worlds fades in. The image of the shocked faces slowly dissolves into the blood red experienced during apoplectic haematoma with internal haemorrhaging and subcutaneous cranial fracture. The planet is left to contemplate the repercussions of the extinction of rationality, fairness and perspective etc in mankind ]

THE END. OR IS IT...?