We work from a room on the first floor of the Toffee Factory, a Victorian building beside the Ouseburn in Newcastle upon Tyne that used to make sweets and now holds a couple of dozen small studios. None of us does this full time. Between the six of us there are two teaching jobs, a rail-industry day job, a part-time bookshop shift and one person still finishing a degree.
Four of us met in a pub argument about a strategy game that everyone had reviewed warmly and that all four of us thought fell apart after twenty hours. The argument was not really about the game. It was about the fact that nobody's review had said anything about the twenty-hour mark, because nobody had been given three weeks to reach it.
We started writing in February 2025 with no plan beyond spending longer with games than a release schedule allows. The first attempt, published that April, was a nine-thousand-word account of a strategy game that read like a diary and helped nobody. We withdrew it four months later and replaced it with a note explaining why, which remains the most-read page on the site.
Two more people joined during that first year: one because we needed someone who could actually assess a flight model, and one because our access scoring was being done by people who did not need any of the provisions they were scoring.
Fig. C — The wall. One card per published teardown, removed only when an amendment closes it.
A signalling engineer on the rail network by day, which is why the transit builder teardown reads the way it does. Marged wrote the junction analysis that most readers arrived through, and is the person who insists that a stability figure comes from the weakest supported machine rather than the fastest available one. She also maintains the procedure sheet and refuses to let anyone amend it quietly.
Teaches secondary school computing in Byker and has an unusual patience for systems that keep hidden state. Iona spent a fortnight trying to break the guard memory list in our stealth teardown and documented every failed attempt, which is why that piece runs to five thousand words. She wrote the adventure teardown as well and argued hardest for its access figure, against two colleagues who thought it was too harsh.
Works part time in a bookshop on Grainger Street and spends an unreasonable amount of time in spreadsheets working out how quickly a game hands out capability. The eleven per cent figure in our tactics teardown is his, derived from forty-six hours of logged upgrades, and he will explain the methodology at length to anyone who asks. He is also the person most likely to argue for a lower endurance bar.
Flew gliders for eleven years out of a field in Northumberland and joined because none of the rest of us could tell a good flight model from a convincing one. Hal wrote the flight sim teardown, defended its access score of twenty-nine through a long and public disagreement with a reader in Cardiff, and then rewrote how we describe access sections as a result of that exchange.
Finishing a physics degree and the person who logged seventy-four hours in a roguelike so that the rest of us did not have to. Priya uses a modified controller and checks every game on the bench against the six access criteria before that bar is set. She is the reason we stopped accepting an easy mode as an accessibility provision, an argument she won in a single afternoon.
Teaches adult education classes in Wallsend and wrote the survival teardown that carries our only structurally unsound mark to date. Callum keeps the amendment log, which means he is the person who has to write down every occasion on which one of us got something wrong. He describes this as the least popular job on the bench and has declined three offers to hand it over.
The honest answer is that it barely is. The desk rent, the domain, the hosting and most of the games are paid for out of six pockets, split evenly at the end of each month. Nobody draws anything. If a teardown costs sixty hours of someone's evenings and weekends, that time is a donation to an argument we care about.
This has consequences you should know about. It means we publish three teardowns a month rather than twelve, because that is what six part-time people can do properly. It means we cover fewer major releases than we would like, because a forty-pound game is a real decision when it comes out of your own account. And it means we occasionally cover a small release with almost no audience, because at that price the risk is affordable and the systems are sometimes more interesting.
We have been approached twice about sponsored coverage and declined both times. Neither approach was returned to. We do not run a membership scheme, a tip jar or a subscription, mostly because none of us wants to be in the position of owing readers a fixed number of words per month.
If you want to support the desk, the useful thing is not money. It is a letter telling us where a teardown was wrong, or which system we failed to notice. Six of the seven pieces on this site were improved by correspondence, and four of the six entries in the amendment log came from readers rather than from us.
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