The Book Shelf – Page 2 – Video Game Canon

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…

[Continue Reading…]

Masters of Doom’s David Kushner is Back With “Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game”

After battling imps and cacodemons on the surface of Mars and confronting gangsters on the streets of Liberty City, David Kushner is ready for his greatest challenge… two paddles and a small dot that represents the ball.

That’s right, the latest book from the author of Masters of Doom and Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto is all about Pong.

Unlike those earlier stories, Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game is presented as a graphic history as it details the epic feud that flared up between Ralph Baer, the creator of the Magnavox Odyssey and the “Father of the Video Game,” and Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari:

A deep, nostalgic dive into the advent of gaming, Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master returns us to the emerging culture of Silicon Valley. At the center of this graphic history, dynamically drawn in colors inspired by old computer screens, is the epic feud that raged between Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and inventor Ralph Baer for the title of “Father of the Video Game.”

While Baer, a Jewish immigrant whose family fled Germany for America, developed the first TV video-game console and ping-pong game in the 1960s, Bushnell, a self-taught whiz kid from Utah, put out Atari’s pioneering table-tennis arcade game, Pong, in 1972. Thus, a prolonged battle began over who truly spearheaded the multibillion-dollar gaming industry, and around it a sweeping narrative about invention, inspiration, and the seeds of digital revolution.

Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game was illustrated by Kushner’s constant collaborator, Koren Shadmi, and the graphic history was published by Bold Type Books. It’s now available in stores as a paperback or an ebook.

Boss Fight Books Will Publish “GoldenEye 007” as a Paperback and Expanded Hardcover in 2022

Boss Fight Books will return.

The publisher isn’t quite ready to unveil the titles from the sixth season of their long-running series, but we did recently get our first look at an upcoming one-off… GoldenEye 007 by Alyse Knorr.

Boss Fight Books is currently seeking funding for GoldenEye 007 through Kickstarter, though they’ve already surpassed their initial goal at the time of this writing. Similar in structure to the books for NBA Jam and Shovel Knight before it, this entry in the series will explore the full scope of GoldenEye 007‘s creation through extensive interviews with the development team at Rare, as well as additional commentary from experts and fans:

Bond—James Bond. In the 80s and 90s, the debonair superspy’s games failed to live up to the giddy thrills of his films. That all changed when British studio Rare unleashed GoldenEye 007 in 1997. In basements and college dorms across the world, friends bumped shoulders while shooting, knifing, exploding, and slapping each other’s digital faces in the Nintendo 64 game that would redefine the modern first-person shooter genre and become the most badass party game of its generation.

But GoldenEye’s success was far from a sure thing. For years of development, GoldenEye’s team of rookie developers were shooting in the dark with no sense of what the N64 or its controller would be like, and the game’s relentless violence horrified higher-ups at squeaky clean Nintendo. As development lagged far behind the debut of the tie-in film GoldenEye, the game nearly came out an entire Bond movie too late.

Through extensive interviews with GoldenEye’s creators, writer and scholar Alyse Knorr traces the story of how this unlikely licensed game reinvigorated a franchise and a genre. Learn all the stories behind how this iconic title was developed, and why GoldenEye 007 has continued to kick the living daylights out of every other Bond game since.

In a first for the publisher, GoldenEye 007 will be released as an ebook, a paperback, and a deluxe hardcover. The deluxe hardcover will include a redesigned cover, an extra chapter about the game’s sound effects and music, and additional pages dedicated to design documents and photos from the developers.

The ebook edition of GoldenEye 007 will be available in July 2022, shortly after the conclusion of the Kickstarter campaign. Paperback copies will follow in September and the deluxe hardcover edition will arrive in December.

UPDATE (7/7/22): Ars Technica has published an excerpt from GoldenEye 007 that focuses on the game design philosophy of the development team and the unlikely inspiration for the objective-based missions.

Aidan Moher’s “Fight, Magic, Items” Will Tell the Story of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Other JRPGs in October 2022

The global recognition of the Japanese RPG can be placed squarely at the feet of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, which launched outside of Japan within 12 months of each other in 1989-1990. But interestingly, the genre itself goes back much further than you might realize, and you’d need to take a detour that goes through Sir-Tech’s Wizardry, Koei’s Dragon and Princess, and Tetris to get the full picture.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Aidan Moher, a freelance writer with bylines across the Internet, is quite familiar with how the latter three add spice to the story, but we know for sure that The Big Two will be a major focus of Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West, his upcoming history of the genre.

In addition to behind-the-scenes details about the development of those two franchises (as well as Phantasy Star, Chrono Trigger, and Kingdom Hearts), Moher has also conducted new interviews with some of the biggest players in the JRPG space:

The Japanese roleplaying game (JRPG) genre is one that is known for bold, unforgettable characters; rich stories, and some of the most iconic and beloved games in the industry. Inspired by early western RPGs and introducing technology and artistic styles that pushed the boundaries of what video games could be, this genre is responsible for creating some of the most complex, bold, and beloved games in history—and it has the fanbase to prove it. In Fight, Magic, Items, Aidan Moher guides readers through the fascinating history of JRPGs, exploring the technical challenges, distinct narrative and artistic visions, and creative rivalries that fueled the creation of countless iconic games and their quest to become the best, not only in Japan, but in North America, too.

Moher starts with the origin stories of two classic Nintendo titles, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and immerses readers in the world of JRPGs, following the interconnected history from through the lens of their creators and their stories full of hope, risk, and pixels, from the tiny teams and almost impossible schedules that built the foundations of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest franchises; Reiko Kodama pushing the narrative and genre boundaries with Phantasy Star; the unexpected team up between Horii and Sakaguchi to create Chrono Trigger; or the unique mashup of classic Disney with Final Fantasy coolness in Kingdom Hearts. Filled with firsthand interviews and behind-the-scenes looks into the development, reception, and influence of JRPGs, Fight, Magic, Items captures the evolution of the genre and why it continues to grab us, decades after those first iconic pixelated games released.

Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West will be released by Running Press on October 4.

UPDATE (9/10/22): An excerpt from Fight, Magic, Items all about the shadow that Final Fantasy VII continues to cast across the entire gaming landscape can be found at Gizmodo.

UPDATE (11/9/22): Just ahead of the launch of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, a new excerpt from Fight, Magic, Items about the rise of “Pokemania” was recently published by Engadget.

Daniel Dockery’s “Monster Kids” Could be the Definitive History of Pokemon When its Released in October 2022

Even though the franchise has flourished for more than 20 years, there’s never been a definitive history written about Pokemon. Daniel Dockery, an entertainment writer who got his start at Cracked, is hoping to change that this October with the release of Monster Kids: How Pokemon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All.

In addition to delivering an electrifying portrait of Pikachu, Dockery will examine the developers behind Pokemon, the fans who grew up playing it, and the slew of imitators (including Digimon, Cardcaptors, and Yu-Gi-Oh!) that popped up in its wake:

More than just a simple journey through the history of Pokémon, Daniel Dockery offers an in-depth look at the franchise’s many branches of impact and influence. With dozens of firsthand interviews, Monster Kids covers its beginnings as a Japanese video game created to recapture one man’s love of bug-collecting as a child before diving into the decisions and conditions that would ultimately lead to that game’s global domination. With its continued growth as television shows, spin-off video games, blockbuster movies, trading cards, and toys, Pokémon is a unique and special brand that manages to continue to capture the attention and adoration of its eager fanbase 25 years after its initial release.

Monster Kids: How Pokemon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All will be released by Running Press on October 4.

UPDATE (10/22/22): Monster Kids is now available in stores, and Dockery recently shared an excerpt with Polygon about Pokemon‘s American debut to celebrate.

John Romero Will Tell His Life Story in 2023 in “Doom Guy: Life in First Person”

John Romero’s about to make you… listen to his life story.

One of gaming’s most flamboyant personalities emerged in the early 1990s as one of the first “rock star” game developers after co-creating Doom with John Carmack and id Software. He’ll explore those early adventures in a new autobiography, which will be published in 2023 by Abrams Books.

Doom Guy: Life in First Person will trace the course of Romero’s entire life, starting with his childhood in Colorado through his partnership with Carmark to his days after id Software:

Doom Guy: Life in First Person is the long-awaited autobiography of John Romero, gaming’s original rock star and the cocreator of Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein—some of the most recognizable and important titles in video game history. Credited with the invention of the first-person shooter, a genre that continues to dominate the market today, he is gaming royalty.

Told in remarkable detail, a byproduct of his hyperthymesia, Romero recounts his storied career—from his early days submitting Apple II code to computer magazines and sneaking computers out of the back door of his day job to do programming projects at night in his garage to a high-profile falling out with his id Software cofounder John Carmack, as well as his continued role in the gaming industry today as the managing director of Romero Games.

His story is truly one of a self-made man, founding multiple companies after a childhood filled with violence and abuse drove him to video game design, where he could create new worlds and places to escape to. An alcoholic father, a racist grandfather who did not approve of Romero’s parents’ mixed-race coupling, and a grandmother who once ran a brothel in Mexico combine for an illuminating story of his youth—a story that has never before been revealed.

After years in the gaming spotlight, Romero is now telling his story—THE WHOLE STORY—in his own words.

John Romero has always had a way with words, so it’ll be interesting to see how his autobiography expands upon David Kushner’s excellent Masters of Doom

Doom Guy: Life in First Person will be available on January 10, 2023.

UPDATE (7/20/23): After a short delay, Doom Guy: A Life in First Person is now available on stores shelves. John Romero has marked the occasion by sharing an excerpt of his book with The Verge, all about the first time he played John Carmack and Tom Hall’s unauthorized PC conversion of Super Mario Bros. 3.

David Craddock’s “Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1” Will Fight Its Way Onto Shelves in October 2022

Get over here… and learn more about the release of the next book from David L. Craddock.

The author of Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense, Shovel Knight, and many more will dive into another mostly unexplored corner of video game history this October with Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1: The Fatalities and Fandom of the Arcade Era.

As you might have guessed from the title, Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1 will focus on the early days of the franchise (specifically Mortal Kombat through Mortal Kombat 4), and will be the first volume in a trilogy of books:

Long Live MK Round 1 is divided into four sections, organized according to material that concerns MK1, MKII, MK3 and Ultimate MK3, and MK4. You’ll discover the obstacles co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias faced as they made each game, the ways Midway’s culture influenced MK’s creative and technical directions, how Acclaim revolutionized video game advertising by going all-in on the multi-million-dollar “Mortal Monday” campaign, learn how actors from the games and films landed their roles, and other crucial events in MK history.

If you’d like to get an early look at Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1, the author was generous enough to share excerpts from the book with a quartet of outlets:

Game Informer – Read An Exclusive Excerpt From Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1, A Novel On The Early History Of MK

Nintendo Life – How Mortal Kombat Led To The Birth Of E3 And The ESRB

PC Gamer – Why do Mortal Kombat 3 players still insist on keyboard controls 27 years later?

Shacknews – How Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3’s Tier List Determined the Best Fighters

Craddock is currently seeking funding through Kickstarter to publish Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1. If the campaign is successful, the book will be available in a Standard Edition (in your choice of hardcover, paperback, or ebook) and an oversized Ultimate Edition with dozens of photographs and a stylized layout.

UPDATE (4/12/22): It’s your lucky day as the author has returned with three additional excerpts for Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1, bringing the total to seven:

Ars Technica – The punch that changed Mortal Kombat history

Game Developer – Crushed: Inside Capcom’s Marketing Feud with Acclaim and Mortal Kombat

Medium – How Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat Divided Arcades

And congratulations are also in order, as Craddock’s project is now fully-funded on Kickstarter.

UPDATE (10/4/22): It’s release week for Long Live Mortal Kombat Round 1 and author David Craddock is back with one more excerpt. This time, he shared a story with IGN (Mortal Kombat Nitro Developer Remembers the Faster, Bloodier SNES Version That Never Was) about Sculptured Software’s plan to release a bloodier upgrade of Mortal Kombat for the Super NES.

UPDATE (10/8/22): Happy 30th Anniversary to Mortal Kombat! To celebrate, David Craddock shared yet another excerpt with Ars Technica. This time he delves into the story behind the fight over the actor who claims he co-created Mortal Kombat.

“Mortal Kombat: Games of Death” by David Church is Now Available from University of Michigan Press

The Mortal Kombat franchise has been spilling blood and ripping spines for 30 years, and we’re bound to see some sort of celebratory announcement from NetherRealm Studios later this year.

But first, fans will be able to revisit the history of the series in David Church’s Mortal Kombat: Games of Death. In addition to recalling its arcade debut (and the political backlash it caused after moving to the Genesis and Super NES), Church will explore the multicultural inspirations behind the franchise’s creation, and its evolution over the years:

Upon its premiere in 1992, Midway’s Mortal Kombat spawned an enormously influential series of fighting games, notorious for their violent “fatality” moves performed by photorealistic characters. Targeted by lawmakers and moral reformers, the series directly inspired the creation of an industrywide rating system for video games and became a referendum on the wide popularity of 16-bit home consoles. Along the way, it became one of the world’s most iconic fighting games, and formed a transmedia franchise that continues to this day.

This book traces Mortal Kombat’s history as an American product inspired by both Japanese video games and Chinese martial-arts cinema, its successes and struggles in adapting to new market trends, and the ongoing influence of its secret-strewn narrative world. After outlining the specific elements of gameplay that differentiated Mortal Kombat from its competitors in the coin-op market, David Church examines the various martial-arts films that inspired its Orientalist imagery, helping explain its stereotypical uses of race and gender. He also posits the games as a cultural landmark from a moment when public policy attempted to intervene in both the remediation of cinematic aesthetics within interactive digital games and in the transition of public gaming spaces into the domestic sphere. Finally, the book explores how the franchise attempted to conquer other forms of media in the 1990s, lost ground to a new generation of 3D games in the 2000s, and has successfully rebooted itself in the 2010s to reclaim its legacy.

Mortal Kombat: Games of Death was recently published in hardcover and paperback by University of Michigan Press as part of their Landmark Video Games series. It’s also available to download as an open access title via Fulcrum in multiple formats.

Warren Davis Relives His Career in “Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games”

Warren Davis spent two decades in the game industry and he is ready to talk some @!#?@!.

The game developer got his start at Gottlieb in the early 1980s and is best known as the creator of Q*bert. Believe it or not, in a nod to the nonsensical “swearing” uttered by the main character, that oddball arcade game was originally known as @!#?@!.

The story of that name change, and more interesting episodes from Davis’s career, can be found in his new memoir, Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games, which was published late last year by Santa Monica Press:

Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Games takes you inside the video arcade game industry during the pivotal decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Warren Davis, the creator of the groundbreaking Q*bert, worked as a member of the creative teams who developed some of the most popular video games of all time, including Joust 2, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, and Revolution X.

In a witty and entertaining narrative, Davis shares insightful stories that offer a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to work as a designer and programmer at the most influential and dominant video arcade game manufacturers of the era, including Gottlieb, Williams/Bally/Midway, and Premiere.

Whether you’re looking for insights into the Golden Age of Arcades, would like to learn how Davis first discovered his design and programming skills as a teenager working with a 1960s computer called a Monrobot XI, or want to get the inside scoop on what it was like to film the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band Aerosmith for Revolution X, Davis’s memoir provides a backstage tour of the arcade and video game industry during its most definitive and influential period.

After Gottlieb, Davis spent most of his career at Midway, providing assistance on groundbreaking arcade classics such as Mortal Kombat, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and NBA Jam. Not only did he help make “digitized graphics” a household phrase, but he even got one of his former co-workers, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon, to pen the Foreward for Creating Q*bert.

Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Games was released in November and should be available wherever you get your books.