The Video Game Library Newsletter - Vol. #009
Amiibo, Atari and Art Books, OH MY! An INSANE week of literary announcements and releases, plus a great interview with gaming historian, Kevin Bunch!
Welcome back to The Video Game Library Newsletter!
9 weeks in, and 50,000 words later! I’ve been blown away by the amazing response to the content. Thank you ALL for the kind words and support!
If you’ve been appreciating the crazy research that goes into these - and having a weekly one-stop resource that celebrates Video Game literature and the talented authors that make up this space - please consider supporting at the paid tier. Not only will you be helping keep The Video Game Library project growing, but you’ll also get additional content and perks along the way.
This week in News & Highlights we blitz through a global wave of book reveals - from Lost in Cult’s new EDITIONS line and Dark Horse’s trio of highlights, to Mel Croucher’s new Kickstarter project and some great localization efforts happening in Germany and Japan.
In Behind the Shelves, I share the wins (and Wix-induced woes) I encountered this week. You’ll hear about rarities like the 16-volume Genso Suikoden series, and how far we’ve come in our efforts to catalogue the full Shinkigensha run.
Our Recommended Read section spotlights Paul Murphy’s collectible-crammed Unofficial Amiibook. If you’re as much of a fan of Amiibo as me, you’re gonna want to check this out. Shameless wall shot below. 😜
From The Archive reminisces on a series of 80’s arcade pocket guides that set out turn weekend quarter-feeders into leaderboard legends. The Video Master’s Guide series!
And finally, in Community Spotlight, we sit down with historian Kevin Bunch to talk to him about his book Atari Archive Vol. 1 and all the work he does in the community.
In the words of everyone’s favourite mustachioed plumber, let’s-a-go!
📰 News & Highlights
TONS of new reveals and announcements this week from all corners of the globe. From promising new lineups, to a ton of great translation efforts.
Grab yourself a drink, sit back, and enjoy what this week had to offer in the world of Video Game literature.
Exciting news (once again) from Lost In Cult this week. They’re throwing their hat in the “physical edition” ring with their new EDITIONS lineup. Lots of people have covered the inclusions - but since this is a book blog - let’s focus on the 40-page Essay and Interview Booklets that come bundled in each. 3 have been announced: Immortality, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, and Thank Goodness You’re Here! (the latter 2 still need cover reveals - so are absent from the site).
Dark Horse Books continues its Spring announcements with news of the upcoming The Art of Borderlands 4 set to release on Sep. 30. Pre-orders are up for this 224-page, hardcover volume collecting art and commentary chronicling the game’s development.
And they then proceeded to drop this - Heroes of Might and Magic: 30th Anniversary Retrospective. A whimsical, full-color hardcover volume chronicling thirty years of the beloved fantasy strategy franchise. Expecting it to officially hit shelves in November.
And in terms of actual releases, this week sees the finale of their latest Cyberpunk comic run - Cyberpunk 2077: Psycho Squad #4. Lots of CD Projekt Red literary love coming out this year!
Industry pioneer, Mel Croucher, has announced his next book on Kickstarter. Gamers: Ghosts In The Machine is a captivating collection of true stories chronicling the lives and legacies of twenty pioneers who helped shape the video game industry. If that’s something that interests you - go show it some support!
Minecraft is getting a tabletop RPG, and the Minecraft: Roll The Adventure - The Temple of the Charged Creeper book has just been announced this week. Expect it to start hitting shelves in early July. Very excited to see what other books come out for this.
The fourth entry in the Pro Gamer’s Guide series from Brian Saviano has just been fully-funded in the lineup’s most successful Kickstarter ever! Pro Gamer’s Guide To Defeating Trolls is on its way to print now!
And if you’ve been following Rodrigo Copetti’s architectural hardware deep dives, then you’ll be pleased to know that the 2nd book in the series has officially been released this week - The Sprite Decade: An Architecture Analysis of Home Video Game Consoles from 1983 to 1990. This one covers the NES, Famicom, SNES, Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 and the NeoGeo.
For those of you who missed out on Yokoi Kids Annual Vol. 1, you’ll be excited to hear that, as of this week, you can now get a DIGITAL version of the Game Boy fanzine. It even includes a BONUS PAGE!
After a few delays - Hurt Me Plenty from Bitmap Books officially released this week on May 21st! A follow-up to I’m Too Young To Die, I can’t wait for this one to make its way onto our shelves!
I’ve been playing through Clair Obscur, so was excited to see that Pix’n Love has just announced that they’re be partnering with Kepler Interactive and Sandfall Interactive on a “Monolith Edition” of the game - set to include the Clair Obscur Expedition Journal - a 48-page artbook for the game.
For Spanish and Italian speakers, we’ve got our 70th (and currently final) entry in the impressive Videojuegos Legendarios series. ICO: Team ICO and Gaming As Art by Francisco Javier Brenlla Duarte released this week! For those who’ve been following this newsletter, this series has made an appearance in EVERY issue, so it’s crazy to see that the run is done (for now).
It’s been great to see copies of the Czech and English versions of The Art of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II from Xzone finally landing in fans’ hands. This is a beefy artbook and looks absolutely gorgeous!
While we saw “Il était une fois le jeu vidéo” release last year, the German version - retitled Gaming - Eine Pixel-Zeitreise: Ein Sachcomic über Games, Spieledesign und Popkultur - has just released! This video game history graphic novel comes ahead of the upcoming English translation set to release in July.
For those who remember all the Battle Cats efforts we highlighted back in Volume 4, the series continues with their latest installment just announced: Learn With The Battle Cats! The World of Dinosaurs. Expect this one to be hitting shelves in late July!
A release date of September 26 has been announced for the Alice No Yakata 35 Official Catalogue (ALICEの館35 公式図録). This book will be published in conjunction with the AliceSoft 35th Anniversary Exhibition, showcasing more than 2000 works from the Eroge developer across 700 pages.
The hit Japanese mobile game, Uma Musume Pretty Derby, just had a gorgeous art book based on 2 of the franchise’s anime movies released this week. Uma Musume Pretty Derby Animation Guide: ROAD TO THE TOP & The Door to a New Era is out now and is packed with amazing illustrations from the 2023 and 2024 movies.
And in Japanese localization news, looks like the Bloomsbury Academic collection of Influential Video Game Designers books is starting to hit shelves. Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design From Metal Gear to Death Stranding got the Volume 1 spot, and went on sale in Japan this week.
Did I miss something cool? Want to see this laid out differently?
Drop it in the comments or swing by our Discord to share it with the community.
Let’s keep this celebration of game-inspired books going strong!
📚 Behind the Shelves
Every week, I take you behind the scenes of The Video Game Library. From surprising discoveries to cataloging challenges, there’s always something new as we dig deeper into this ever-expanding archive of game-related literature.
This week’s site work was both frustrating and rewarding. For those who may recall from previous Newsletters, I opted to build this site on Wix. For the most part, it’s an intuitive platform which lends itself well to the “repetitiveness” of the work, but continuously pushes updates that break the websites that use it.
One such update happened this week, which changed the data that carries over when posts are “duplicated”. Suddenly, all of the Meta Descriptions, URL slugs, and Title Tags from the legacy post were being carried over as well, rather than intelligently generated from the content in the blog post itself.
This added a few (very annoying) steps to the cataloguing, but as of this morning, the issue seems to have resolved itself. I’m pretty sure I’ve gone in and manually updated all of the impacted records, but if you ever see a book with a clearly incorrect meta description show up in your Google searches, just give me a shout…please 😜
As for actual cataloguing, tons of amazing books were added this week. Worth highlighting the continued efforts towards completing the Shinkigensha series. Starting to hit the Tokimeki Memorial era, but also some cool books on Way of the Samurai and Pop’n Music, along with some Konami Official Guides.
One of the biggest projects I tackled this week was the 16-volume Genso Suikoden Genso Shinsho (幻想水滸伝 幻想真書) series. Each volume spotlights a handful of characters from the series, and includes lore, insights and interviews. It took a while to research the content of each, and recreate some of these covers with better quality.
The last addition I’ll note was an embarrassing miss on my part, since I have these in the personal collection. Brian Saviano’s “Pro Gamer Guide” series just saw their 4th entry successfully funded on Kickstarter, so I got all of those catalogued here.
This, as usual, is only a small sample of what we catalogued this week, so take a peek at the site to see everything! And while you’re at it, drop your thoughts in the comments below. Your feedback helps shape how we deliver these looks behind the curtain.
💡 Recommended Read of the Week
The Unofficial Amiibook
Paul Murphy
Whether you collect Amiibo or not, there's no denying the craze that surrounded these NFC figures when they first released, and has held firm over the years. Like many, I spent my fair share of time dipping in and out of retail shops on the regular to find the latest and greatest release to hang on my wall. So when I saw that Paul started up a Kickstarter for this project, I knew I wanted to support it.
Fast forward to now having book-in-hand, and I couldn't be happier. Admittedly, it's not quite complete, and I can't help but feel that some of the write-ups and references do a disservice to the handbook's timelessness. But boasting nearly 270 pages of full-color content, there's no denying my satisfaction.
Several intro and outro write-ups bookend the read; but the real enjoyment comes from the in-between. A full page dedicated to each Amiibo release, complete with descriptions, fun-facts and a price-guide (though the latter is in British Pounds, and is privy to the whims of the collector's market). It adds hearty substance to an otherwise well-formatted picture book.
And to top off the niceties, it not only covers Amiibo figures, but also the Power-Up Bands from Super Nintendo World in Japan and a Pokémon Rumble U NFC figures section as well.
As I said, the book will likely have a version 2.0 release at some point - unless Nintendo themselves have other plans up their overalls - but until then, highly recommend picking this up if you were one of the millions swept up in the Amiibo craze of the 21st century.
You can find details about The Unofficial Amiibook here
💾 From the Archives
Each week, I’ll dive deep into the shelves of The Video Game Library to spotlight a hidden gem or forgotten series — with the hope of surprising you with something new, unexpected, or long overlooked. This week, I wanted to share…
…a look back at The Video Master’s Guides.
In the early-1980s, Bantam Books spotted an opportunity in crowded arcades and released The Video Master’s Guide series - single-game paperbacks that promised to turn weekend quarter-feeders into leaderboard legends. Each book zeroed in on a blockbuster cabinet (Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Defender, and Centipede) and was penned by an expert whose patterns, maps, and wave-by-wave breakdowns were essential to mastering the game. The books’ neon-tinged covers shouted “New Secrets!” while inside you’d find screen diagrams, timing strategies and even kill-screen lore - info that simply didn’t exist outside word-of-mouth arcade circles.
What made this book quartet special wasn’t just depth, but authenticity. Steve Sanders, John Birkner, Nick Broomis, and Ron Dubren weren’t journalists; they were high-score contenders who’d logged marathon sessions and, in Birkner’s case, held a Pac-Man world record. That credibility let them publish cutting-edge discoveries - the fast-chip patterns for Pac-Man, the infamous “blob” strategy for Centipede - months before magazines or arcade flyers caught up. Players suddenly had portable coaching manuals, and sales followed: the Pac-Man volume alone moved well into six-figure territory, cementing the idea that video-game expertise could be commodified.
Four decades later, these pocket guides stand as charming time capsules of the arcade boom. They capture a moment when mastering a machine felt both mystical and attainable if someone just showed you the blueprint.
You can read through these blueprints yourselves over in The Video Game Library.
✨ Community Interview
Kevin Bunch has become one of the most trusted archaeologists of early video-game history. His Atari Archive videos - and now the hardback Atari Archive Vol. 1: 1977-1978 from Limited Run Games - reconstruct the VCS’s earliest years, when Atari jockeyed with Fairchild and Magnavox in a market many still considered a passing fad.
In the conversation that follows, we dig into how Kevin - energized by the likes of Chrontendo and Jeremy Parish (and a bit of spite towards overzealous Wikipedia modders) - committed his diligent research and interviews to print.
Enjoy!
To start off - who is Kevin Bunch? How did a communications specialist by day become one of the most prolific historians of early video game history by night?
I credit Chrontendo and Jeremy Parish for making me get off my duff on the video effort with their projects in the early 2010s, and being a big fan of the 2600 and recognizing its importance to early game history, that seemed like a sensible target (and Parish I remember even told me that having access to English-language sources and developers would be very handy, which has been true). Of course, at that point there was no list for when games for the 2600 came out, so it took me a couple years to pull that together to a point I felt comfortable moving ahead with actually making videos.
The book side of things is a bit funny - I got very annoyed with overzealous editors on Wikipedia deleting any edits referencing to my video projects, even when the edits were made by the literal man who made the game. The explanation they left is that videos didn't count as quality references, and that got me thinking "well fine, maybe I'll just put my work down into a book, then they won't have an excuse to reject it." By happenstance this was around the time Limited Run was getting underway with their book initiative and they approached me if I had any ideas, and well, since I already had started working on what became Volume 1... so in short, I wrote a game history book out of spite! More broadly, I also liked the idea of a book because it's less ephemeral than a video or a website - if folks in a century are referencing a book I wrote, that would make me feel very nice posthumously, and probably be likelier than my online publications still being live!
Your book doesn’t just cover the games - it reconstructs the culture, competition, and commercial landscape of 1970s gaming. What was your research process like?
A whole lot of digging into publications! Newspaper coverage is a great resource, as are more traditional magazine articles and games-focused media. I also find trade publications for specific industries such as retail, coin operators or consumer electronics to be immensely informative behind the scenes in the business, and I always try to seek out existing interviews with old developers and executives (and, if necessary and possible, I will reach out to them myself for an interview). My goal is really to be as fulsome as possible because I recognize these games are fairly slight by modern standards and may not be terribly interesting on their own. I wanted to give them context; how, why and when they were made, what the gaming landscape and genre history looked like at the time, how they were received, and how they stacked up compared to what other platforms and companies were making. This is particularly true for these 1970s titles, as they were just so early in the lifetime of home video games. I am kind of fortunate that my professional journalistic skillset is extremely useful, as figuring out how to best gather this information and put it all together is something I'd already been doing for almost a decade by the time I started Atari Archive and was very comfortable with.
You mention newspaper coverage and interviews. What’s one of the most surprising or gratifying discoveries you uncovered while researching Vol. 1?
For volume 1 in particular, the materials surround the VCS's creation itself were incredible. Getting to personally interview the surviving folks behind the hardware development (and the man responsible for software development at that early stage) allowed me to learn and synthesize stories I had not really seen told in any real depth before. Certainly not from all those different viewpoints! And getting to see just how Combat informed the hardware development and vice versa was extremely exciting to me.
The book focuses on 1977 to 1978 - the first two years of the Atari VCS. Why did you choose that era as your starting point, and what makes those years so vital to understanding gaming history?
The period the book focuses on really is the start of the home video game space as we know it (though I do give the previous years their due early in the book, and in the Channel F chapter). Dedicated consoles were very much seen as a fad, like the kind of consumer electronics that you'd see take off and then flame out in the 70s like CB radios and digital watches. They were extremely seasonal and they were largely very similar... and everyone knew they were on borrowed time and that if they wanted video games as a business to keep going, they needed changeable games. And I think for me what is most fascinating about this 1970s period is that looking at it broadly, the VCS wasn't really that far removed from what other game consoles had in their libraries. The VCS as we think of it today really soared in the 80s, but these early years they had fierce competition with Fairchild and Magnavox in particular in a market that was really very small! The VCS had the most sales and even then they didn't move 1 million units until the end of 1979, and it's not like Fairchild or Magnavox weren't able to sell consoles so much as they had their own internal issues that let Atari really become the big fish in the small pond.
So let’s talk about some of these ‘competitors’. You’ve done deep dives into the Channel F, RCA Studio II, the Bally Arcade, and other lesser-known systems of the '70s. What is it about these early platforms that fascinates you so much?
Part of it is that I've always liked an underdog, but beyond that, they interest me in the sense that everyone was trying to figure out what a programmable game system looked like in the mid-1970s (and even before that, in the case of the Channel F and Studio II). They all landed in different places and their success, or lack thereof, really depending on very different circumstances. And why they "failed" interests me because, like I said, it wasn't necessarily that the quality of their games was all that different from Atari at the time... they all had different things going on within their respective companies. Smart people worked hard designing those consoles, designing those games, trying to figure out how the heck to sell them, and those stories are just as worthwhile as the story of the system and its people who succeeded. And also, honestly, some of their games are pretty rad and I'm always happy to take an opportunity to celebrate them! The Bally Arcade in particular has such a strange and unique relationship with its userbase essentially producing their own gaming ecosystem around it that has largely gone overlooked, and there's really nothing quite like it.
What was your approach to revisiting the content from your videos for the book? Were there any major changes, updates, or new stories that didn’t make it into the original videos?
Absolutely, one of the reasons I wanted to revisit this stuff is because in the time since I made those initial videos, I'd gained access to more sources and had done more interviews than I had at the time: trade periodicals, internal documentation, court papers and other materials I'd come across at libraries and archives, etc. My pieces for Combat and Space War in particular are very different from their video counterparts, but all of them had some revisions to some extent. For Combat in particular, having access to Larry Wagner's memories and his own notes, as well as those from the VCS hardware engineers, really helped flesh out that game's development history beyond the pretty paltry details I had access to beforehand. As for Space War, I was able to rewrite what I had using research details from historian Keith Smith on the arcade counterparts that re-popularized Spacewar, and from the Smithsonian's Spacewar Reunion that I was fortunate enough to attend back in 2018! Of course, wouldn't you know it, I have since come across even more information on a few of those games, so I suppose if I ever do a second revision I'll have to make even more updates!
How did partnering with Limited Run Games shape the final form of the book?
Limited Run (and Jeremy Parish's help in particular) did a lot to inform the visual side of the book. Jeremy had the idea of theming each game's color scheme after the color of their respective box, as well as the idea of photographing all the physical objects themselves. I also worked with their then-editor Jared Petty to clean up the copy (though this was after a pass by an editor I hired separately), which I think helped ensure everything came across in an easy to read way. There was also some reordering of content, but there wasn't really anything they asked me to cut out or cut down.
Many fans know you from Retronauts or your YouTube channel. How do you balance your passion projects with your day job in science communication - and how does one influence the other?
The answer is "not very easily," these days, but I make do! I try to maintain a strict work/life balance and separation to the extent possible, so when I'm off the clock I try not to think about my day job and vice versa. That said, since having a kid I don't have the same degree of energy and time to work on these projects as I used to, and that's something I've just had to do better with my time management and recognizing my own limits to deal with. I can't say the two spaces have overlapped that much, though the rudimentary skills I've learned doing presentations, doing voiceover and editing audio and video have been pretty helpful with my day job. On the flip side, there have been a couple times where someone I've worked with on a project at work from outside of my organization recognizes me as the guy from Retronauts, which I found deeply funny!
From Superman to Combat to obscure bridge simulators, which Atari VCS game most surprises you in terms of design, complexity, or cultural relevance?
I suppose I'll note that Superman and Bridge are from 1979 and 1980 respectively, though I do think the former is surprisingly relevant in terms of game design and complexity. I described it recently as the first true "console" video game and I think that's very apt. For the 77-78 period however, I think it's Alan Miller's Basketball! Miller's other early games aren't anything particularly special (Surround, Hangman and Hunt & Score) but he nailed this one in such a way that it effectively reinvents what a Basketball game looks like. He's the one who came up with the idea of a forced perspective, and put together a computer opponent who shifts in difficulty based on how well you're playing. I'm not sure that you would necessarily get something like NBA Jam without Atari Basketball showing how it's done.
What do you think most people misunderstand about the Atari era - and what do you hope readers walk away with after finishing Vol. 1?
What I would primarily want people to understand is that the VCS debuted into a very different video game landscape than the one that it became popularized in later on. The console predates Space Invaders reinventing what arcade video games could be like, and the era volume 1 covers predates its similarly earth-shattering home port, which led to the VCS and Atari becoming cultural icons. This is an era where gaming was so much smaller a pastime and absolutely nobody expected it to become the massive industry it wound up as. My goal was to try and describe what that landscape looked like and how it factored into the games that were being made for the VCS and its competitors, how they responded to market forces and government regulations, and that sort of thing.
With Volume 2 in the works, what's next for the Atari Archive? Will you continue through each year, or expand into other corners of forgotten game history?
I already have an outline for a Volume 3 to work on after Volume 2 is done, but I'm still rolling along on the video project for as long as I still have fun doing it! There's still hundreds of VCS games, plus the Intellivision side series, and I have several different one-off "annex" videos I want to do too. With a day job and a family I only have so much time to work on these things, so the speed of my output is something I feel a bit bad about... but I'm very happy with the results. And even whenever I do hang up the video side of things, I probably won't stop flexing my writerly muscles.
For those who want to dig deeper into early gaming history or follow your work, where’s the best place for people to find you online and stay up to date with your projects?
I am fairly active on Bluesky these days under @atariarchive.org, which is also the web address of my website, atariarchive.org, which I update every so often. I also regularly haunt the Gaming Alexandria discord server, which has been quite helpful for finding resources for my research I may have otherwise missed. My videos are also supported by Patreon, which helps push me to try and knock them out on a fairly regular basis!
Thanks for your time, Kevin!
🙏 And THANK YOU for Reading
That’s a wrap for this week’s deep dive into all things video game literature. I hope you discovered something new, surprising, or just plain fun.
As always, your feedback helps shape this project—so don’t be shy! Drop a comment below, join the conversation on Discord, or just reply to this newsletter and share your thoughts.
And if you’re enjoying these weekly roundups, please consider supporting The Video Game Library with a paid subscription or forwarding this to a fellow fan. Every little bit helps us keep preserving and celebrating these incredible works—and the passionate people behind them.
Until next week — happy reading,
Dean (Founder, The Video Game Library)
Awesome wrap-up as always. Thank you for such a thorough newsletter!