Biography

If you were to ask Mathew Kumar to describe himself in a sentence, it’d probably be “The best damn games journalist in Canada.” Then he’d probably follow that up with “Well, probably the only games journalist in Canada, really.”

He’s selling himself short, though. Mathew has written about movies, music and more, depending on his whim, but it just happens to be his whim (and his greatest successes) has mostly been in the field of games journalism.

It wasn’t really meant to be this way. Born in Glasgow, Scotland (and fiercely proud), he graduated high school top of his class in computing. A degree from Glasgow University in software engineering beckoned with a cushy job sitting in a faceless cubicle programming faceless databases for a faceless corporation to follow. Only he realized he hated programming.

Why he dropped out and took a computer games technology course at another, far less well respected university we’ll never work out. It was only going to be more programming, wasn’t it?

Of course, it’s there that Mathew discovered his real love, which was less about coding and more about cussing other’s code. Starting with a summer job at games industry quality assurance firm Absolute Quality, where he learned how to play a game he hated for hundreds of hours and pull apart its every flaw for the inevitable bug reports, Mathew cultivated his ability to examine and critique video games. He began to write about them by covering the UK trade shows for Insert Credit, arguably the internet’s first new games journalism outlet.

(He’s still conflicted about that term.)

In 2005 Mathew made the move to Toronto, Canada, following his heart (or rather, a girl with a job that could support him) to sit in his place as “The best damn games journalist in Canada”, and branch out, covering film (including the Toronto International Film Festival) for Twitch Film and Torontoist, where he became Film Editor.

Since then he’s held a variety of positions within his freelance games journalist remit. While maintaining writing credit at Eurogamer, Edge and The Globe and Mail, Mathew has also served as editor of Think Services’ mobile games industry website Games On Deck, helped found the Independent Games Festival Mobile as content director of the inaugural event (and is performed a similar task for The Dobbs Challenge) and was recently promoted to contributing editor at Gamasutra.

Last Updated: July 23rd, 2008.

August 16th, 2006