Great books on classic video games(bossfightbooks.com) |
Great books on classic video games(bossfightbooks.com) |
Wolfenstein 3D Black Book: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/
Doom Black Book: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Fabien_Sanglard_...
It is a DRM free book.
I am using another app to read it.
For the link to Boss Fight books: FYI the selector defaults to paperback; ebooks are a very reasonable $5 if anyone prefers digital. They're that price at Amazon for Kindle, too. But IIRC and based on reviews out there, they vary quite a bit in style and quality. Supposedly the Spelunky one is great and written by the creator himself. I bounced off the series because one book was mostly personal anecdotes from the author, a random person who just liked the game, rather than anything about the topic you wouldn't get from playing it or even reading wikipedia. Some of the books do have more research and interviews.
If you're considering reading some of these but are specifically interested in the developer's point of view, I suggest reading some reviews and/or a bit about the [author] so you know what you're getting into.
For example: I liked the ZZT book very much, but that may be because I was briefly involved in the ZZT community in the early 2000s; it feels good to have a part of my history written down. If you've just read the Spelunky book (written by the developer Derek Yu) and are hoping the ZZT book is something similar from Tim Sweeney, you [may] be disappointed.
I was hyped going into it and it opened strong, but then it devolves into being a bunch of clips of Tom Kalinske & friends talking smack about a dead Japanese guy (head of Sega Japan) with no one to speak on the dead guy's behalf.
It felt super dishonest and one-sided, less a documentary than a PR piece to rehabilitate Kalinske's reputation, to the detriment of everyone at Sega Japan.
It only covers the good things SOA did and only the bad things SOJ supposedly did, and none of the opposite.
He, along with Sega co-founder David Rosen, were interviewed in the excellent 2014 book Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, and their accounts don't really go along with Kalinske's. Rosen flat out rejects the (absurd) idea that the Japanese parent company was trying to sabotage Kalinske (a claim Kalinske has made many times in recent years). Rosen says Kalinske just had a hard time understanding why the Japanese side had to make the decisions they did.
As someone who is currently writing a book tangentially related to the Japanese history of Sega (plug: https://rasterscroll.com/product/legends/ ), I feel the need to say that Console Wars (however entertaining it might be) is not very accurate.
For one, it omits what I consider to be one of the biggest factors in Sega's decision-making from 1993 on--the massive drop in revenue that occurred in the U.S. and European markets. I've written about this recently with some interesting data on export revenues:
https://mdshock.com/2021/04/14/segas-financial-troubles-an-a...
1. Masters of Doom
2. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
For those interested in Blizzard/Blizzard North/Diablo 2 history you can also check the 2nd book called Stay awhile and listen: heaven, hell and secret cow levels. Author goes more into what wenr wrong during Diablo 2 development (and obviously what went good). The 1st book is about Diablo 1 and is much weaker: it is mlstly quotes "we made a great game". The second book repeats a lot of info from first and focuses more on why Blizzard North fell.
I read the Spelunky one and enjoyed it, and grabbed the Baldur's Gate II one because I was under the mistaken impression that all these books were by developers or people otherwise involved in the game's creation, and they'd be war stories or other interesting insights. It wasn't, it's just some guy (he's written a D&D novel but not related to BG in any way) writing general stuff about the game - nothing really in any depth - and a whole lot of stuff about himself. Not at all what I was looking for (my fault, should've read the blurb).
Some of the other books seem to have interviews with creators or serious research done - are these good?
The Best Books For Understanding The Video Game Industry By Doug Walsh (who wrote over one hundred officially licensed video game strategy guides) https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-video-game-industry
or
The Best Video Game Narrative Histories And A Couple Of Others By Harold Goldberg, he is an author/journalist in the industry and wrote 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us' https://shepherd.com/best-books/video-game-narrative-histori...
Really a treasure trove for old and "forgotten" classics.
Some fun descriptions/stories of early life at Atari
It probably also got me to start recording my own game design journal. I'm still kicking myself for not doing one earlier like I initially intended to while I got a pretty cool job working for a video game publisher as a producer (instead I wrote like, 5 or 6 journals total... that was 11 years ago now, so a lot of it has gotten fuzzy...maybe if I sit down and try my best to remember at some point).
But my game design journal (plus some personal stuff) journal, despite me still not having anything published during that time yet, is sitting at over 300,000 words over four years. I generated a ton of ideas and prototypes and consumed lots of lectures and playtested a bunch of other designer's games and had several 'almost' opportunities during that time, so there was plenty to talk about anyway.
Pandemic really stunted that habit, though, and I'm struggling to get back into the habit of it (taking a break from writing an entry right now, actually, only the third one this year so far :/).
Mechner has superb talent, especially back in his 20's, and I'm grateful he put out his notes for us to read.
The quality of the Stripe Press books is outstanding, although the type size is a little small in the Dream Machine book.
I'd temper one's expectations on this one. It's a massive, unwieldy book, mostly speaking to old PC VGA graphics programming techniques, in pages taken verbatim from Abrash's previous Zen of Graphics Programming book.
It definitely isn't focused on a specific game, but it does go a bit into the BSP tree stuff used in Doom, if memory serves.
Maybe it's just because I had already read both his Zen of {Code Optimization, Graphics Programming} books, but I was rather disappointed upon acquiring and skimming the Black Book.
Fabien's deep dives are more interesting IMHO, if looking for stuff about tech in classic id games.
edit: BTW, if old [34]86/pentium-era PC optimization and VGA programming books is what you're after, the aforementioned Abrash books were goldmines at the time, and much more conveniently sized, physically speaking. I don't intend to throw shade on Abrash, it was just the Black Book that disappointed me, largely because of the high expectations set by his previous books. You can still find used copies of the Zen books readily on Amazon...
Yeah, the start is essentially Zen of Code Optimization, which was also a great book, but pretty much dated in 2021... but it's interesting to see how he thinks. The best thing to take away is not about picking the right instructions, but to use your brain to pick the right algorithms and use benchmarks
The author explains how he made the R-Type conversion for the ZX Spectrum 48k and provides an interesting view of the "bedroom coders" and the early video game industry in the UK back in the 80s.
Self-published and downloadable for free here: http://bizzley.com/
There is a small part about the departure of ID Software guys from Softdisk that is inaccurate and has been corrected by John Remoro himself when he spoke to the blogger who writes the famous CRPG Addict series (btw, completely out of topic but this blog is EXCELLENT if you want a COMPLETE view of pretty much every RPG out there since the 70s). The correction (as the blogger wrote) was a correction about a mistake he made in writing one of his earlier post about Dark Design, but I think it also corrects the claim made in Master of Doom.
The link to Romero's correction is as following: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2020/09/game-378-goodcodes-ca...
You will need to scroll down to the second part, or just search "But since I was only able to get 1,200 words out of Goodcode's Cavern" on the page. To simplify things I'm pasting the paragraphs:
>I had consulted several sources to assemble that paragraph, including one that purported to have interviewed both Carmack and Romero in detail, and I was pretty confident in what I had. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when John Romero (who I didn't even know was aware of my blog) invited me to participate in a podcast interview of Stuart Smith. (We're recording in mid-September; I'll let you know when it's out.) I took the opportunity to run the paragraph by him and found out that almost everything I'd written was wrong. To wit:
- I was a year late; 1990 was the year most of this happened. Romero worked at Softdisk prior to Carmack and was actually the one who hired Carmack, not because of Dark Designs but because of a tennis game plus his obvious facility with programming.
- Romero and Carmack loved working at Softdisk and only left because it was the wrong sort of publisher to take advantage of the horizontal scrolling technology that the duo would use in Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.
- It was actually the president of Softdisk, Al Vekovius, who suggested that Carmack, Romero, and Tom Hall start their own company. There were no lawsuits and no threats; Carmack and Romero kept working for Softdisk for a year to avoid leaving the company in a lurch.
- The reason Carmack and Romero are credited on so many Softdisk titles stretching into the mid-1990s is that those titles used technology and code that Carmack and Romero had created. They otherwise had no involvement in games like Cyberchess and Dangerous Dave Goes Nutz!
The ending to the console wars movie was basically "Sega failed, Nintendo was runner up, and Sony won", but didn't cover the almost-made-it Dreamcast comeback -- best selling launch of all time at that point. They almost made it, and it fixed pretty much everything the Saturn did wrong.
Hey by the way, your book looks cool, reminds me of "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers" by John Szczepaniak
It may only appeal to a certain niche audience, but it's so full of great details. It's a good balance between describing the technical challenges and then the hacks/tricks/wizardry that got around the sometimes insane limitations!