As the title implies, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers is a documentary about Japanese game developers. Originally, John Szczepaniak, a video game journalist, went to Japan in order to write a book about this topic (still in the works). During this trip he also filmed his interviews and encounters, which gave birth to a 4 hours long video documentary now available on DVD: This documentary follows John Szczepaniak's journey, with video segments featuring different materi
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Keywords : japan, history, documentary
A 260 pages book dedicated to the history of the Genesis / Megadrive, the famous 16 bits Sega home console. The book is divided in 4 sections. The first one details the birth of the machine, while the second one is focused on the ads used by Sega to promote it ("Genesis Does!"). The third section presents a selection of emblematic Genesis titles. Each game is described over a single page with a short text and several screenshots. As this section is organized chronologically, it's a gre
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Keywords : history, genesis, megadrive, sega, sonic, streets of rage, advertising
Happy new year everyone! This new year comes with an improved version of my first ever LudumDare competition entry: The One Fork Restaurant. To celebrate the release of the final version of this game, I've decided to write down a full postmortem about it. As the title implies, it's a funny time-management game taking place in a restaurant, where many people come to eat various meals. But the restaurant has only one fork, so customers have to share it! When the customers are w
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Keywords : the one fork restaurant, postmortem, ludum dare 28, game design, game development
The biography of Markus "Notch" Persson, and his world famous creation: Minecraft (2011). This books details the birth of this legendary game, and it begins with the end of the story: the MineCon convention held up in 2011 to celebrate the official release of the 1.0 version of the game. At this date, the game was already played by 16 millions people in the world, making both Markus Persson and his company, Mojang, millionaires. The book then goes back to Notch's childhood, from his pa
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Keywords : minecraft, notch, markus persson, mojang, indie, biography
The biography of Yoshihisa Kishimoto, a japanese game creator unknown by the general public, although he created one of the most famous videogame series: "Double Dragon". This well written book is full of pictures and starts by telling you the childhood of this little-known genius, alongside with his thug-like youth where he was always eager to fight inside and outside of school. He hopefully changed his lifestyle before becoming a real criminal. Fond of movies, he then started to crea
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Keywords : yoshihisa kishimoto, double dragon, kunio-kun, renegade, thunder strom, road avenger, vier, biography
This book a call for all amateurs creators around the world to use videogames as means for their personal expression. The authors states that most commercial videogames are guided by market analysis more than creativity, as she concludes that this trend results in locking the expressive potential of videogames. But for Anna Anthropy, an American game designer recognized for its unique creations, there is still some hope left: what the industry can't or don't want to produce, the amateur game des
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Keywords : amateur, indie
This article focuses on tools that allow amateurs to create or modify videogames. In order to contribute to study the nature of game design, we will analyze games as crafted "artifacts". We will first review five categories of tools that allow creating games, in order to highlight the different "parts" games are made of. We will then use this empirical review to introduce a simple model of the inner structure of games: the ISICO model.
Keywords : game design, tools, game creation toolkit, mods, gaming 2.0
Who said that you had to be famous in order to write down your own autobiography? In this book, Mat Dickie, an indie video game creator, tells us about his personal life alongside with the various games he created during his 10 years career. While we can smile at the fact that the oversized ego of this unknown author led him to write such a book, it's a quite interesting book for the videogame history specialists. It tells us the life of a British kid born in the 80's, fan of videogames, who sta
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Keywords : mat dickie, biography, indie, wrestling, religion
The autobiography of Nicolas Gaume, founder of the french game studio Kalisto, which created some of the finest videogames during the 90's: Pac-in-time, Nightmare Creatures, Ultim@te Race Pro, Dark Earth, etc. Praised for the quality of its creations, this studio unfortunately closed its door in the 2000's, mainly due to the financial crisis caused by the burst of the ".com economy" bubble. This rare book is a detailed legacy of the quick transformation of the AAA videogames industry f
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Keywords : biography, nicolas gaume, kalisto, french touch
This book focuses on the history of role-playing and adventure games made in the USA. The central theme of the book is the truly captivating story of Richard Garriott, the creator of famous rpg saga Ultima (1981-1999). The book details his path starting with his teenage years, when he discovered Dungeons & Dragons, a game that will greatly influence his first amateurs creations on the Apple II. After two years of work, he attempts to sell his first "real" game, Akalabehth (1980), b
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Keywords : history, ultima, richard garriot, origin systems, id software, john romero, doom, texas