Born in Stirling, he moved to Bath in 1991 to work for computer magazine Amiga Power as a staff writer, where he gained attention for his video game reviews.
In 1988, Campbell won the UK National Computer Games Championship's ZX Spectrum category, having been a runner-up in the Scottish heats earlier that year.
Despite regularly professing his love for titles such as Rainbow Islands and Sensible Soccer, and compiling "top 100" lists, he is perhaps better known for his unreserved and often highly disparaging critiques.
He was also a resident gaming expert, alongside former Amiga Power colleague Dave Green, on the BBC technology television programme Don't Read the Manual[16] (presented by Lindsey Fallow[citation needed] and Rajesh Mirchandani), appearing[17] on most episodes of the show in 2001 and 2002.
He discussed his transition from journalist to game designer, and the difference he saw between the two professions: "The pace took some getting used to – compared to working on a magazine, development goes at a crawl...
In both cases you're a group of young men doing a fun creative job in a fairly small and close-knit team, and then going to the pub quite a lot.
You have to make a conscious effort to stay aware of the outside world, which is probably why [Cannon Fodder 2] is so full of cross-cultural references from music, movies, comics and the like.
"[23]Campbell was director of developer Herosoft, which in November 2010 launched "Free-App Hero", an aggregator application created to help consumers find the best free games available for iOS.
Campbell was a founding member of the campaigning group FairPlay,[29] which led a week-long boycott of videogame purchasing in late 2002, in protest at what it regarded as the artificially high prices of games.
[35] The campaign succeeded in having a warning from the Gaming Board of Great Britain (now the Gambling Commission) added to the front of all subsequent machines which exhibited this behaviour,[36] although it was unsuccessful in having the practice outlawed entirely.
[46] When Campbell was banned from Twitter in 2020, he said that it was an instance of "direct censorship" motivated by the platform's support for "controversial and massively unpopular trangender ideology.