Polygon Exit Interview: Matthew Reynolds, Deputy Editor for guides and services

Welcome to Polygon Exit Interviews, a series of chats with my excellent former Polygon employees who were laid off (along with me) when Valnet purchased the website from Vox Media May 1. We’re talking about how these talented people got to Polygon, what they did in their time there, and what they hope is next.

Next up: Matthew Reynolds, who was Polygon’s Deputy Editor for guides and services. Previously with Eurogamer and Digital Spy, Reynolds is an experienced games writer and editor who recently launched One More Catch, a publication dedicated to covering Pokémon.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your pre-Polygon background.

I entered games media straight out of university, where I was sort of the games editor of the student paper. I've read games magazines since I was a kid, and just loved the idea of trying to get into games writing and being part of the industry.

I joined entertainment website Digital Spy fairly soon after uni, and I was on their games team. But I also dabbled in other areas – production work in the evenings, helping out with image editing, and I helped out with Big Brother, the reality show, which was huge in the UK at the time. I did shift work overnight, watching the live feed and writing notes of what everyone was doing, which didn't sound terribly relevant [to what I wanted to do], but actually a lot of the games work I went on to do was fast-paced blogging stuff, so it ended up being really good experience. 

Eventually I became the sort of games editor there. I moved to London and the office in Soho, and I just remember having a huge appetite to grow the section and the reputation of the site for games. I found that really satisfying, and I learned a lot. Then I had a brief stint at Hello Games for about six months or so, and then I joined Eurogamer as the guides editor. I was a huge fan of the site. I'd read it for years, and I'd written guides as a teenager for GameFAQs for free. I really just enjoyed it. The combination of working for a site I was really in awe of and also doing guides work made it a bit of a dream job, really. I had a lot of fun there. And after six or so years there, across the pandemic as well, I joined Polygon, and I was there for about two and a bit years.

What do you remember about first joining Polygon?

I remember the site being really healthy culturally. I'd always worked hybrid to a degree, but never fully remote. I'm based in the UK, and Polygon is a primarily North American website. How they figured out how to make everyone work together remotely in an asynchronous way was just really, really great to see. And the initiatives like Donuts [a bot that paired random co-workers for quick chats] – I'm sure you and I did a few Donuts over our time there. Basically a chinwag over a coffee every few weeks with people, and they did monthly meetings where they had work anniversaries. So that was a huge thing that just made a big impression, as well as just a really respectful work-life balance. 

From the outset of interviews, being in the UK, one of my questions was Do I need to work US hours? From the outset they said that would never be the case, but you always had in the back of your mind like, Well, I’ll have to. But no, I stuck to my hours, and they were really respectful. I had a kid soon after joining, about six, seven months later. And it helped that a lot of the staff had kids themselves and were parents, and so they understood. That was a real positive thing. 

But as for the site itself, everyone was just super smart, super on top of things. It was great to work with a guides team that had loads of experience. I was working with people who'd done this sort of thing for years. My position was to oversee the team and get them working closer together and moving in the same direction. Everyone was working quite siloed, individually, on their own games. As a result of that, there was a lot of pressure on individual shoulders. My goal really was to make sure there were few bottlenecks and that the load was lightened on people's shoulders individually.

Can you run me through your history at Polygon – what roles you had, and what each entailed?

I was the deputy editor for guides and service, overseeing that team. My focus was on guides – not only just big new releases, but also live service projects. As you can imagine, that was in full swing by the time I joined. So it was getting our head around how to juggle both new releases and live service projects, as well looking at legacy traffic. One of the benefits of guides, just from a business perspective, is you work on something and it ideally has a huge launch. But also, there's a tail of traffic that can last weeks, months, years. The challenge is, you've got years of projects that you've published, and you want to make sure they are ranking well [on search engines], and importantly that they’ve got the most up to date information. A lot of my role was to think about how we actually approach that. How do we actually get people on the right project at the right time to update things? That was something that I was keen to chip away at, and I think we did make inroads.

Brag about yourself: what’s one thing you’re proud of from your time at Polygon?

It was the huge game releases that we covered comprehensively on guides. The first one for me was Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. I joined around January 2023, that was out in May. That was just this huge thing looming on the horizon ever since I started. Part of my role was to figure out how to cover it as quickly as possible, as comprehensively as possible. It was a huge success in terms of volume and traffic, and also the speed we got things out, and that we were able to get everyone from the site to contribute as well.

We were also figuring out how to change the way we work, to spread the load. We had a limited amount of codes [to play the game], so we had the guides writers record footage of them playing it and share it amongst the team to write it. We tracked discoveries in documents and spreadsheets, monitoring all the work and what the priorities were. Even though that was a success in many ways, it was also hugely challenging, and, I think, quite messy and quite stressful, to no fault of the writers or editors. I think that was on me, in terms of just not knowing the team fully yet, or the working culture. So it meant there were a few bottlenecks and people overworked and quite stressed and so on. So even though I was enormously proud of it, and I think everyone who worked on it would also say the same, it was quite tough, I think especially on the guides writers who were playing the game and feeding that information out. 

We worked on a similar project a year later, for the Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree. We took a lot of those learnings and we worked out what worked, what didn't, and it was just so much more efficient, even though there was a lot to cover as well. It was really satisfying to have that. Tears was quite a stressful thing for a lot of people, but Elden Ring’s DLC just went a lot more straightforwardly. I don't think we had just as much success, but it also just went a lot better for everyone. That comes with experience of working in the industry after a certain amount years. You will have another go at this, and you will just apply the lessons you've learned to next time. It’s always difficult, every project is different, and there's different stresses, but things become clearer, and that's just really beneficial.

Do you have a favorite Polygon story or video by someone else?

As you can tell, I'm very project-minded, so I was very always in awe of the theme weeks that used to run on the site. They were put together primarily by the games team and Matt Leone, and they had just amazing, fun, smart articles and often very beautiful artwork, which I was always just in awe of. My favorite was Retreat Week, because it had these lovely lead art images of a tropical island that was made out of clay. I also really enjoyed the video team’s marathon streams that they did, Polygonathon, especially when they went overnight into the UK time zone, and they'd become slightly unhinged in the early hours of the morning as the sleep deprivation kicked in. I was always privy to that in my time zone, so that was quite fun. 

And also, it's not really what you're asking, but a shout to those in the management team, especially my boss Chelsea Stark, who did a lot of behind the scenes work that wasn't reflected on the website, but was hugely important in keeping things running and keeping morale high. 

What’s next for you?

My main focus at the minute is my own publication called One More Catch. It’s a website that is covering Pokémon Go and the next generation of Pokémon games. I’ve covered Pokémon Go since the very beginning, and I’ve done guides on just about every element of the game over the years. It’s a game that I've just really enjoyed reporting on over the years in very various different ways, both at Eurogamer and later at Polygon. I felt a bit adrift, really, when I left Polygon, because it was a game I'd covered for close to a decade and wasn't able to anymore. So I wanted to make a destination where I could continue that. 

If you know Pokémon Go, it’s become a very busy game. There’s events all over the place. Every day there’s something different and a different focus. There's just a lot to be aware of, and I wanted a newsletter that basically told people how to keep on top of that and know what the priorities are each week, but also do some reporting, and do some features and deep dives into both the game and also the wider world of Pokémon.

What do you think has kept you coming back to Pokémon Go for nearly 10 years of coverage?

I think it’s two elements. I really enjoy Pokémon, it’s a series I find hugely fascinating. It’s got a long history and all these different elements to it, primarily the Pokémon themselves, and it just keeps going on and on and on. I’m also someone who is really fascinated by live service games. I’ve covered a lot of them over the years, and Pokémon Go is a really interesting one in that most have resets or have changed the way they work, whereas Pokémon is fairly static in the sense that the locations are real world locations. It’s basically the same game it’s always been, and that’s rare for any live service game. It builds upon itself, but your neighborhood is the same, the cities you visit are the same. It’s adding layers on top of that – new locations to interact with, new battle mechanics, and so on. It’s done a really good job of layering on those things smartly.

I think the challenge it’s currently facing is there are actually probably too many things to keep on top of and be aware of. That’s a challenge they’ve been aware of, and working out how to bring lapsed players back in, especially with the 10th anniversary coming up. 

They've done really well at capturing the elements of Pokémon that make it Pokémon, like trading and battling and working with trainers. A lot of people have said over the years that they want a Pokémon MMO, and this is actually it, when you look at it. It is the realization of that, but layered into real world locations.

Where did your interest in Pokémon start?

It was when I was a young teenager. That's when the original Gen 1 Game Boy games came out. I picked up Pokémon Red. I remember playing it a lot on my 90-minute bus commute to get to school. Even after the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance had come out, I was still with this old, chunky, monochrome Game Boy, just grinding the Elite Four over and over, powering up my Venusaur and getting all 151 Pokemon. One of my classmates had a Mew and was able to give it to me. One of my great regrets is I got bored one day, and I cleared the save, started over again, but only got as far as two gyms in, and just never got back up to that point. So I could have had a save file with all those memories on, and I'd love to just be able to plug that original save in and see it all, but obviously I just deleted it.

Back then, it was a lot harder to get the trades for certain evolution. You had to work really hard. I also remember I had an Official Nintendo Magazine. That was like my Bible, the Pokédex entries on the right side of the page and the walkthroughs with beautiful maps. I think that probably also was subtly an influence in terms of my future in guides. I wanted to make guides like this and guide people through it.

Time for some rapid-fire questions. Favorite Pokémon game?

It probably would be Pokémon Go at this point.

Favorite Pokémon non-game media?

I used to watch the anime when it was playing back in the ‘90s. I never really got into the card games. I did have an original Charizard trading card. I sold it for 4 pounds at my local game shop. And I dread to think how much that'd be worth today.  But really, sort of very on-brand for me, it’s Pokémon Amiibo. I've got a giant Detective Pikachu. I've got the Mewtwo as well. I'm a sucker for Amiibo, and the Pokémon ones are amongst my favorites.

Favorite Pokémon?

They're all boring Kanto ones. I'd say a top three of Bulbasaur – just my OG starter – Gengar, and Snorlax.

Favorite Pokémon Go catch?

I've got a few unusual ones I really like. I went to the first GO Fest. As a sort of apology, thank you sort of thing for attending, they gave everyone a Lugia for free. It’s technically a costume Pokémon in the way it's kind of regarded on the back end, and there's no other way to get it. The game has grown much since then, so it's extremely rare. 

One of the things I like with Pokémon Go is going on holiday and going to unusual locations. I've got loads over the years. I went to Paris last year for the Go Fest there, and I got a few cool background ones that are shiny as well. You can leave Pokémon in gyms, and they defend the gym, and accrue coins. But I went to the Azores in, I think it was February 2020, and left a Pokémon on top of a mountain. Then the pandemic happened, and it was trapped there for months and months. Just the idea that it was trapped halfway around the world and couldn't go anywhere felt very symbolic of where we were at. It did come back eventually, but it took a while.

Where can people follow you and your work?

Onemorecatch.site, and you can find me on BlueSky.

Matthew Reynolds recommends: Blue Prince and Dept. Q

The very obvious one, especially now it’s on Switch, is Blue Prince. I was obsessed with that game when it came out, a really good mix of the roguelike and puzzle elements that I just really, really enjoyed.

I also fairly recently watched Dept. Q on Netflix. That’s a bleak crime drama, which is a very popular genre in the UK. It’s a really smartly written, well directed show with very interesting characters that often play against type for these sorts of shows. I absolutely adored it, I went through it in a very short amount of time. It’s quite bleak, but also quite funny.