Introducing Leroy King, Co-Editor

I’m glad to welcome Leroy King to Past Meets Pixel as Co-Editor.

Leroy recently completed an MA in Japanese Studies at SOAS University of London, where his work centred on historical videogames, Japanese history, cultural representation, and public history. He comes to the publication with a clear interest in the questions this project was built to ask: how games turn the past into something playable, and what that transformation does to the history it claims to represent.

That is the strand he will develop here. Expect close readings of individual games — how their mechanics, level design, and narrative choices work as interpretations of the past rather than backdrops to it; comparisons between historical sites and their playable reconstructions; reviews; and a sustained engagement with Japanese and East Asian material that Past Meets Pixel has only begun to explore. The existing work on preservation, archives, localisation, and cultural circulation sits squarely in his path, and there is plenty of room for it to grow.

Leroy will be writing original pieces, curating work that fits the publication’s concerns, and helping to shape where it goes next.

I’m looking forward to what he builds.

— Chris