Retronauts - 765: Retrogaming in Print

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Jeremy Parish, Nadia Oxford, Pat Contri, and Ryan Burger discuss their respective print projects about chronicling video game history—the good, the challenging, and the weird.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

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Start your free trial today. This week in Retronauts, all the world. work that fits in print on podcasts. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode. I believe this was 700. Oh, God, I don't know. 760 maybe?

Let's see. Let's look at the notes. Yes, 760. I remembered right for once. I am Jeremy Parrish, and I'm here to talk about books. As you know, I make a lot of books, both for myself and for limited run games. But this is not about me selling books to you, although, please do feel. free to go buy some of my books. No, I'm talking to some special guests this episode, one regular,

and two other folks that I know and have collaborated with in various capacities. And I want them to talk about basically the art of publishing books or other publications about classic games in the year 2026. How has it changed? What's different? What's new? What's challenging? What's cool? Et cetera, et cetera. So without further ado, I will let everyone introduce themselves. We do have a regular retronauts contributor here. Please speak up and introduce yourself, Nadia. Hi, everyone.

I am Nadia, and I am a regular here, which I'm very sorry to, I'm very sorry about that. But yeah, I am happy to be on the show and talk about my upcoming book. So thank you for inviting me. Yes. And we do have someone else who has been on the show before briefly in a segment recorded on the spot at Long Island Retro Expo. That's you, Pat. Oh, I do remember that. Hi, this is back.

It was very quick. That's right. I'm like, what are you talking about? No, but my name is Pat Contry. I started off as one of the, I guess, first wave of retro gaming YouTubers YouTubers in 2008. And I have from there started doing stuff like Flea Market Madness. I was producer, director on the video game years documentary series.

I helped produce the Not for Resale Video Game Store documentary, amongst other items and podcast. Yes. Yeah, and it's great to finally get you on the show in a formal capacity. It's been overdue. A big fan of your work, by the way. My husband and I watch all your stuff. Thank you, Nadia.

Appreciate that. And then finally, last but not least, certainly the person responsible for publishing most frequently here, we have someone. I don't think you've been on the show before, have you? I don't think so a regular listener, first time caller. Ryan Burger from old school gamer magazine. And for the last eight years, we've been publishing old school gamer every other month, anywhere from 60 to 80 pages covering video games, pinball, all in the retro arena, which for us counts as 20 years plus. I don't know where you guys judge that line to be, but 20 years back is what we consider to be retro. That is always a topic of some contention where Reconnaught is concerned.

I drew a line a long time ago. This was 20 years ago when the podcast first started and said 10 years back, because in 2006, we were playing PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360, and 10 years ago was like super NES and maybe some early PlayStation stuff. So to me, that seemed like a pretty good rule. But things move more slowly in the games industry these days, in the hardware space. So 10 years back is not that different looking than it is today. I mean, it's different.

you didn't have DLSS or whatever. Hopefully they don't have it now. Making real games back in those days. But yeah, like it's certainly the line has shifted quite a bit. So to me, 10 years is like at that point something is kind of historic. You know, it's been in the air for 10 years. So that feels okay. But I don't consider something 10 years old retro at this point.

Well, for really, it's somebody. when you think of high school and college, what you played back then is what it personally is for me. For the younger crowd out there that's listening to this, yes, it is the Wii, it is the PS3, is that kind of material. But yeah, a lot of people consider it starting at the Ness Arena. Well, I think of Atari and Television. There's always the distinction between retro gaming versus classic versus vintage. They have different definitions.

So I always conflated a couple of them. I used to say, well, retro gaming to me was. sort of the cutoff when the arcades died out in the late 90s. So I was considered like the dream cast sort of as the cutoff. That's no longer applicable. It's probably, as Jeremy said, about two generations back is what it definitely used to be. But now the generations are melding and don't matter anymore. So I think, true. In 20 years, and now the historians might look at it differently than we do. Yeah, no, you look back 20 years and like I said, you had the Wii launch. And that was really kind of the, that was the last standard definition system. So that kind of feels like a line in the

sand a little bit. But, you know, it is sort of arbitrary. And anyone who puts a point down and says, this is where retro starts. This is the cutoff. Someone's going to argue with it. And that's, that's, you know, gaming has been around long enough that there are all of these sort of, you know, paleological eras. You know. looking back through history and geography. So it's fine. When I started, I guess, my interest in, you want to say retrogaming or gaming history began probably when I was about 11 or 12 years old.

So now I'm going to date myself. I was born in 80. So we're talking, you know, early Super Nintendo era, NES era. 80 babies. Yep. United. My friend Billy had an Atari 2600 and a lot of games because he probably got a lot after the video game crash for pennies on the dollar.

So it always fascinated me how, okay, this seemed out of time to me versus, you know, NES, Super Nintendo games and, like, the PC games I played. So I remember trying to purchase it from him and the games, even when I was like 11 or 12, and his parents wouldn't let me. So that was like my first sort of dipping the toe in the water into, like, discovering an error of games before I could, like, remember them for the most part. Yeah, I started with the Klico Vision. And so I went really far back there. And when the children say, like, oh, the PS3 is retro, I'm just like, I'll take it because it's convenient for work.

But otherwise, you're wrong. Yeah, you know, when kids talk about how, like, the first game they played was Overwatch or Minecraft. Minecraft, actually, is pretty old. But, you know, like, Breath of the Wild. And then, you know, I start to feel the mummy dust creeping up. I mean, for me... The arthritis creeps in. For me, the, like, my interest.

in older games started when I came across, I'm sure I've told this before on the podcast, but I came across a, just like a flea market that had a bunch of NES games. And this was kind of toward the end of the Super NES arrows before, right before PlayStation launched, I think, in Saturn. So, you know, I saw those. I was like, oh, you know, I threw those aside so I could play Super NES games and, you know, play CD-ROM games on my Mac. But actually, these were really good games. They were really fun. I should try them again. And then the following year, you know, emulation started happening in 96. And I started going to flea markets, you know, pawn shops and stuff. And they were just closing out NES, Super NES games for dirt cheap.

Yeah. And so I started amassing older games and saying, these are actually pretty good. And then, you know, I'd go on to websites like gaminers.com. I can't remember the GameSpot kind of side. spin-off. Yeah, it was gamers.com that had the reader reviews and I would just like review old games for any else that. And no one read those. But it was just kind of fun to, you know, stretch my legs a little, I guess. Well, I think I've got the senior set here in that, I mean, I remember my Intellivision. I remember my Ti-99-4A playing Parsec and Lunch Man, loading stuff off cassette tapes. Ah, man. I don't know if any of you've ever been to vintage computer festivals, but that's a whole other vine where people are still living in like 16K levels off. Hey, hey, 16K.

What does that get you today? So, you know, now that we've all established the fact that we like old games and have for a long time, how did you start writing and, you know, just like saying maybe my work should be about old games? This is what I'm going to do. This is, this is me. This is my ethos now. Pat, I guess you kind of got there first. Did I? You said you were on YouTube back in 2008 talking about old games.

So that's a, that is kind of putting yourself out there, you know, not not publishing in print, but certainly creating material and covering stuff and building awareness as people started to look online and say, what do my fellow nerds have to say? Sure. So I started collecting games around 90. definitely by 97, I was heading up the flea markets. I was going to my local Funko Lands, rest in peace, because I'd love that store. And then also dabbling with emulators and buying games in early eBay in college, and then getting Mike Etler's NES Rarity Guide. Shout out Mike Etler, one of the unsung heroes of the history of video games and collecting.

He doesn't get the credit he deserves. And I'd love to meet him one day and talk to him. He's still in New Jersey at video game connections, I believe, in the store. So all that said, in college I dabbled in video production and writing. And I wrote a couple of screenplays. And then this YouTube thing hits in 2006. And then one of the phenoms still to this day was the James Rolf's Angry Video Game Nerd character, which is, you know, over the top look at the video games.

But it was historical because there wasn't really. conversations happening about these games that came out at that point, 15 to 20 years before, in that capacity in that medium. And I said to myself, I think I have the ability to do something like this in a slightly different way. I could use my knowledge at that point as a collector of retro games and my small knowledge in video production, because back then there was a much wider gap between those that could create and those who could not because you had a, the knowledge and money gap to get into

it was steep 20 years ago. It was, yeah. And so it was a combination of all that, plus something that I was going to talk about you with offline, Jeremy, the Three Stooges on NES. That was one of your more recent videos. You are in slight trouble, which we'll get into later. But there was, it's still on YouTube. I'm not trying to shame them. But there was probably, if you probably searched by the earliest YouTube Three Stooges NES video, you'll find someone playing it in real time using like their, it sounds like one of those old gateway stick microphones.

And criticizing the game because they didn't understand like what the point was or what it was about. So it was someone that was playing the game who did not really know what the Three Stooges were. And I was a huge Three Stooges fan growing up in the 80s. So it was a combination of those things that said, well, I think I can educate a little bit and use my little goofy humor to sort of tell a story the same time. And that's how I got into, you want to say writing about video games because you're writing those short, silly stories that appear in video form. How did that translate into book publishing for you, though? That's a weirder throughline. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I'd gone to a few conventions and I looked at the market and there wasn't anything at the time that existed that I wanted to read about the NES.

There wasn't a full-color, you know, review of each page gives it gives every game. it's due, full color screenshots, describes every single game, not just the popular ones, not just the first party ones. And I was like, you know what, I want to do something that I think I would enjoy as a reference guide and do that style. And so there wasn't a, I think, a structure for how to do that at the time. So I had to sort of put one together based upon things I had read. And so I did a Kickstarter that I launched during, it was the fifth NES charity. Marathon. We used to do these 24-hour envious marathons, me and my podcast partner, Ian Ferguson. And so I launched the Kickstarter thinking, oh, I'll get like a few thousand dollars and it's

30 days. I think I put like a 15 or 20,000 goal on it. It hit the goal in about 15 minutes. Wow. Wow. So to me, it showed at the time there was a need for that sort of a book to exist in that format, that large, you know, nine by 12, you know, sort of coffee table records. A bit tailbook, yeah. Yeah. So that's sort of like, it hit me like a ton of bricks because I didn't have the experience to, or a team yet to put all that together. It was like, oh, I'm going to write about all these games myself with Ian.

We're going to write about all 800 plus NES games. Just like that. Yeah, just like that. And then it was, for lack of a better term, hell on earth. Because Ian's time commitments could not keep up with the project with other things going on. So then I took on more than I. I hired other writers to help work on it. And I sort of just, it was trial by fire to establish even a writing style.

How do you do this? How do you have like a semi-uniform style to throw this all into one book and enable to publish it in one, in one volume? How do you do that? And it was, you know, three years of hard work. And I screwed up a bunch of things. I wouldn't do 10 years later. But it ended up, I guess, finding an audience enough.

I want to call it like it wasn't professional, it wasn't amateur, it was somewhere in between that first book. And from there, the knowledge that we got translated into doing a Super Nintendo book, then doing a second and third print of the NES book in there, and then the N64 book that came out a year and a half ago in the fall of 2024. And it was sort of like building knowledge upon knowledge about how do you take this seriously enough to make it not just viable from a monetary standpoint to support itself, but that it has some historical value on top of the entertainment factor of reading about these games. And that sort of has been a 12-year process and establishing that and refining that and honing that skill between not just myself, but my other editors and the rest of the writing team. Nice. All right.

That's a, yeah, I find that publishing is very much a pick-it-up-as-you-go kind of experience and that, you know, you look back at the work you published 10 years ago and think. Wow. Really? Yep. I don't want to look at anything I published 10 years ago. There's a lot of my older work that I'm very proud of, but also like I look at it, I'm like, oh, wow. That's bad.

Not a good, not good. Yeah. Not a promo, but that's the reason why, instead of doing a third, excuse me, instead of doing a fourth print run of the ultimate guide to the NES library, it's been out of print for two and a half years. I don't want to know how much money I've lost, not instantly reprinting it. but it's not a small amount of money. But I said to myself, why do that when you know, I know we can do better now? So let's do the entire book from scratch and re-edit and rewrite it. So that's why I want to do, like with all the knowledge from the past 10, 12 years, much better,

we're all much better writers, we're all much better researchers. There's better resource guides out there and research materials to work with. Let's do it now much, much wiser, more mature, and a lot more gray hairs. Let's do it. Yeah, it's hard to say no to the opportunity to do something, you know, kind of remaster it. Like I get George Lucas and what his deal is now that I've been, you know, working and publishing. I'm eager, you know, I've published books on, like in-depth books on the NES, 85, 86, 87 years, those libraries. And I'm, I have, you know, scripts for 88 and 89 now, but the opportunity has come up to revisit

it the 85-86 book, and I'm like, well, you know, that's been in print for a long time and it's had a few different printings, but there's so much more I could do now that I'm kind of taking the bigger, more contextual view. Like, what if I included a lot more information about the arcade games that, you know, are the counterparts of these and so forth? Like, you know, do I, do I want to do that? Do I want to keep kind of spinning my wheels over the same ground and eventually move on to new stuff. It's it's kind of a toss-up. Like, I want to do the new stuff, but also, like, I know I could redo that old stuff better. So, you know, it's one of those existential crises that's going to keep me up at night, I'm sure. Sure. We can hear from Ryan about how he got into the

publisher. Yeah. That is exactly where I'm headed. Okay. Let's back up. High school kid. I'm a mobile DJ. We do the school dances and weddings. That's where we start me out. Let's see, I get a job after college. I hate it. I get out of that. I get more into IT. And I create a website in 1995. So right on the cusp of things called pro-dj.com.

I then 14, let's see, I figure my, let's see, 95, whatever, 2006, whatever that mathematically figures out to being, I purchased the trade magazine and convention for the DJ industry. So these are the guys do weddings. dances. All the industries had trade magazines at the time. Yeah. And, you know, teachers had their magazines. Printers have their magazines. Everybody has magazines. But that started to fade in the 2010s. But before that faded too much, I create a magazine for retro video games. It all kind of came out of me going to Classic Game Fest, the Austin Show, July 2017. And then we had our first first issue ready by PRGE, Portland Retro Gaming Show in November 2017. And like what you guys are saying, oh my gosh, that first magazine looks like crap.

Okay. And I had experience with doing a lot of this kind of stuff before that. But the magazine we had designed for disc jockeys was more of a industry magazine. It was more, I don't know how to describe it. It wasn't a fandom magazine like what we're dealing with here. I had read Retro Gamer, UK magazine. I'm sure you guys have all seen it. Oh, yeah.

I remember when it used to come with discs in the front. I loved it. I still get it digitally. But no one had done it successfully for more than about a year at a time, a year or two, when I decided to get into it. In the U.S. In the U.S., yes. There is some Italian magazines. There's a couple different people in the U.K.

with some great stuff out there. But no one else in the U.S. So we started it up, and it's been a blast. Not making much money at it. Never really had the goal of that. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. I'm enjoying interacting with people like yourselves, getting to meet Ken Williams, having breakfast with Nolan Bushnell. All that kind of stuff is just crazy.

But yeah, we publish every other month. We've been, we just celebrate our 50th issue, working on number 51 that's behind schedule that will be out by the time everybody else hears this and having a blast doing it. I mean, it was just a transition from me coming out of my shell as a DJ, being a geek, creating a website, being a journalist online, purchasing the established print magazine to creating a fan magazine using my same skills. I love doing it. I also love being a high school teacher, which I transitioned to around the same time. Oh, cool. Do your students think you're really cool? some of them really do, especially when I'll bring in someone like Carlos Pesina,

who worked at Nether Realm Studios for the last 25 years, and they sit and talk to them by students, and they realize he was Raiden. Or David Crane talked into the kids, and I have to explain to him who this guy is and what he's done and everything. And I think he's just amazing. And they say, oh, yeah, okay, whatever. We get John Romero from Doom to show up. I mean, we know who that is.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's been fun. We're just having too much fun with it. I'm an okay writer. I'm a better organizer at business person. I have other people that do most of the writing for the magazine. It's interesting. You said that you try to apply some of your skills from your prior, you know, work life.

Because, again, if there wasn't a, there wasn't like a blueprint for us to do any of this, really. No. And then you have to discover people with different. skill sets. Some people are good writers. Some people are good editors. It took me a while to figure out folks that are great writers don't necessarily make good editors. Oh, no. Or vice versa. And then I guess I was fortunate enough where like you, Ryan, project management, I always excelled at project management. And that honestly was my, you know, my corporate life was project, a lot, mostly project management and that, which when you're managing these teams of people, people, like, for example, on the new NES book that I'm working on, or the NCC4 book, it's about a combination of editors and writers and artists. You're talking between 20, the 25 people, something like that. So it's recognizing that, you know, we're all pulling towards the same goal.

And then how do we accomplish that with all these different people and personalities and what they excel at? And how do you, like, sort of maximize everyone's abilities to do this? You have to recognize what works, what doesn't, and who can make these things work better. And that's something I guess I found along the way that I was good at. Otherwise, these books would be impossible for me to do. Like the first book was, I did 90%, 80% of the overall work on the first book in terms of the writing, you know, the editing, putting it all together in design, finding all the assets and all that. and all that.

And it almost broke me, and I couldn't put myself through that again. I just couldn't. Yeah, I know with our 50th issue, we had 30-some different writers writing segments to it, and we ended up coming with 70 great games, and we had to roll them into our next issue. I'm looking on my screen right now at Google Doc,

which I keep track of. This says March 26, DOS Gaming of the 80s and 90s, lists articles that we wanted, list who's writing them. I'm looking at the JRP one, which we have. have a bunch of people writing for. And on that one, especially, for instance, and that's our May issue, I had to go to an outside source. I talked to Jeremy, he found to be a couple

other people, that we didn't have someone who had direct expertise in that. It seems like a lot of people know a ton about their exact subject. If I want to find someone to talk about the TRS 80 computer or the Turbographic 16, you can find a niche person that's really deep into that. And then there's some other people that will go out and write on anything, it will research it. But I like having the passion of someone that wants to write specifically on a deep topic that they absolutely love. Sure. And Ryan, you would understand being in this that that's only part of your job. Yes. Because you also have to then find people that create art, create assets. You have to manage, if you have advertisers or sponsors for issues,

you have to have people responsible for doing the layouts and approving that. And it's a lot to juggle. It's a lot. So Ryan has to not only know the basis of the expertise of the knowledge of being able to hire folks to do that part of it, but that's only like half of the work. There's still another world outside of that in production that you have to at least know what you're doing. Yeah, I have a gentleman named Christian Abara who's in charge of our graphics work in layout and Adobe Indesign who's put out books. to you guys on stuff. And he just spends his entire life for like two weeks out of every two months working on it and showing me updates. I mean, I'm due to receive an update later tonight

of little changes we made, little things we just tweak. And he's taken our magazine way beyond just column, column, insert photo that wraps around here kind of vibe. I'm using my hands, not remembering that this is not a video thing. You're allowed to speak with your hands on our podcast. He never dropped that. He never dropped that habit. But, but yeah, I mean, getting it to lay out, and we finally now, with what we've done the last three issues, I consider a professional-looking magazine. It's great, and that's why I feel even worse about my old stuff, and I want to redo some of the material and publish it in a compendium edition.

But do I update everything off of it into our new skills? Not really. I mean, people want to see some of the old stuff, but I kind of feel I don't want to put it out because it looks so bad. The content is better than the layout without a doubt. I mean, Capcom still publishes the original Mega Man, even though that's a pretty rough-looking game, especially, you know, next to its sequels on NES. Pat, don't be offended. I like the original Mega Man.

I owned the original Mega Man back in the day. But, you know, compared to where that series went, you know, I think it could be tempting for them to say, like, You know, what if we spruce everything up with Mega Man's six-style graphics? But they don't. They put it out there because that is the work that they created. It's still, you know... They did have powered up RIP. It's a reason why people like me will always say that I want the original Star Wars

and I do not like the special editions because that art existed at the time and place it was created and that's what established what it was. And you cannot take it out of that time period and compare, at least in my opinion, to something decades or even, you know, five. or six years later, because that's the foundation. Without that, without that, the sequels don't exist. Yeah, I like, I like when people reprint old material, republish old material, and give you the option. Like, here is a new take on it. Here's something fresh. Like with Star Trek the next generation where they've got the digital, the CGI effects, but you can also turn that

off and watch, you know, the classic Star Trek video toaster graphics, and they look pretty bad, but, you know, that's how it was. And it looked cheap even in 1987. And that's okay. because that's kind of what television was at the time. Yeah. But then they've, you know, tweaked it a little bit. So you've got CG models and things like that. And it looks a little more contemporary and giving people that option. I think that's always a great way to preserve media is to say, like, here's, you know, here's what it was.

And now here's something that might be a little easier for people accustomed to new ways of doing things might be a little more comfortable with. Yeah. Yeah, that's always a very hot point of contention, again, on Acts of the Blood God, where our co-host Victor is very much into that old school, quote-unquote, friction. And we argue a lot about that because I'm the kind of person who's like, oh, I've never played Final Fantasy 10 before. I guess I'm just picking it up on the Switch. And a lot of people scream, no, they screwed up Teetus's face.

And I'm like, yeah, but they have like fast forward. So I don't know what to tell you, man. I'll take your face. Well, we all do get to celebrate Star Wars, I guess, next year for the 50th anniversary in the original super done original edition without him messing with stuff Han's shooting first

and everything that goes with it I was in a theater when that happened men people were not happy Oh I wasn't I guess it goes back to the point of When is meddling When should you stop meddling With the original work

And I guess it goes with me redoing this book But I can honestly say like I wrote like dozens From Scratch reviews that I did from the first edition. And I rewrote all three Super Mario Bros. I felt it was incumbent upon me to write three of the most important games that came out on the platform.

Plus, they are like full page, you know, 600 word reviews. The others are like, whatever, 450. So those are fleshed out more. And I looked at my Super Mario 3 is one of the last reviews I wrote. And then Daniel Greenberg, one of our editors, staller editors, I was working on with him. And what I wrote, like, whatever, a month ago, was so much better than what I wrote, like, 11 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I want to leave in the history, or excuse me, that's what I want people to remember that version when I'm dead and gone in 100 years. If there's a book around,

I want them to read what I wrote a month ago. It's a much, it respects the game a lot more than what I did, knowing a lot less about what I was, I was doing, you know, 11, 12 years ago. And that's all part of the learning and growing process as you go. But is that, is that the same as, you know, having Grito shoot first? I don't know. I hope not. So Nadia, what about you? How did you get into this deep, dank world of writing about video games and putting it into print? I took a very much more roundabout way than a lot of you. For the starters, I flunked college and, well, I flunked out of college. So I went into the workforce and I was in my 20s. And just to kind of pass the time, I just wrote a lot of fan fiction and I actually started this

back in high school. I started writing Mega Man fan fiction. And frankly, I've never stopped. I'm still writing it, to be honest with you. And I have written official Mega Man stuff for Capcom through the Robot Master Field Guide and the Maverick Hunter X field guide which both are published by Udon. I wrote with my husband. Unfortunately, they've been out of print for a while. I'm really hoping they come back

someday. So I moved on to the internet and when I started like around the, I say the 2000s is when blogging became very big. So I started up several blogs. I've told the story before. This is going to like bump up the rating to M. I'm very sorry. But my real first breakout, I suppose, blog, if you want to call it that, was I don't even know how I found it. There was a McDonald's hentai that I thought was really funny. So I wrote about it.

And yeah, it got some attention. And people started reading my stuff. So I eventually moved like, I was on like some platform. I don't even remember, but I moved on to Live Journal. all eventually Jeremy said to me, hey, you like a mega man, like a crazy person. Do you want to write for this, you know, new site called OneUp.com? I'm like, sure, why the hell not? So I wrote a article about Mega Man. And I'm like, wow, I'm addicted now. So I just started writing and writing and writing. And eventually it got to the point where, like, I have chronic body pain. And I used to work with animals as well as writing. And I couldn't do that anymore. I couldn't be a groomer. So, because my body just, it just started to hurt too much. So I said, I said, okay, well, I guess I got to really buckle down and start writing full time. So I've been doing that ever since, and I'm publishing my first for me book, like, by me, for me. It's called From Pixels to Pros, what video games taught me about storytelling. It's from retro games books. It's coming out soon, I hope.

Very soon, I hope. Jeremy knows what I mean. But I owe someone a very, very overdue forward, and I need to write that ASAPA. Oh. Yeah. Uh-oh. I'm very much looking forward to it. I've had a couple people read the book.

They say it's very good. It's very entertaining. Oh, good. So you have read it. I'm happy with that. I have read it, yes. So there we go. There's a review.

Five stars from Jeremy Parrish. Yes. It's a triumph. A triumph. As long as it kept you entertained, man, that's all I care about. That's my main thing with writing. I'm not like, we were talking earlier about how some of us are organizers, some of us are editors. I can edit.

I'm not good at it. It's actually my husband, who is the major editor. checker kind of person. And actually right now, he is writing as well. He is writing the, he wrote the Mega and Legends comic for Udon, which was published very recently. Free Comic Book Day, there will be a Battle Network comic. He wrote that as well. So, please support us. Did I miss what, Madia, I'm sorry, did you say what the new book's about? Did I miss that? Oh, I'm sorry. It's basically, the subtitle is what video games taught me about storytelling. And I've always been a storyteller. I've always been a reader. And that's one of the

reasons I got into video games, especially RPGs, because I was like, oh my God, you can read in a video game. That's so cool. That may be very cool with all my friends. Let me tell you. So I was always a writer, as I said. When I was a very little kid, I wrote, I swear to God, Archie fan fiction because I read a lot of Archie comics growing up. So again, I eventually moved on to Mega Man and other video games. And the book is about how it got me into storytelling. Like, obviously there's like other books, there's movies, there's more kinds of media out there. But video games don't really get much of the credit they deserve for storytelling. So, I was your uncle. I like, I like what you said about, you know, you started

writing and you realized, oh, this is addictive. Like, realizing that moment when you realize, like, you can push your opinions about some niche little thing that you enjoy and broadcast it out onto everyone else and get money for it. Like, that's, that's a, that's an amazing sensation. You can also push opinions of, you know, negative opinions of things and get people to sent you to. Sure. I think, you know, trolling and, you know, that kind of bait is easy. But if you have something substantial to say, that's the real trick, like getting that out there and getting someone to offer you money in return for publishing it. It's really hard.

Congratulations. You've made it. It's actually, I meant to say Ryan very quickly, I had a very small stint in writing for trade magazines. and I kick myself now because it was really lucrative at one time, and I got in just in the end. I wrote at least two articles for a magazine called Just Labs, as in Labrador Retrievers, because I was a – I said, it was a dog groomer. So I wrote a couple of stories for this magazine about hunting Labradors, like raising them, very specific, very niche. And I'm like, okay, here's how you groom your Labrador. Here's the brushes you use.

Here's how you clip their nails. It's got some good money for the time, unfortunately. That was the very end of it all. Yeah, I mean, really that a lot of that super niche stuff disappeared when Facebook allowed everybody to communicate directly and they could target ads straight to you. I mean, they didn't need us new as much as it was before. But the reason why the retro gaming magazine stuff is taking off is because people are into physical. And that's why we're able to do it. That's why our books work.

That's why all this stuff is out there because we like physical products. We don't want to be renting the game like a lot of games are nowadays. Absolutely. And Ryan, you have just provided me with a beautiful segue into my next question for everyone, which is, what do you think is interesting about print as a medium? What can't you do in other mediums that print allows you to do? Why are you messing with something that everyone keeps telling us is dead? I mean, I remember the pivot to video and what that did to sites like one-up.

Oh, God. You know, just online media in general, like, you know, driving people away. way from reading. And, you know, when you add print to that, that's a, that's an extra step. You have to go someplace and buy something. You can't just like read it online immediately. So it's, it seems like kind of a challenge, but surely there must be some kind of benefit to this that everyone sees and gravitates toward. I guess the way I could start out is a little big curation. I mean, everything is out there. Everybody says things. If it's on the internet, it's true. Of course. Of course. Of course.

But to take that next step and actually put, honestly, money behind it, you've got to have a quality level. You've got to turn your things up a little bit to do stuff. I mean, yeah, there's vanity presses. There's being able to print stuff through Amazon. You could print anything. But at the same time, when you put the work into it, you do everything behind it. It's more than just an impulsive. Yes, Mega Man number, whatever, is the worst of the group.

You guys are all talking Mega Man, so I thought I'd cover Mega Man. Is there a worst Mega Man? by the way, in the whole series that no one likes. Okay. What is it? You want me to give you the NES guidebooks opinion on that? Oh, okay. Well, you guys are all totally about the Mega Man and I want to talk about Nightstock

on my television, you know. But yeah, I mean, there's an investment in what's happening with things and there's a curation of it. I mean, be it someone submitting a book to Jeremy to publish him editing it, putting it out there, someone investing in printing it, sending it out, or someone investing. doing the same process like what Pat is doing with gathering all these different materials and organizing and having a standard to stuff. It's not just, it's not just a blog, I guess the way of saying it.

Yeah, I think about this a lot because the Kickstarter that I did was so successful for the first book. I had zero expectations. I didn't know if it was going to make $20,000, $30,000. It hit $145,000 in the first book. Awesome. And that just showed me that, wow, there is. people are starving for this sort of book. Why?

And I don't know if it comes back to the actual physical object itself. I think that helps a bit. And books never really died physically. That's what's so weird about this. All other physical media, for the most part, with little bits of, like, you know, vinyl comes back a little bit. We still do, like, you know, living and run games, does their prints of some of these digital games. But books, I think it's the feeling of responsibility. that, as Ryan said, this is all curing put together.

This must be worthy for me to look at. And so I will discover things going through this. I never would have thought on my own to go out and look for the information of. I think it's a combination of that. It's a combination of, you know, for example, I'm going through, you know, this book and, oh, I'm going to learn about Ninja Guide and I know about that. But hey, what about Ninja Kid? That's a more uncommon game I might have never known of. And then right after that, I read about Nobanaga's ambition.

It's like, oh, that's a strategy game. Maybe I heard that. But it's all in front of me to now digest. I'm already invested in this, this form, this product, this medium. Now I want to learn about things that someone else decided that you should. These are the bits of information that I think are important for you to learn about. And I think there's something to that. I agree.

Yeah. For me, it's kind of an ego thing, whereas I'm very old school. And I know this is completely out of date thinking. But when I really started getting into writing, it was like print is the legit. Print is the, ah, you have, as Pat said, print just got more and more valuable as digital became just kind of encroached on everything. And you know what? I went on a bus the other day and I saw several people just reading books. People are reading books again.

And myself even, like I have nothing against e-books. I read them all the time. But there's just something about sitting down with a book that makes me, if I get into it, I'm like, oh, I'm not going to stop and check my mail the way I would, even with an e-book. Like, I'm just sitting there reading, and it's just writing as purest form, especially in this day and age. Just you don't have to deal with your browser crashing because a whole bunch of ads are going to pop up. You're just reading some words on a page. And there's just something.

We kind of lost something with that. And e-books don't have like quick flipping between two things or a third thing real quick. You can't do that with the e-book. It's just something to like, oh, I want to flip through to this section real quick and go back to this one and put my finger in between two. pages. There's just something to that that you can never replicate with an e-book. You just can't. Well, in e-books, unless you have a PDF, you can't recreate a physical layout precisely the way like it looks on the page. And for me, design was actually my inflection point into publishing. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a comic book artist and then, you know, realize maybe I'm not

good enough at drawing to be a comic book artist, but I can be a graphic designer. So I studied graphic design and then got into the real world and discovered that all people want me to do with graphic design is make phone book ads, which suck. So, you know, I always had this aspiration to create books and publish books and design books. And, you know, along the way, I realized, oh, I actually write pretty well so I could write and design books. But it wasn't until Hearst sold EGM and the Ziff Davis Magazine Group to, or no, actually, as if Davis sold the magazine group to Hearst. And Hurst said, oh, we already have magazines. We don't need this. We just want the website. And all of a sudden, my avenue for writing in print, you know, like official PlayStation

magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly, GMR, they all went away. And so I, you know, I got into self-publishing. And initially it started out pretty minimal. Like you couldn't do a lot on blurb.com in a book in 2009. But those tools improved and then, you know, I kind of parlayed those self-published books into working with a fan gamer, then then parlayed that into just having my own book line at Limited Run, where, you know, books can look the way that I want them to. And, you know, for me, there's a lot of pleasure not only in writing the book and having someone else edit it, Thank you. But also, like, making the pages look the way I want to take photographs and capture screenshots and come up with layouts and arrangements that just, you know, hopefully

enhance the text and supplement the text and give people a better idea. Like, what is this guy writing about, you know, old video games? So what? But then you have the layouts with, you know, screenshots and photos of the screen that just kind of convey, hopefully, the spirit of the video. games. So yeah, for me, it's really about the physicality of the thing, but also just like this is kind of the way I'm visualizing it in my head, and this is the best way for me to get it out. And, you know, there's value to video too. But to me, print is just the purest form of expressing those ideas. And it's probably because I'm old and grew up reading books and comic books and magazines and so forth. But to me, there is still like this kind of physical

anchor of concepts that, you know, you put it onto the page and it becomes more real somehow. And I'm really drawn to that. That's the part I've enjoyed about the last couple years. I mean, our magazine looked good before. It would have themed pages. It would stylistically do stuff. We'd pull content. But the last year since Tristan came on with us, we're able to make it look and pop out

and be like the part of the game on things. And I've got a lot more excited about what we're putting out. So, I mean, it's growing in your skills and seeing the results of it lay out and really, really be fantastic. So we've talked kind of glancingly about, you know, the process of publishing and, you know, the importance of having the right team to have someone who knows their topic and is a good, clean writer, someone who likes to edit and doesn't necessarily want to be a writer, but loves bringing out the best of the, you know, the best possible version of what's been. submitted, of having designers, of having someone to kind of corral the entire team together. But just beyond that, what's challenging about publishing in print? I feel like all of us, as Pat said before the episode began, could do an entire episode just about how hard it is sometimes to bring a print publication into existence. So maybe Pat, you want to lead,

since it sounds like you've got some grievances to air. Oh, wow. That's a negative sort of slant on what I was going to say. You know, grievances with the universe, not necessarily with any one person. Oh, I have grievances with particular individuals that work on my books. But I probably won't publicly say who they are. I think it's a tough medium because I think Ryan alluded to the fact that I'm not mixing your words, I hope, where you said it's not something that's making me a lot of money doing this. he put down a zero sign. Oh, yeah, we're not visual again, are we? For me, it has.

It has. It has to have enough value in it that not only can I dedicate three to four years, like the N64 book took four years in my life. An opportunity costs, a lot of rework, a lot of money to editors and writers, and it has to be worth that investment on the back end. So that's part of it. But it's discovering and finding those people that not just can work on the project consistently, but do the assignment to the expectations, not just to me, the editor-in-chief,

but to what I expect the end consumer and a reader to expect. And that's easier said than done for a lot of reasons. There is no such thing, at least from what I'm. doing. No such thing as a, I want to say, professional retro game reviewer. Like, don't exist. There's not, I can't, you know, there's not someone on LinkedIn. I can search for a retro video game reviewer and have a list of a few hundred people that have done it consistently and done it to what I want or the style that I expect. And so just finding consistent quality people that are not trouble that know that, hey, I'm part of a team

that I might have to curtail some of my, you know, eccentric writing natures to fit the style of 15 other people on this project and know that this is one mission that I'm a part of a team. It's like playing on a football team. You're one of 11 people. You're all going towards the same end zone. And doing that has been so difficult to find writers that not just are consistent, are good, could take a good direction without holding grudges at one side. Because we've had writers that have dropped off because they were unhappy with what an editor said or recommended. Or it's like their ego was like, how dare you have me change what I think is a work of art, what I've written, and it's perfect and pristine how it is?

And there is a lot of that amongst, not just writers, but people that work in any form of art entertainment that have problems adjusting or taking criticism when it comes to that. And Brian's probably been in the same shoes working with certain writers. They're probably the same way where it's like, how dare you touch what I think is perfect on the page? Yeah. Yeah. We've made it. We've made edits to people's piece before. And it's like, no, you submitted it.

You're getting paid for it. You're doing this. It's great. The nice thing I like about having things the last couple of years is we started out with almost completely volunteers. And volunteers would submit their material when they felt like it. We've started moving into a lot more paid writers that know what they're doing once they've established themselves with us.

And it does help tremendously in that, yeah, I mean, this is a professional publication. We need to work with you. So, I mean, for me, exactly what Pat was saying. That is the tough spot, is working with people and people that don't like each other. He got the lead story. Why is what he mentioned on this? It's like, slow down. None of us are making a living at this.

We're all doing this for various reasons. Yeah. And then I learned quickly that professional, the meaning of professional doesn't mean as much as you think it does. Because someone who says I'm a professional. And I hired people that wrote for magazines, wrote for retro gaming websites, and had quote unquote experience doing this that washed out from the projects because they could not either adapt their style or fit to the writing style guide of what we had. And I have a huge writing guide style for these books. The instructions are very, very specific about how you write these

and I train them, those same way I train the editors. It's not just like just drop them in. Some professional writers that had written for a famous magazine said, this is not something I can do. I can't wrap my mind around what you're asking for. Or some got super insulted and said, how dare you try to, you know, teach or train me? I was writing when you were still in grade school. And seriously, someone said something like that. And I was like, all right, that's fine. You don't have to be in the project.

That's fine. Goodbye. So it's a lot of, as Ryan would probably think, it's a lot of personality juggling as well, when you're in this sort of business with teams. That's part of project management. And sort of dealing with, again, people's strengths and weaknesses and giving people a little bit of rope to make mistakes. But realizing at some point, we all have a standard that we must attend to when we're working on these projects. Otherwise, especially for my book, where my book is, books are like, well, we have the same amount of words per game to write about.

This is the assignment. Every game gets exact same due. It's not like one game gets. a thousand words and one game gets 100. Every game is treated exactly the same. That's the mission. And that's a tough pill to swallow for some people, some writers, and they realize that I really have to work at this. And sometimes the amateurs are better than the pros. It really comes from your, I guess, your ability, not just to write, but the wanting to learn more and to adapt. Exactly. The other side of things that I do with is just getting bills paid.

We're a unique medium. You guys decide how many books to print, either do it through a Kickstarter Avenue or whatever. We've got to pay the bills in the magazine. And when we print the magazine, we're not making a lot of money off of it. We're covering a couple of advertisements that we've done different deals with and it helps out with stuff. But just paying to put out a magazine in a world that people used to think magazines, We're cheap and free. You get a $30 annual subscription of Sports Illustrated. They send you the free football phone as part of it. And me trying to get $15 for a magazine, and it costing me almost as much as a subscription.

And by the time to get out there, I've got to make a dollar to and pay my small expenses off of a couple advertisers. So, I mean, it's a tough toss-up on financial stuff also. We've looked into and have done and are going to be doing some more in the book area. And I understand what you're dealing with. It's you've got to find a niche that maybe someone hasn't covered yet or hasn't been covered well. I mean, and you were the first one to put out these nest books, but now there's been a dozen other people do something like it. Now, with your next edition, you're coming up with more of what makes it definitive

the best product out there. Well, there's people on the call here that have also done NES books, so I want to say it's the best one. My NES books are very different in nature than yours. Yes, they are. I don't see any competition there at all, honestly. I feel like we're creating different things. Yeah, yours are interesting. I haven't read a lot of them, but yours are a more thoughtful glance at the period in time

and everything revolving around the game, you know, tucked into what the game is about. It's a more sort of thoughtful approach that I don't have the page space for. I just don't. I just don't. You're doing 600 words or 400 words a book? 4. 25 or like 650 for like the five star single page reviews. Yeah, or as I'm doing like between 1,500 and 3 or 4,000 words for a game, depending on, you know, the game.

And for me, it's really about context and explaining like where does this fit in history. and what are, you know, like the cultural and historical factors that fed into this game. I mean, you can't talk about, you know, the Zapper Lightgun without explaining, in my opinion, you know, like the feedback that and the static that was created around realistic depictions of weapons and toys in the 1980s and how parent groups were like, this is not good, this is not cool. And so suddenly it becomes orange, you know, like that's a big part of the story. Oh, sure. Oh, this is an aside, but I remember when they shifted how the toys. look, because I had a toy oozy that looked like a real Uzi.

So did I? I had water guns at school. Oh, that would not fly. And then once you hit what, 1989, it was like, okay, they have to be orange and neon and tips on them. Megatron's a tank? What? I had a cap gun that was

die cast, like it looks really, really realistic. Oh, yes. Really nice, hefty thing, too. Could have killed someone with it, in otherwise. Master Chief style. Another thing to bring up is we have limited lengths to deal with where a YouTuber can just add two minutes to it, they can just keep on going.

We have a certain amount of space that we can do. I mean, we can keep adding more pages to it, but that adds expense to what's there. So you've got to decide at what point are we getting so deep that this should be a two-part article or it should be a book instead. You know, a lot of what we do in the magazine is we'll cover, like for instance, I'm contacting a group that does the TI-99-4A, that old computer that I was into. And I'd like to do a two-page article on that. They could probably give me 300 pages of depth, but I don't want that.

I want the niche. Someone else put out a book on that, great. But I want what the average person would want to read. Correct. And so just to get back to, you know, Jeremy's thoughtful approach, which I wish I could do more of. So, for example, I have the review and I have the reflection section underneath each game, which is more historical background, the legacy of the game,

like why this was important when it came out, but I cannot dedicate nearly as much space to that as I do the review, because that's most, first and format most what the ultimate tenter books are. They are review guides. It tells you about the games. So I do wish, like,

so that's one of the challenges in editing is like, oh boy, we can talk about Super Mario Brothers in the background forever in the historical, but we have to cut this off. We have to, it has to fit on the page. Another good example of a book done by Limited Run

that I absolutely loved, Atari Archive, okay? That's the exact opposite of, like what Pat is doing. Atari Archive took one game and wrote about everything around it that influenced everything going up to the combat game,

was tank, was this, was that before it. And that's a totally different level. I mean, I never need that much detail in what I do. That's where the handoff to something of that level is fantastic. And I want that next book to come out, by the way. And I think we can encourage Kevin to do, I want the next one because I love that. Kevin Bunch is a legitimate historian, and he's really gone into things like researching the FCC to understand how government regulations impacted video game consoles in the 1970s, which was,

turns out really a massive influence. Like, it had a huge effect on just the nature of what video game consoles were. And even which ones could come out and kind of slip through the system and became dominant in the market. It's pretty wild. But, yeah, he's working on the second volume now. I've given him the green light. So it'll happen. It's going to be a good one.

It all comes down to what is your goal. What are you trying to accomplish with this? Are you trying to educate about one game or a subset of games? In my case, are you trying to give a historical record of every game that came out in the console in one sort of like one package? Do you want to learn about articles? I'm sure you have, Ryan, you have themed issues where it's like this. Usually we learn all about this and that. And so it's like, what, how will this affect the person?

reading it. Like, what are they getting out of this? And then, I guess in my case, or for books, when someone picks us up 30 years from now, what do they, what I hope they can still remember or want to learn from this in the future? Like, I think, unless you know that going into it, it's hard to get the final version of what you have in mind to the finish line. Like, you have to have to have that always in the back of your head. When I'm editing Super Mario Brothers 3 and writing it, I have to give the exact care and detail to that as Pictionary. Because there might be someone 50 years from now that says to themselves, I want to learn about Pictionary.

And I can't half ask that just because people don't remember or regard Pictionary in the same way of Supermire. That's not my responsibility to make that decision. It's not. It's my responsibility to find those games in the same. the library and give them the same amount of due as the, you want to say, the heavy hitters of the console. It's like you can't, it's sort of like making sure they're not forgotten in my head. We can't forget about these games just because people didn't buy them as much as the popular

games. Like, I take that very seriously. That is a part of my philosophy, too, is like give time to the games that are bad or forgotten because someone worked on these. You know, there's someone, someone played this game as a kid and really loves it even though it's complete garbage, you know? And that's fine. That's valid. I may not agree. I may not like the Three Stooges as a property. Not just a game. But, you know, there are, yeah, there we go. I'm not preaching to the choir on this one. But Nadia, I want to hear from you. Like, what have your challenge has been? And, you know, what are you, what are you up? they're trying to do. Your work is very different, I think, in nature than everything else we've been talking about. Yeah, my book is, I mentioned I started off writing blogs. And this book has a very bloggy style. I think you'll agree with that, Jeremy. And when I started out... It's like the longest blog I've ever read. It's very, no, it's like very earnest and from the heart, but also it just like,

it segues into new topics very, very, very fluidly. Oh, thank you. I'm very glad to hear that. Yeah, It's actually an extension of what Pat said earlier. When I started this project, of course, like every stupid idiot who wants to do a book, I say, this is going to be easy. I'll just write a big blog. It's not that easy. I wrote my first draft, and it was good, but it was not cohesive. You said the book flowed, and I'm glad to hear that because we put a lot of work into making that flow.

And to do that, like I had an excellent editor at Retro Game Books. And to do that, you have to be, you have to be stoic enough or have your hearts, to kind of steal your heart for criticism. That's what I'm saying. Because you have to say to yourself, okay, this editor is trying to help me, trying to make my product better. And if an editor's not being like,

hey, you stupid asshole, you suck, then they usually have at least a good point that you should listen to. And I think by working with the editors at Retro Games books, I made the project a lot better. And as someone who's been writing for the games industry

for a very, very long time, I have crossed paths with copy editors before, like Jason Wilson, you, Jeremy Parrish? I'm not a copy editor. Were you ever a copy editor? No, it's torment for me. I hate, hate copy editing. It's so slow and laborious for me. It's just not a natural way for me to think.

I'm someone who has to just vomit content out. I can't, I can't bring order to other people's vomit. It's just, that just doesn't work. That's why I like working with. the editors. Order to other people's vomit. That's kind of a... That gave me a mental image. That's publishing for you. Yeah. I have the taste of my throat now. Thanks, but... Editing is a very specific skill. It is. Yeah. And that's why I respect editors because a lot of the time they're right. And so I... Writing something and publishing it is

being vulnerable. It is, especially in my case, this book is very... As Jeremy said, it's from the heart. And I, initially, the book was more based on facts about games. And my editor said, this is good, but you know what? I really want to hear about more how these games, what they mean to you. And because that seems to be where the best content comes from. So he was very gentle about it, if you know what I mean. He was like, you know, please understand. I'm trying to help you. You don't have to, you know, take any of this advice. And I'm like, no, man, this is great advice. Like, as Pat said, I think a lot of people are just kind of resistant to criticism and editing. And I understand why.

That's a very, very hard thing to take. When I, even when a comment is nice on something that's being edited mine, I have to kind of like go and be pissed off for a little bit. I have to like, you know, stop off and put it out. And then I'll go back and say, well, okay, they have a point here and I'll fix that. Also, I think it's beneficial about me is that I don't want to stop learning how to write. I always want to change what I'm doing. I always want to try new things. I always want to make myself, if not marketable, God knows, adaptable.

Like, I want, I've had people tell me that their kids love my work, like the Mega Man books they put out. And that makes me so happy because that's all I want. That's, ideally what I'd love to do with this book once it's out is tour it around the city, maybe. Like, I have plans already to go to the Toronto Public Library System, which is a great system, and promote it through there. because they have like gatherings all the time and meetings for, um, authors and whatnot. It's a Toronto Public Library System is very, very good. I will defend it with my life. Um, yeah, that's what I want.

I just want people to remember why they love games. And in this horrible, horrible world we're living in, I'm really hoping that, you know, it'll be warm without being too twee or, or shallow. Yeah. No, I, I really feel like being edited is, it's difficult. Like, you're putting, you're putting, your, Your thoughts, your words out there. And someone is saying, you could have done that better.

That's hard. And, you know, even still, sometimes I bristle when I take, when I get feedback and I'm like, wow, I really disagree with that. But, you know, it's not necessarily my call. And kind of like you, I just have to like go cool down, have a martini or something, come back. I'm like, yeah, everything is great. I don't know. Yeah. But, yeah, like, I feel like I am a good writer because I got harsh feedback.

throughout my life. And instead of letting that discourage me and stop me from writing, it kind of, pissed me off sometimes. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to show you. I had a teacher in sophomore English in high school. And her grading was brutal. Like she just destroyed. You know, we would get essays. We'd write essays. The whole class would be assigned it. She just demolished everyone. She would give us a content grade and a mechanics grade. And like in the, you know, she would never give anyone below a failing grade. Like, I'd never give anyone a failing grade on content, but the lowest you could get was like 70 out of 100. But on mechanics, you could get a zero, and everyone did. And over the course of the year, you could, I think you could kind of track the

people who were going to become writers or were going to go into some kind of writing oriented, related vocation because they were the ones who brought their scores up from zero to 99, 100. And it was hard fought. And, you know, when I got into the press and contributed as a freelancer to EGM and OPM and so forth, guys like Dan Shue were not gentle. I mean, they weren't mean, but they were also very blunt. Like, you're writing in cliches. Don't do that.

Like, never say gaming goodness. That's trash. Don't do that. Like, apparently everyone does that at some point. Everyone turns in an article that says, gaming goodness. And he says, no, never use this phrase. And there's a lot of those just like lazy cliches and, you know, turns a phrase and just cliche constructions. And EGM and the other magazines were really good about saying not only like this is not up to snuff, but also like you got to cut this down so that it fits in the space.

Like you have to write to the voice. of the magazine. And every publication has its own voice. Like, if you compare, go back to 1995 and compare Game Fan magazine to Edge Magazine, those are, like, those, those, those magazines had very, you know, next generation, if you want to call it, instead of Edge. Like, they had distinct worldviews and personalities and styles. And you would never mistake one publication's content for the other because they were just so different. But there was consistency and, you know, not uniformity, but consistency across, you know, within those publications. And that's the sign of good editors. I mean, you can argue if you think game fans' editors were

good, but they knew their assignment. They, they were out there to express themselves and to just voice the joy of loving video games. And it was messy and chaotic. But it was earnest, again, you know, like I said about your work. Like, it was real. And, you know, I respect that in hindsight as much as I respect something like Next Generation, which was like, you know, kind of sipping the tea with a pinky out and saying, well... Mega Man Legends. They hated it.

This game, it's fine, but imagine if it were in polygons instead of sprites. And, you know, that was a perspective also. It's like the Frazier crane of the crowd. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. The only other thing that really hit with me is, just recently,

with an article I wrote for the issue we're working on right now. I wrote about my memories of BBSs, Bolton Board systems. Oh, my brother had one. Okay. And I kind of droned on a bit at the beginning. And my editor cleaned it up and said, well, we're not going to talk about this part. It's like, but that's part of my memories. Yeah, but you kind of went too deep on the memory stuff.

You want people to connect and understand that you're not just a professional writer, which I'm definitely not. but you're not a writer that just happens to write on video games versus someone that is a video game fan that is an okay writer. I want to have that perspective, and he's able to clean me up. Jared props to you. He does great work for me. But I fought him on it, and I gave back into him because he is the ultimate decision maker on content in the magazine because he can step out of it better than I can. So video game publishing, very challenging.

And that's fine. You know, you need a little friction for it to be worthwhile. It's just like video games themselves. But, you know, there's good to come out of it, too. In addition to the publications that we create, like, I feel like in the process of making books, making material about. video games, you become smarter about video games. You learn things. I'm curious to know, you know, like, where has your perspective shifted? You know, what have you learned since you

started doing this? When you look back at your older work, like, what do you look at and think, nope, blew it there? I think we are a product of the information and resources available to us. Absolutely. So I don't think, like, I messed up. I definitely made errors. I'm not talking about, like, hey, I dropped in the wrong screenshot here, or, you know, I'm putting together, like, you know, in the NCC4 book, there was a couple of assets that were out of place. That's going to happen. But in terms of, like, the actual research and putting your nose to the grindstone, I've learned that what is, what the official story is, is often wrong. And the information out there has not been collected properly or does. disseminated properly, even officially.

So that was sort of like a weird pill to swallow discovering these things. And the fact that like no one up to that point had really told me that, hey, you can't trust these sources out there. You can't trust even if it comes from Nintendo or if it comes from these third-party publishers because they didn't care when it happens. They didn't care enough to track these things from a historical perspective. And that was something that to me was sort of like a shock to my system. Because if I'm trying to record this properly, like who can I count on to give me the proper information? Then you learn that I have to count on myself and other people that are basically tradesmen

historians that, because they don't exist. Like video game historians is not like, hey, there's a hundred years of people going to universities and studying this. It's not a thing. People on this call are part of like the first or second waves of gaming history. on here. And it's something that I'm still sort of like struggling to wrap my mind around and still not sure about a lot of these sort of dates.

You know, we have some resources like computer entertainer at the time, which would actually call and track when these things were released. You have, you can look at board production dates, for example, and realize that, for example, Mega Man, the first rent of Mega Man was produced end of November, 87. that's the board. That doesn't mean it came out in 87 because there's a time frame in between doing that, putting the box together with this,

putting it on a freighter to come across the ocean, to get sent to the Nintendo's warehouse, you know, up in Washington State, and they get disseminated out everywhere. So it's discovering that no one cared about the history as much as you do working on this. And that's a strange thing to sort of accept and see. Yeah, no, I've certainly encountered a lot of those discrepancies.

I mean, soccer for NES is a great one because it's been proven that that was a game available in New York in October, 1985, November, 1985. But Nintendo lists it as a 1987 release. So I don't know why. Mock Rider, they list as a launch title and it was an 86 title. It's like, why? If Nintendo doesn't care, and they're putting out. false information for decades. And they're supposed to be the source.

Exactly. First party is the source. It's bizarre. And I don't, I guess I took it for granted. But thankfully, a bunch of us, not just me or other people, in the past 10 years,

I think before the call, Jeremy and I talked about it, in the past 10 years about, we've come such a long way in uncovering a lot of these gaps, a lot of these missing or hidden developers, shadow developers on these NES games and others. It seems like once you get to the 90s, it's a lot more clearer on what actually happened. But the 80s, we still don't know who developed the uncanny X-Men NES game.

Which is probably just as well for those people. Let them be anonymous. There used to be, release dates used to be a lot more catch as catch can. I have a vivid memory. Yeah. I have a vivid memory of, I used to go to a independent store here in Toronto called. independent gaming or something like that. Or Gameorama, sorry.

And when Chrono Trigger came out, I actually called him and said, like, hey, is Chrono Trigger here yet? And he's like, I've got to go to the airport to pick it up now. You can come over later. Like, that was the kind of thing that you got back in the day. I would say maybe it was Mortal Monday that changed everything. Suddenly release days became a thing. What about Sonic Tuesday? Maybe it was Sonic Tuesday.

I don't think we had that in Canada. I don't think we were left out of Sonic Tuesday. Yeah. Sonic Street. But we did have Morrill Monday. I remember that vividly. Oh, yeah. I mean, amongst other things, like, this is a show and tell time. But one of the things I'm doing for this book is we're doing a lot more of the international releases and like the unlicensed stuff. And I did not have an expertise in the Brazil, how big the Brazilian NES market was. Oh, huge. Yeah.

The Brazilian NES market was probably just as big. It might have been bigger than the European NES market at the time for just the overall number of games released that were official. unofficial, and obviously they had so many clone consoles that came out there. And so, like, for example, give me an example, show and tell. This is a game from Milmar called Millionaire. That was also a Sachin Asian release

in 72 Pint. So it's just discovering that trying to find out, okay, these Brazilian publishers, how many of them were pirated, how many of them were, they had the actual rights to release these legally? And

No one has done research to the extent to do a book to easily say, oh, here's a list of the pirate games. Here's a list of the ones they got the rights to. Like, for example, Gradiente, we know probably got the right to do something like Stealth ATF. You know, they had packing games, you know, from like Ghostbusters, Super Pitfall with their Phantom system. So it's like those are likely licensed releases from the original rights holders. But the fact that like we're unsure about a lot. of these still, it just makes me realize that there's a lot of gaps that have to be filled in while we're doing this sort of work.

And the problem is, the problem is now that a lot of the people that were the first person that did these actual things are getting to that age that they aren't going to be around much longer. So documenting these first generation of Atari through Nintendo through Super Nintendo kind of stuff, you'll have some documents in some warehouse, but the people who made these games aren't going to be around a ton longer. And they remember the stories differently. We published a big interview with Nolan Bushnell.

I was thrilled to be able to do from Atari fame. And on my mailing list of the magazines is Alan Alcorn, Pong, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, cool. And he said, okay, I want to do the interview. And we did an interview basically to say his side of the stories that was a little bit different. Two people that were both primary sources. Everybody knows the Nolan Bushnell. versions of the story because he's been out there.

Alan's a little bit quiet or reserved engineer type of guy, and he remembers everything differently, from Sears, from Andy Capp's Tavern with Pong and fixing all the stuff. We've got to get these stories down, and paper is stronger than anything else.

Jeremy, as you've told me before, a lot of your prior stuff that was on the interweb disappeared when things happened. Yeah, that stuff goes away, and you two someday will go away. Not me. I'm sticking around forever. I'm going to be in that cring robot suit. Just my brain telling people about video games.

Part of my day job is I do the yearbook. Remember yearbooks? I worked on a yearbook, man. I have the yearbook teacher at the high school, okay? And I'm having to explain to these kids that TikTok or whatever will probably not be around 20 years from now when you want to show your kids these pictures. And we're going to have to explain what the six, seven meme thing was back in the day. And you're not going to be able to pull up a video because it's not going to be around. It's going to be the MySpace or the Friendster of 25 years ago.

So get it in paper. Get it on something solid. Can you tell a passion about this? Get it down and get it out there. And the kids just don't understand. I'm even trying to connect with their parents. And they're not quite understanding. it's me that's almost a grandparent level to some of these kids that understands that going back to my wife's 35th high school reunion was an absolute blast look at her yearbook and find people that are there.

In print means it's staying around. Simple as that. Absolutely. So you hope that the people that are entrusted to create these works on paper know what they're doing or at least have the dedication since there's a lot more investment mentally, physically, monetarily, to putting something in physical paper format that you hope their heart's in the right place to do that. That's the hope. Exactly. Yeah.

So speaking of the future, this is taking us into our final topic for the episode, the final question. You know, in addition to preserving information for the future, where do you see your work going from here? Like what's next on the horizon in terms of publishing for you? Do you just want to keep kind of going in the same direction you've been going? or do you have new ambitions that are still kind of being felt out, sounded out? Who wants to speak first? I'll cover first. For me, because we have that moving schedule of what is retro, it's now covering the

Wii, the Xbox 360, and PS4. My problem is going to be when we start moving into the arena of virtual products, of download-only products, it's going to be tougher for me to do things. So I can see another 10 or 15 years, who knows if I'm going to be doing this 10 or 15 years from now. But I can see another 10 or 15 years of talking about those types of games. But how do we get into covering all those little games on our phones? All those little games, you know, all the stuff that's out there, all the indie publishing. So, yeah, for me, it's just the moving schedule, what's 20 years old and what I consider to be retro.

Yeah, we just published at Limited Run. It's actually still on the shipment coming in. But Kurt Kolata and Hardcore Gaming 101 put together a huge book on licensed movie games from the 80s and 90s. And to get some of those properties complete, they looked ahead into more recent releases. And so many of those are just like a minefield of games that can no longer be played. They were for, you know, smartphones or they were for Japanese Java phones, feature phones. And they're just gone. They're like, they can describe based on, you know, some bad YouTube footage what those games are, but you can't play them and weigh in on them unless you're very fortunate and find someone who has, you know, still like a working iPhone 3G that has iOS like 2.0 on it. And, you know, those are out there, but, you know, do they have the games loaded on them? Do they still work?

How about Flash games? Remember the Flash game? Oh, Flash. I mean, New Grounds, thankfully, is still around. I mean, Adobe just announced that it was discontinuing support for Flash and all of those things are going to stop working. But people are building frameworks to substitute for that so that those things will keep going. But yeah, so many of those games just bubbled away into the either. Yeah, there definitely is a desire to preserve. Ryan, you work with children. You would know far better than I would.

But I feel like kids today have an appreciation for stuff that came from the aughts and the tens. I think they know they're getting cheated a little bit. I think they know that there's a tactile world that is gone, and there's no reason for that to be the case. There's no reason why books should go out of fashion. We've already talked about a great deal about why they're beneficial. For myself, I have published several third-party books. I mentioned the Megaband Books.

I've done work for Inside Editions. I have a book called The Gamer's Bar, which is basically it's cocktails and mocktails with a video game theme. I got away with... Yeah, it's from Inside Editions, if you want to pick it up. It's Amazon and everywhere. I got away with a cocktail called

the Seed of Hojo, because we had to have a cocktail based on Sephiroth, and my editor was like, oh, why don't we do... I don't know, it was something cliche. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. And I did that.

And I also... My favorite, though, was Cody Travers' toilet wine. And I said, there's no way anyone's going to pass this, but they did. And I'm like, oh, shit, great. So go buy that book if you want. I have some more coming from them.

But what I want to do for myself, again, is first I want to see how this book is received. And then I might make a decision from there, because I could easily write more books in that style. But I also want to write fiction. And I have a lot of great fiction ideas. I have written fiction in the past. I've done, like, commissions. I've done like a couple of books for that, too, but not anything like that's mine again. I have like a compilation book that I have some stories in and whatnot.

I just want to do, I've always wanted to write fiction. And maybe I'll get there sometime. Thanks. I think I agree. I always, my passion was always writing fiction. Right, yeah. Whether it was screenplays I dabbled with. The path to any of the punk video series is fiction.

You can argue the merits of some of it, but it's fiction that I enjoy doing. And then this is nonfiction that while I excel at the process, you know, it's not something I wake up every day saying, I must work on this guidebook. Yeah. I feel almost like it's a duty. It's yeoman's work. It's not something that, you know, like I know other people are enjoying it. I see them buy the books. But it's not something where like 20 years from now I'll want to like talk about with people.

But it has to get done. Someone has to do it. With that said, you know, the new NES book will come out. I will, the superintendent book did a, did a double print run. This is great timing, guys. Late 2019, I said, this is enough to do like a year and a half, two years. three years of conventions and oh boy a pandemic happened but that's that's almost sold out i don't want to think about how much wasted money uh an extra storage costs i incurred with that uh but so so i'll reprint

the superintendent book with you know update the layouts and stuff like that and i'll you know re-edit some of it but after that i'm not sure i'm not sure in terms of nonfiction uh two two members of my team really want to do a game cube guidebook and it's doable it's about 600 games. It's not as bad as doing 800 games, but the newer the games are, like with the N64 book, I said, well, it's half the games. A superintendent, it should take half the time. Oh, no, because the games are more complex and are harder to learn and get through. And so, I said to the two editors, if I work on a GameCube book, I really honestly, I cannot work on it day to day in Project Management. I've done three of these. We've done three of these. When you

now four over 10 years. They take three years each, but on average, I just want to be the CEO, show up at a meeting and just guide you. I just don't have it in me probably to do the same amount of work on a GameCube book. I just don't with all of my other stuff going on. But we'll see. Never say never. People ask me, Pat, why don't you do a Game Boy book?

And I say, well, that's a lot of games, first and foremost. Second, there's not nearly as much nostalgia for Game Boy as other consoles. and so you have to, of course, unfortunately, you have to factor in what's the monetary outcome of this. Yeah. Investing a lot of money in three to four years of your life, only to see nobody buy it. You know, it's a tough pill to swallow when you're self-publishing. I agree. I think you need to go virtual boy.

I heard something about virtual boy? I think someone took care of that. Oh, yeah, yeah. There was one book. What does it start out? I was an April Fool's joke if I remember correctly by somebody. Are you kidding? I can't tell if you're kidding.

No, no, it started out as April Fool's joke and then someone called him on it. I think someone made a virtual boy book. Yeah, I did. But it wasn't an April Fool's joke. Oh, oops. Okay, I don't think, never mind. I tried to help you with that. That's not the book I was talking about it.

I forgot if I told you, Jeremy, I was in touch with the pro wrestler Kenny Omega. Oh, hey, really? Because when he used to be at New Japan Pro Wrestling, he thought he might have access to the finish, but unreleased a New Japan Pro Wrestling Virtual Boy game that they advertise in a couple places. I couldn't get at it. So like someone has like some prototype

or something of that. It just has, you know, anyway, didn't have. That one's probably not showing up at an SO. Yeah. Yeah, I want to bring Kenny Omega on my podcast. I want to talk RPGs with him. There you go. He's a huge gamer.

Yeah. He is. Yeah. So anyway, video games and video game books. What a glorious world. I think we'll wrap it up here. I don't need to talk about what I'm doing in the future because I, like, you can't stop me from making video game books. I love it.

It's what I love doing. So it's just what I'm going to keep doing. But it's been great having all of you on here and bringing very different perspectives on things and lots of experience. So, yeah, that's this year's referendum on video game books. There's a lot of video games books, video game books being made these days. So I'm sure we'll keep revisiting this topic with lots of different people and getting lots of different perspectives. But this was a great little convention of folks talking and sharing their thoughts on things. I had fun.

I will wrap now and tell people that we appreciate their support of Retronauts. And for listening to the show, if you enjoyed it, you can go to Patreon and subscribe. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. By subscribing, you make sure that this podcast continues happening. It is supported through almost entirely through user subscriptions on Patreon. So that's awesome. Patreon.com slash retronuts. That's the pitch.

Lots of good stuff there. Check it out. You'll love it, I promise. Now everyone else can tell us where we can find your work. Pat, do you want to kick things off? Where can we find your books, et cetera? Sure. Thanks so much for having me on.

I feel like it was overdue, but I'd love to come back. Ultimate Nintendo.com is where you can not just order the NCC4 book or Super Nintendo book. You can also pre-order the new NES book, or you can wait for the Kickstarter on that. That'll probably be later in the year. I also do a goofy podcast and other stuff that you can search up if you want. Ryan, what about you? Old school gamer magazine, old school gamer.com.

We are the only North American multi-format retro gaming magazine. We have fun doing it. And check out old schoolgamer.com slash retronauts. So I know that you heard about me from here. Nottie. Oh, you. We know you. You know me.

You can't get rid of me. I'm irrepressible. I'm Nottie Oxford. I also do The Acts of the Blood God, which is a RPG podcast about RPG's old and new Eastern and Western. Hopefully you will see my books. soon. And I hope you will buy it. And I hope you will enjoy it. Please tell me what you think. I'm on Blue Sky at Nadia Oxford. You can find me. I never go away. And you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Blue Sky as Jay Parrish. You can find me, you know, all the usual places online.

You can also buy my most recent book, which I very, very deliberately did not talk about. So this wouldn't seem like a me podcast. But the history of Metroidvania, Decade 1, available at all fine bookstores through limited run and Dark Horse. It's a collaboration. It's very cool. If you go to a bookstore and they don't have it, they are not a fine bookstore and you need to tell them to get their act together, special order it. You can also just get it online. It's available there too. But it's hopefully the first of like three Metroidvania history books that I will publish, decade by decade. assuming that anyone actually picks this one up and their, you know, Dark Horse says, this is worth doing more of. If not, well, I guess you'll just have YouTube or, you know, publish pamphlets or something

and hand them out at events. Anyway, this has been Retronauts. You have been listening to Retronauts. Thank you, everyone for joining us, Pat Ryan, and Nadia. Thank you, everyone for listening. I can't name all of you, but there's thousands of you. So thank you. Good night.

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