As an avid midlife gamer with nostalgic interest in gaming history I enjoy reading gaming books.
In this picture you can see the gaming books I own. My favorite is “Masters of Doom” followed by “The Ultimate History of Video Games” (I am aware there is a second volume).
I would like to hear more recommendations from you.
P. S: Note that PC gaming is my thing therefore it is highly unlikely that I will get a book about consoles or console games.
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Maybe you will find Blood, Sweat and Pixels by Jason Schreier of interest. Been a little while but I enjoyed it as an audio book.
I’ve read that tedium. Some chapters revealed something interesting, but everything else was empty. Why do I need to know what kind of wine the developers drank and in what pub after the bad news got announced to them?
This book’s core issues are very important. The book itself sucks!
I haven’t read either, but the following two are on my list:
- John Romero actually has a book coming out in like 3 days called DOOM Guy: Life in First Person
- Mark Brown from Game Maker’s Toolkit recommends Spelunky by Derek Yu (by the dev of, well, Spelunky).
Are you interested in books that are based on game series rather than being strictly about gaming? If so you should absolutely read the Halo books, they’re fantastic. Start with The Fall of Reach.
Another game series with a great set of books is Battletech/MechWarrior. The lore behind Battletech is crazy deep, I’ve watched so many YouTube videos about it and have only scratched the surface. I’ve only read one of the books but I want to get more of them.
both of Jason Schreier’s books - Blood, Sweat, and Pixels and Press Reset
If you enjoy science fiction, Ready Player One is super great. Do not judge it based off the movie. Quite different plots. Do skip Ready Player Two though.
Came here to recommend RPO, myself. It’s an absolutely fantastic book. It’s loaded with tons of 80s/90s music, gaming, and pop culture references, and is just so damn fun.
If you’re into lore expanding fiction, I really enjoy the Halo books:
- Fall of Reach
- Contact Harvest
- Ghosts of Onyx
- Forerunner trilogy (this some deep sci-fi)
- First Strike
Raising the Bar (out of print for several years now so I recommend just finding yourself a .pdf) is a book about the development of Half-Life 2 and bits of Half-Life as well. Geoff Keighley has also written a few “The Final Hours” books about the development of Portal 2, Titanfall, and Half-Life: Alyx, though I think all are digital-only.
I also second this one.
“The Ultimate Guide to Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest”
Couldn’t have beaten the game with it.
Freeway Warrior by Joe Dever. An eternal classic.
I appreciate the mixup in book recommendation as this looks genuinely awesome!
https://aaronareed.net/50-years-of-text-games/
Originally a blog, recently edited into a published book via Kickstarter.
I can’t personally recommend them yet but I’ve read great things about the lock on “magazines” (they look more akin to coffee table books) and have a set in my cart that I’m going back and forth on
If you like DooM and are interested in the techy parts of it at all, there’s a great series called “Black Book” that has a volume dedicated to DooM. The author is a cool dude and has done one for Wolf3D, DooM, and others - https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
I think it would be more worthwhile to learn a programming language. The great majority of gamers have no clue how games actually work, and it isn’t that difficult to at least grasp the basics. It will completely change your perspective while gaming and you’ll have a deeper understanding of features, design decisions, etc.
Thanks for your advice but I am pretty sure that is not what I am looking for (source: I did start a programing career in college eons ago but lose interest and become a dropout. :)).
