About Mollie

Mollie has covered the world of video games in some capacity for over 30 years, which—at this point—is a huge chunk of her life. She started by making fanzines in junior high and high school, leading up to the publication of Digital Anime, a video game-focused zine that won numerous awards in the fan community and which was sold both at a local comic shop and via mail order. As well, Mollie was one of the main creators of Honor Students on Acid, an underground art and literature zine distributed for free around her home town of Omaha, Nebraska.

After high school, her work on Digital Anime lead her to a freelance position with Viz Media’s ill-fated GameOn! USA, where she both wrote reviews and launched a column to help promote the fanzines of other up and comers. That experience lead her to her first full-time position in games media at the legendary (and infamous) Die Hard GameFan, a publication she had loved since discovering it via its third issue.

Writing under the pseudonym of “shidoshi,” Mollie would be a part of GameFan until its final days 1999, working her way up from assisting with GameFan Online to fully writing, designing, and laying out her own previews and reviews in GameFan, as well as managing the magazine’s popular AnimeFan section. Having been a fan of Japanese anime and manga since her childhood days of watching programs such as Shogun Warriors Gaiking and Warriors of the Wind, and then becoming entrenched in the Western fan scenes in the early days of tape trading before the market took off in the States, Mollie had a long and rich history with the mediums to pull from in working on AnimeFan.

After her time at GameFan, Mollie would move to Japan to study at Momoyama Gakuin University in southern Osaka. There, she would not only improve her grip on the Japanese language, but deeper even further her understanding and knowledge of not only the Japanese gaming scene, but anime and manga as well. As well, her interests expanded into other aspects of Japanese culture as well, such as street fashion.

In 2005, Mollie reunited with some of her old GameFan colleagues when she joined Play magazine. There, she spearheaded the expansion of Play Online, including crafting a complete site redesign on her own. As well, she once again indulged her love for print by becoming a bigger part of the magazine side of the company, from heading up Play‘s handheld coverage, to assisting in the design of issues, to coming up with and creating print and digital marketing campaigns.

After Play‘s demise in 2010, Mollie would end up becoming a part of the other magazine she read religiously as a child, Electronic Gaming Monthly. She joined the staff less than a year after its relaunch, and would go on to become the magazine’s executive editor in 2013. As of 2024, Mollie still works with EGM Media on the production of Walmart Gamecenter among other projects.

Across her career, Mollie has clung fast to a number of lessons she learned early on, such as how it’s better to help readers find a great game they might otherwise miss than exert that effort into bashing bad games for attention, how it’s important to judge games on what they’re trying to be, not what they’re not, and how it’s important for video game critics to have at least some level of skill at any and every kind of game. While Mollie has been reviewing games for nearly her entire life, she’s especially passionate about interviewing the people who help bring those games to market. She has had the chance to sit down with names such as Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Shinji Mikami, Keiji Inafune, Donald Mustard, Trip Hawkins, and many more.

On a personal level, Mollie has been podcasting since 2006 through her self-launched network known as morning radio, and has hosted or co-hosted numerous shows over the years, including the legendary Warning! A Huge Podcast with her ex-GameFan friends Nick Des Barres and Casey Loe. She has worked on a long list of professional and personal design projects, and has won awards for work such as her design mock-up for new MacOS functionality. Mollie has also done much to help promote the concerns and issues of the LGBTQ+ community in video games, such as her hosting of various panels at PAX events as part of the transgender-focused group Press XY, and her discussions with numerous video game developers (including Capcom) on the inclusion and presentation of trans characters in gaming.

Mollie has also helped break ground for a number of aspects of gaming fandom. At GameFan Online, she was one of the first people to push for posting news throughout the day, versus waiting to have everything go up at one or two set times per day (as was the norm back then). She was the creator of Puristic Example, a website devoted to video game characters she loved that went on to become a template for numerous large character shrines in the earlier days of the internet. She was also the creator of The Velvet Room, the first English-language website in existence devoted to the Persona series (and one of the earliest English-language websites about Atlus’ Megami Tensei series period.) A website, by the way, that remains alive and viewable to this day. Later, she would go on to produce Play‘s cover story for Persona 4‘s North American release, which was notable as the final cover story to be produced by a Western media outlet for a PlayStation 2 title.

Most importantly, Mollie is a person with a wide variety of interest and talents in areas far beyond video games as well. She is a proud redhead, spouse to a loving wife, and mother to two beautiful twin daughters.