PC Zone, founded in 1993, was the first magazine dedicated to games for IBM-compatible personal computers to be published in the United Kingdom. Earlier PC magazines such as PC Leisure, PC Format and PC Plus had covered games but only as part of a wider remit. The precursor to PC Zone was the award-winning multiformat title Zero.

Early PC Zone’s single most inspired idea was to give Duncan MacDonald the task of writing a light-hearted back page column from the perspective of a PC gamer who wasn’t a brainiac PC buff. Entitled “Mr Cursor (He’s afraid of his PC)”, these columns rapidly deviated from talking about PCs and games, becoming a series of increasingly ...

Nov 13, 1999 · Mr. Cursor was the name of a column that appeared on the back page of PC Zone magazine (UK edition) from issues 1-54. Cursor was the alter-ego of the brilliant Duncan MacDonald, and was basically the archetypical PC newbie.

PC Zone Buyer's Guide - 7 pages (113-119) Mr Cursor - Page 122. Art Editor. Deputy Editor. Technical Editor. Production Editor. Designer. Contributors. Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted. This issue was cover dated April 1993 and sold for £3.95. It came with two free floppy disks.

The UK is being invaded by Japanese comic culture. Manga books and anime films have taken the country by storm and have become bywords for a level of violence and eroticism that used to be left on the cutting room floor. Is it art? Is it pornography? Is it about to change the face of PC games in a major way? Featuring Cobra Mission Reviews []

Nov 13, 1999 · He wrote the semi-anonymous, semi-autobiographical and semi-completely made up Mr. Cursor column which featured on the back page of PC Zone magazine for several years.

Po-faced complaints about Mr Cursor were a fairly regular occurrence, with one correspondent (Wordprocessor, Zone 25) deriding him as a “Timmy Mallet [sic] wannabe”.

Mr Cursor disappeared following Zone 54, while Patrick McCarthy and David McCandless had left by the end of the 90s. The Cursor page was replaced for a while by a column called Looking Back, in which various Zone staffers provided a running commentary on whatever had been happening in the office that month.

The second episode is dedicated to the late Duncan MacDonald, who sadly died in 2017. Duncan was a talented contributor to Zone’s review pages as well as providing regular back-page laughs as his alter-ego Mr. Cursor. Before that, he also entertained readers of Zone’s spiritual predecessors Your Sinclair and Zero.

Sep 29, 2020 · While Duncan forged a reputable career in games journalism after Your Sinclair, working at its spiritual successor, Zero, and PC Zone (most notably as ‘Mr. Cursor’), his first home is often his most fondly-remembered, especially when it came to a certain April fool joke.