Retronauts - 431: Retronauts Episode 431: Retrogaming in Print

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

Jeremy Parish chats with retrogaming book authors Richard Moss (The Secret History of Macintosh Gaming) and Evan Amos (The Game Console 2.0) about the processes, predicaments, and perils of producing print publications about classic gaming topics. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, reading is fundamental. Hi, everyone. Welcome to an episode, a segment. But this is Retronauts, and I am, as you would expect, Jeremy Parrish. And this week we are talking about something near and dear to my heart, the printed word concerning classic video games. That's actually kind of my gig now. That's what I do at Limited Run Games is make books about old video games or publish them. And so with me on this episode, we have two authors who are not, you know, they don't publish with me, but they've published great books.

and are here to kind of talk about them. And, you know, I'm sure there will be some promotion in here. But both of them are absolutely worth checking out, you know, giving some attention to. And both of them, I believe, have basically been republished in new editions very recently. Correct me if I'm wrong. But why don't we start with, let's go with the local guest. Evan, please introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your book, just as a quick intro. Hi, my name's Evan Amos. I'm a photographer. And for the past decade, I guess at this

point, I've been taking photos that I put on Wikipedia, on Wikipedia articles for video game consoles and other things. And that project eventually led to me doing a book about video game history, which starts all the way from the Magnavox Odyssey to today. And it's the game console. I just released the second edition. I released the first edition about two years ago and that was right around the time that the switch came out. So I knew that the, uh, the PS5 and the Xbox series X would be coming out. And so it'd be like, oh, what if it would be great if, you know, I could fill the book with even more consoles that I got, I missed the first time and put in the new stuff, updated it, uh, fix some of the stuff that I got from feedback from the first edition, change.

some things, added some stuff. So, you know, I'm really happy with the work that I got to put into the second edition. And now, to me, it's like the definitive edition of the book. Yeah. I think it's worth circling back very briefly to mention the fact that you are responsible for so much the game console photography and computer photography up on Wikipedia. I mean, if you have done a search, this is talking to the audience, if you have done a search for a game system on Google images.

Evan's photos are probably the first thing you're going to find in your results. They're very clean, very professional, extremely well lit, and comprehensive, sometimes with exploded viewpoints and that sort of thing. And people, I think, have a tendency to just say, oh, it's on Wikipedia. I can just use that. But it's good to credit Evan, because he does a lot of great. work and has done a lot to really promote and just standardize a game system preservation in a way that, you know, otherwise would not have been done.

So, you know, that's basically the game console 2.0 is that in a book form. Yeah. Before I started working on the Wikipedia photos, the state of photos of consoles in general was pretty bad. There was a lot of times that you wouldn't even find pictures of consoles for certain systems, let alone good pictures. And when I started the project, it was just kind of like a whim thing that I did because, you know, I was just on Wikipedia. I had this photo equipment and I had like a GameCube in the other room. And I was just thinking to myself, you know, I could just replace this picture on this page because that's one of the great things about Wikipedia for those who don't know

it is you can really just go in there and do anything you want. You know what I mean? Maybe it'll get reverted instantly, but you don't know. But for photos, like, they are starving for people who can contribute photos. So almost any kind of photos that you contribute will become, you know, used on the page and stuff like that. But when I started, I never really thought of it past Wikipedia pages. You know, I was naive in the sense that it was just like, oh, this is just on a page and that's fine. But, like, after a while, I noticed that the use of the photos had, like, exploded past Wikipedia itself and that they were being used in books. They were being used in videos.

and kind of when I got to that point, I really wanted to kind of take the project to the next level to where, you know, I started a Kickstarter and I raised money so I could buy a bunch of other consoles and just that opportunity to be able to preserve a lot of these like very obscure systems. Things like Cassio PD-1,000, 2000. And, you know, I tend to think of everything very small scale.

Like I kind of just do stuff for myself and things like that. But it really does humble me, like sometimes when I get to see those images of, like, things being used so widely. And just knowing that these images will be like a very good means of preserving the history of these consoles. Because a lot of people don't have an opportunity to see old or rare hardware. And if you can provide them with like very clean pictures, very pictures that you can like zoom into, you know, it will give a lot of people an opportunity to have an idea of like this. huge history of video game stuff that extends far past things like the NES and the PlayStation, like all of that second generation nonsense. You know what I mean?

Right. So our other author here tonight, this afternoon, this morning, depending on where you are in the world, comes from a place far away, from me, at least. And also, I would describe your work as being very, very different in tone and tone. texture from Evans, whereas he's all about high-resolution, full-color photography. The book you've published is kind of the opposite. It's, you know, heavy on text and what images appear are, you know, like two-bit black-and-white image maps, bitmaps. So please introduce yourself and then tell a little bit about what this book is. Yeah, in large part they are. There's color pictures in there as well.

but um and i love everyone's work but so i am richard moss i did a book called the secret history of mac gaming that came out a few years ago and has just got an expanded edition from bitmap books i started writing professionally about a decade ago and um it always bothered me that i knew from my own experiences growing up that there were fascinating really influential games on the Mac, but nobody else seemed to know it. There was this, there's always this running joke, and it's still around today that the Mac doesn't have games. The Mac has never had games, but that's not true. The Mac's kind of a crap games machine now, unless you just install windows on it. But throughout the 1980s and the 90s, there was this whole world that was

sort of off on its own where there were interesting games. And some of those games then would make it out. Like Mist was originally a Mac game. It was very much a Mac game. It was made in a tool called HyperCard, which was only available on the Mac. And HyperCard really defined what Mist was, that those jokes about it being sort of an interactive screen saver or whatever, they're due to the constraints of HyperCard. And it's always forgotten that Mist was a Mac game. people just talk about it as this great PC game. And then you had other things like DejaVu and Shadowgate, these other games in the Mac Venture series from ICOM simulations.

These were the first English language point and click adventure games. They were made in 1985 on a Macintosh very much inspired by the Macintosh. And so I wanted to really dig into these stories. I wanted to know how these games got made. I wanted to know how the Macintosh inspired people. And I spent a bunch of years tracking down as many old school Mac authors to learn the stories of how they made their games, how they sold their games, how the community responded to things and everything else and put together this story of this weird, quirky little community that had a bunch of unique games that would nowhere else and like nothing else. fly a paper airplane around the house. It's pretty cool. It sounds very simple, but it was wonderful. And put together the book, and to my delight, the book has been a big success.

Yeah. And when you say you put together a book, it's not just like, you know, a little pamphlet. Your book is a tome. It is, it could cause physical damage to someone if it came down to an altercation. It's hardcover. And how many pages is it? Like five, six hundred pages? let's see what the newest edition is I've had a lot of people say that it could be it could double as a weapon but of course that would ruin the binding which is very nicely put together that's what the sharp corners are for

yeah 480 pages so yeah it's long and I think that really does fly in the face of conventional wisdom about Mac gaming i.e. it didn't exist because there's there's a lot there I haven't I haven't I have the first edition and I have not read the whole thing. There's just so much content to it. But I am curious, what aspect of it is secret history? How is the history of Mac games secret? There's sort of a couple of layers to that when I was thinking about the title years back and I've never been very good at titles. So it was really just

maybe I'll think of something better later and I never did. But, I thought, well, it's sort of a secret to the world. So there's the outside in perspective of this is a secret to the world. No one seems to know outside of the Mac gaming space that there was a Mac gaming space. So let's reveal this secret to the world that there is a history of Mac gaming. And that it turns out the Mac and Dosh is actually really influential to how games look and play today. that inspired a lot of modern-day interfaces through things like SimCity. And then on the inside-out perspective, it's let's really understand what makes these games tick.

Let's learn the histories behind them because most of these developers have never told their story before. And in a few cases, it was a very development-centric book, this one. I'm planning to do a second volume that takes a broad. of you, but it's very development-centric, and there's a little bit of community history that is even more secret that basically nobody knows at all. I didn't know anything about it. No one in the community knew anything about it, except that, hey, there were these interesting websites and like a Mac-only easing that was pretty popular for a bunch of years inside Mac games. and just for this expanded edition

I was able to add in a couple of pages about really short-lived UK magazine called Mac Action it ran for just under a year and it was a spin-off from Mac World and it was dedicated to games on the Mac and of course it went under because they didn't have enough to write about in the magazine space you need

big glossy commercial games to pay your advertising, and there weren't many of those happening. Most of the Mac games that were coming out commercially were ports of Windows or DOS games, and you can't fill a glossy newsstand magazine with reviews of shareware games, because you won't have enough money coming in. Yeah, speaking as someone who has been using for my main computer for nearly 30 years now, you know, this book is actually very, like, it's, I feel like it's very important because you're right, it is an area of history that is very underserved by, you know, the games community as a whole. And, you know, the Mac really was this kind of galapagos of gaming where things existed kind of outside of the realm of, you know, what was happening in the rest of the industry.

But people were paying attention. And there were these communities around it. You know, there were all the various Mac user groups who would share things. You also had, you know, as you mentioned in magazines, things like Mac Addict, Mac World. Like, you know, I was reading those all throughout the 90s. And, you know, they always came with, after a while, they started coming with CD-ROMs full of files and, you know, things to play. So there were always interesting shareware games. You have guys like Jeff Fogle of Spider-Web Software who got to start making Mac games in the 90s.

and still is continuing to make games and remake some of his older games like Avernum and really, you know, it's kind of this sort of quiet and mainstay of the games industry who, you know, has found various successes with mobile platforms and things like that, but I feel like his hardest really with the Mac and he's never really had a huge breakout hit

because his games are so sort of specific and old school. But, you know, there is this kind of core, Mac game design and history to these games. And it's just great to see things like that out there and to see them recognized by someone other than as like, you know, saying, oh, wow, here's a weird thing. Can you imagine Mac games? Like, you know, a real serious study is great stuff. You know, I have a question for you, Richard.

So I grew up, I was born in 1983 and I grew up with an Apple 2. And I remember like a lot of those kind of like kitty games. games being like a core part of my experience growing up, I knew that there was a Mac, but why was the Mac not really adopted much like the Apple II was? Was it just too high scale or too high end for a lot of people? There's multiple reasons. I think absolutely one key thing is that the Mac was more expensive than the Apple II and so therefore out of reach for a lot of families. It also had a different emphasis in its marketing,

which is really a huge part of why it's got this reputation as not being a games machine, is that Apple decided we'd better distance ourselves from games because people are starting to talk about our computer, like it's a toy. And no, no, no, it's a serious machine because we want people to use it in offices. We want Fortune 100 companies to buy thousands of our systems.

And so they did jump on to education and try and really get into that home and education market, but they didn't do it for several years. So like the late 80s into the early 90s is when they finally recognize that there's a big market that they can tap into for home use and for schools. then I guess the Apple 2 had a lot of inertia behind it because it was released in what 1977 so there's a huge catalog of cheap games educational programs and everything

and it's really easy to use it's getting very cheap when by the time the Macintosh comes out in 1984 if you can grab an older model or something and it's a nice computer to be like a kid's first computer if it's middle-class family, maybe they can buy an Apple 2 as this entry point for their kid to get into computers.

Okay. Yeah, because my trajectory is I had the Apple 2. I remember going to school and then they would have the Apple 2 computer lab where you'd have like, you know, the math games and then you have Oregon Trail. Everyone loved Oregon Trail. And then I feel like that tipping point would just went like straight to DOS. Yeah, the PC kind of just rock. could it up in market share.

So the first IBM PC was, I think, 1980. And by the mid-80s, the PC-compatible whole ecosystem of DOS machines, they already had, I think, a majority of the computer space. And they just kept growing from there. By the 90s, they were up past like 90% of new computer sales every year. And so it just completely obliterated everything else. And unfortunately, that meant that there was less diversity in the computers that most people were coming across in their lives. So did both of you guys grow up with Max?

I did not really grow up with Max. I, you know, occasionally my life would intersect them. You know, we had a computer lab in the mid-80s where they, I did not really grow up with Max. I don't know how, you know, our school system could afford to do it, but they bought a bunch of Macs for use in the lab. So, you know, there was like a year where I would just take any excuse to go mess around with the Macs and, you know, draw and Mac draw and, you know, just create things on the screen. The mouse was amazing, just a revolution in interface design. But, you know, it wasn't until I'm older than you, I think. So once I got out of high school, my parents were like, well, we can buy you a car for

graduation, you know, a used car, help you pay for that, or we can help you buy a computer, a Mac. And I said, ah, yes, I need the Mac. So that's what I took to college with me. And I couldn't drive anywhere, but I did have a Mac. So it was, it was kind of like a thing that, you know, I would see at my friend's house or was just aware of, but, you know, would use sometimes at school in the journalism lab or something. But when it came time to actually own a computer, I just felt like, you know, this is the system that's more for people with an artistic temperament who want to create. So that's what I should get. And I just kind of stuck with it since then through ups and downs. I did grow up with a Mac. So I'm a few years younger than you, Evan. And my dad bought

a Macintosh Plus around the time I was born. I think before I was born or something, which I've got no idea how he afforded because we weren't a well-off family but somehow he did maybe justified it as a business expense because he ran his own small business so some of my very earliest memories are of that Macintosh and I've told this story before of how the first game I remember is Ultimate Reality the City which my brother got a copy of sometime around in 1990

or so and I was watching Captain Planet or Banana Man or some kids cartoon show and I was suddenly drawn to this weird world that he was descending into because it's an extremely deep role-playing game that one and so then I threw out the 90s was using Max at home and we're always years behind the latest system release and hardware releases. Like once the whole Mac world was into MacOS 8 and 9, I'm still stuck on System 7.5, which was released like three, four years earlier than the initial release of MacOS 8.

So I was years behind and jealously looking at things like the iMac coming along, while I'm still using a mid-90s computer. and my brother got some Windows and Windows laptops he had like Windows 95 on a laptop so I got a little bit of exposure to the PC world through that and through my schools. So, Evan, let me direct the question at you now. How did you become interested in photography of game console? I mean, you talked about adding images to Wikipedia, but I mean, I feel like there has to be, you know, a step in there that you haven't mentioned, where you basically said taking photos, like very nice, clean, detailed photos of video game consoles is a thing I want to do. I used to when I was in college I worked in a one-hour photo lab and I had no photo experience or anything like that before I had done that and working in the photo lab got me really interested into cameras and stuff like that so I bought like a cheap old Nikon from like a garage sale and then I was really interested in portrait photography where I would kind of just grab a friend and be like we're going to go to the park and I'm going to shoot off like three rolls of film and we're going to have fun you know.

And that was, like, how I really cut my teeth on, you know, taking photos and getting interested into that whole world. And later, when I moved to New York, I really stopped doing all the portrait for photography stuff, but I still had the equipment. I had the lights and all that stuff. And it really was that random in terms of, like, I've read a lot of Wikipedia pages. I was really, I'm always really interested in the history of these consoles and these systems. And I just saw it one day and I was like, you know what, I'm going to do something. and so I had all the equipment there. I think that really was the ability that made me do it

because it's like I had these equipment sitting here that I hadn't been using for quite a while. And to me, you know, I had done portrait stuff and the idea of, you know, doing product photography is really like a different beast, you know. It's a different realm of skills and everything. So I was like, you know, maybe that would be a fun project too, on top of contributing to these Wikipedia.

pages. And once I had just started doing it, I got really hooked, really fast. Because I essentially was like, okay, I took like three pages. I did three console pages. I'm going to make a list of everything. And then I'm going to try to do all that. And once you kind of like compile the list of all the consoles out there, you really open up like this crazy world of like all these like failed systems and all this other weird stuff that you never really had like any idea of all the foreign stuff. Like there's like this whole European section, like all these Japanese consoles. And, you know, I really just fell in love with the idea of kind of discovering all that stuff. And before I did the Kickstarter, I was reaching out to random people.

I would make Craigslist posts asking if people had stuff. And one of the first opportunities I had was, was this guy who lived in Long Island. He was like an eBayer or something like that. And he was like, oh, you want to come out to my house on Long Island. I got a bunch of stuff. So that's what I did. I got all my photo equipment on like one of those granny cart things.

I took it on the train. And this guy, I went out to Long Island somewhere and this guy picked me up. And then I, you know, shot for a couple hours at this guy's house. And I was so happy to be able to be like, oh, man, I got this. the Sega CD Model 1. I got the 32x. Like, at that point, I was so happy just be crossing things off the list.

And I just did that probably like three more times where I met with people who had collections. And one of the biggest ones was this guy named James Baker. He worked in Manhattan for one of those like browser game things. This was quite a few years ago. And in his office where everyone worked, he had like his entire collection of video games on a wall. And one of the, like, I loved video games, but I was never a big collector.

Once you kind of step into the world of collectors, you kind of really get to meet all these people who have been doing it for decades. And it's humbling just to like walk into this thing and see this guy who imported like the Othello Nintendo systems. You know, the one with like the, the multivision. Yeah, it was like there's the stuff that they did right before the family. com like the TV games and just discovering all that stuff and it was just like every time that I would meet these people I would like discover these rare things and it just always blew my mind and I was so happy that I would be able to get the opportunity to take the photos of stuff but because I was doing it that way I would create like a moment where I would have like

to take a ton of photos in like three hours so I would always be like oh I wish that I cleaned this better. I wish I'd take these photos better. And like, I ended up taking a break for quite a while. And then I kind of got the urge again to do the photos. And that's what pushed me to do the Kickstarter in terms of like, oh, if I really want to be able to take these photos the way that I want to to be able to like take things apart, like I would have to buy them and own them myself to be able to spend that time with them. Because, you know, I don't expect to drive out to some guy's house and then take apart a system and spend, you know, a couple hours photographing one console. You know, it's not practical.

Yeah. Also, collectors, I think, tend to be a little leery of people who dismantle their game systems unless it, you know, to recap it or something. Some people, I've met some people who were so blasé. It's kind of shocking. I mean, you know, they have like a wall of stuff and it's like, oh, you want to take the part? Okay.

I mean, you know, I'm all kinds, Jeremy. I guess. I'm always grateful for people like that who are like, oh, yeah, I've got this collection. It's huge. I've been amassing it. And it really needs someone to, you know, do something with it. So please do something with it. Those people like that have been a huge help for me with my own work doing videos and books and that sort of thing.

So, you know, it's awesome that people who collect aren't necessarily just, you know, hoarding for their own personal museum. Do not touch. Everything must be, you know, slabbed and put behind glass. There are people who really want to, you know, get that out there and share the history of video games with people. But it is, I think it's very fortunate that you started this project several years ago and really kind of wrapped it up for the most part several years ago because prices have just skyrocketed on classic hardware over the past. Oh, yeah. I feel like it would be prohibitively expensive to try to do something like that now. Well, when I got the money, the Kickstarter was successful.

I got like $15,000-ish or something. I think I had to set aside like $1,500 for fees and other things. But I just started making like a spreadsheet of like, okay, what's the best way to use this money? What are the things that I can afford? And I kind of budgeted items. And I live in the city. I live in New York City. Sorry if you hear stuff.

Um, but I look back at some things that I bought, you know, um, being able to buy a complete magnafox odyssey in very good condition in box for like $130. Like you're, you're going to pay like $350, I think, today. Mm-hmm. Um, there's a lot of sitting and waiting. If you, getting into collecting now is crazy. You got to have deep pockets. But there is still a way to collect if you are willing to wait for a very long time. You sit on auctions, you wait over them.

You use things like auction sniper. That's really helpful. But like, you know, there was a lot of times that I pass things up waiting for, you know, a certain item to be in a certain condition, a certain price point. And I did it. But honestly, yeah, just like you said, if I had tried to do this anytime recently, I would have been able to get a fraction of the collection for the money that I raised back then. I think literally prices generally have quadrupled. Yeah, that sounds about right. I was just at Midwest Gaming and Classic, and browsing the vendor floor was kind of shocking.

You know, just two years ago, the last conventions I went to, the prices were like half of what they are now. It's really wild. Anyway, so now that we've kind of talked about that, I'd like to ask Richard. Actually, I'd like to ask both of you, but starting with Richard, what was your process for creating your book? Like, you know, when you sat down, what was kind of your vision for the book that you wanted to write? and, you know, just how do you go about amassing that much material? I think Evan, you know, kind of had a head start with the photos he took, but even then there had to be, you know, a lot of text created and a lot of organization imposed on the photos in order to pull it together into a nicely readable book. So, yeah, like how do you tell the history, the complete comprehensive history of Mac games in,

a single volume and start from zero. Yeah. I don't really know, and I had such a chaotic process. It was my first book, and I started working on it only a few years into my professional writing and journalism career, so I was sort of clueless about what to do. And I've since established a fairly clear process for how I do games history, and it's made things a lot easier on my second book, which is out next year about the whole shareware scene, not just on the Mac, but broadly across all platforms. But so for this first book,

I just sort of made it up as I went along. The vision for the book largely grew out of some stuff that I'd done before. I was sure whether it was going to be a book, where I'm just like, I remember this old Mac game. I want to see if. maybe I can talk to the person who made it, get their story, publish that. So I did that with the glider games, for instance, which are these delightful puzzle games where you're guiding a paper airplane through a house. It started out as a shareware thing in the 80s that had, I think, 15 rooms. And the last one, you've got to get the paper plane past a cat that's on the windowsill.

And then you get out the window and you're like, you're free out in the world. I did a really long email interview with the developer, John Calhoun, and then I wrote an article, Dreaming of a Thousand Room House, I think is what I called it. And then over the couple of years after that, I wrote a little bit more, talked to a few more people, and then once I decided that this project, it really should be a book, not say an article series or like a 10,000 word, e-book, but a proper actual physical book, I just sat down and I wrote out a list of all the things that I thought should be in it. And then I began researching it.

Researching Mac gaming history is really tricky because there wasn't much documentation of it to begin with. It's not like I can just go into the internet archive and dig out a bunch of games magazines and read them for a while because games magazines for the most part didn't cover the Mac. So I can read old Mac world issues and Mac addict and things like that, but they've only got a tiny amount of games coverage where maybe in a single month they have one page or two pages dedicated to games and they cover five games in that space. So it's very shallow, very brief. I can get most of that same information

just going to Wikipedia or the Macintosh Garden, Moby Games and looking at a description of the game and when it came out and a few screenshots. So I had to get a bit more creative and that

meant tracking down old extinct websites like GeoCities websites and following links from Inside Mac games, which until a few years ago, still had an archive of online articles that you could browse over the course of 10, 15 years,

and was able to track down every copy of their E-Zine before they had a website and read through those, and they had lots of links in that thing as well. And gradually through lots of painful, just banging my head against a wall, I sort of amassed enough material that I had a big picture overview in my head of what happened. There were lots of gaps in the historical record, which is really frustrating. And then I found as many people as I could to interview.

And I've learned a lot of tricks over the past few years for how to find people. But at the time, it was just search for their name. Get on a search engine. Get on Google. Search for their name. search for the name of the games, start doing different combinations of things that I know they worked on. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll find their LinkedIn profile or their Twitter or Facebook or on

occasion they have a website and then see if I can contact them. And sometimes I'd get lucky and that would be really easy. Other times I'd have to send them like a message on Facebook and pray that they happen to see it and respond to it. Some people I would ask around. Anyone know how to contact this person? And even in the fan, there are some games that still have a really strong fan community,

like Realms, a mid-90s role-playing game. The publisher of Fantasoft gave Jeff Fogel his first exposure to the audience. The fan community for Realms has no idea where Tim Phillips, the guy who made realms is. They wish they knew where he was because they want him to officially release his game to the public domain or give them some source code or something so they can properly update it. But they don't know. They can't figure out how to

contact him. I talked to people who worked with someone from another game studio and they worked with him for years and they got no idea if he's even still alive. He just vanished. So I had to make do with a lot of gaps and then you had inconsistencies in the historical record and when that happens I have to just sort of guess what the right story is and you you Jeremy would have come across this with some Japanese games history I'm sure where you have conflicting accounts

of what happened in different sources sometimes it's a more recent interview on somebody's misremembering or people just have a very different perspective on something that happened. And sometimes it's a myth that took on a life of its own. Like the bungee guys, their games, have a lot of strange misinformation around them. There's a ridiculous myth around Halo that it was originally going to be a Mac exclusive strategy game. That was never the case. it was there was a prototype that was a sort of a strategy game because they started working on it out of the myth engine and myth was a strategy game but at no point were they actually going to release a strategy game and at no point was it going to be mac exclusive it was always going to be windows and mac bungee weren't a mac company anymore they were even doing most of their development on halo on a windows machine so i have to

ask people sometimes just outright, what's the real story here and hope that they're telling me the truth and in large part take them at their word because I didn't have the luxury of fact-checking everything. I just had to hope that I wasn't being lied to. Right. Yeah, I definitely have encountered that. Even something like Final Fantasy, I think Hironobu Sakaguchi, the original, you know, designer, director of the series, has given like three different stories about why it's called Final Fantasy over the years. And I remember transcribing an interview or, you know, like summarizing an interview from Next Generation magazine in like 1998, talking about the origin of the story, you know, the name by him. And then, you know, a couple of years ago, he came out

and was like, oh, no, that's just a myth. That was like, no, dude, you said it. You're the one who put that out there. So, yeah, you know, people, memory is a funny thing. Like, I've, I've, I don't even know how much stuff I've forgotten about, like, this podcast, good Lord. Um, so I definitely am sympathetic to, you know, how, how easy it is to forget towards, you know, slip up on details like that. So, yeah, like, pulling together that information does seem really challenging. Yeah, it was super hard. And I would do my best to, to find things, like because the community was so small, the developers would often turn up on Usenet threads and talk about their game or somebody who met them at a trade show and had a chat to them

for half an hour would write a post on Usenet saying all the things they learned from that conversation and I would be hoping that they remembered that conversation really well the next day because that was a much shorter time frame that they had to worry about. And often there would be, by the same token, there'd be little brief mentions in something like Macworld magazine where some proper really good journalist like Stephen Levy has talked to someone and they've put two paragraphs in their article to let you know a little bit of trivia about the upcoming thing. And these tiny hints of information were the best that I could come up with or sort of being my bullshit detector when I'm coming across newer stories on

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a convenient tap-to-mute sensor, and four selectable polar patterns, so it can broadcast crystal clear audio, whether you're gaming, streaming, podcasting, or impressing your remote colleagues and classmates. So what are you waiting for? Join the Quad Squad and tap in today with the HyperX QuadcastS microphone. All right. I think that's a pretty good rundown of the process and also the challenges. And Evan, you've talked a bit about the process of, you know, taking a cart out on the train to Long Island and so forth. But, you know, just in terms of the organization.

and fleshing out the images with text. Like, what was the process there? And how did you kind of define the scope of what you were doing? Well, the book project started right at the end of the Kickstarter being funded. I had gotten a lot of push for publicity at the very end. And from people reading about the story, I got a book offer from No Starch. And so I never really had plans for a book. I kind of had like this idea.

I wanted to make like a pamphlet for like Kickstarter backers. So I was kind of like, well, I could do something like that. But the book was something of a surprise. Like I never envisioned it or planned it. And, you know, when someone, at least back then, I was like, if someone comes at you for like a book offer, you should take it. You know what I mean? And it's like, how much rope do you want to hang yourself?

All of it, you know? And so I just, yeah, I was. like, sure, I'll do a book. And that'll be easy, yeah? You know, hindsight, but at the same time, you know, you crawl through this fire and then you end up with something. But the book at the beginning was a real struggle to figure out what I wanted to do and then try to work with the publisher to turn that into something. I mean, I figured out early on that I wanted to do like a history of game consoles because, you know, obviously I've been taking pictures of these video game consoles and I had been doing

all this research naturally, you know, trying to create the pages or, you know, filling in the pages. And in my original concept was much more dense in terms of like text, in terms of photos. It was like very encyclopedic. And one of my favorite books of all time is the onions are dumb century, which is, have either of you guys are familiar with this? Yep, yep. Yeah, that's a great book. It is an amazing book. And one of the things I loved about it was that it's just, every page is just full of little separate things. And so, like, you could just flip to any random page and you can just enjoy things. It doesn't have to be read front to back or anything like that.

You just pick pages up, start reading it. And I kind of had that inspiration to do the original version of the book. It would just be filled with like little corners, little asides, longer write-ups. And I spent quite a while trying to do this version of the book. And I think probably after like two and a half years, the process for doing the book was a very long process. It was by no means an easy thing or straightforward. I mean, I started working on a version of the book that ultimately had to get completely scrapped. And because it was like, you know, if I do want to do this book to this vision that I have, it's going to take like 10 years.

because I'm doing it all myself. And then it was like, okay, tear everything down, kind of identify what I want to do. What can I do? What's much more a complishable? Whatever that word is. And, you know, I started thinking about like the idea of like big photos, like one photo a page, one thing a page, kind of like big things. And then my inspiration kind of went towards the idea of a museum.

exhibit. Like imagine that you're going into a space and then you walk up and then you see like a cabinet with like the glass top and you have a console in it. And then you have like the write up on the, you know, outside the case that gives you like a little brief thing about what this console is, some specs, you know. And then that kind of really took off with like the direction that I wanted to do with the book. And then it's just kind of like rebuilding up everything to figure out how to accomplish that. So that was one of the big struggles with the book. Um, the other big struggles. Also, again, I did the whole book was done by me in terms of like layout, photos, editing, writing, all that. And you have to learn a lot of things to be able to do a project that

way. I mean, you do the book similarly. Don't you, Jeremy? In terms of like, you're the whole front back man. Um, yeah. I mean, what I'm doing is with my books for the most part, is taking, you know, the scripts to videos that I've produced for YouTube and kind of reworking those. So if you read my books front to back, then, yeah, you get like this kind of chronology, but, you know, they're all kind of standalone art. Well, I mean, front to back in the sense that you're doing all the aspects of the book yourself, like the writing, the photos. Oh, oh, yes. Okay. Not literally front to back. Ah, got it. Yes. It's a, it's a one-man shop job and there are a lot of positives about that kind of process and a lot of negatives because

it's like it's all on you but you know if you have this idea at the 11th hour to redo something then you know you can easily turn that around versus you know going through the process of talking to people having a meeting you know getting ideas thrown around it's just like boom I'm going to do it but yeah I just to just interject um I've been putting together a very photography-heavy book. I guess maybe I didn't realize it, but probably inspired by what you've done, just focusing on video game box art. I've photographed for my videos. And I've been uploading the work-in-progress files to my video patrons over the course of the year. And they, I don't know, you know, exactly what their thoughts are, but they must be like,

this guy is an idiot because, you know, like every other month I make these massive bookwide changes to how the layout works. I think I'm finally done and just need to write, you know, the last of the content and take a few photos that are missing. But it's been, you know, like people have kind of seen the ugly tortuous process through which I put together a book and like think, oh, well, I need to make a design change. And, you know, I can't really do this through a library. So I've got a like a linked library. I have to just. do everything, all 300 pages, manually by hand. So, yeah, they can, you know, it's, it's been an opportunity for people who support my work

to see that birth, birth is an ugly, horrible process. Yeah, I mean, a lot of work, I think, is accomplished through iteration, a lot of bigger projects. Like, you're not going to have some amazing idea that you're going to create perfectly on your first attempt. So, and I imagine that this is true for things like music and video. games and other things where like you kind of build something you're not happy with it you try it again you try it again and then you give up and you release it you know yeah if i were working

with a graphic designer um they would have quit by now or maybe hunted me down to kill me it's people think that you're being fussy but it's so hard to commit to this idea of like okay this is final because like the next day you'll be like oh i kind of wish that this was a little bit moved or something like that. So, like, I don't know what the process was for you when you're kind of like hands off. It's done. Like, did you have to do a hard thing for yourself or did you kind of have like an external thing where it's like, oh, here's a deadline.

It's done. No, it's pretty much like I get to a point where I think this is, you know, realistically as good as I can do for now. And then, you know, all the things that I'm dissatisfied with once it's actually printed, I take those and put it into the next book. that I produce, since, you know, I'm kind of doing this as a series. It makes it, you know, it gives me the possibility to improve through iteration. And if you go back and look at, you know, the first of the Game Boy collection books that I published in 2014, 2015, and compare that to

what I've published, you know, recently with Super NES and Virtual Boy, it's pretty night and day. Like, there's, there's been a huge step forward in terms of design and just cleanliness and, you know, quality of writing. Like, everything is just better now than it was. But I had to go through that process, you know, to say, I hope people don't feel like I'm just churning out inadequate work. Like, you know, here you can support me by buying my, my crappy work and progress. It's not like that. It's just, you know, you do things over time and you get better at it. And that's, you know, that's kind of the philosophy I've taken with the books that I produce is like, I'm not going to, these are going to be perfect.

There's never going to be a perfect book. But my goal is for the next book to be even better than the one before. I do kind of like have to just say, this is where it stops. Like, this is as good as this one's going to get. And let's move on and learn and get better. I've had that a bit with photos. So when I started way, way back, I didn't really know anything about product photography. And my photos were okay to begin with.

But, you know, there's always things that you learn as you go along and you get better at it. like when I look back at some of my early stuff like I just horrified but one of the things about doing photos on Wikipedia too is that you can re-upload a new file or upload a new file and replace it so over time I have gone through and replaced some of the photos with better photos and then because of the magic of the internet I get to enjoy all of my old photos still living on in other places you know my horrible photo of like the Xbox is still lingering around on some meme format thing somewhere, you know, they never die on the internet. But back to the book, in terms of like creating it, like the design was the whole thing.

Writing it and research is another big aspect because I come from a Wikipedia background in terms of like all the work that I was doing before I did the book. So I kind of know how to navigate Wikipedia in terms of like looking for good information and how to look for citations. But, you know, a lot of the times there's a lot of stuff that you're finding on Wikipedia that's just not, you know, attributed to anything. And you basically can't use it. So, you know, the process of research for the book was I had to just kind of like amass

a lot of research about video games, which you come to learn isn't a lot. lot because for a long period of time, video games were not treated seriously. I mean, there's still kind of not to most people. But, you know, when you're going through research for, like, older video games, it's mostly, like, magazines that you're relying on. So, like, I had to go and find scans of old magazines. I have, like, probably, like, hundreds of gigabytes of just a massive file of just scans of old magazines that I go through, I spent hundreds of hours probably going through old

newspapers, you know, like the things where you go online and you can look through newspapers by keywords and stuff, you know, they have the scans. And I found that newspapers actually had a ton of information that generally wasn't well known on the internet because it's just something that takes a lot more effort to look through. Have either of you guys done newspaper archive searches. I did it a lot for my next book, Shareware Heroes, and found so much really good stuff that way as well, yeah. Yeah, I've definitely done some newspaper archive searching, you know, to look up prices on games, contemporary reviews, you know, since there weren't a lot of magazines in 1985, 86 covering console games, you know, that that information is really valuable.

Or just, you know, trying to pin down, when did this game actually launch. Like, did it really ship this year? So, yeah, newspaper archive info is extremely useful. One of the things that I kind of found out, like, going through, you know, newspapers and trying to figure out just the prices of consoles, like the idea of a launch date and a launch price for a console was very nebulous in the second generation for things like the Atari and like more of the obscure consoles. Because there really was no. standard date for things to release. Things got released in waves.

They had like electronic stores. If you try to look at newspaper articles for ads from electronic scores, you'll find that they say that the suggested retail price is not what it actually is because they'll put their sale price as something that makes it look more attractive. You know what I mean? Like say like this console release for 259 most places, if you looked at some ads, it might say that the retail price was $279 and that they're selling it for $249, like, that kind of craziness where it's not something that like a lot of us would think about because we didn't really live at that time in like the 70s and the early 80s of like, you know, this retail world where like, you know, he would have like these independent stores that weren't just like Toys or Us or Target or something like that. So just trying to figure out very simple information in the 80s and like the late 70s is.

incredibly difficult. And I'm sure that both of you guys know that, considering like the realms of the books that you're doing. Right. Yeah. At some point, I'm going to, you know, really tackle the epic epic super cassette vision.

And I despair of finding any hard info about that on the internet. It's going to be just ridiculous. For the epoch super cassette vision, I think that surprisingly one of the best resources, it doesn't seem like it would be trustworthy. But, you know, the people that do them are actually very, like, eager people who are just so passionate about the project. But, like, these people who run fan sites dedicated to one very specific thing, like the Tomi Tudor, the Fairchild Channel F, there's these people who have, like, these websites where they just amass everything that they can find. And then they post it.

They have forums. And those are, like, some of the most invaluable places for things that are just more niche. and more obscure and I think that a lot of the information that I came for like the epochs super except vision came from like one of those kind of sites I think it was Japanese I'm not sure I'd have to go back but sounds likely yeah yeah I you know so the write-ups in the book for a console is a hundred words about they used to be much longer and then I just kept cutting them down and cutting down just because I I like the brevity I like the readability of it but you know there's a point kind of realize, like, how much history that you can give in a hundred words, you're not going

to be able to find super in-depth information that will improve that at a certain, past a certain point. Like, it's just diminishing returns. So, like, a lot of systems, you just have a very general history that you're working with. Like, if you're trying to do a deep dive for something obscure like the super cassette vision, I feel like you would always just have to try to go to primary sources where you're like do you have any kind of system set up where you could interview people from epoch if right you know people who live in japan and we're making a game system 40 years ago it's going to be tough you know a lot of them were fairly established engineers at that point so they're probably in like their 80s 90s if they're they're still

around so yeah things like that are tough but you know it's um i think one advantage that um we have with the internet is that there are people, as you mentioned, out there who are, you know, gathering this information and people who are out there, I think, on our side, you know, who appreciate the fact that we are trying to curate this theory and cover it. And, you know, when we put out a call, I think there's, you know, a pretty good track record of people saying, hey, you know what, I have some info that could help you or I know where you could find something. So I don't think it's impossible. But, you know, there are some topics. are just, you kind of have to wing it, and that's how it's going to go.

Anyway, so I don't want to take up too much more of anyone's time. So I did want to ask each of you, you know, looking at your books as they exist now, one, what's next? You know, you've kind of mentioned some things, especially Richard. But two, actually, let's say one, what would you like to do to improve the books you've published even further? Is there more you can do? You know, would there be cause or reason?

reason for a version three, a third revision. And then, you know, number two, like, what do you want to tackle next? So, Richard, how about you? Yeah, okay. So I probably won't do a third revision of it, but there are more stories to tell. And I've done actually a bunch of interviews for a second volume, which I know too, a lot of people would sound just insane. How can you've already written this 480-page book about Mac gaming, how much more can there be? But there's actually quite a lot more that I could dig into. In the first volume, I really focused on original development. And anyone who was playing Mac games during the era knows that there were a lot

of ports going on. I had one chapter about the whole porting industry but there were multiple companies and I've for instance there's a company called MacSoft they were for years the leading publisher

of Mac versions of PC games I have over the past 18 months or so interviewed all the core people who worked on that and when I was doing this second edition thing, sorry the expanded edition

to use the proper nomenculture. I had to think about what do I want to add? And I talked a bit to Sam at Bitmap about it, and we didn't want to add too much. We didn't want to make people who have the first edition feel like they've been screwed over. Oh, he's gone and made the book 50% longer or whatever. And now I have to go and buy it again. I wanted to make sure that if someone has the first edition,

and they wanted to buy the second edition, they would have enough in there to justify the purchase, but it wasn't a requirement. I didn't want to put too much new stuff in there. So there will be a volume two eventually going into stuff that I felt like I didn't have room for the first time or literally didn't have room for because I had a publisher and the publisher gave me constraints. Like we have this much money.

You need your page account to be somewhere in this. sort of range. And also there are people who I wasn't able to track down the first time. And as I mentioned earlier, I've gotten a lot better at research. And so there are people who I could not find anywhere before who I've now tracked down and I've been able to interview or people who I tried to interview last time. And despite our best efforts, it just never happened. And eventually I got to the point where I had to say, look, I got to finish this book. We can't talk. And so that's coming.

As I've mentioned a few times, I have a book coming out next year that it's done. We just finished copy editing. So it's going into the text layout, the typesetting, the images. I've captured a lot of screenshots. Shareware heroes. So it's about that whole shareware scene in the 80s and the 90s, which sort of faded away in the early 2000s. although the shareware concept itself has never really gone away completely

which is basically the idea that you get to try something before you pay for it I mean free to play free medium stuff it's basically just an evolution of shareware it's you get to play this game you don't pay anything for it and hey you like it okay start buying all these microtransactions for extra stuff

that's I think just in many ways an evolution of the original shareware concepts with some elements maybe of coin ops thrown in where back at the beginning it was, I'm going to give you my thing and I'm making it freely available because this is a really good way to get my software into people's hands

without having to go through a boxed retailer. And then if you like it, you pay for it or there was some evolutions on that like Scott Miller at Apogee came up with this idea. that we'll give you an episode free and then you'll pay and you'll get the rest of the game. And Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and Commander Keen these were released that way. And that was part of why they were a huge success, was that people got hooked because the gameplay was so good.

So that's coming up next year. And I have some other projects that are in the sort of early stages that I probably shouldn't be talking about yet. because they could wind up all falling apart and not coming out. Right. Just go ahead and overpromise. Come on. Right. Yes.

Definitely. I mean, I made that mistake plenty of times. Evan, how about you? Well, I got to spend, you know,

a cozy couple months doing the second edition, which was, you know, a completely different experience than the first edition's wrap up. And I'm really happy with the second. edition. So really the only kind of thing that would warrant a third edition would be if I got a lot more stuff, which at this point is not a lot in terms of like missing consoles from the book, missing computers, or, you know, like in six years when the PS6

comes out, you know, that's really the only time I would even consider doing something like that. But like other projects, I don't know. The book industry, the book things weird. I don't know like how it works for the both of you but like when you kind of like consider like the amount of time and effort that you put into the book and then like the money that you get back from it it's like there's an imbalance there you know at least for me because i spent so long on the first edition because it was just you know me trying to figure out what the heck i wanted to do um i assume that both of you have it figured out do you have it figured out not really do not no but nobody writes books to get rich right yeah it's not even getting rich sometimes you just want to

break even yeah i will say that the sort of publishing label i guess you could call it that i'm heading up at limited run um you know it's focused on sort of small print runs but our goal is to really make these profitable for writers you know no one's going to get rich i don't think from the books that they publish with us but but the hope is that you know giving them a favorable, like a really favorable, generous percentage on the royalty, which is kind of limited runs. I don't know how much of I was supposed to say about this, but limited runs approach with, you know, game developers, too,

has always been to be very, you know, generous and accommodating compared to other publishers in the industry. And we're applying that to the book process, too. So my hope is that when people publish through us, they're not going to sell 100,000 copies of their books, or maybe not even 10,000 copies of their books. But our hope is that they will walk away from it thinking, you know, that was worth my time. I'm glad we did that.

So, yeah, I kind of taken the lumps that I've experienced over the years and the kind of disproportionate investment that I've made into books versus the return and said, you know, I want other people to have a better experience. So, you know, I don't know if that's going to change the world or anything, but hopefully, you know, it'll make a, a few people's lives happier, that's, that's kind of the goal. And there's a balance that I think every author needs to be thinking about when they're working on their book between, do you want something that's commercially viable, something that's actually going to sell enough copies that maybe you do break even or earn a profit on your time, which then sort of leads into the question of, well, how much do you want to be earning for your time? Do you want some really expensive hourly rate, in which case what's commercially viable gets a lot narrower because you've got to think about a much higher volume of sales or a much lower volume of work for yourself. You have to think about balancing that commercial side against your artistic integrity. What do you want to do? What's your vision?

What's your dream for the book? What's the best case scenario of how much? stuff you're able to squeeze into it, how perfect these words are going to read, how beautiful this page design is going to be, what the flow of sections through the book is going to be, how many iterations you're going to go through it before you say, okay, this is good enough now to put out. Yeah, at some point you do have to kind of cut your losses. But, you know, I think I think anyone who's kind of doing this sort of work and saying, hey, I'm going to really take a deep dive into the history of Macintosh video games.

You know, I don't think people like you or me or Evan are motivated by the desire to become fabulously wealthy from our work. It's more like, here's a thing that I really care about and that I want to put into the world. And hopefully, you know, at the end of the day, I can look back. and say, yeah, that wasn't a total waste of time. And I'm not going to have trouble paying my mortgage or rent this month because I did this thing. But yeah, it's definitely not the line of business where people are going to become very, very wealthy from publishing a book. You really have to go, as you said, kind of toward extremely general popular appeal to manage to do that. and write something, you know, like console wars and put it, you know, couch it in terms that are going to be maybe not extremely historically accurate, but appealing to kind of a mass audience.

So, you know, when you're taking the documentary approach, you're going to kind of have the same sort of success that documentary filmmakers have, which is, you know, people will appreciate the work you're doing and maybe you can make a career. of it, but you know, you're not going to be raking in Steven Spielberg bucks. You're not, you're not the next JJ Abrams. And God bless you for that. Anyway, I think that's probably enough conversation about video game history books. Unless there's anything either of you would like to say further that we haven't touched on, I think this is where we kind of say, okay, we're drawing a line here. This is where the podcast stands. So this is where we close the book.

But yeah, if there is anything that you're interested in chatting about or, you know, saying before we wrap, please speak up now. I would maybe just add that I really like Evans' console, game console book. Oh, thank you. For something that I don't know that we've really gotten into

here in this conversation, which is the way you get this visual design history of gaming hardware. You can see if you browse through the book the way that the industrial design of these systems and the controllers has shifted and evolved over time,

the different form and size and shape, the colors and materials that are used, and how they became, it's really clear how they've become more complicated over time, how we've gone from these almost primitive systems to these really complex things we have today that have a gazillion buttons on them and can do everything that a computer can do. And I think it really spells it out visually in a great way. I enjoyed looking through it. Well, thank you. I don't know about you too, but like when I'm doing this kind of project,

I come up with these rules for myself about like the vision for the book, how I want to do things, and then I just try to stick to those rules. One of the big rules that I had for the book is that I wasn't going to feature games, which is kind of weird when you're having a book about video game. history, essentially, but no mention of games, because, you know, I'm focusing really on the physicality of these consoles, the way that they look, the way that they evolve over time, you know, and like when you have like those break apart shots where you get to actually see inside of all these systems, like you can really do that comparison as, you know, technology improves

because like those motherboards from like the second gen are so weird looking most of the time, you know and like i i find that stuff fascinating it also helps me too because you know it's something that's very physical because you know i'm approaching this as a photographer taking shots of physical items you know and focusing on that really brings all that to the forefront as opposed to trying to talk about video games and including screenshots and stuff like that the only screenshot in the book is of pong because i can actually draw that myself I could also do the Magnobox Odyssey if I had a dot, you know. Right.

You need three dots, actually. Three very fuzzy dots. Yep. All right, gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and for kind of walking us through the process and the challenges of documenting video game history and book form. It's, you know, something very extremely adjacent to this podcast and a little bit of a different conversation than we normally have. but I think, you know, still very valuable for that. So to wrap, please tell us where we can find you online. And most importantly, where we can find your book to support your work

and also to enlighten and edify ourselves as to the history of video games. Richard. You can find me on Twitter at Moss R.C. my book you can go to bitmapbooks was it dot co.uk I think I didn't come prepared with the

URL here. Bitmapbooks.com. You'll find it there or if you want to get one of those fancy redirection links go to I think it's Macgamingbook.com and that will redirect you straight to the store page where you can

spend 30 pounds whatever that translates into in U.S. dollars for a hardback and you get a PDF with it. And if you want to pre-order Shareware Heroes, that's somewhere at my other publisher, Unbound's website. Unbound.com slash books slash shareware dash heroes, like a hyphen in the middle of the word. I think that's everywhere for me. Okay. And Evan? you can find my book on Amazon, just game console 2.0 for the second edition. You can find it at other places too, like Target and Barnes & Nobles and stuff,

but most people just shop on Amazon. You can also get it from no starch directly, no starch.com. And I think the benefit of that is that you get a free e-book version when you buy through their website. And I think it's discounted too. You know, it retells from 40, but usually you can get it cheaper than that because of discounts on like Amazon and stuff like that. No, but that would be great if you did buy the look if you enjoy it. Thank you again for having me on this, Jeremy.

It was also nice talking to you, Richard. Yeah, this is great. Yeah, thanks both of you. And finally, I've got to do my pitches and so forth for Retronauts, which, of course, is the podcast you right now are listening to. You can find us at Retronauts.com And on many, many podcatchers, you can find us on, I don't know, just go on the internet, look for Retronauts, and you'll find us, and you can listen to us. You can also support us.

We are totally crowdfunded, or pretty much mostly crowdfunded. Patreon.com slash Retronuts. You can subscribe for three bucks a month and get every episode early and a high bitrate quality with no advertisements and cross promotions. You can also subscribe for $5 a month, and in addition to that, get bonus episodes exclusive to Patreon every other Friday and also exclusive columns every weekend by Diamond Fight and have Discord access and so on and so forth. It's a phenomenal deal. I highly recommend it. And you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as GameSpite and publishing books at limited rungames.com.

You can also see the videos. many of my books are based on by going to YouTube and looking up my name, Jeremy Parrish. And that's it. So, yeah, now that you've been listening to the history of the video games, you go read about the history of video games. It's good for your eyes and your brain. You know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.