Graham is gone. The longest-running editor of Rock Paper Shotgun worked his last day on the website earlier this week, and has leapt quietly into the mysterious realm of the games industry proper. The emotional fallout of this departure is roughly the same as any other time RPS has watched a writer swan-dive out of the RPS treehouse and into the mist far below. There is sadness tinged with hope. “There goes another one,” you think, smiling through a single tear and imagining their future life far from these branches.
Only this time, well, it’s Graham.
Brendan: I officially quit RPS myself back in 2019, but have since reappeared as a regular freelance phantom. This gives me the weird opportunity to write a goodbye post for the man who wrote my own goodbye post. Fuck you, Graham, I see your compliments, and I raise you. Eat it.
Back in the horrendous mists of 2014, Graham jumped ship as editor of PC Gamer. He was hired by the ancient founders of Rock Paper Shotgun because the ancient founders were terrible at spreadsheets and were always standing in the wrong place. In Graham Smith, they not only got a managing editor who could tell them what day of the week it was, but a writer who was able to eviscerate developers for their terrible names, champion funny new ways to play, and celebrate the best games of all time, all with the same decorous lethality.
Go through Graham’s entire author archive and you will find over 4000 articles that collage into a vivid desire for this industry to be more than it often is. Indie physics brawlers stand side-by-side with EA shooters in a swirling list of cool or heinous shit that was important enough to tell you about. Few can write this much this well for this long, and not emerge a master of the knife-like phrase.
“Fuck underscore that,” he said of Watch_Dogs.
Reviewing picrossy game Proverbs he wrote: “It was there when I closed my eyes, as if my brain was defragmenting.”
“Makes me feel like I’m on hold,” he said of the wholesome nothingness of Naiad.
I’m picking these articles basically at random. They are probably not the pieces Graham is most proud of writing – only he knows those. But it says a lot that I can dig through his archives in a single morning and find, so easily and quickly, countless examples of wit, energy, and humanity. A humanity that he often expressed privately in our daily meetings, rather than on these digipages. God I wish we’d recorded our meetings as a podcast. We would have broken SO many NDAs.
When I say “humanity” I mean just that. Graham knows that when you write about games, you’re really writing about yourself.
“I’m reminded of how precious it is to play a videogame and never need to compete,” he wrote of Minecraft in 2014, not knowing then that exploring those mountains and valleys would years later become a regular ritual with his son. “Minecraft is a toybox, a dressing-up box, a pencil case of colouring pens, and sometimes just a sunny hill. I played it in 2009 and I played it yesterday and I have no reason to doubt I’ll be playing it in 2039.”
As somebody who has freelanced for this beautiful cesspit since its scrappy red-faced days, I also know the good Graham has done not as a writer, but simply as a guy who can get things done. He dragged this place kicking and screaming into a modern internet that none of us could avoid. Remember when RPS was a traditional blog? It was great. But articles would more or less evaporate when they left the front page. There was only space for three top stories at any one time. Graham oversaw the site as it got an even bigger splash of top stories. Some readers frothed at the mouth to see the blog roll pushed further down the landing page, reacting with that familiar viciousness we have grown to find adorable in you over years of subsequent RPS facelifts, minor and drastic. But, oh, whaddya know? YOU MOTHER FUCKERS CLICKED ON THOSE TOP STORIES DIDN’T YOU? You filthy, lovely, loyal dirtbags. It is for you Graham killed our darlings. Change is neither good or bad. Change is simply change.
When Graham was first hired, his welcome post wrote that “the tragedy of being editor of any magazine is it dramatically reduces the amount of writing you get to do” and this curse threatened to come to pass when he ascended into the white halls of corpomanagement eight years later to become a bigger, badder directorial man. But the truth is, Graham never stopped writing. He kept doing news posts at nights and weekends. He kept writing news. He kept crushing expensive action adventures and toothless indie darlings with equal knuckle-cracking insight. Okay, he took a hiatus from our Sunday Papers column (one of the site’s longest traditions) but even that didn’t last.
It’s in those Sunday Papers pieces that I feel you get the most bang for your Graham buck. Rock Paper Shotgun has always been the home of great writing, and perhaps nobody has built the site’s editorial ruleset as much as Graham (with the possible exception of Alice O’Connor, who wrote over 8000 articles and the style guide we use to this day – an untouchable legacy). His final Sunday Papers last week is a fangs-out manifesto for games journalism, and if there is any young pup who still covets this job over the glamour of being an influencer or the solitude of being a video essayist, then their greatest hope for honing their craft lies in Graham’s words.
“There are infinite ways to play a game and none of them are wrong,” he says. “There are infinite ways to write about a game and some of them are wrong, but you have to decide what those are for yourself.”
Or you can just ask Graham. You can follow him, and whatever he’ll be doing next, on Bluesky. I suggest you do. Words will burst out of this man if he doesn’t write them down somewhere. You’ll want to be there when he pops.
Jeremy: I’m still relatively new to the Treehouse and have known Graham for fewer months and years than the other folks here, thus rendering me incapable of writing anything as poetic as Bendy’s ode above. But as someone who’s read RPS since ye olden days prior to actually getting a job here, I’ve felt Graham’s presence on the site for a long time, and it’s been a superb guiding light.
As a fella who also had a long career working in non-games journalism, I feel compelled to add that I’ve suffered under the hands of many bad editors, and Graham was not one of those. He is the rarest of beasts, the ultimate of Achievements – an actual Chaotic Good guy-in-charge who cares not only about this bizarre corner of the internet, but the people behind it. A real one, in other words. We’ll miss you, Graham, and now that you have left us I am currently gathering healing potions to prepare for our swift descent into Lord of the Flies territory.
Edwin: Graham, I will miss all those moments in meetings when I’d try to act wise about video games journalism – sorry, videogames journalism – and shame-facedly realise that you’d heard it all before, probably a dozen times over, from successive generations of RPS scribes, all the way back through the great Google Meet invite list of History. You have absorbed everything worth knowing about this business, and it is only fit that you depart for a kinder realm, where you can enjoy your Crunchyroll subscription in peace, and spend less time fielding complaints about deal posts. Please shine down on us occasionally, great beardfather in the sky.
Mark: If Jeremy’s still new to the Treehouse, my feet have barely cleared the topmost rung of the ladder into it as I write this. I’m sad I didn’t get to work with Graham for a lot longer, even if just to try and glean more of the secrets that inevitably lurk within his face fuzz by staring at it in morning meetings.
James: Looking at RPS from the outside in, Graham’s influence is far-reaching and obvious – there’s a reason this site has kept on trucking as long as it has, and that reason has a rich beard and an impressive collection of graphic tees.
I wish that everyone currently saying their goodbyes also knew the full extent of Graham’s impact behind the scenes, that they might clap and wave just that little bit harder. Relatively few people see the Graham that so effortlessly elevates our good ideas (while tactfully squishing our bad ones), or the Graham that lets us disappear for days on end, no questions asked, when things go wrong at home. Or the Graham that always encourages us down the most honest, integrity-paved road through an industry that often isn’t just unconducive to the principles of good reporting, but actively hostile towards them.
We’ll be fine – he’s seen to that too. But when you think of Graham the writer and editor, know that you can also think of Graham the leader, Graham the shield, Graham the engine. Let’s thank him once again, for all that and more.
