Reset issue 1 carries Liam Wong’s game-trained eye

I missed publishing this one earlier this year and too bad. Reset, the print magazine launched this spring by Kepler Interactive—the publisher behind Sifu, Pacific Drive and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33—has already sold out its first issue at the publisher's own shop. Two hundred pages, three reverse-cover variants, £20 while it lasted. And somewhere inside, Liam Wong writes about the thing longtime readers of this site have suspected for a decade: the eye came from games first.

The announcement post puts it plainly—for issue 1, Wong reflects on an early immersion in video game culture and its foundational impact on the photographer's taste and visual style. We wrote about Wong back in 2016, when Ubisoft's then-graphic design director was shooting Tokyo at night in frames that read like lighting passes, and the argument then was to take the photographs on their own terms. Ten years on, Reset makes the stronger argument: there is no border left to police.

Directed by Simon Sweeney, Kepler's creative director, issue 1 reads games through architecture, fashion, music and art—Yoko Taro, Frictional Games' Thomas Grip, Read-Only Memory's Darren Wall, Sable's Gregorios Kythreotis and Cruelty Squad's Ville Kallio share the book with reverse covers devoted to Clair Obscur creative director Guillaume Broche, artist Mélanie Courtinat and fashion designer Yaku Stapleton. Fewer screenshots, more graphic systems; a games publisher spending real money on a design object about game culture.

I think sometimes there's a sense that there can only be one of these things. I remember when Amusement pursued a similar path back in 2008, so it's nice to see Reset along with Immersion (French only) make their way.