Jonathan Nash, a legendary games journalist and comedy writer, has sadly passed away. This piece celebrates his life and work, focusing on his time at AMIGA POWER and his unique ability to make even the most mundane game reviews hilarious and insightful.
There is a reasonable chance you have not heard of Jonathan Nash . However, the games journalist and comedy writer has been such an inspiration for a generation of games critics, and the generation inspired by them, that his influence has almost certainly reached you. J Nash was extraordinary, and I’m very sorry to report he has died. I also can’t wait to tell you why you will want to read everything he ever wrote.
There’s a thing about life, and the thing about life is this: it is immensely complicated. So began a review of the wholly forgotten 1994 Commodore Amiga game Sub, in the pages of the always capitalized AMIGA POWER. It continued, No matter how long you stick with it, there’s always something you can’t quite get to grips with or, indeed, begin to understand one tiny bit at all. Unfortunately life doesn’t come with an instruction book, but if it did, it would undoubtedly be a badly translated instruction book with lots of sentences that had a very good but ultimately unsuccessful stab at making sense. And, d’you know, in these respects, life would be a lot like this game. Which you could accuse of leaning into cliche, were it not followed by, So wrote Stan Wallpaper in his now standard textbook, ‘101 Extremely Contrived Introductory Paragraphs.’ Thanks, Stan. It changed my life. The UK had a fair few influential gaming magazines, but perhaps none more so than AMIGA POWER. The magazine launched or boosted the careers of a large number of writers, many of whom would go on to form magazines you know like PC Gamer, as well as launch the careers of famous names like former games journalist and current comics writer Kieron Gillen. The magazine’s finest writer was Jonathan Nash, a unique voice whose astonishing prose forced everyone around him to aim to keep up. No one could. The best sorts tried. I first read Nash’s work as a child, a 12-year-old reading through the magazine that made me want to be a writer, Your Sinclair. I would seek out his reviews, because they were the funniest by far, though I was still far too young to appreciate the wholly unnecessary level of skill that went into every review of a cassette-based 16-color video game based on a recent action movie. It all seeped into my brain, started defining me in indelible ways. Without Jonathan Nash, and the cohort of writers at Your Sinclair and AMIGA POWER, there would never have been a Rock Paper Shotgun, given that at least three of the four of us who began that site somewhat viewed our games journalism careers as a sort of pasty tribute act to the man. This is not a proper obituary, and I fail to mention some of his greatest moments, but instead just a celebration of the way the man put words in front of one another. Jonathan had a way of putting words together that no one else would ever think to try, with results that would make me gasp as I read them. Even in an email, Nash would phrase things in such a way that I’d want to pin it to a board and dissect it to find its secret, only to find myself covered in gory letters and be none the wiser. On one occasion, when he was writing a deeply strange and complex text-based video game, I demanded of him a prize for being the first person to complete its demo. He replied, “You are correct. Nobody else has managed this, possibly because they have run out of proteins.” Last night, as the awful news of Jonathan’s untimely passing spread among his former colleagues and friends, my messages were filled with people sharing favorite lines of his, screenshots of throwaway gags they’d never forgotten from magazines published 35 years ago, desperate searches to find scans of PC Gamer from the 90s that Future Publishing hadn’t spitefully deleted from the Internet Archive, anything to try to capture the essence of Nash’s writing and what it meant to us. Man Of Mystery J Nash (as many of his closest friends called him) may not even have been called Jonathan Nash. I’ve always had my suspicions. His love for Victorian obscurity has long made me wonder if he named himself after Jonathan Nash Hearder, an electrical engineer of the 19th century. Our J Nash was a deeply mysterious figure, often unseen by anyone who knew him for five or more years at a time, who then might suddenly show up on a doorstep unannounced (a thing that actually happened). He co-wrote sitcoms with people that never met him, and created archives of work that were never publicised, but always astonishing. But he will be remembered more for one era than any other: his time on AMIGA POWER. It’s hard to convey what this magazine was to people who never read it, let alone never lived in the country where it was published. It was a gaming magazine for the Commodore Amiga home computer that was written with the energy of the music magazines of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but imbued with a silliness that undermined all its venom.
JONATHAN NASH GAMES JOURNALISM AMIGA POWER COMEDY WRITING INFLUENTIAL WRITERS
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