Videogame Books: The Definitive Review
Always. Buy. Books.
It may or may not come as a surprise that I am obsessed with non-fiction books. I buy shitloads of them in a wholly reflexive, instinctual manner. My choice of topic is obviously idiosyncratic to the extreme,1 and a lot of my purchases are dirt cheap. I am an arch scourer of Charity shops and if there’s a dedicated Charity bookshop, I’m definitely spending time in it. On a recent family sojourn to the great Shepton Flea, I nabbed a tasty copy of the brilliantly comprehensive Electronic Computers for just £1. This sort of thing brings me profound delight, to the point where I wonder why the fuck there isn’t a book-hunting open-world videogame. However, this waffle isn’t solely about my love of the pre-owned. We’re actually looking at a lazy list article where I show off some of the videogaming books I’ve bought and behave like an asshole about it.
Britsoft: An Oral History
Rather than building up to the best, let’s kick off with one of the greatest hardback videogame books you can buy. Britsoft: An Oral History is also one of the best books to come from the best publisher as far as I’m concerned, Read Only Memory. Alex Wiltshire pulls together a superb body of quotes from the movers and shakers of the 1980s British ‘software house’ scene, creating a warmly human free-form narrative of the era as told by a lot of people who will almost definitely be dead within 20 years. Some have already died, which underlines the importance of such a work. The only way this book could be improved would be by making it way longer and interviewing far more people. While Britsoft is an ‘official’ companion to From Bedrooms to Billions, within the Read Only Memory stable it finds a far stronger partner with Japansoft: An Oral History, Alex’s condensation of the Japan volumes from John Szczepaniak’s Untold History series. While not couched in quite the same nostalgia as Britsoft, it feels even more valuable in the way it describes the birth of Japan’s videogame industry with the same warmth, enthusiasm and excitement that can only come from personal testimony. I think that if you really care about the history of our medium and the printed article, just fucking buy both of them. Then we might get European and American volumes, if we’re lucky.
The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga
Written by Jimmy Maher and published in 2012, The Future Was Here is as definitive a guide to a hardware platform as one could hope for. Beginning with a detailed explanation of the seminal ‘Boing Ball’ demo, Jimmy explains the Amiga’s hardware and software with technical precision and a lovely narrative flow. You’re left with a surprisingly complete overview of the system, encompassing the Amiga’s multimedia capabilities, the dalliance with pro video overlay, its technical peculiarities and the benefits they brought, the Amiga demoscene and deep inspections of various iconic games. As mentioned, this really is how you should do it. While I’m yet to own a copy of Racing The Beam, reviews testify that The Future Was Here is the superior platform document. I can only wish for similar volumes for beloved hardware, but the meantime I just have to content myself with the hardcore technical profiles of Rodrigo Copetti, which really are superb despite their deliberate dryness. As an aside, I got The Future Was Here for a bargainous £2.99 at the Oxfam bookshop on Upper Street, Islington. I remember it well because holy shit, that price. I couldn’t quite believe that it was that cheap, nor that anyone could possibly donate such a book to fucking Oxfam.
The Fantasy Art of Oliver Frey
Now very sadly RIP, Oliver Frey was perhaps the very first sci-fi artist I knew by name, thanks to reading things like the 1985 Eagle annual, for which he drew both the cover and a magnificent Dan Dare strip. This had been my first contact with the legendary hero, and to have Frey burn Dare’s fabulous eyebrows into my neurons rather than Frank Hampton might be sacrilege to many, but for me I was suckered by Frey’s imagery as a contemporary take on Hampton’s luxurious style. Fatefully coming into contact with a massive pile of Zzap 64 magazines in 1987 meant I was instantaneously bombarded with a huge array of Oliver’s cover art and my admiration of his wonderfully dynamic and vibrant style was utterly cemented. There’s a beautiful fluidity to his work, where the sense that it was banged out under time pressure only seems to enhance the energy and life of the pieces. And he did so, so, SO many pieces. In a way, arranged chronologically, Frey’s mag covers are a hand-painted mythology for the UK gaming culture. They serve as a gorgeous primary source for what caught the imagination of the era. This book, which I bought as soon as it was first published in 2006, does precisely what it should. It presents full-page reproductions of Oliver’s greatest hits, and seeing as he has so fucking many of them, it’s quite a dense book. Naturally, a few of my personal favourites are missing, but I’m thankful Roger Kean and Frey himself got to publish a seriously well-curated collection. Sadly, and I mean that in a very real and profound sense, the same doesn’t exist for my favourite 80s videogame illustrator, the equally, tragically dead Bob Wakelin. The Art Of The Box might be the best I can hope for.2
Re:Play Ultimate Games Graphics
An out-of-nowhere explosion of a book, Liz Faber’s Re:Play arrived in 1998, well ahead of 2001’s Supercade (which criminally I do not own). Laid out with such slavish devotion to the contemporary graphic design of Edge that Future Publishing could have brought legal action, Re:Play was the very first book I remember seeing about videogames that treated them as artefacts with cultural value. Focusing entirely on imagery, it’s a haphazard yet earnest attempt to document videogame visuals according to category. The first chapter, ‘Kill’, features games of violence and as follows for the rest of the book, arrays its screen grabs in an almost deliberately acontextual fashion. It carries a scrapbook quality, where a full-page print of a screen from Atari’s Star Wars trench sequence sits opposite a beautiful composite image of Zaxxon’s opening level, stitched into its entirety. It mashes abstracted, purely aesthetic presentation with the technically diagrammatic, never justifying the swings between them. And yet, it allows you to behold a disembodied Sim City 2000 metropolis as pure artwork, divorcing it from the superstructures of the game’s display so the city sits on a background of pure white. It’s wonderful. Perhaps a touch pretentious, or cloyingly late-90s-overload as a whole, it’s still a fascinating collection of surprising depth and taste. I’m proud to own it as a pioneering volume for making the imagery of the digitally virtual into a thing you can hold in your hands, divorced from the commercial imperatives and reportage of videogame magazines. Can I overstate how important it is to be free to experience a videogame capture solely for its visual values? Absolutely not. I own Bitmap Books’ Visual Compendium for both the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, and bought them because I thought I should. However they share a certain dull conventionalism and what I can only see as a naïve sense of how best to present both machines as engines of visual beauty. The compendiums fall short by sitting on a fence between full-on artbook and system guide.3 The compromise feels thinner and more conceptually vacuous than either extreme, and no amount of coloured, bound bookmark ribbons is going to make up for being so frightfully boring.4 Have a gander through Re:Play’s indulgences and you might understand why I take that position.
Arcade Game Typography
When it comes to an effortless sense of perfect presentation, look no further than the delightfully niche Arcade Game Typography. Being a self-professed Graffiti writer and erstwhile graphic designer,5 I do love fiddling with letters and actually mess about with fonts quite a bit in my day job. I also had a deep love for demoscene custom pixelart typography, what with its influences from graffiti, advertising and, naturally, videogames. This book was practically targeted straight to my pleasure centres and I can comfortably say I didn’t regret ordering the second it was available. It’s a wonderful thing, and while the hardback is out of stock, I urge you to buy the paperback. In stepping through the typefaces of Arcade history, we grasp not only the efficiency of communication and the flourishes allowed within, but the growing confidence and style that comes as a medium matures. It functions as both a typographic guide and a nostalgic journey, and not only for those who notice the forms that text comes in. With 250 examples covered, the book is suitably comprehensive and Monotype UK designer Toshi Omagari guides you through with supreme expertise. It’s a wonderful ride full of typographic insight and the perfect niche videogame book. If you don’t love ‘the niche’, we cannot be friends, and I’d say we need far more videogame niches to make it onto published, hardback-bound paper than we have now. Buying simply superb books like Arcade Game Typography is perhaps the best way to encourage more entries of this calibre.
Honourable Mentions?!?
As with any culture, there will always be a tension between the soft populism of the mainstream and the hard elitism of the Avant Garde. Read Only Memory occupies a position somewhat more loftier than the steadfastly populist Bitmap Books, but for my money - which I have most definitely spent on the site itself - Read Only Memory is where the treasure lies. That’s not to write off Bitmap Books in any way. A Gremlin In The Works is a fine biography of Gremlin Graphics that I’m proud to own, but it feels like a rarity, a visitor to the stable instead of a native. However both Bitmap Brothers: Universe and Sensible Software 1986-1999 fulfil much the same role only with a touch of individual pizazz that signifies the Read Only Memory difference. Duncan Harris brings a studious Edge sensibility to the Bitmap Brothers biography whereas Gary Penn’s conversational approach with Sensible Software’s Jon Hare brings a more personal, human tale of two veterans who knew each other throughout the period discussed. Pinning even more of my colours to the mast, Read Only Memory feels like an expansion of the Edge mode, something I entirely welcome, and I insist it remains ploughing a more decidedly elitist furrow. I don’t begrudge the more quotidian content of Bitmap Books - I know plenty of people adore them, and there are a fair few I’d still buy, despite my arrogance. Instead, I’ll just look down my nose at Fusion Retro and its gaudily cheap-looking design style. Supremely offputting in the light of more considered entries from other publishers, even I can’t be too much of a bastard when it comes to some of these biographies, as I am absolutely glad they exist - even if they have the air of enthusiast fanzine about them.
It should probably be noted that I’ve picked primarily visual books, and completely ignored the pure text entries. But then, I’m not sure Masters Of Doom is as good a document about the games as Fabien Sanglard’s superb Black Books and John Carmack’s .plan files, complete with comments on how he put twin turbos on a Ferrari F50. But hey, it’s better than Console Wars, which genuinely made me laugh out loud when I attempted to read it. In a wild turn, my most recent videogame book purchase was Andy Kelly’s Perfect Organism, something I’ve wanted to read for quite some time. It reminds me that I still have to buy some Boss Fight books, as they’ve been on my Amazon wishlist for nearly a decade. No doubt there are legions more for me to discover, or plenty I’ve forgotten even exist. And there’s always new books on the way, right? I guess, while searching for a suitable wrap-up line, I should just fucking buy them. Buy. Them. All.
[21]
IF YOU MUST KNOW, I go for motorsport, vintage science, automotive/aeronautic and Graffiti. The more obscure the better - my favourite military/aviation find is British Military Aircraft Accidents: The Last 25 Years, which is a real book with an incredible front cover. I also go deep on old science books, especially if I know where they go wrong. Pre-1960s physics is a hoot, as is anything planetary astronomy from before the Space Age. There’s a wonderful thread of jet age books on aeronautics that capture the thrill of the white heat era which crop up with surprising regularity in my area, although living within a dense nest of military infrastructure probably explains that. Motorsport books I could write a literal book on, and my love of Graffiti books means I’ve been bought fucking Street Logos more than three times. I do, however, willingly own two copies each of Subway Art and Spraycan Art, not to mention the superb Cope 2 and T-Kid collections. I think I’ll stop there as I’ve run out of energy to dig out hyperlinks.
As a wildly tangential aside, I recently picked up a Roger Dean artbook that had a bit of Pysgnosis artwork in it, much to my delight. I have an unstoppable urge to buy Sci-Fi/Fantasy artbooks whenever I see them at used or discount prices, and am unreasonably proud of how many I’ve managed to amass. This started with the Terran Trade Authority books and only got worse. I got Spacewreck for an absolute steal, way back in the late 90s!
The real issue for me is that the best part of both books is the fucking front cover, which uses games and lettering to make up 26 letters of the alphabet. And right there is a far better concept than the woolly scattergun-scrapbook approach both take. Get your 26 games for the alphabet and do a page on the title screen, a few pages for the game in play, then print the sprites. background tiles, font etc. Add in some tech context if available, but I think the bulk of the writing should be in the introduction, which outlines the graphical capabilities of the machine in such a way that it helps explain the graphical limitations and exposes where talent was able to overcome them. To me, that is what you need from a visual compendium.
I can't hold my tongue on another pair of books that I felt committed much the same crime: Read Only Memory's Megadrive and Dreamcast 'collected works' books. Not wanting to offend the sensitivities of messers Stuart and Parkin, I bought both out of a sense of necessity but found them to be a touch too broad to really work as definitive articles on both platforms. Significant chunks of both books are dedicated to artwork with barely any explanation, structure or context, they're merely in there almost as visual filler. A kind of instinctive inclusion, yet they are not filed as if archival or structured to demonstrate some arc. They are merely present. It smacks of an overall concept that lacks the laser focus and expert precision of Read Only Memory's superior titles. You should still fucking buy them, obv. IF YOU MUST KNOW, I would have preferred both books to cover the electronic design and case/controller aesthetics alongside the graphic design for the consoles’ packaging, with a companion volume for both that details the launch range of games. But hey, I am a terribly unreasonable nerd in that respect. Sorry Keith and Simon!
My failure to have the steady hands and focused concentration required for pen-and-pencil typography was a key reason for dropping out of Art Foundation prior to an Art degree. Just one year later the course switched to DTP computerised graphic design and that would have put me in much better stead. Instead, attempting to construct my initials in a generic Serif font with a ruler, compass and a 2H on plain paper saw the graphic design tutor laugh at my efforts, which absolutely shattered any dreams of doing it for a living.
Some terrific callouts in this piece! Thank you so much for sharing the literary love and helping shine a light on all the amazing video game books out there!