The Book Shelf – Page 2 – Video Game Canon

Guardian Faber Will Publish Keza MacDonald’s “Super Nintendo” in 2026

Keza MacDonald has been writing about video games for a long time. She is currently a Video Games Editor at The Guardian (as well as serving as the regular steward of their Pushing Buttons newsletter), and has previously written for Kotaku and IGN. MacDonald is also the co-author (with with Jason Killingsworth) of You Died: The Dark Souls Companion.

But for her next trick, she’ll be flying solo with Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun, a new book all about Nintendo and why the company is “the key to understanding video games and what they do for us”:

Super Nintendo explores the cultural and social impact of video games through the franchises of Nintendo; the Japanese company is universally regarded as being the most influential in the industry, having produced landmark series such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon.

Having exploded in popularity in recent years, video games are now the dominant cultural medium of the 21st century, adored by millions of people around the world. By telling the stories of these games – of those who made them and those who play them – MacDonald will provide readers with an unparalleled understanding of how and why Nintendo spreads the joy it does, revealing what our affection for games tells us about ourselves. In doing so, she speaks to that most human of desires: the desire to have fun.

MacDonald recently published a fantastic interview with Shigeru Miyamoto for The Guardian, so she’s clearly the right person for this topic.

Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun will be published in the UK by Guardian Faber in Spring 2026. A worldwide release will presumably follow.

“Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment” is Coming from Jason Schreier on October 8, 2024

After releasing Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made in 2017 and Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry in 2021, investigative journalist Jason Schreier is getting ready to publish his next deep dive into the development side of video games.

Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment will explore Blizzard’s founding and its early years creating classics like Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft. But it’ll also tackle the company’s more recent woes as corporate intrigue surrounded its Irvine campus in the wake of its merger with Activision, as well as an examination of the sexual misconduct and discrimination lawsuits levied against the company, and Blizzard’s eventual acquisition by Microsoft in 2023.

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David Craddock Will Explore the Many Ports of Doom for Boss Fight Books in “But Does It Run Doom?”

John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, and Sandy Petersen changed everything when they released Doom in 1993. It wasn’t the first first person shooter (nor was id Software’s earlier game, Wolfenstein 3D), but it defined what the genre would look like for years to come and led to a stampede of “Doom Clones” that continue to be produced to this very day.

Even after writing all that out, it’s still hard to believe… Doom is 30 years old.

David Craddock, the author behind Stairway to Badass: The Making and Remaking of Doom 2016 and Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters, recently moderated a discussion between Romero and Carmack that has been embedded above. The two developers touched on a lot of interesting topics as part of the anniversary celebration, and at the end, Craddock revealed that he’s cooking up another Doom-adjacent project for release in the not-too-distant future.

The author will work with Boss Fight Books to publish But Does It Run Doom?, an exploration of the many ports (both official and unofficial) that have been based on the seminal shooter. Here’s what he had to say about the new book, including a promise that it’ll also delve into some of the very weird machines Doom has appeared on…

These guys have graciously allowed me to insert a quick plug for a project I have coming out and it’s in the vein of what we’ve been talking about.

I’m partnering with Boss Fight Books to release a book called But Does It Run Doom? I’ll be writing about some of the conventional ports such as the Super Nintendo [and] PlayStation, but also some of the more out-of-leftfield ports such as on pregnancy tests, on the sheep in Minecraft…

So look for that on @BossFightBooks on Twitter [and] BossFightBooks.com. [They’ll] have information coming out.

This is somewhat of a departure for Book Fight Books, but hopefully that means they’ll have more to say about But Does It Run Doom? soon.

“Doom At 30” is a “Guide to Thirty Years of Ultra-Violence” from Marc Normandin and Trevor Strunk

Between David Kushner’s Masters of Doom, Dan Pinchbeck’s Doom: SCARYDARKFAST, and John Romero’s Doom Guy, a lot of words have been written about the development of Doom and its impact on the rest of the games industry. But you’ll definitely want to make room on your digital shelves for at least one more upcoming book about id Software’s masterpiece.

Doom At 30: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Three Decades of Ultra-Violence is the brainchild of Marc Normandin (Retro XP) and Trevor Strunk (No Cartridge), who have joined forces as No XP Publishing and gathered together more than a dozen writers to explore the franchise from every possible angle:

DOOM at 30: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Three Decades of Ultra-Violence will be a digital book, zine, whatever you want to call it, that takes a deep and complete look at the 30 years of the franchise. It will include reviews and discussions of every DOOM game — including the ones once thought lost to time, as well as modern add-on episodes like John Romero’s Sigil — the DOOM movies, and an array of features diving in from all angles. The tech, the WADs, the mods, the violence, the terror, its place in various genre canons, and, of course, DOOM 3 opinions. Many, many DOOM 3 opinions. DOOM at 30 might be unofficial and unauthorized, but we want it to be the definitive look back at the franchise’s first 30 years all the same, which is why there’s even more than what’s listed above planned.

The duo is currently seeking funding to publish Doom At 30 through Kickstarter. In addition to the various reward tiers, they’ve also shared who’ll be joining them on this project, and the list includes more than a few names that should be familiar to fans of video game history: Demetrius Bell, Madeline ‘Mads’ Blondeau, Kerry Brunskill, LaToya Ferguson, Elijah Gonzalez, Brendan Hesse, Sorrel Kerr-Jung, Cameron Kunzelman, Liz Ryerson, Colin Spacetwinks, Jackson Tyler, and Carli Velocci.

If you want to get am idea of what Doom At 30 will offer, Normandin recently published several bonus articles that look at how John Carmack and John Romero built their groundbreaking 3D tech and the expanded universe of mods that have arrived in Doom‘s wake.

He talked briefly about id Software’s early experiments in the first person shooter genre (including Hovertank 3D, Catacombs 3D, and Wolfenstein 3D) at RetroXP. And over at Astrolabe, he examined some of the fan-made mods that have emerged over the last 30 years, including Romero’s unofficial fifth episode, Sigil.

The Kickstarter campaign for Doom At 30 will end on Wednesday, September 20.

UPDATE (9/21/23): Doom At 30 was unable to reach its funding goal, but Normandin wrote on Bluesky that he’ll “think up something else to make it happen down the road”.

Stuart Gipp’s “All Games Are Good” is Now Available to Assure Us That There Are No Bad Games

It shouldn’t be surprising, but you’ll see a lot of the same titles if you peruse the Best Games lists that make up the Video Game Canon. Obviously great games like Tetris and Half-Life 2 and Resident Evil 4 and many others have served the listmakers well across the decades.

With more than 1,400 games included in the aggregate list, there’s also a massive buffet of good games to play, along with plenty of forgotten corners to explore. And though it might be hard to believe, some of the titles you’ll found on the Video Game Canon (like Atari’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial at #539) are thought of as bad games by a not-insignificant number of people.

But does it have to be that way?

Stuart Gipp, a writer who makes his home at Retronauts and Merry Hell, has written an entire book to let the world know that All Games Are Good. And as a fan of more than a few of those bad games, I have to admit, he’s probably right…

What makes a game good? A compelling storyline, perhaps. Intuitive, responsive controls are a stand-out quality. But now (at last!) one man dares to stand up and speak truth to power – all he wants is to jump on frogs and collect colourful fruit.

This edifying, entertaining and occasionally emotional rummage through a lifetime spent playing all the wrong games should last the test of time as a under-appreciated and over-criticised chronicle of the games that nobody else writes about.

Open your heart, eyes, mind and wallet, and you too will understand that All Games Are Good.

All Games Are Good features Gipp’s completely honest thoughts about more than 200 games that were “woefully under-appreciated, over-criticized, or simply forgotten” in their time. He’s got a lot to say, and this weighty tome is now available from Press Run, the book publishing arm of Limited Run Games.

“The Greatest Games: The 93 Best Computer Games of All Time” is a Best Games List from 1985

More than 70 Best Games lists have been used to create the Video Game Canon’s Top 1000 (with the oldest going all the way back to 1995). But did you know that an even earlier generation of writers were compiling notable lists in the 1980s?

It’s true. People were already having fierce debates about which games should be considered the Best Games of All Time, even though we were just a decade removed from the launch of Computer Space.

Dan Gutman and Shay Addams, the editors of Computer Games magazine, were two writers who wanted to try their hand at creating just such a list. Branching out from their day jobs, the pair took their gaming expertise to Compute! Books, who agreed to publish The Greatest Games: The 93 Best Computer Games of All Time in January 1985.

The Greatest Games first appeared in bookstores during a very strange time for the industry. This was just after “The Great Video Game Crash” of 1983 marked the end of the line for the Atari 2600. But it was also a time when players were migrating over to a growing number of different computer platforms (especially outside the United States). You also have to remember what was still to come, as the book was published before Street Fighter II revitalized the arcade scene, before Tetris escaped the USSR, and before the NES changed everything.

So what were a couple of video game experts talking about as the best games ever in the 1980s?

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Boss Fight Books: Season 6 Will Include “PaRappa the Rapper,” “Animal Crossing,” “Minesweeper,” and “Day of the Tentacle”

The team at Boss Fight Books has returned from a short hiatus with the sixth season of their documentary-style books about classic video games. The season’s theme is “Here to Play,” and publisher Gabe Durham has promised that this set of titles will explore the “fun, playful, and goofy” side of video games.

Boss Fight Books: Season 6 is currently seeking funding through Kickstarter (until Tuesday, March 7), and it’ll include PaRappa the Rapper by Mike Sholars, Animal Crossing by Kelsey Lewin, Minesweeper by Kyle Orland and Day of the Tentacle by Bob Mackey. All of these authors will be making their Boss Fight Books debut during this season, but each one is also a crafty veteran of the game history game.

Mike Sholars has previously worked as an editor for Boss Fight Books. PaRappa the Rapper will be available as an ebook in April 2023 with the paperback scheduled to follow a few months later.

Kyle Orland has served as the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012. Minesweeper will plant a flag in your ebook library in May 2023 before the paperback is released this Summer.

Bob Mackey is a co-founder, co-host, and podcast producer for the Retronauts network. Day of the Tentacle will invade bookstores as an ebook in August 2023 and in paperback a month later.

And Kelsey Lewin is the Co-Director of the Video Game History Foundation and co-host of the Video Game History Hour podcast. Animal Crossing will close out Season 6 as an ebook in November 2023 and in paperback a month later.

You can learn more about all four books after the break. And be sure to read a trio of excerpts from Minesweeper at Ars Technica, Kotaku, and GamesIndustry.biz.

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Jordan Minor’s “Video Game of the Year” Will Feature “The Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games” from 1977-2022 When it Releases in July 2023

PC Magazine’s Jordan Minor will publish his first book in 2023, and for the subject of this tome, the journalist has zeroed in one that’s very near and dear to my heart.

In Video Game of the Year, Minor will sort through thousands of titles in his quest to compile… and here comes the subtitle… A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977.

Minor, along with a small army of contributors (including Jason Schreier, Rebekah Valentine, and others), will choose the defining game from each year and explore how they “captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed” through a series of essays:

Pong. The Legend of Zelda. Final Fantasy VII. Rock Band. Fortnite. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For each of the 40 years of video game history, there is a defining game, a game that captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed. Through a series of entertaining, informative, and opinionated critical essays, author and tech journalist Jordan Minor investigates, in chronological order, the innovative, genre-bending, and earth-shattering games from 1977 through 2022. Minor explores development stories, critical reception, and legacy, and also looks at how gaming intersects with and eventually influences society at large while reveling in how uniquely and delightfully bizarre even the most famous games tend to be.

From portly plumbers to armor-clad space marines and the speedy rodents in between, Video Game of the Year paints individual portraits that, as a whole, give readers a stronger appreciation for the vibrant variety and long-lasting impact of this fresh, exciting, and massively popular art form. Illustrated throughout with retro-inspired imagery and featuring contributions from dozens of leading industry voices, including New York Times bestselling author Jason Schreier (Blood, Sweat, and Pixels; Kotaku), Max Scoville (IGN), Rebekah Valentine (IGN), Blessing Adeoye Jr. (Kinda Funny), and Devindra Hardawar (Engadget), this year-by-year anthology is a loving reflection on the world’s most popular art form.

Video Game of the Year will be published by Abrams in paperback and all ebook formats on July 11, 2023.

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Cliff Bleszinski Takes Readers Behind the Chainsaw in “Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games”

Whether you know him as CliffyB, Dude Huge, or The Guy Who Made Gears of War, game developer Cliff Bleszinski just added another title to his long list of monikers… Memoirist.

Bleszinski has been promising for years to pen a book about his life in game development, and it finally became a reality earlier this week with the release of Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games. Published by Simon & Schuster, Bleszinski’s memoir will chart his career from teenage programmer through his post-Epic projects, as well as include his thoughts on the games industry of today:

Video games are dominating the planet. In 2020, they brought in $180 billion dollars globally—nearly $34 billion in the United States alone. So who are the brilliant designers who create these stunning virtual worlds? Cliff Bleszinski—or CliffyB as he is known to gamers—is one of the few who’ve reached mythical, rock star status. In Control Freak, he gives an unvarnished, all-access tour of the business.

Toiling away in his bedroom, Bleszinski created and shipped his first game before graduating high school, and at just seventeen joined a fledgling company called Epic Games. He describes the grueling hours, obscene amounts of Mountain Dew and obsessive focus necessary to achieve his singular creative visions. He details Epic’s rise to industry leader, thanks largely to his work on bestselling franchises Unreal and Gears of War (and, later, his input on a little game called Fortnite), as well as his own awkward ascent from shy, acne-riddled introvert to sports car-driving celebrity rubbing shoulders with Bill Gates. As he writes, “No one is weirder than a nerd with money.” While the book is laced with such self-deprecating humor, Bleszinski also bluntly addresses the challenges that have long-faced the gaming community, including sexism and a lack of representation among both designers and the characters they create.

Control Freak is a hilarious, thoughtful, and inspiring memoir. Even if you don’t play games, you’ll walk away from this book recognizing them as a true art form and appreciating the genius of their creators.

Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games is now available in stores.

UPDATE (12/9/22): Literary Hub recently shared an excerpt from Control Freak about Bleszinski’s quest to climb the leaderboard in Super Mario Bros.

Press Run, a New Book Publishing Imprint, Launched by Limited Run Games

“Forever Physical” is the rallying cry of Limited Run Games, and the boutique publisher has done to their best to live up to those words over the last seven years, publishing hundreds of physical games across more than a dozen platforms.

Limited Run also recently invited several prominent game historians to their headquarters to create bonus material for some of their upcoming releases, as well as work on other projects. We got a look at one of those mystery projects last week, when the company announced that they’re expanding their already-pretty-massive operation with the launch of a new book publishing imprint.

Known as Press Run, the imprint will focus on “good reads for gamers” and it’ll be led by Jeremy Parish (the creator of Retronauts and the Video Works series) and Jared Petty (an IGN alum who also hosts the Top 100 Games Podcast).

“Readers searching for meaningful, informed, and entertaining stories by great writers will find a lot to love in Press Run books,” said Press Run Senior Editor and Project Manager Jared Petty. “We’re helping authors share their passion for games with larger audiences… it’s a thrill to get up every day and be a small part of that process.”

“Our long-term goal with Press Run is to create an ever-growing library of great books covering a wide array of topics, across a variety of formats and styles by a diverse lineup of authors,” said Press Run Media Curator Jeremy Parish. “Press Run will exist to keep great books in circulation for as long as people want to have them.”

Parish had even more to say about this mission in a lengthy blog post published on LimitedRunGames.com.

The first batch of titles from Press Run will include…

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