What books about videogames do you enjoy?

What books about videogames do you enjoy?

and no i don't mean like game adaptations, yes i mean you that guy with all the S.D Perry Resident Evil novels. Hide your shame.
I mean games about the history or development of videogames over the years.

One i've recently read that i can really recommend is "The untold history of japanese game developers volume 2". Its a series of interviews -sometimes candid but anonymous for legal reasons- that details the fascinating and often fucked up history of the japanese games creation scene turning into a full on multi million dollar industry.

From beginnings in the late 70's of lone guys sneaking into department stores with cassettes to work on code on a home PC demo kiosk and sharing their codes in specialist hobby magazines to the sinister corporate activities of the late 80's like Sega of America hiring the Yakuza to kidnap an employees sister so he wouldn't defect to Nintendo it is a fascinating read. Not just in terms of developer insight. Though it is interesting to hear how things like Megami Tensei got the greenlight when they were so different to everything making money at the time. But also in terms of how they feel about the modern industry, both with the west cowtowing to social justice outrage culture and their own domestic japanese problems with mobage and brand exploitation killing off new original works.

Its a fucking riveting read from start to finish and its given me a hankering for more videogames history books.

Which others do you enjoy and recommend?

Other urls found in this thread:

exhentai.org/g/1128139/d1d835cd21/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

No

The writer doesnt really have any input beyond 'tell me about what you worked on and what the studio was like'. Its just a collection of transcribed interviews.

ez

...

Eric Nyland was hand down the best writer in the series, to bad what you posted is all he wrote.

I remember thinking the first two Halo books were good, but I was pretty young then, so I may have been wrong.
I read the first Splinter Cell book. That was a mistake. It was garbage. It was also insufferable to read, because it was written in the first-person and present tense. So it reads like, "I go to the door. It is locked. I look around for another door." Awful. I assume it was the writer trying to write it "like a video game," i.e., trying to convey the feeling of playing a game, but it just doesn't work. I ended up shredding that book.
I also read two (I think) Mass Effect books. I didn't actively hate them, but they were pretty much a waste of time, and if I could go back and do things over, I wouldn't read them.

Oh. I've never done that. I've watched some behind-the-scenes/making-of things, but I don't think I would spend money on a book about a piece of entertainment.

This is supposedly good

I was about to post Tom clancy game-based titles but I realized you wanted design

also this