#MediaMonday – Ryan “Mac” McCaffrey

Today’s Media Monday comes to us from the San Francisco Bay Area.  Ryan McCaffrey is a baseball fantasy camp player, a life-long gamer and multi-media guy.  He’s executive editor of Previews at @IGN, founder of NerdStyles.com and host of RIDE THE LIGHTNING: Tesla Motors’ Unofficial Podcast.  I was fortunate to be a teammate of Ryan’s, or “Mac” as we called him, during the recent Arizona Diamondbacks Fantasy Camp.  Among the highlights for our team was Mac’s bases-loaded triple into the left field corner in the top of the ninth inning to knock in the winning runs of our playoff game!
Ryan, time to share:
When people hear that I’m an editor at a video game website, they either don’t take me seriously or assume I play games all day. I wish that was true! Video games are a massive industry that continues to grow, and my IGN team and I take the coverage of them very seriously – though we are very fortunate to get to come to work every day and always have some new and exciting product to cover in some way. I grew up with the original Nintendo and was fortunate enough to combine my talent for writing with my penchant for video games and somehow, almost 15 years later, I still get to call this my career.
I graduated from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in 2002 after having mostly grown up in Arizona, and due to my career I’ve lived in the Bay Area ever since. I love living here, but my geographical location will never affect my affinity for Arizona sports teams, particularly my beloved Diamondbacks. I was there for the first-ever game on March 31, 1998, I was there for Game 1 of the World Series in 2001, and I’ve rooted them on from Chase Field (nee Bank One Ballpark), AT&T Park in San Francisco, and my own living room ever since.
Recently I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend Dbacks Fantasy Camp at Salt River Fields. I rubbed shoulders with Luis Gonzalez, Matt Williams, Mark Grace, Orlando Hudson, and best of all my incredibly fun, supportive, and fellow baseball-loving campers. I’m not sure I’ve ever made more friends in a single week, and getting to spend a week playing baseball instead of working was pretty nice too! 🙂
When I’m not watching the Dbacks or covering the video game industry, I’m covering the revolutionary American car company Tesla Motors on my weekly podcast called Ride the Lightning: Tesla Motors Unofficial Podcast. Elon Musk and the incredible Tesla team are always up to something new and interesting – 2017 in particular promises to be the year the first truly affordable long-range Tesla becomes available in the form of the Model 3 – so give it a listen if you’re curious!
You can also follow me Twitter.