Retronauts - 579: Writing About Video Game History

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Nadia Oxford, Stuart Gipp, and Kevin Bunch have one thing in common: They've published books about video game history. In this episode, they break down the work involved in making the magic happen. 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 on Retronauts, it's words about words. I am Jeremy Parrish, and this is episode 579. I can't believe we've gone 578 episodes without talking about ourselves, basically, and about our work. I mean, we talk about it some, but it's never before been like it's going to be now. This episode is all about the stuff that we do, specifically the writing that we do, specifically the writing and print that we do, because all of us here on this roundtable have, written and published books. We are now famous authors. And this is a chance for us to tell you to go buy our work. No, actually, it's not. I'm not, I don't feel good about just naked self-promotion.

No one wants to listen to that. So here's the trade-off for this episode. We're going to talk about the books that we've published, and you're going to hear about that and hear all about where you can buy those books and support our existences. But in return for that, we're going to talk about the process of publishing and about just what it takes to create a book, to publish a book, to get something like that together. And the goal here is not just for us to talk about the work we've done, but hopefully to help inspire or inform people who are interested in creating their own books, their own publications about gaming or, you know, really whatever, to go out and get published. Because it's easier to publish these days than it's ever been

before in human history. Yeah, for sure. We've made, come a long way since the Gutenberg Press. And there is self-publishing. There are small press houses, you know, boutique houses. There are larger print companies that still give people contracts and things like that. There are a lot of options out there. And there's no one right way to create a book and no one right way to get published.

There are probably wrong ways, but we're not going to talk about those. We're going to talk about just our different experiences. and how we've gotten there. And just as an active disclosure up front, I'm going to remind everyone that my day job is working at Limited Run Games as the head of Press Run Books, a print imprint, a book imprint under the video games company.

But this is not an exercise in supporting that. Some of these books that we're going to talk about have been printed by Press Run, but not all of them. And this is not about me tooting my own horn. It's not about saying, hey, go buy our stuff, go support my company. It is really just about us talking about our work and providing some transparency into how easy or difficult it's been for us to create these things and what it's taken to bring them to fruition and get them out into everyone's hands, hopefully. So without

further ado, I'm going to let everyone else chime in and introduce themselves, starting with, of course, the most venerable of co-hosts here, who has been on the show the longest besides me. Hey, everybody. It's Bob Mackie, and I am no longer illiterate. Congratulations on that. I'm glad that you have chosen to read to succeed. And, Jeremy, I hate to contradict your entire intro, but I am here for naked self-promotion. I have a mortgage now, and I command everyone to buy my book. Oh, you have a Vancouver mortgage, no less. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I'm about to take on a new 2023-sized mortgage. And it's not pretty. But I'm still, I'm still, you know, going to offer the people a trade-off here, you know, a tit for a tat. So yeah, that's, that's fine.

Your naked avarice can be balanced out by our generosity. I think that's the retronauts. The retronauts promised to everyone. Yes, I will still dance for Nichols, but I do ask you to buy the book at the end of this podcast. Fair enough. All right. Who was that who just chuckled? Probably me. Nadia Oxford. I, I, good word, word good, real. Actually, probably some of the first stuff I published was for your zine parish. One of the things I distinctly remember publishing is a breakdown of the book, Crystallids, because I thought it was related to the game Crystallis in my first heard, like, you know, kind of saw the two in six sessions. But they have nothing to do with each other. But they do involve, like, future kids in the future. I don't remember that. I mean, I remember the zine, but I don't remember that article. But, you know, that was 20-something years ago. So I think I can be forgiven for forgetting some of the fine-tuned particulars. Yeah, I'm just cursed. That's all. But you were writing before that, not in print, but online. You wrote some timeless works of fiction, I believe.

Oh, God, don't call on that. All right. Let's move on down the. East Coast to the person located midway between myself and Nadia. And that would be... That would be me, Kevin Bunch. I had something clever and I just slipped to my mind. Sorry, everybody. That's okay. We love you. That's okay. As long as you remember it, you know, for the second round of revision. That's the great thing about print, about books, is that they, they, a proper book does go through a few rounds of revisions. So you do have time to remember, oh, that thing. I need to include it. God bless the editors.

I don't, you know, my, the books that I publish these days are based on the video series that I create. And by based on, I mean, I take the video scripts and I adapt them into something that works better in print, which involves a bit of rewriting and expansion. But I treat the videos as basically the first draft and then crowdsource, you know, corrections and editing. So when I screw up, people on YouTube are very happy to tell me, you screwed up. So I catch a lot of errors that way and my books are much better for it. So that's, you know, part of. of the editorial process. So we'll, like I said, we'll get you in the edit rounds, Kevin. And then finally, bringing up the caboose here from far. What? Bringing up the caboose on the book train. Oh, thank God. Okay. Hello. I'm Stuart Chip. I read a book called All Games Are Good. And I'm just learning now that I can revise that to my intended title, which is All Games Are Bad. Yes. Of course, they are all bad. Yes. But that'll have to be in the same.

second printing. It'll be great because people will think it's a new book, but the text will be exactly the same. As long as I don't listen to this, of course. Right, right. That's the trick. Cultivate two entirely distinct audiences. So just to begin with a little bit of background here, you know, I was talking earlier about how publishing has been democratized. And it really has. When I was in college many thousands of years ago, I really wanted to go into print, publishing, and design. By the time I got out of college, everyone said, oh, no, print is dead. Go on to the internet instead. So I ended up on the internet. And that was fine. And, you know, I was very fortunate to be able to be hired at oneup.com back right before it launched and started there doing design. but eventually, I think everyone said, actually, you're probably, yeah, that's not so good. Why don't you go do writing instead? So I switched to writing and editing, and everyone seemed much happier that way. But, you know, I got there because of other people's generosity, other people taking a chance on me. And throughout my time there, I was able to publish in the Zip Davis magazines, thanks to other people's generosity and taking a chance on me. And, you know, I've been very fortunate. And it was very sad when the print magazines went away. And at that point, my wife said to me, you know, you really like creating things in print,

why don't you self-pub. And she pointed me to a website called blurb.com, which was designed for publishing photo books for photographers. Oh, I don't know that. And I said, oh, okay, I can make books here because I just upload files and they'll print them. Which actually wasn't a great idea because being geared toward full. color, you know, large format publications about photos, their books were very expensive. And so, you know, I was publishing these tiny little black and white publications that were mostly text. And they were extremely expensive. And yet I and the people who contributed to them

made very, very little money because the actual net profit on those expensive books was minuscule. So, you know, there are many more printing options now, and they are varying degrees of generous with their royalty structure and with their pricing. But it's also easier to create small runs of books, pre-print them, you know, and get the volume discounts that way. When you're printing one book at a time, as with print on demand, it's just necessarily expensive. And printing, you know, a small press run of a thousand books even, cuts the price dramatically. And also, you can afford to invest in better materials, better printing quality, you know, like web press or something versus just the digital process that they use

for those print on demand photo books. So, yeah, that's kind of where I started from this. And I've, you know, kind of spent the past 10, 12, 15 years-ish making books just because it's a thing I enjoy doing. There's something very satisfying about seeing that layout, about getting the final product in your hands and saying, whoa, I did this. And then immediately it's on to the next thing because this is a restless world and there's no time to relax and enjoy things. But I don't want to talk too much about my stuff. Maybe I'll save that for the end if there's time. But I'm actually more interested in hearing what everyone else has to say about their processes and about the books that they've created because you're not me. And so I don't know your stories. Some I know better than

others. Like, Kevin, I helped you and Stuart get your books to, you know, over the finish line and to print. But even so, like, I don't necessarily know about how you went about sourcing your material and finding your inspiration and just, you know, what kind of writing do you do? Like, how do you do your writing, et cetera, et cetera. So I'd like to talk about that. So I will, actually, I think, Bob, your book is the most recently published. So why don't we start with you? First of all, What did you create? What is this book that you have produced? I created a book that is a very in-depth oral history on the LucasArts point-and-click adventure game, Day of the Tenticle.

Like, I basically wanted to talk to everybody who was involved with the game and learn more about it because this is, I mean, people, there's a lot of retrospectives on, like, Monkey Island and Sam and Max and other LucasArts games. But I found that this game, while a beloved adventure game that people really like, there wasn't a lot of research or scholarship or interviews on the subject. So I wanted to make the definitive exploration of the game. And that's exactly what I set out to do with this project. So this is published through Boss Fight books, correct? That's right. So what's the process there? Did they contact you?

Did you contact them? Did they have just like a big pile of book? projects that they wanted someone to write about. And you said, I'll do that one. Well, I think this is a very long time. By the way, this book took about six years from the pitch to release. So I think my story is going to be much different than everyone else's because like COVID happened in the middle of me writing my book and that delayed things on both ends a lot. But yeah, they were, they had a call for pitches. I believe they do this pretty regularly, boss fight books. And if you want to pitch to them, you can. And it was December of 2017.

and I pitched a book and actually I pitched a Maniac Mansion book initially and then it changed to the day of the tentacle book because I realized that I had already done a lot of the groundwork because I had written tens of thousands of words on the game for a U.S. Gamer for a very in-depth cover story and I felt like a book project would be the good way to sit down and refine that with the time I didn't have as someone who was writing for a website and also doing two podcasts on top of that in 2016. So I actually don't remember that cover story. Was that when I was EIC or was that later? Yes, it was when you were EIC. It published when the Data Tenticle Remastered released in... Don't I feel like an asshole. No, no.

You approved it. But yeah, it released when the Day of Technical Remastered version came out in like spring of 2016. And it was written to go along with that. with that remaster. So it was for U.S. Gamer, and I was proud of what I had done at the time, but I was running up against, like, realistic constraints and deadlines for a website, and like I said, also having to do other things for a website and also having to work on two podcasts. So I felt like I could do more with it.

I felt like it could be expanded upon, and it was essentially all I wanted to do in the press. This is kind of like my capstone project for the press, basically, where I've kind of met everybody I wanted to meet within reason. Some people that are unmeatable, I just put, I took them off my list. And this was kind of the last thing I wanted to do. And I did it, but I felt like, oh, if I could go back and revisit this, I'd really love to put like some more polish on it. And then in the process of, you know, working on the revised version, which took years and years and many edits and writing a lot of new content, U.S. Gamer went away. So I was like, oh, there's even better reason for me to write this because, you know, millions of my words that I wrote

you can't read anymore. But now this is available in a physical form, Zipf Davis can't buy all the copies and burn them. Well, I will say in fairness, U.S. Gamer went away, but you can still read your words if you go to VG 247 and wade through a bunch of pop-ups. That's true, yes. A lot of the U.S. Gamer content has been retained. I'm not sure how much of it. Yeah, I could probably step in and kind of tell you what happened. VG247, it was really good at the arc and everything. There's also someone who, I'm really sorry, I can't remember their name, but they archived

pretty much all of U.S. gamer on archive.org. But yeah, VG247 has our features, but our news stories I think are all gone, which is unfortunate because that means so our headlines who wrote like Animal Crossing has tarantia island because God is dead or something like that. I wrote some funny headlines there. But yeah, they did spare a lot of our work, which I'm glad for. I mean, just like in general, the, you know, writing on the internet for the past 23, 22 years of my life means that 99% of my work is not available.

And that's like millions of words. And it's nice to have something that a company can't take away and delete because I was actually writing my author blurb for the book. book. And I was like, Bob Mackey is a writer who lives in Vancouver. He has worked on these websites. And as I was writing them all down, I realized like, oh, none of these exist anymore. People are going to think I'm making this up. It's why I can't ever apply for a real job. If I list what I've worked on, if people look this up, they're going to be like, you just made up dorkly. That's not a real word. The mayor of Candyland. Okay, sure, buddy. Yeah. Sixty one France for a second. What the hell is that? Exactly. Well, yeah, exactly. I realize like, oh, my God, everything I worked on has gone now. So, as I'm working on the book I'm realizing more and more why it needs to exist because like everything is disappearing and then I sit down to write my blurb and it's just like well everything I've done is gone so it's important that at least some physical object something will be around after I'm gone to prove that I did anything for 20 years of my life writing in the press. You know, and I'm going to be.

Yeah, yeah, the, you know, it's kind of inevitable that U.S. Gamer stuff went over to VG 247 because that last year, 2016, that I was EIC, management became very, I would say, hostile to deep dive feature content and said, what you need to do is stuff that's more like VG 247, just, you know, like post 20 news articles an hour and make them as clickbait as possible. that's what games journalism needs to be. And that is why I stopped being there because I just, I can't do that. My brain's not geared that way. No judgment on people's people whose minds are geared that way. Mind just can't do that. And I saw that the writing was on the wall and I needed to go away. But yeah, that really does get to one of the fundamental values, one of the fundamental appeals of print is that once something is printed, unless, you know, someone really goes for it and tries to track down every copy of it and set fire to it, it's there. You can own it. You, like, no one can take that away. If you can get that into libraries or bookstores, then it, you know, just proliferates

and spreads. And, you know, people will occasionally ping me and say, hey, I saw one of your GameSpite zines in, you know, half-priced books or something. And, you know, those were self-published, self-distributed, 15 years ago, and people are still finding them at random bookstores far, far away from anywhere I've ever lived. And that's cool. Like, you know, my words and the words of everyone I collected into those volumes is still out there. And even though we made very, very little money off of those things, the writing and the thoughts still exist. And actually, the GameSpite Quarterly, the Game Spite Zine, is what got me my job at Limited Run Games, because the CEO of the company, Josh Fairhurst, bought all of those publications that I was putting out because he

was like, wow, cool. Someone's writing stuff about video games in an interesting way. That's really great. And so, you know, when the opportunity came to have me do that kind of thing for his company as a full-time project, he was like, yeah, come do it. So, you know, once we did some initial books that succeeded, like my Super Aneas Works and Virtual Boy works books, they did way better than anyone anticipated. And he said, we need to have a book imprint. That would be a great thing to add to our video game company because it's, you know, it's something different. It expands what we're doing in terms of business. And, you know, I think it's kind of seen as something that adds some legitimacy to a company that sometimes kind of gets a bad rap for

things that are out of our control. So, yeah, it's kind of nice to have that, um, that extra a bit of like, no, we're actually doing cool stuff in print. You may not like what we're doing in terms of video games. They may not be to your taste or, you know, you don't like our distribution processes. But come on, you can't not like books. Books are good. They're, you know, they predate video games by centuries. Everybody likes books. Exactly. Yeah, but like, I mean, the, uh, the reality of what's happened to the internet and websites over the past 10 to 15 years is why I'm much happier having been a full-time podcaster for the past seven years. It's also why I'm very happy, to write this book. And one, to have written this book, and one thing that I feel that I didn't

really have the chance to take advantage of when I was in the press was an editor, because all of the teams I was on, they were very, very small, and nobody had time to look over anyone else's work. It's like, if you're not working on something to publish, then you're wasting time. We need to stay afloat. So very few times I've had an editor, and sometimes the editors were bad the few times I've had them and I've really value a good editor because a good editor will improve your work or they will

like, they'll show you something you haven't even noticed about your own writing. Bad editors will be like, write this like I would write it or tell you something insane like every sentence must have an opinion which I've encountered editors like that I'm like, what is this? This feels like a puzzle or something but

yeah my writers at Boss Fight, sorry my editors at Boss Fight books were great and they really helped elevate the material and show me like issues with my own writing that I've now incorporated into writing, the little writing I do today. But I feel that it's unfortunate, but we just could never take advantage of copy editors. And you hear like in the past, like somebody's job at a website would be copy editor. And that just sounded insane to me as someone who just could never stop writing out of necessity

for a website. It's funny because no one who worked on games websites had a title of writer. It was always something editor. And yet editing was the one thing we never got to do. Yeah, I really missed, you know, when one-up was under the Zip-Dav Davis Publications banner. We had great copy editors like Jason Wilson, who were so thoughtful and would add so much to your work and really, you know, take the time to, I think, bring out the best of your ideas. And I learned a lot from Jason. Yeah, same.

tried to pass along to, you know, the works that I edit under press run. But yeah, like when they started cutting heads, that was the first department to go. They were like, oh, making our work better. Who gives a crap about that? Get rid of those guys. That just slows us down. Yep. So, yeah, you know, the slower, more deliberate process of publishing books is great. Were there any particular challenges you had to, you know, kind of deal with working on your day of the tentacle book besides, you know, COVID? Well, COVID, actually, the funny and big scare quotes thing is, I remember turning in my big first draft on like the eve of COVID, on COVID Eve, basically. It was like March 18th, 2020. The coffee shop. Yeah. Yeah, I think that could be the exact date. And like the coffee shop I'd usually been working in, they were closing early because of COVID. And there was like this really eerie thing where we didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know what was going to happen. And I thought. like, oh, I'll just get another cup of coffee and there was just no employees in the coffee shop. I didn't know where they went.

Oh, that's terrifying. I should just leave. And yeah, that's when I turned in my first draft. But yeah, COVID really slowed things down in terms of, it slowed down Boss Fight books. They had regular releases before COVID and then during COVID. They really slowed down the releases for obvious reasons. But I think some of the big challenges were writing a very extensive intro. for the book that grounded my oral history in the context of what are adventure games, what is the history of adventure games, why is this one important? That is something that I didn't have to consider with my oral history because, you know, if you're, if you are on a website and you're looking for things about a game you like, you don't need that context. But here, it required a lot more for this project. And it was a real balance of how do I explain this and keep it interesting and keep it in my own voice and not make it so I'm talking down to people because all of this history is in my head and I assume that most people know it. But then when I put it on the page,

it's like, oh, this is actually way more complicated than I realized. Yeah, the books that I've been putting together based on the videos that I mentioned, there's a lot of context that I add to the videos that is visual, you know, like footage of games that I'm referencing. And, you know, there's the entire. continuity of videos and all of YouTube, basically, for people to look at if they want to learn more. And that doesn't exist within the book. So, yeah, that is definitely a challenge. I do a lot of additional writing. I would say probably the bulk of the additional material I put into each book is just sidebars for added context. I don't want to make, you know, overstuff any of the

individual articles about games because they're already pretty dense. So then I have to kind of say, well, what here is not actually going to make sense to someone who's just picking this book up off the shelf and reading about the history of, you know, NES games in 1987. So there's a lot of thought that goes into that. But, you know, I think that's a good problem to have. It just means you kind of have to be mindful of the audience that you're writing for. And again, that's what editors are good for because they will come in and say, hey, you know, you're kind of living in your own head here. But think about the reader. Yeah, that really did help getting people who weren't as knowledgeable about adventure games to look at the book. Terms, I can't think of any offhand, but certain terminology, they would question, like, well, what does this mean? You have to explain this. Like parser? Yeah, things like that. And even like video game press words that we relied on in the past that were still in my work, like, well, what is this?

What does this mean? Things like that. I guess another challenge was also having to work with some of the creative people who were on the game. I mean, the interviews were done in 2016, and I used my power of the press to get them done. But then the unfortunate thing about working for a website is once you are laid off or leave, you lose all of your emails or all of your contacts. So I'm going to tell all of you folks out there, I would say try to move a lot of conversations to private email when you talk to famous people. And then you'll still have all our contact information. That's just my little tip for all of you out there.

So I had to get in touch with Tim Schaefer again, which was easy to do because I think it was like a PACS. 2019, I was helping my wife, Nina Matsumoto, run the fan gamer booth. And I think Double Fines booth was just across from them. So I was able to talk to him and get him to write the afterward. It was going to be the forward. And Tim Schaefer almost broke my heart because he agreed to do it. And then there was like a lot of back and forth. And then he just like totally ghosted me. And that's because he was working on Psychonauts too. He didn't need to email me. I totally understand why. And then when the Kickstarter for the books was announced, he realized that he owed me the piece of writing for the book and he got back to me immediately. So

I'm glad that I didn't have any sore feelings about Tim Schaefer after the production of this book. But I totally understand if he couldn't have done it. But things like that, working with creative people, having to tell creative people, oh, our editor wants you to actually change what you wrote, a person who worked on the game I'm talking about. So that was something I wasn't really anticipating. So with the book out in, you know, printed in the world in hands, is there anything about it that you look at and you're like, ah, that could have been better? Or do you feel like it is kind of the work you envisioned and you're ready to move on to the next project?

I really wish I had time for follow-up interviews, interviewing. I only interviewed one of the three composers who worked on the game and I wish I had time to track them down and talk to them that just couldn't happen and maybe if there's a second edition of this book I could try to include that material but yeah that's really I feel like the only shortcomings of the book but I feel like as it stands it is the most comprehensive piece of work on this game and even in its old format the three feature articles are cited constantly on the Wikipedia page of day of the tentacle and I'm glad that my citations live on in more Wikipedia pages than just Bad Simpsons games.

connected here, is that everyone really kind of took a different approach to the work that they did. Like, Stewart is very much kind of, like, you know, opinion column, whereas Kevin is very much a sort of academic approach, very research-oriented. Bob Ears was a very journalistic approach with lots of interviews and just kind of pulling together that oral history into, you know, something that takes a lot of random and distinct conversations in terms of. into a single narrative. And Nadia, I would say you, your work is somewhere between like database writer and fan fiction writer, which I think is kind of, kind of sums up your mindset as a whole, honestly. But could you tell us about the books you have published? You were actually the first

among us here to land a proper book deal and actually have someone else publish your work as opposed to going to a website and saying, I'm going to make my own book. Gosh, darn it. I have been published, and at least one of those, like, I can't remember the name of the module right now, but someone wrote like a D&D-based module where I kind of helped out with the character, bios and information and whatnot, and read some stories for them. But, yeah, the book, I suppose I'll be talking about most is the, the Megamon X, Mavercundress Field Guide, which is the one I worked on the most. I also worked on the Robot Master Field Guide, both of them, as kind of a co-writer beside my husband, David Oxford. We kind of worked on it together, which was fun. but Mega Man X was the one that's closer to my heart because I'm just a big Mega Man X fan. And whereas the Robot Master Field Guide was more academic and kind of based on the information you got about the robot masters, et cetera, from the CDs.

And I think it was Mega Man and Bass. It was the game that had the CD. See, it sounds right. Yeah. So that was kind of a transcription of that with some stuff added in. But the Mega and X Maverpenter Field Guide was a much more of a fan-based project. where I got to write, like, the biographies for a lot of these Mavericks and characters. Like, the way it's supposed to be set up is that you pretend, or you are a new Maverick Hunter on the job, let's just say,

and for some reason or another, you can't get access to your database, so you have to, like, a good old-fashioned analog manual. And that's what this is. And it kind of explains the characters, the weapons, the armor sets. My husband did, like, all the writing for the armor sets and whatnot. That's really his kind of writing that he loves doing. But myself, I'm just like, I'm going to slip a half-life reference to the Dynamo profile, see if anyone notices. And nobody noticed, but I thought it was pretty funny. I did it.

But, yeah, that was, if you look at the Zero profile, that one has the most pages spent on it because, of course, it does. That's the one I wrote. Well, also, Zero is kind of the biggest of those characters, you know, that was significant. Narratively. Yeah. What's that? ironic? Yeah, Zero being the most prominent of all. He's

a zero and a hero. Yeah, there you go. He has a long hair. That's how I know he's cool. It's a real cool in anime. And that music that plays. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, he rushes in to save you. And so he is just like a captivating character from the start. And when you're a dumb teenager, not even a teenager at that point. Like, oh, that's so cool. I love his character. So I kind of have this lifelong love affair with Zero. And yeah, as you say, Parr, she is probably the most interesting character in the series. He links

a lot of the games, especially Mega Man X, Megaman Zero, and probably Mega Man ZX as well. And the original series, thanks to the magic of retconning. Yeah, he's, like, Wiley's creation. Apparently that was always planned according to Inifune. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, whatever you say. So, Nadia, you said this was a fan creation, but your Mega Man books are official licensed products published through Udon books who have a long-running partnership with Capcom.

Like, they've published Mega Man books. They publish, like, their monthly Street Fighter Girls and bikinis calendars and, you know, all those things. Yeah, I should reiterate that this is not really a fan project. Like, everything here is canon. It's been approved by Capcom several times over. It's all good. Even the Half-Life reference? Yes.

Amazing. Well, I just said that Dynamo is a man who, uh, dynamo proves that the wrong man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world or something like that. Oh, okay. I just thought that was fun. Not like when he started working at Black Mace. No, I didn't say Dynamo is the G-Men. And caused the Residence Cascade. That would be a really cool addition to Half-Life.

But anyway, yeah, it's totally official. It's all approved. It's all canon. I made it as fun as possible still. I'm sure David did as well. But, yeah, this is, it was published by Capcom. And they dealt with most of the layout. They dealt with, of course, a lot of the editing.

Thankfully, there was not a lot of editing. Capcom is pretty, they're not exactly hands off, but they're pretty like, you know, okay, cool, whatever. that sounds good to us. I've also written for them with their not just in print, but the album covers

for Breath of Fire. Yeah, I've written those covers. And Capcom's generally pretty good about saying, okay, yeah, that's cool, that's fun. Some companies will be like, oh, you can't mention this, you can't mention that.

But Capcom, they have fun with their properties, and so do I. Yeah, generally what I find with Japanese publishers, most of the time, the things that they will kind of, you know,

draw the line at is first if you are too effusive about their their creations they're like that's that's too much tone it down like don't be too positive that's not in keeping with you know the modesty that we want to project yes so they'll they'll draw the line there they draw the line at you mentioning anything that exists outside of their company like yes a thing they did not create a property they did not create, even as a passing mention, nope. If you want to talk about someone who created something while they were at the company and then left the company, nope, nope. But then other than that, yeah, they're generally pretty hands off as long as you are kind of sensible and knowledgeable about what you're doing. You know, the biggest notes I've gotten back

on my Konami liner notes for stuff like Bayou Billy, some of the people who actually composed those albums, those soundtracks are still with the company. And the liner notes apparently passed through their hands. And they're like, oh, actually, you know, here's an interesting thing that I did with like the sampling channel on the Famicom. And that's, to me, the most important thing about the soundtrack. So be sure to include that. But, you know, that's not a big deal. That's like, oh, cool. Here's an insight from the creator. I'm more than happy to incorporate that. But yeah, yeah, in my experience, Japanese publishers

tend to be actually a lot more chill about approving external submissions about their work than Western publishers are. Yeah, and I think Capcom has also been working for a very long time with Udon, which is based in and around Toronto, actually, so cool.

So what was the process of becoming involved with that book? Like, how how do you end up writing, you know, basically a database of Mega Man X Mavericks? Well, me and David, we kind of know one of the editors at Udon, and we had talked for a long time about possible doing Mega Man books. And eventually the Robot Master Field Guide came out, and that actually did quite well, especially in book fairs, apparently. Kids really like to pick it up there, which is really awesome, I think. Yeah, it's colorful, and it's lots of tiny chunks of text, so it's not too daunting. Yeah.

Very kid-friendly, for sure. So we kind of wanted to do a follow-up for Mega-9X, of course. And we started planning that. And one thing you say about Capcom, even though they are very cool and hands-off, they can take a long time with approvals. So we had to wait forever. And for a long time, we figured, okay, this isn't happening. We'll just kind of go on with our lives. And then out of nowhere, said editor reached out to David and I and said, hey, do you want to do this Mega-N-X field guide?

And yeah, of course we do. So once we got that, the second half kind of running, like it went really smoothly. we had like help from a lot of great people like Brian from Proto Dude from the Rockman Corner and Ash Paulson of course and serve about 20 on Twitter who's been like a friend of mine since the 90s and he's like the guy who knows everything about Japanese rock men so we name all the consultants and acknowledgements in the book and yeah we're glad to have them all but it went quite well I am not good at one thing it kind of keeps me from publishing more is that I'm so bad at layouts like I'd love to just kind of self-publish as Bob Mackey mentioned, how much, like so much my writing has gone into the shade, but I just have quite a bit of it because I wrote on documents and stuff like that. So I love to just kind of get that bundled and out there. And I'm talking to someone about that. But otherwise, I still have other books in the works, hopefully. Again, like Mackey, I've realized that going independent is really the only way to survive in this horrible workspace.

So we actually went independent, actually the blog got our podcast after COVID, got U.S. Gamer shut down. And since then Kat and I and Eric and Victor and Mike, like, we've all been doing really well, thankfully, with the show. But I like to get my writing out there more. You know, I've kind of gotten lazy about my writing. I'm working on a fiction book. I'm working on, like, kind of a game-related book that you know about Parrish and hopefully get that somewhere. But, yeah, I'm producing. I am producing.

Let's see. I feel like there was something else I was going to ask you, but now I can't remember what it was. Oh, no. Is it about Duff McWhalen? we have the quote-unquote proper name in the Maverick Country Field Guide but we have like nicknames or like also known as so uh I can't remember what title whale that was the name of Duff McGuillian so we have title whale also known as Duff McWailen and you know fun fact the Japanese games each give each Maverick kind of a title that doesn't show up in English so like Storm Eagle is like the Prince of the Skies and Morph Moth ridder's name was like Fallen Angel is something around stuff like that we included as well in the also known as. We took all the information we could possibly glean from all the sources that we had out there. Like, for example, did you know Wheel Alligator was declared Maverick after he left a tooth in a Patriot's leg or something.

So that's the kind of stuff we included in the field guy. We just really had fun with it. Love it. It's great. So was it difficult to track down all that info? No. It seems pretty esoteric, but maybe it's pretty well documented online at this point. David and I are both sickos.

Like, we have a lot of stuff. God, I have, like, Iwamoto's mongas all kind of, you know, in a row on my, on my shelf. Not that we used Iwamoto in the book, but I would have loved to. We have just all this information startup. Again, Survebot 20 is like, if you go to the Reploid Research or Lavatory, and yes, the misspelling is totally intentional. It's also canon in the game, isn't it? It's canon by localization, that's for sure. This is where all the reploys go to take a piss, I guess.

oil everywhere. But yeah, Surveot 20 has been really good about documenting all this stuff from Japan. And Udon, of course, has access to stuff as well if we needed it. But they've put out a couple of source books from maybe, and even before we started these projects. So that was handy as well. So going, really kind of to the other So going really kind of to the other extreme from Nadia's official work on Mega Man. Let's talk to Stuart, who your work is extremely not official, but it is. It's also lots of kind of, you know, small bits of information that you can easily digest in whatever form

you like. So tell us a little bit about your book and where that got started, how that got started. Well, my book's called All Games Are Good. And it's more of a philosophy than that factual sort of statement because you would not believe how often I get that thrown at me on Twitter when I say I don't like something like just like I thought you said all the games were good stew I know first person to say that to me you can dislike good things that's fine yeah I can I force my only response to say you're right I concede but what it is I mean the way it sort of came about was um Jeremy asked me a few years ago if I would drive write sort of some sort of short things for the website, for the retronauts website about games that

I don't know how it developed, but I had to sort of, I don't like to use the term reputation because it sounds self-aggrandizing, but I think you knew that I genuinely liked things that a lot of people don't tend to like or talk about or just sort of write off. And I've been writing about that stuff just sort of elsewhere, like on websites like GameCola, which is like a kind of it was sort of like this is undermining the people who worked for and I don't mean to do that because they did sort of work very hard but it was like a

it started as like a Yahoo newsletter you know and then it sort of developed into a website where we would all write stuff and there wasn't any sort of money involved it was just kind of a passion thing and it was fun but then I'm not sure how exactly how it came about

there's kind of a question mark there it's like they're sort of underpants gnomes like you know but because Jeremy got in touch I think maybe from seeing my YouTube stuff, Stewardip in Video Worlds, which is basically just me and passionately yelling about

like Jim Power, The Lost Dimensions and stuff like that. And I sort of came in and I was just doing like these kind of 500 word things about like Spiro, Attack of the Rhinox or like Cosmic Spacehead and Alfred Chicken and all those kind of things that I genuinely love because I had this kind of incorrect gaming sort of upbringing of just not having Nintendo and just playing whatever I could sort of get my hands on for micros or for master system. It's all the wrong stuff that you really

are not supposed to enjoy. And putting it that way makes it sound like I'm trying to be like a contrarium, but it's really, it's not. It's like, I try to be as intellectually honest as I can, even when that honesty is me saying, like, I think this thing is really obviously about six out of ten,

but I love it anyway. So what eventually happened is I ended up getting like hundreds of these short pieces of writing, almost all of which were kind of positive slants on something that was sort of lesser known or maybe like a European game or like some American platform that tanked or it's just something confusing that only I enjoy

or even something that sucks that I really like action Paccio the kind of the egg rolling game on the Super Nintendo that's like a dizzy, it's like a cross between Dizzy and Sonic and nobody talks about it for a good reason. That's a Pachio game like Pachio Koon, the Pichinko ball? Yeah, I think so. don't know who that is. I don't know who that is. I've made videos about Pachio

Kuhu. Oh, wow. Well, there we go. The Pachinko ball that plays Pachinko. It's kind of weird. Yeah. Like his people are enslaved in these Pachinko machines and he's just out there tossing coins in there. It's a little messed up. It is kind of when you think about it. I didn't really approach that angle. Maybe I need to come back and reissue. But so what it ended up being like was I wanted to, well, I was going to, I wanted to compile those pieces of writing for reasons that has already been mentioned that I knew that a blog, a website is kind of ephemeral and I don't mean to be arrogant, but I wanted to preserve this, this writing, because I thought some of it was pretty good and funny. Because I was kind of coming at it like, initially I was

a little bit tentative because I wanted to retain the work, you know? I didn't want to come out full jip and just like alienate everyone immediately. No, I mean, I think there is something inherently arrogant about wanting to publish a book and preserve it, you know, like, here's my work. It must be, you know, made into a physical form and enshrined forever. And that's okay. You need that sense of pride and, you know, kind of determination to make stuff like this happen. If people didn't have that element, then we wouldn't have books. And how boring would that be? It's true. It would be a terrible world without books. So, yeah, I sort of came, I compiled all this stuff myself. It wasn't edited as all. It was just how it was

with some minor changes that I'd made, and I had mentioned it in passing, I think, to Jeremy. I think I'd said, like, would it be okay with you if I did, like, self-publish this or republished this? Because originally it was written for the retronauts. And the sort of response was more like, well, you know, I'm doing this press run thing in the jig. And it's like, I'm listening.

And then there sort of fell in a long process after that, which I guess you could put down to, we could put down to COVID again, but also it was then edited. and what needed to be done was to sort of bring it all to some kind of coherent state because like I mentioned when I first started doing it I was a little bit tentative and I was going down this kind of sliding scale of like I wonder how silly I can get away with being like when I write this because there's something that was in British Games journalism

and I hesitate to even call it Games journalism but British Games magazines coverage which was that they would be as silly and esoteric as possible as out there as possible and sometimes barely mention the games whatsoever, just write absolute nonsense and then put a score on the end. And I absolutely loved that and I wanted to read it. But I also wanted to kind of marry that with, you know, intellectual honesty and actual opinion that's sort of worth reading and well thought out, hopefully, you know? So I wanted to create something that was as entertaining

to me as that stuff, but also had some kind of value to people who weren't already completely tuned into it. Like, you could pick it up and you could be like, okay this is kind of funny but also that's interesting rather than just being like why is he writing all this stuff about this guy's arm that makes no sense I don't understand because I used to get comments like that just like what I wrote about that

the pitfall the pitfall game on the GameCube and the whole only thing I wrote about is that on the right stick you can wobble his arm around and I thought that was funny and I get comments like what is he talking about why is he talking about his arm what is this is ridiculous stop

so just kind of marry that kind of irreverence with some rather good and hopefully sort of emotional sort of content it is a sort of a grab bag is the sort of thing that i enjoy reading which is just like a basically every time you turn the page you're going to be seeing like almost every time you turn the page it's going to be like a new game and there's something like about 400 odd pages in this book i don't even know the page got off my own book i'm pretty sure it's 400 odd it's a chunk it's 420 something i think I want to be a blazer or something Blaise it Um drugs Am I right? Um

I wanted it to be this this tomb you could pick up and open and sort of be entertained and hopefully informed you know And maybe you'd come away from it and go like Some of the enthusiasm would rub off and you go Oh I kind of want to give this game a try now I want to try out tinhead or I want to try out like Stone Protectors

I'm not sure either of those games are in the book Seven for the sequel Protector Yeah exactly that's coming out on Steam soon or like it's weird yeah I know but yeah those will be in the sequel

not all games are good but it came together as this kind of sort of relatively long process of editing that was still kind of painless because it was never taking sort of the personality out of it it was always sensible things like

Stu there are 100 semicolons on this page so there are like I really like I found out about semicolons and I was just like yes and proceeded to use them all the time. That's part of your personality now, the semicolon. Yeah, the semicolon, yeah, yeah. I thought I've already gross joke about that.

I'm going to leave it. Yeah, I find as an editor, the majority of my suggestions and edits are just, please don't make every sentence passive. Please do not make every sentence, there is this, this was that. Yeah, you thought it's a trained to me out of that and made me into a better way to that. Well, I will let you know that you are not alone in that. That's something that- I'm struggling with passive. That's something I'm working on. That's something that editors passed to me back in the days when websites were edited. And I took it the heart. And it made me, painfully aware of the fact that, wow, everyone, not everyone, but lots of people just

kind of default to writing like this. And, you know, it's fine to have some of that. But when you, when every sentence is structured like that, everything develops this kind of tiring, exhausting rhythm. And it just stops being fun to read. I'm not saying that your book was like that. Just that, you know, that that is a danger that, I don't think many people are aware of. And that's, yeah, I think it's fair to say, because at the point of editing, That's what editing was for, was for removing that. And I was going through a fair amount of it and changing that sort of, that tone to make it more readable, to make it more exciting to read and sort of more punchy. I was also adding in lots of new stuff, taking out the bits that were either too profanel didn't make any sense.

I mean, there is still some really sort of far out stuff in there. There's like a sort of transcript of a marriage ceremony between me and a copy of Sonic 3 and Knuckles, which I thought was quite a fun. highlights of the book. I was really proud of that. I was prepared sort of to say, like, no, this is staying in. It's too funny. I don't think there's any question. Yeah, I don't think there's any question of us taking that out. Okay, good. I'm glad. I'm glad. No, I mean, this is, this is an important landmark moment in Stewart's life. We have to leave this. It explains why he is the man that he is. I have a question for both of you in this book. I have not a chance to page through it, but did Jeremy have to edit out the superfluous British use in the book? Or are they

Oh, that's a good question. Oh, I'm moving in Canada now, so I'm going to use to color and flavor having a use jammed in there, but... Yeah, welcome to Canada, bitch. I'm pretty sure it was all kept British spelling, wasn't it? It was all kept British. You used too many British idioms for us to take out some of the British spellings to make it more American. And I feel like, you know, this being, it being a personal memoir, really, and very much about your own experiences and tastes, it would have rung false to take out, like, your culture and your, and your, you know, nationality. So, no, we left that for sure. No, no hitting control F and looking for the word

bin. The boy, bin is so funny, though. I love the word bin, Stuart. It's so good. I mean, I do like garbage fire. That's fun, too, but like, just big burning bin is funnier to me. Burning bin is pretty good. I'm just Canadian spelling. There's Big Ben, and then there's big burning bin. Not to be mistaken for one another. But it was nice to sort of have this thing that sort of came together, I think, as what I was really aiming for. was just something very entertaining. I think it is quite entertaining. But I also tried, when it came to book form,

to give it some context, like, at the beginning of each chapter, it's just like, here is my personal relationship with this system. And some of it's just sort of this esoteric sort of personal stories about how I sort of came across this. And some of them, I think, were reasonably emotional. And what it creates is this sort of portrait, like, oh, God, I sound like, this is a wanker, and I said that. Keep going, keep going.

It creates this portrait of, um, I think, It says on the back, like, someone who played all the wrong games. But it's how my taste developed in a sort of organic way to appreciate stuff that just does not get a look in. And it's not that there's anything wrong with anyone taking any approach to whatever, you know, to whatever they enjoyed. But I thought it would be nice to have something kind of different out that it wasn't just kind of like, the history of gaming is nothing than Super Mario Brothers, Atari, then nothing, then Super Mario Brothers, at the end. end. I wanted to get all the silly stuff like Ollie and Lissa that I played on the spectrum in there. The Father Christmas, the official game is in there. That's a classic. That's a

banger of a game. Yeah, I'm so bad at talking about my own book. It's embarrassing. Read the words in it instead. That's why I recommend. So given that this book was not, you know, an act of research-based journalism or anything, it was very much about personal experiences. Did you find, find that there were any parts of it that were particularly difficult for you to see through, or was it all a fairly, you know, fluid, easy-going experience? Well, I feel like a small amount of imposter syndrome because there was, to a degree, a lot of it was already written and it was kind of like almost serendipitous that I mentioned

it. And then you said, oh, let's have a look at that. And that sort of came together quite quickly. And it's like, oh, okay, cool, you know. But sort of revisiting it, really the main challenge for me was like really how can I make this something more to take away than just here's what I think about some video games. And I feel like that was achieved. I think it somehow came together quite nicely. I'm very pleased with like the way, and this is nothing to do with me, but the way it's laid out on the way it's being presented, it gives it some, it gives it the perfect level of like gravitas, which is like, as I think you've described it, airport like Stephen King or Michael Crichton novel level of quality, you know?

Yeah, I don't think I've mentioned this on the show before. Oh, you haven't? Okay. But maybe I have? I don't think so. But if I'm repeating myself, I apologize. But yeah, my process when putting together the materials for this book, like picking the paper, was not to find, you know, like a smooth, kind of glossy style of paper, but to try to recapture the, the,

the sense of, you know, like an airport paperback or what you'd pick up at the gas station on a long vacation or whatever. Like, I wanted to evoke, and maybe it's a childhood memory that doesn't convey to younger generations. But when I was, you know, a teenager and my family would go on long car trips and I was, you know, like 12 years old or whatever, I didn't have a game boy, so I took books with me and would read until, in the car, until the sun went down and I couldn't read anymore. And they were always these, like, giant, chunky Dean Coons or Stephen King books, just enormous. And this book is already lengthy, you know, at 400-odd pages. But I wanted to make it even more substantial. So I picked out a paper that's very toothy and textured. So if you,

if you look at your book compared to my Sig Eiden book, SG-1000 works, which has basically the same page count. It's like within 10 pages of each other. Your book is much, much thicker because I went with just like a very smooth, slick, glossy paper for my book because it's, you know, really focused around photography and images, screenshots, and things like that. And those need to be vibrant and pop. And your book, on the other hand, because it's almost entirely text and just a handful of screenshots and some black and white illustrations, it could afford to be on a different kind of paper. So it's very textured and it's very thick as a result. But to me, that just lends it a sense of authenticity. Like, this is, you know, the kind of book I would have seen at Walden Books in,

you know, 1989 and said, ooh, I need to take this with me. It's about video games and I love those. And it's going to take me a long time to read through this. So this is my summer reading. As you say, it works for sort of the sort of general personal nature of it. If it was glossy, it would have been set it distant and sort of impersonal. It wouldn't really work for the material. So I'm really pleased with how it came out. I was also pleased I could get John and Leanne's illustrations and art in there because Leanne's fantastic.

She's done some stuff for retronaughts before. I think she did some stuff for the SG 1000 Collectors Edition as well. She did, yeah, for all of my collector's editions books, actually. Oh, really? Wow. Okay. I didn't know that. Yeah, she did like Gradius for the NES 8586 book. And I can't remember what she did for the 87 book, but she did something there. Now I've got to buy all of them. Yeah, you do.

Everyone has to buy all of them. And we're down to like the last 10% of the collector's editions of NES 87. So you have to hurry on that one. Crap. No pressure or anything. But no, that is, I'm glad you brought that up because that is something that I really enjoy with the book publishing process is just figuring out the materials. Like what's the hardcover material going to be? Is it going to be, like, you know, case bound, which means that the cover art is actually printed as part of the hardcover, or do I go with, like, you know, the cloth wrap that has just the, like, a stamped embossed foil title and then it has a dust sleeve over it.

It's just, it's fun to really just kind of, like, say, what's going to complement the content and the vibe of this book in, you know, in terms of physical materials? The biggest takeaway from me, and this is, I know this is not a competition. and I don't intend to make it that way, but like, Maverick, kind of field guide. Could you hurt someone with it? Yes. Could you kill them? Probably not.

Boss fight books, very good. Absolutely no chance of killing a human. Sorry. Not going to happen. I mean, Jason, Jason Bourne could do it. SG1,000 works, collector's edition. Possibly, but could you then hide it? No.

So that's my book's main thing. The choice, as a murder weapon, it's the best one of the lot, possibly. Fair enough. I'm giving a thumbs up, but you can't see it. And, Stuart, you can actually carve your book the inside of it and put a gun in there. Yes, that's absolutely true. And it'll also hide a burger weapon in the book.

I was pitching for that for a special edition, but it got just not bad. All right. So finally, I'd like to move along to the quietest member of this roundtable for today, Kevin Bunch, who I would say of all the books represented here today, yours is the most. thoughtful and disciplined of the lot, and that's not a dig at anyone, including my own work, just that you really have taken an academic approach to documenting Atari's history with interviews and tons and tons of research, all of which is extraordinarily well documented, which is something that I am terribly lazy about with my own book, and that's, you know, to my own detriment. So, Kevin, tell me about where the Atari Archive project started, and if you intended in the beginning that it should ever be a book?

So originally, this was me going through the Atari 2,600 library game by game. I wanted to look into the context and the history of each release because information existed to some extent, but it was very scattered. And it took me a few years to even figure out when all of these games came out. That was an exhausting period. But, yeah, initially, I did not really have any expectation of turning this into a written work. This was sort of a project for me to learn how to do video editing, which is why a lot of videos are a bit crap, especially early on. But at some point, I decided I should start putting this stuff down in print because, hey, I'm a professional writer. This is kind of my whole thing.

And also, you know, no one wants to cite a video. I found online. I remember it really came into clarity for me. I did a video about the, you know, the Star Trek games, a 2,600 port a while ago, and I interviewed the guy who made the original Star Trek game. And he thought it was really good, and it pulled in his insights very well.

So he added to the Star Trek games Wikipedia page some information from that video. And within, like, two days, one of the editors on Wikipedia removed it because it was a video and therefore, you know, the citations were too loose and couldn't be counted. And that got my goat. And I said, okay, well, I'm just going to turn this into a book and he's going to eat that. And as it so happened, a couple months later, I think you reached out, Jeremy, and asked

if I was interested in doing a book of Atari Archive. And as luck would have it, I was. Excellent. Wow. How fortuitous that I exist. So, yeah, what's the process been for putting together, first the videos and then converting the video material into books? I mean, your videos are very structured and extremely detail-oriented, but I feel like the book takes it, it takes that material to another level in terms of just the, you know, the substance there and the documentation. Right. So my idea for this was that all of these games, you know, they're very old.

They, in a lot of cases, predate any sort of online writings about them, or at least online writings that I could easily source, you know, where they came from. So my idea was, okay, I'm going to go back to the sources whenever possible. So, you know, I tracked down the people who wrote these games. Some of them have online presences. A lot of them I had to just look up some names in the white pages and fire off some letters and hope that I had the right person. which is a shockingly effective approach when you're dealing with a bunch of senior citizens. So the Internet Archive was extremely useful

because a lot of these old game periodicals were on there. I also went ahead and got subscriptions to newspaper services so you could look up newspaper archives and find articles and advertisements, that sort of fun stuff. And then you got into the weeds, as I would like to call it, of the materials that are not online, at least not very easily to findable online. Some of this stuff I was able to get from other video game history nerds who had gone out to some of the archives near them and taken photographs of materials and they were willing to share those. Others, I had to go to archives myself. I visited the Library of Congress.

I visited the Strong Museum. The Hagley Museum and Library has a bunch of RCA papers there. Just bounce it all over the place, pulling together these materials. And then I had to figure out how those were all related for these particular games. In some cases, it was pretty straightforward. And in others, I wasn't able to get quite as much together, so I just sort of did the best I could with what I had. And that was for the videos, and when it came to the books, I figured, well, I have all of this information that I didn't have when I started, so I can add that in, that's obvious. Some of this information I can shuffle around.

Maybe it doesn't need to be in this particular chapter. Maybe it can be its own chapter. And also, since it's in print, I can bring in a bunch of stuff that would not have flowed very well in a video. So I can delve into more detail on, say, for the Space War article, I could talk about the creation of Space War in more detail than I did originally. So that was a lot of fun. I really appreciated that. And then, of course, I added in a bunch of extra chapters about different competing platforms,

just some broader history of what was going on in the video game space at the time. So, yes, I was happy to be able to pull all of that stuff together for the book. And, of course, to make sure it read well, I actually, I initially wasn't sure if you folks were going to do a whole lot of editing for it. So I hired, as a freelancer, the copy editor I used to work with when I worked at newspapers. And she was more than happy to do this. She had no experience whatsoever with video games. And I really appreciated that because, you know, like Bob was talking about, when you're stewing in this stuff for so long, you kind of take all the jargon and terminology for granted. And she had no clue what any of these things meant.

She's, you know, for example, I remember whenever I used the term, you know, ported again from the arcade. She's like, what the heck does that mean? What is it port? So I had to explain what that was. If there was acronyms, you pointed those out. just all sorts of little things like that, making sure I was using active voice more than I originally was. So I really appreciated her help on that one.

Yeah, my finding is that the more people you have copy editing a book, the better it's going to end up being. We did do our own revisions on that. But also, you know, with my books, that's been one of the, I would say the biggest changes between the sort of early self-publish editions that I did. and the more recent ones, like the book that just came out last year from me is NES Works 1985-86. That got its start in, I think its first edition was in 2015, just covering the 1985 stuff under the name Good and Intentions.

Yeah, and that was self-published, and it was really just me taking the video scripts, removing just some of the video-specific commentary and publishing it. And, you know, I read through everything, but I'm kind of blind to the errors in my own work. It's not so much like I don't see the, you know, structural issues or whatever. Like that, I feel like I'm pretty good at catching. But just typos and, you know, when the word the show up twice consecutively, my brain just cruises right on past that because I know what I'm saying in my head and whether or not it actually says what's in my head on the page. My brain is just like, yeah, it's all cool. So, you know, being able to have other people put eyes on that is great. So I, with my books,

I pay someone, you know, to do very thorough freelance copy editing. And it's worth the investment. And then because it's going through press run, it still gets a copy edit pass by our copy editor, Jared Petty. And so that's, you know, two sets of eyes that are not mine. And the result is that, you know, the most recent couple of books that I've put out, SJ1000 Works and NESWorks in 1987, are just much cleaner works than the previous books that I did where I was doing my own copy

editing. And I don't really see people write in to say, hey, I found some problems with your book. Whereas before that, I definitely saw a lot of that. So, yeah, it just, it really, that extra touch of polish doesn't just make the writing better. But it also just, you know, it creates a better impression for the reader like, oh, they took the time to get this right. That's good. And it's not something they're necessarily conscious of.

People notice mistakes, but they don't notice when you get things right. So that's one of those cases where no news is good news. Like, if you don't get feedback about it, it's probably a good thing. Yeah, I did appreciate Jared's pass as well because, you know, he has familiarity with the subject matter. So if I had something in there that Meredith didn't notice because she's not. not a video game dork, he picked it out. And I know there were a couple of points where he asked me to clarify something in more detail or explain what the heck I was talking about that she didn't notice.

And he definitely did. So what was the process involved, if there was a process in kind of reconciling the things you discovered through research with the things that you were told by people you interviewed? Or were most of the quotes in your work from interviews, or were they from, you know, third-party sources? A lot of the quotes were from interviews that I'd done. Some of them were from interviews that other people had published. I think one or two might have been from old internal recordings that had been archived and you could find them online from people who long since passed away. And generally my feeling is that, you know, memory is pretty good. but memory is not perfect.

So you can definitely get through what somebody feels about something or felt at the time or their general impressions experiences. If you're asking for specific details, their memories probably could range from I don't remember that to pretty sharp. But if there's a paper trail of some sort, that would generally take precedence for me when I was putting this stuff together. And if I was interviewing multiple people about a specific thing, like when I was talking about the development of the 2,600 hardware, that's like five or six people I interviewed separately on that one. And each one had their own perspective and their own recollections. And I just sort of tried to assemble that in a way that made sense. And if two of the stories didn't line up, I made a note of that in there. Like, this person remembered this.

This person remembered this. It was probably such-and-such case, but who can say for sure. Yeah, that's something that Leonard Herman, the games historian who wrote Phoenix, he doesn't talk to people. He doesn't interview people for his writing because he feels that memory is too unreliable. People are going to give distorted impressions of what had happened. People may be driven by a job. or may just have forgotten. So he just works from documents and news reports and, you know,

whatever hard, concrete information he can get his hands on, which I think is very interesting. And, you know, I don't agree with that personally. I think it's really important when you can to get people's perspectives on the work that they did. But I can understand why he would feel that way. And, you know, I've mentioned this before, but I've been watching old Doctor Who Blu-Rays and they have, each disc has tons, like hours of supplemental content of interviews and commentary by cast and crew. And, you know, like within the same disc, you'll see different takes on the same episodes from people involved. And they'll say things that directly contradict one another. They'll, they'll sometimes, you know, be speaking to memories and say, oh, yeah, this happened

and we did this. And then you actually, you know, see that contrasted against footage of the actual episode where something different is happening on screen. And you just kind of realize, like, oh, yeah, people do mush things together in their memories. And they're not, the memories are really much more about impressions and feelings than they are about actual sequences of events. So, you know, I can, I can see the challenge there. But I think the way you did it, which is to kind of say, you know, here's one perspective, here's another. These don't line up, but that's what we were told. Like, that's, that makes sense.

Yeah, and I'm actually running into this because I have been working on a another book. I actually started on before the Atari one, and it just sort of got sidelined, and that's about the history of RCA and their video games and computers. And I've been talking to a lot of old

folks for that, and their memories of events don't necessarily line up with what is written out. I just talked to someone about it like two weeks ago who had his years shifted by, like, one, which is a pretty big deal, given how quickly technology and the business was changing at that time. So it's just something I've become used to, you know, prior to what I do now was like science

communication. I was a newspaper journalist, and you interviewed a lot of people about a lot of things. And you just had to reconcile these things that don't quite add up. Yeah, so any final thoughts on Atari Archive before we shift into the final phase of this conversation? I'm really proud with how it came out. I really enjoyed that we were able to pull together all of these details. I'm really glad that Larry Wagner, the guy who wrote Combat and helped develop the 2600 hardware, he was on board with me publishing the interview we did because he had not really done any interviews prior to that point.

and he was really excited for the opportunity to get his story out there. So that's something that I'm keeping in mind for future volumes, you know, checking in to see if anyone wants to do the same that he did. And I do appreciate that I've gotten a lot of really positive feedback from the folks who, you know, have been featured in this and whose stories I pulled from to put this all together. None of them have complained so far, which is very nice. Yeah, you know, what I was. have kind of noticed in helping to sell this book at conventions and things is that the crowd,

the audience looking for information about Atari is much smaller than people who are eager to read about Sega or Nintendo, but they really appreciate the fact that, you know, someone's taking the time to do this. And the people who are into Atari just are absolutely in love of this book. So I think that really speaks well to the work that you did and the value of the space you're covering because even though you're not going to, you know, sell 20, 30,000 copies of this book. Sorry, Kevin, it's just not going to happen. You know, it's still a valuable creation. And it's, it was, it was worth doing for sure. And yeah, I hope that more and more people become aware of it and realize that it is one of the, in my opinion, absolute best

books of documenting video game history that's been published to date. Like, it's just really incredibly solid. It's very impressive. So good work there. Thank you. And then, I don't know, I feel like I should talk a little bit about my books, but I guess I kind of have all the way throughout this. So maybe that's not really necessary. So instead, I'm going to open up the floor to everyone just as kind of a final round and ask, what would be your recommendation for people who would like to publish a book? You know, if there's someone out there listening thinking, oh, I could do that too, or I wish I could do that, but I don't know how. Now is your opportunity to you, the panelists here, rich with the wisdom of having published a book. What's your advice? Not just on getting published, but just on the creative process. Just finding inspiration, finding information, all of that. Like, go for it.

I would love to hear everyone's take because I'm sure everyone's take is going to be different and distinct. I would say on a very practical level, understand what you're getting into. to because if you're a creative person, I think most of us are wired the same way. Like, the initial high of starting a new project is the best part, and then you actually have to do it, and then it's not as rewarding until you're finished. So I feel like understand the amount of work you're going to have to put into it in terms of if you have time in your life to do this, because actually when I first pitched the book and, you know, was very happy, I realized like, oh, crap.

when will I have time to actually write this? And it was a real struggle. So I would say, understand the practical terms, like what you're able to do, what you have time to do. And if you feel like you can actually commit to a project like this, especially if you're not doing it for yourself, if you're doing it for a publisher who has deadlines and expectations. So I will say that one of the things that I really enjoy about creating books is that, yeah, you get that initial high of creation. But there's also the stick and carrot at the end, there is actually something substantial that you were going to be able to hold in your hand, to be able to put on your bookshelf, to be able to give to other people, and, you know,

hopefully sell to other people and, you know, have some money to show for it. But to me, I don't know, that that's something that makes book publishing different than a lot of other creative forms of publishing, you know, making a video, making a podcast, publishing an article online. That's, great, but at the end, you don't have something physical to show for it. And I feel like that is its own kind of high. Like, I made this. This was something I did. And I don't know, maybe that's not something that everyone shares. But for me, it's a big part of the motivation. Just having a thing that exists because of my effort. I really, really find that deeply satisfying. Yeah, I totally agree. I feel like the best parts come at the beginning in the end.

I don't know if anyone else experienced this and I'm not too offended by it, but when it would come up that I was writing a book or I had sold a book or my book was coming out and a lot of the initial reaction people had and I think it came from a good place. I was like, oh, you know what? I've been thinking about writing a book. And in my head, having gone through the process, I, you know, I was friendly, but in my head, I was like, really? Do you really think you're ready for this? Because it is, it is a lot of work. A lot of revisions. You're going to be staring at your own text a lot until all the words have lost meaning. I'm happy that I did it, but understanding what it entails is very important before you begin. Would you write another book, Bob? I'll be honest. And the answer is probably no, because I feel like

this is it for me and I did what I wanted to with this and I honestly have no other inklings or any other desire to put anything else out there. Like Nadi was saying though, we all have so much work that is unavailable

and I have been thinking of compiling a lot of my old work into something that I could kickstart or publish myself. I have like 16 years worth of comedy articles that are just kind of on a dead website right now and I'd love to compile those. and improve upon those and put those out in a collection. But I feel that I find the podcasting

more rewarding now, but I just wanted to get a book out there to symbolize that I was a writer for 20 years and to get what I feel was my best work into people's hands. Nadia, what about you? I mean, you've already said that you have other book concepts in mind. So what would your recommendation be to those looking to get into this cold and unforgiving space? Right, right, right. That is the most important thing. You cannot do shit until you have words in your hand. And it's so easy to have an idea in your head and think, oh, I can write this down on paper. Oh, shit. This is actually really hard. It takes a lot of hard work. Even if you're like tired and frustrated and don't feel like writing, which is me every

single day, he's still got to sit down. You got to write. Once you start writing, I find that the process becomes very relaxing, very fun. It's just that starting that's sometimes difficult. You know, damn executive dysfunction, I suppose. But yeah, that is the main thing. And also, if you are creative, I find some creatives have trouble with editing, like be prepared to be edited. You don't have to agree with every single thing your editor says. But if they are changing your words, it is usually for the better for what you are, you know, what format you are writing for. And if you get, you know, what's what I'm looking for, childish and pissy about your words being changed, which I have seen quite a surprising bit in this, in the field of games writing, you're going to have to put on your big person pants and deal with it. Because if the editor doesn't, doesn't scald you, which they usually do very politely, the internet will.

And there's like, you know, most people are really good. they leave really cool comments, and they're really glad you wrote this. But once in a while, you get someone who says, actually the canon that's in your Mega Man book is totally wrong. The canon that Capcom approved is totally wrong, apparently. So that's just the kind of thing you've got to deal with. But it's a very rewarding feeling, especially in this age where digital print is turning into absolute slush of AI and garbage SEO.

You know, it will get better. But for now, the printed word is something that just kind of turned to. It's very comforting. So it's worth it. It is absolutely worth it. But don't waste your time saying, oh, I can do this or shit-talking people who have done it. Just do it. Yeah, I mean, even AI, there are those books on Amazon you can buy that are just computer-generated.

Of course they are. I think, you know, that's also not anything for us to worry about in the long term. Just the world has to get it out of its system and realize, oh, this is terrible. This is terrible. This is kindergarten writing. Just like NFTs. And then I went to the store and I found a dragon. Great.

Great. Good writing. It sounds riveting. Then what happened? No, you're right. I don't know. What happened to the book I stole from? Yeah, editors are not always correct. And I've definitely been edited by people who change the meaning of what I'm trying to say. Same. Yeah. That's not good. No, no.

But, you know, when I edit books, I tend to leave a lot of comments and a lot of marks. But it's not like, this is crap, this is unsolvageable. It's just, you know, I'm kind of showing. like here's how I would rearrange this, here's how I would rephrase this, here's how you could write this to take out, you know, half of the passive phrases here. So it's not all, you know, like things are mysteriously happening and no one knows why. Like, where is the actor in this? If I could actually interject just one last thing here, please unlearn all the bad habits about writing that your high school taught you. Yes, make you nodia. You don't need to double space

after period. I don't know why it's still going around, but it is. Stop writing. That's from the days of typewriters. It really is. But how long did I learned on a typewriter actually had to type. And that was just before they got rid of the typewriters and put computers in. So I actually learned a very merciless form of typing where if you made a mistake, you got docked marks and you couldn't erase it. So yeah, just unlearn that. Unlearn writing in the passive.

That's really hard. So learn how to do that now. But I'm still trying to break that habit. I can't quit you. Yes, I agree. To add on to Nadia's thing, real quick. I agree. When I taught a writing course in grad school, you know, new students were coming in. In the first week, it was just like unlearned everything you learned in high

school. It was all wrong. No one writes like this. Nobody expresses themselves like this. You can use eye statements. You can have a paragraph with more than five sentences. You can start with butt and and. Yes, exactly. And also, you can use they and them as first person pronouns. I think, I think fortunately, culture has shifted enough so that, you know, those grammar lessons have been made obsolete anyway. But yeah, like there are just lots of things that I had a great high school English teacher, a couple of them who really like kicked my ass and made me a much better writer by just demolishing my my grades on essays until I was no longer sucky. I had a couple of those, yeah, but not enough. But, you know, not everyone is that

fortunate. I really lucked out. And even then, you know, it's still been a learning process. I'm still you know, 30 years out from high school, still learning things, still, oh, that's right. I need to do this. Oh, I need to avoid that. Yeah, it's a process. So, yes, that's definitely something worth considering. Find an editor who knows what they're talking about, work with them, listen to them. That's very important. Stuart, what would your perspective be on this? You're coming from, again, a different place from, from St. Nadia. Yeah, I don't know if I really have any advice for anyone, because, like, I'm trying to, I'm trying to decide whether I should be really real about it or if I should try and be pleasant.

no go ahead and be really real i'm curious to know turn your chair around okay i'm going to do that i'm going to wrap with you kids now which direction is your dad stewart no for real um i can't do that because i would sit on myself and be extremely painful but um i don't really have advice because like i'm still not quite at the point yet

where i understand that i have a book because it doesn't feel like real do you know what i mean yeah like i'm I've, I'm looking, I can look at like boxes and I open up these boxes with copies of all games are good, you know, author copies that have been sent. And I'm just kind of like, yep, there they are. And now to go and do something else. And that's not to say I'm not proud of it or I'm not pleased with it, because I am. And, you know, I've had nothing but nice sort of feedback

about the book, which I'm very grateful for. And I'm glad it exists. I think it's a good, I think it's good or I wouldn't have even bothered my ass doing it, you know. But sort of anxiety and maybe sort of a tangered imposter syndrome just does not go away. And all the time I'm just kind of like, I mean, even now, I'm sort of like, well, you guys' books are like real books, you know. They're not just like about jelly boy on the snows, you know. But that's something that you're going to have to, it's possible you might have to deal with. I don't really know how you deal with it. But if anyone finds out, please get in touch with me and tell me.

and then I too will enjoy the existence of having a book to its fullest potential. I mean, I'm doing another book at the moment, and that also is just a case of kind of like, these are words. I've written these words, and these words may end up in book form, and then that will exist too, and then it will all possibly feel much the same,

but I'll be getting lots of pleasant comments on that one as well, hopefully. It's very hard to explain what I mean, but be prepared to deal, with that, because it's quite weird. So I was going to go last, but I'm going to jump ahead of Kevin here, just because I feel like what I settled on as advice is kind of relevant to what you were saying, Stuart, maybe without you realizing it. But I think, you know, just looking at the work you've done and how your articles became

a book, the most important thing is just get out there and do it, not just like what Nadia said about right. But I mean, just put yourself out there and create things. And don't be afraid to do a bad job of it. I mean, if you look at, you know, my most recent publication, SG 1000 works, I think it is probably the best thing I've ever created. And I'm genuinely proud of it. I think it is a phenomenal publication. It's beautiful to look at. The text is thoroughly researched and revised and copy edited and very informative and as correct as it could possibly be considering the subject matter. But it's not like that was the first book I ever created. And if you go back and look at where I started with the self-publishing, you know, the first

time I took video scripts and put them into a book form, it was a really kind of lousy layout. The photography was not very smart. The text needed a lot of polish. It just, it wasn't that great. And even before that, if you look at, you know, the self-published zines I was doing 20 odd years ago, those are fraught with problems. And it's just been this constant cycle where I, you know, work on things and try. And sometimes I fail.

Sometimes I don't fail, but I could do way better. And I just keep pushing, you know, myself to do better. the next time. And I don't know, maybe that speaks to like an obsessiveness that maybe I shouldn't be sharing with everyone and foisting upon everyone else. But yeah, I just feel like to really make something like this happen to be able to publish, you can't be afraid to fail and to try something and for not to work out and not to be discouraged, but to say, okay, that could have gone better. How could it have gone better? Let's get that right next time. And so I feel like if you look at the things I've published, each book has been better than the last.

And I feel like that's a good curve to follow. But it does mean I feel kind of bad for everyone who was there on the ground floor with me because you, you know, you bought a book that was made obsolete and is kind of bad by current standards. And I apologize for that. But I'm glad you stuck with me this long because, you know, I feel like I finally, I've finally gotten there. Like, there's still room for improvement. But the improvement has come over the past. past decade or so, or two decades, if you want to count that far back. And I'm fortunate that I've been able to fail in creative ways and that people have still been entertained by my relative failures. And that there's been the opportunity for improvement. You know, people have been very generous and very supportive. And I'm very fortunate that way. So maybe it's easy for me to say, go out there, put yourself out there and try because, you know, I kind of came into this with

having the advantage of a built-in audience, thanks to my time at one-up, the newest gamer and so forth. But still, I feel like that's scalable advice, that, you know, it works for people all along the spectrum, you know, of visibility, popularity, whatever, and people who, you know, sell thousands of times more books than I do, still, you know, that's still good advice for them, just as it is for someone who's going to sell, you know, 20 copies of a self-published book. It's just don't be afraid to mess up and don't take that as a sign that your work isn't great because it can be better. You just have to apply yourself and say, all right, I need to learn from my failures here and focus on what's good. Anyway, that's my homily for today.

Kevin, what about you? You wrap this up for us. So I was going to say, I agree with everything you all have said. So I have to come up with something else. But no, my other advice is that books are very long and they take a lot of time, so you have to parse that out. But also, don't forget that you can take it a chapter at a time, you know. That's true. If you want to come back to another chapter and revisit it and flesh it out or trim stuff, that's fine.

That's part of editing. You just get one thing down, move along to your next item, work on that, and keep going until you've got a whole book together. and then start cutting it up as you need to. Well, that's it, folks. We wrote a book, each of us, some of us, more than one book. But the point is, we've been published, and you can too. If that's something you want to do, and if not, that's okay, too. Thanks for listening.

Please check out our books. I'm going to let everyone kind of walk you through where they can find our publications. But collectively, we are retronauts, and you can find us here, not publishing books, but publishing podcasts, which are like books that we speak off the cuff rather than put into print at retronauts.com on Patreon as Retronauts. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. We are supported by, collectively, by your subscriptions, your support. Subscribe to Retronauts for, remind me, it's like three bucks a month. Then you get every episode a week in advance at a higher bit rate quality with no advertising. than on the public feed. And for $5 a month, you also get a crap load of bonus stuff. It's the better deal. I highly recommend the $5 level. Check it out, patreon.com slash retronauts. Uh, Bob, where can we find you and your book? You can find me. I'm still on Twitter as Bob Servo. I'm lurking on blue sky as Bob Servo, so I might be posting there at some point. Uh, about my book. It is the boss fight books volume all about day of the tentacle. You can find that at the boss fight books website on Amazon.

wherever you find books. And it is also available digitally if you don't want a physical book in your home, if you have too many books, or if you just want a cheaper version, you can buy it for any e-reader, Kindle, Nook, you name it. And I also do podcasts for Talking Simpsons. That's my other gig. It's patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. We cover The Simpsons. And behind the Patreon paywall, we cover King of the Hill and Futurama and Batman, the animated series. In the past, we've covered the critic in Mission Hill. There's over six years worth of podcast there. Check it out wherever you find podcasts or go to the Patreon to hear all the exclusive mini-series. That's it for me. Nadia.

Yeah, you still find me on Twitter at Nadia Oxford until it all burns. I'm on Blue Sky as well at Nadia Oxford. I'm on co-hosts at Nadia Oxford as well. We'll do a little bit of blogging sometimes. Primarily, I am a podcaster on Acts of the BlogGGGG, which is a podcast about RPGs, old, and new Eastern and Western. We've been going on for years. please listen to us. We have a Patreon at patreon.com.com for it slash blood god pod. There's also where I do Charlene Dropout, which is a Final Fantasy 14 podcast. And yeah, that's, oh, of course, my books, duh. You can find the books pretty much anywhere. Amazon, probably hiding in bookstores as well.

Book fair, apparently, if you want the real classic experience, hunt it down there. See if you can find it. Let me know if you find my books at book fairs. I will give you a thumbs up, I suppose. And I guess... RIF, Rockman is fundamental. Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose I'm just always in the field for a, you know, an agent of any kind. Like, you know, I'm trying to get more into books and writing stories, especially fiction.

If you hear my voice, please reach out. Thank you. Oh, wow. I didn't even think about the literary agent aspect of this. I know nothing about that whatsoever. So there's still room for improvement in this podcast. See, I'm just totally nailing it right there. Always learning.

Yep, always learning. Let's see, Stuart. Hi, yes. You can find me on Twitter at Supercarb, where you can witness my ever long ongoing breakdowns there. You can read my book, all games are good,

available from limited run and from Amazon a bit. I think it might be sold out on Amazon, but it's coming back, hopefully, maybe, unless it's completely sold out, in which case, thank you. What, the on Amazon? It should be there, yeah.

It was there, and then it wasn't there, and it's probably going to be there again. say this is the live me complaining about the book being nothing else but yeah the as of this moment is it is available for uh two day delivery on monday november 27th now you know when we recorded this that's weird so you're good okay that's great that's good to know cool everyone got on amazon and buy it right now um i need shoes uh other things um i do a podcast called the dillcast where we're reviewing me and my friends goblotula grizzle grislegris and holly

are reviewing every single Dilbert comic ever and we're also playing a Dilbert themed Dungeons and Dragons games game called keyboards and cubicles we just started another round of that so yeah it's basically like purgatory but in podcast form it's pretty great you'll love it we'll have lots of fun on there

reviewing Dilbert and I'm also going to plug NINSight which is a new Nintendo publication thing in me which is coming soon that I'm doing the retro content editing for An Insight, good name, very good. It's like Insight, but with Nintendo, if you're not sure if everyone got that, definitely

get that listen to. Listen to? That's not a podcast. God damn it. Red, hit it red. Listen to the Dillcast, read Ninsight. I'm blowing this. That's okay.

There's always room for edits. Kevin, how about you? You can find my book, Atari Archive, on limited run games and on Amazon. That's volume one. I do not have a volume two as of this. recording. Maybe by the time you listen to it, I will. And you can find me on... That's very ambitious, because this is going up in like two weeks. Well, you know, maybe they'll listen to it. Maybe they're well behind. Okay, okay. But, yeah, you can find me on Twitter

ostensibly under Ubersaurus and on Blue Sky more regularly under the same. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on the internet as Jeremy Parrish, or on Blue Sky as Jay Parrish. I do log into Twitter. or once a day to check to see if I have DMs, but yeah, I've kind of given up on that one. Of course, you can find me on YouTube creating my rough drafts for my books in video form. Look for Jeremy Parrish. Otherwise, this whole podcast has really been kind of ancillary to my day job, which is working at Press Run for Limited Run games, publishing books, among other things,

for people, with people, and for myself. Anyway, that's about it. you can find all that stuff on the internet. We are available and accessible and ready to fill your life with words. So thank you for your support. Thanks Bob, Nadia Stewart, and Kevin for taking the time to come in and share your insights on the creative process. And hopefully people will check out these books that they haven't already and enjoy them because, I mean, they should enjoy them. They're all great.

So we'll be back again. And I guess like, I don't know, a few days with a bonus episode or in a week with a not bonus episode. So look for us then. In the meantime, remember it's patreon.com slash retronauts. And yeah, that'll give you something to do when you're not reading a book. Thanks, everyone. You know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.