Great books on classic video games (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

https://mtlynch.io/book-reports/making-of-prince-of-persia/

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...

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/

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam

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!