Retro Gaming Australia

Independent video game books publisher Read-Only Memory, the house behind the recently published Sensible Soccer history book, has launched a new Kickstarter for a highly ambitious book covering the Sega Mega Drive.

Called Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, the book aims to be the ultimate retrospective for Sega’s widely loved 16-bit behemoth. It aims to be a definitive volume – they’ve got Sega on board to give them unprecedented access to the company’s archives and personnel. The book will include production artwork, interviews, development sketches, manufacturing plans and interviews with 20 Sega personnel, some of whom have never been interviewed before.

Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works is currently only available in hardback with a pledge of £30 (plus £15 for international shipping) with an expected delivery date of June 2014.

The folks behind the lovely Retro Gamer magazine have just released another “Bookazine” compilation – their 7th to date.

Retro Gamer Bookazines are essentially best-ofs, featuring 228 pages of content selected from numerous recent issues. The latest volume includes Making of features on Computer Space, Tetris, Double Dragon, Final Fantasy VII, Maniac Mansion and Sonic the Hedgehog, Collectors Guides for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Game Gear, and other features like 100 Classic Gaming Moments and Inside the Atari 2600.

You can order Retro Gamer Bookazine #7 from Imagine Publishing for £9.99

If you, like me, preordered Pix’n Love Publishing’s upcoming releases The History of Mario: 1981-1991 Rise of an Icon from Myth to Reality and Gunpei Yokoi: The Life & Philosophy of Nintendo’s God of Toys when they were first announced for English release back in 2011, you might be wondering what’s going on with them.

Originally due for release in “Q1 2012”, the books have consistently slipped, and just missed their most recent updated release date of May 2013. Such is life in the world of book publishing. There is a ray of sunshine, though – both books have just appeared for preorder on Amazon US with release dates of January 7, 2014.

You can order The History of Mario: 1981-1991 and Gunpei Yokoi: The Life & Philosophy of Nintendo’s God of Toys now.

This year is the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Capcom, and to celebrate, the company has teamed up with publisher BradyGames to release an encyclopedia of their pantheon of video game characters, simply titled the Capcom 30th Anniversary Character Encyclopedia.

According to the publisher, the book “celebrates Capcom’s 30 years in the industry and gives fans concise information about every major Capcom character, their key artwork, statistics, background information, and interesting notes on the history of each character and game franchise.” Over 200 of Capcom’s finest will be featured in the book, which is a 208 page hardcover edition.

The Capcom 30th Anniversary Character Encyclopedia is available to order from Amazon for just $US12.72

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, new publishing outfit Boss Fight Books will be releasing a number of books on classic video games. Each book will take what the publisher describes as a “critical, creative, historical, and personal look at a single classic video game.”

Five books have been announced at this time: Earthbound, Galaga, Super Mario Bros 2, ZZT and Jagged Alliance 2. The Earthbound book is the first planned release with a tenative release date of December 2013.

The Kickstarter campaign still has 23 days to go, so you can snap up all five books for the early bird price of $US25 for the digital version, or $US100 for both the print and digital.

We’re pretty big fans of the website Hardcore Gaming 101, and it just so happens that one of their editors, John Szczepaniak (who also appears frequently in the pages of Retro Gamer) is running a Kickstarter for an ambitious new book on the history of game development in Japan.

Szczepaniak’s book looks to cover the ground missed by Steven Kent’s Ultimate History and other gaming history books, which have focused mostly on the West. His plan is to fly to Japan, hire a translator and conduct as many interviews with Japanese game developers as he can, and then put it into print. He feels that now is the time, particularly with the 30th anniversary of the Famicom and MSX, and a number of Japanese developers, such as Warp’s Kenji Eno, having passed away in the last two years.

If Szczepaniak’s past work is anything to go by, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers should be one heck of a book should it come to fruition, so we highly recommend that you consider backing this project.

Want to know everything there is to know about the Punch Out!! series? Melburnian Daniel Lanciana has launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a 240 page encyclopedia on Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!.

The book is complete – the campaign is intended to help the team raise money to get copyright clearance from Nintendo and cover the cost of printing the books – vanity publishing doesn’t come cheap!

Chipping in $US10 will get you a high quality eBook version of the guide. If you want a physical copy of the book, you’ll need to up your pledge to $US125. I’m a sucker for these high quality coffee style books, so I hope this campaign succeeds.

UDON’s latest Mega Man book, the Mega Man Robot Master Field Guide was finally released into stores in the United States this past week after months (possibly years) of delays.

The book features a detailed biography and art for every character in the “classic” Mega Man universe (i.e. Mega Man 1-10 and associated spinoffs). UDON’s website has a free six page sample.

If you were hoping to snag a copy off Amazon, you’ll have to wait another month or so, but it’ll only cost you a piddling $US9 (plus shipping).

A couple of months back, I wrote a gushing review of Pix’n Love Publishing’s The History of Nintendo Vol. 1 – 1889-1980. The book, while seriously excellent, was limited to something like only 500 copies, which sold out quite quickly – so if you didn’t get in early, you missed out.

Until now that is. I was contacted this morning by Pix’n Love Publishing’s new UK arm, who informed me that they will be reprinting the book and distributing it to retailers in the UK. It will be available next week. You can read a couple of samples from the book at Pix’n Love’s Facebook page.

So, for our UK readers, you’ll be able to pop into your local bookshop and grab a copy for £25. For those of you not living in Ol’ Blighty, you’ll be able to order it directly through Pix’n Love’s website for the same price – shipping is free.

A novel based on the story of PlayStation 2 cult-classic ICO is being released in the USA next week by Viz Media.

ICO: Castle in the Mist, written by Miyuki Miyabe, will be available August 16 for $US15.99. It’ll be published under Viz’s Haikasoru imprint.

You can preorder the book here.

Via Destructoid