Update: a second edition with new introduction was published in 2024.
It’s finally out. Japansoft: An Oral History is a new book I’ve edited that’s based on interviews by John Szczepaniak with Japanese game developers of the 1980s and early 1990s for his series, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers.
I’ve not been doing much feature-writing lately because of a couple of big book projects, but I’ve done this and that. Here’s a quick round-up of work from the past few months that I’m pleased with.
Yesterday my boy came out of his room in the cottage we’ve rented for our holiday in west Scotland. “Dad,” he said. “I finished Spelunky.”
14 years old, GCSEs ahead of him, standing at the very brink between child and adulthood. Voice breaking, sometimes sullen. He still breaks into open affection with a hug, or, more frequently, a joke, but now we feel we’ve earned it. We still tell him what to do, but maybe he needs it less than we think.
“I killed King Yama!” he said, eyes bright. “I shotgunned his hands away so he couldn’t throw skeletons at me, and then threw four bombs at his head.”
I’ve been rather remiss in noting this, but I’m currently working on a new book! Called Japansoft: An Oral History, it’s a spiritual follow-up to Britsoft: An Oral History, which means it’s a set of intimate reminiscences by members of the early Japanese game industry.
Later today I’m speaking at the Bath Children’s Literature Festival about writing about Minecraft.
As I put it together I realised that I’ve written about Minecraft in many different ways: creativity-n-biz style features in Edge, practical guides about blocks, entertaining (that was the aim) vignettes about them, designing and explaining builds, fiction-based descriptions of mobs, almost-academic works about Minecraft’s creative culture. And then there’s my work as publishing editor at Mojang, in which I read and edit other people’s writing about Minecraft, from novels to sales blurbs.
So I want to talk about that process for the kids that’ll be there, helping them learn about researching, imagining, and putting words down, and hopefully keeping them actually interested by spicing it with little tips and a quiz.
A couple of quick nods to recent The Mechanic articles. Most recently I talked to Zach Barth about the excellent Exapunks, a puzzle game about coding viruses and using them to hack candy bar recipes and printshop accounts systems so you can publish zines.
What about a puzzle game about writing viruses like Stuxnet, which was designed to attack a very specific kind of industrial controller used in Iranian nuclear centrifuges in order to destroy them? A game about writing programs that unfold, multiply and deploy themselves to make changes to the physical world.
Tomorrow night is the private view of the V&A’s Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, an exhibition on which I was a curator back in 2013/14. I’m incredibly excited to see how it’s all come together.
I was only working on the exhibition in its earliest stages, involved in pitching to the V&A’s board the concept of what videogames might look like in a gallery, in the hopes of unlocking a good budget and a big space. But I found the process fascinating, proof of the rigour that goes into making exhibitions at internationally renowned museums like the V&A.
I talked to four modders who are making money from their work about how they run their practice, and what challenges they face.
Release day for an indie developer sounds like it’d be a celebration. Years of work have finally reached a successful conclusion. They can sit back, relax, and wait for the adulation and money to roll in. But it’s not really like that. “I heard a lot of people speculate what this would feel like and I was never really sure what would happen when we finally hit launch,” says Simon Stafsnes Andersen, head of Owlboy maker D-Pad Studio. “The reality was … conflicting.”
The truth is that launch is not an end. It’s the start of something else, and with that fresh start come many struggles that are born in the intensity of game development. This is true for almost all modern game developers, but it’s especially dramatic for indies who have spent half a decade or more quietly working on their dream project. After you’ve put all of yourself into a game, what comes next?
For PC Gamer I talked to Simon Stafsnes Andersen, who led development of Owlboy for nine years, Eric Barone, who made Stardew Valley for four and a half years, Ben Porter (Moonquest, six years), Joakim ‘Konjak’ Sandberg about Iconoclasts (eight years) and Jens Andersson about Yoku’s Island Express (five years). I was honoured to get some tender and candid insights into what it meant for these developers to let their games go out into the world.
I have completely rebuilt my website. This is it, here. The idea is that it looks much like my old one, with the same colours and fonts so you probably haven’t noticed, but under the hood it’s completely different.