Editing PC Zone (section)

==Evolution==
In its original incarnation, ''PC Zone'' recognised that its audience consisted largely of males in their late twenties and older, and adopted a tone suited to that audience. This was in contrast to contemporary multiformat and console magazines aimed at children and teenagers. During this period, the PC was not yet widely recognised as a games platform in the UK, an attitude PC Zone arguably helped to change by championing a succession of notable games such as ''[[Star Control II]]'', ''[[Star Wars: X-Wing (video game)|Star Wars: X-Wing]]'', ''[[Ultima Underworld]]'' and ''[[Doom (1993 video game)|Doom]]''.

By 1995, under the initial editorship of John Davison and then later Jeremy Wells (promoted from deputy editor with Davison moving on as publisher for the title), the magazine adopted a tone which heavily referenced [[lad culture]], which had been made fashionable by magazines such as ''[[FHM]], Loaded'' and Dennis Publishing stablemate ''[[Maxim (magazine)|Maxim]]''. This period was marked by several moderately controversial episodes, including the accidental inclusion of a pornographic ''[[Doom (1993 video game)|Doom]]'' modification on a cover-mounted CD-ROM, an article about the infamously bug-ridden [[First Encounters|Frontier 2: First Encounters]] illustrated with a large photograph of a piece of excrement wrapped with a bow, a joystick group test which featured a model dressed as a nun (testing each joystick for “phallusicity”), and a one-page comic by regular contributor [[Charlie Brooker]], graphically depicting animal cruelty (originally intended as a comment on the violence against animals frequently portrayed in the ''[[Tomb Raider]]'' games) which resulted in the offending issue being withdrawn from [[W H Smith|W&nbsp;H&nbsp;Smith]] newsagents.

Towards the end of the decade, during the editorship of long time contributor Chris Anderson, the magazine underwent another redesign and a stricter scoring methodology was introduced. For a twelve-month period, it was rare for a game to score above 90%, although this was later relaxed, resulting in controversial 94% and higher scores for ''[[Black & White (computer game)|Black & White]]'', ''[[Unreal II]]'' and others. It was around this time that the magazine retired the long-running Mr Cursor column, a series of humorous, quasi-autobiographical anecdotes written by a thinly-disguised Duncan MacDonald, originally intended to be a counterpoint to the jargon-heavy nature of much of the rest of the editorial.

Anderson was succeeded by Dave Woods. Most of the regular recurring features used in the current version of the magazine were introduced during this period, and Woods' final contribution was the redesign which marked the handover of the title to Future plc and the editorship to Jamie Sefton.