Our next book, Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner, comes out this holiday season. In honor of the 10th Anniversary of Shadow's North American release, please enjoy an early look at the book's introductory first chapter.
A massive, open world with almost nothing in it. A big-budget game that’s more interested in exploring the experience of its questions than distracting you with answers. An unwavering trust that players will figure out where to go, what to do, and even think about why they’re doing it. Shadow of the Colossus is a landmark in so many ways, and still unique more than a decade after its release.
It’s also a study in focus, as it was in its time amongst its peers. Resident Evil 4 released earlier that same year in 2005, revitalizing the entire survival-horror genre with a tight over-the-shoulder perspective that made combat a tense, precise nightmare. Just a couple of months later came God of War, a bold and bawdy exploration of Greek mythology with a deeply satisfying bloodlust.
All three games have since seen HD re-releases and are considered seminal events in gaming history. Yet both Resident Evil 4 and God of War hew closely to convention, very much gamers’ games filled with inventories, attack combos, and carefully scripted moments always upping the ante. Both games are also very filmic, with long expository cutscenes wrapped around every big event, and a monologue for every hero and villain that dives deeply into their lore.
Clearly, 2005 was an incredible year for games. But what interests me is just how far Shadow swung away from those other hits. Its reductions were across the board, and uncompromising: Only sixteen “enemies.” Only two weapons, both of which you start with and will never level up. You’ll never learn new moves, only strengthen your grip and your health over time. You won’t unlock new areas, only new challenges in places that have been accessible all along. You won’t meet any new main characters after the opening cinematic. There’s (almost) nothing to collect.
Yet despite all that isn’t there, Shadow is absolutely riveting. At a time when games were doubling down on the gamer by betting big on proven formulas, and leaning on the legacy of film to tell their stories, Shadow was content to spin its mystery up front and shove you into the blinding sun to fend for yourself and figure out the rest. The entirety of the experience lives deep within me, like some primordial dream. Soaring high above the sprawling desert, clinging to my foe as the wind laps at my unsteady feet. Finding the relief of fire at the bottom of a treacherous crevasse, itself in the shadow of an ancient, endless bridge.
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I first read about Shadow in the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a long-running gaming magazine I would later write for. A game in which entire levels were puzzles set atop the backs of massive creatures, the promise of an epic puzzle-platformer from the team behind the thoughtful, sweetly haunting Ico. Building on their craft and artistry, Team Ico’s Shadow promised action, and a gauntlet of giants to conquer. Its titular creatures were striking, even in those early screenshots. Towering, dimly sentient relics with piercing yellow eyes and mossy manes. I was smitten.
In broad strokes, Shadow is about a boy trying to save a girl. The situation is dire, and his last hope lies in a distant, long-abandoned corner of the world. He brings her to this place, throwing himself at the mercy of its overseer. This spirit tasks him with defeating a number of guardians that dwell within the land, and in exchange there may be a glimmer of hope for her yet.
But like so many wonderful moments in life and art, Shadow of the Colossus is defined by the space between its lines; the gulf between its quieter, contemplative moments and its tremendous spectacle. Strung end to end, its titanic battles would make for an amazing — if exhausting — barrage of action. But driving your horse across an imposing sun-baked expanse, twisting up through shade-mottled woods, only to find your ageless, unwitting foe at rest in the stillness of a lake gives the encounter exactly the breathing room it needs. Shadow lets its best moments come to you at your own pace, subtly leading and showing rather than telling.
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There were rumors that Shadow was originally planned to have whole cities and dungeons dotting its spartan landscapes, lost in time to schedules, or budgets, or something equally mundane. And one of the best, most wonderful things about it is that it feels that way. The remnants of a world that once was, or never was, frozen in time. A lost civilization perpetually under construction.
There are so many empty, functionally useless corners of Shadow’s expansive world, but it hurts to even call them that. They always felt alive and mysterious, as if exploring the right nook or climbing an especially precarious peak would unlock…something. A bridge to that lost civilization, a seventeenth colossus, some armor for my horse maybe. Despite its creator Fumito Ueda telling me years ago in an e-mail interview that all of Shadow’s secrets had been found, it never felt that way, and still doesn’t.
Thankfully, the legacy and lessons of Shadow live on in gaming today, through a generation of fans, artists, and especially game developers whose work carries its influence forward. Game development has become democratized in recent years through cheaper and more user-friendly software while the audience has expanded tremendously through more ubiquitous platforms to play on. As a result, many players are looking for more varied games across the full spectrum of human experience, and some of the themes that Shadow explored — such as hope, regret, and sacrifice — have become both easier and more commercially viable to express. At the same time, series such as the Dark Souls games have built on Team Ico’s legacy, dropping players into vast, unforgiving worlds that seem to have existed long before they came along, with narratives that unfold through gameplay as much as through storytelling — no doubt influencing a future generation of developers to live by the tenets of trusting and respecting their players while giving them something surreal and spectacular.
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Oh right, and I’m Nick Suttner, bearded indie game advocate. After writing about games for EGM and 1UP.com (where I hosted a retrospective podcast series on Shadow), I went to work at Sony to help shape the culture of independent games on PlayStation. Shadow is the entire reason I’m working in games, and specifically the reason I went to work at Sony (which published the game). I've spent almost nine years in the gaming industry championing the more artful, emotional, intellectually stimulating side of gaming, and truly, Shadow has been my constant muse.
My endeavor here as your guide, as a Shadow devotee, and as someone whose career and personal aesthetic has been so deeply influenced by the game, is to dig into the experience and unearth just what makes it so special. Why is Shadow still so singular over a decade later? How has it managed to maintain an air of mystery beyond that of any other game? I'm hoping that you've played Shadow already, but if you haven't made time for it I'm happy to give you an excuse. Consider this your companion guide — I’ll be playing through it again with a critical eye, talking about it with others who love it the way that I do, and sharing my findings along the way. To maybe even find that elusive quality that encapsulates the game's enduring appeal. Or maybe not, and to instead just get lost in the roar of the earth once again.
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Pre-order Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner here.
When I was a kid, I didn’t often have the luxury—much less the sense of spontaneity—to purchase video games without first doing my research. My monthly subscription to Nintendo Power was a great source of information, but the featured walkthroughs and “Pak Watch” previews were a poor substitute for actually playing Nintendo games. Luckily for me, my family didn’t live far from a video rental store. West Coast Video, a chain founded in my own city of Philadelphia, began stocking video games along with VHS tapes. I saw this video games section grow rapidly from a dedicated shelf to an entire rack, and finally to a complete section of the store. Eventually, West Coast Video and the recently moved-in Blockbuster became not only cheaper alternatives to buying games, but also libraries—places to find video games that had long stopped selling in stores. Unlike retail stores, where games were often locked inside towering plastic cases, video rental stores gave me full access to the packaging. Often enough, video games boxes were my first impression of games, and their imagery influenced the way I approached their contents.
In the late 1980s through the 1990s, the video game boxes that I mostly loved, sometimes hated, and often tried to imitate with pencil and paper, differed vastly from their counterparts in Japan. In some extreme cases, box art might be mutually unintelligible to players on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. With the help of the internet, it has become an easy task to make side by side comparisons of North American, Japanese, and occasionally European box art. Discussions about transoceanic box art differ- ences usually highlight the subjectively poor artistic merit of North American artwork compared against its Japanese predecessors, though defenders of the Western aesthetic are not in short supply. Box art comparisons, then, tend to become simple arguments over which region did it best, though recent matchups have also demonstrate subtle changes in the box art of American and Japanese versions, like how Nintendo’s beloved pink puffball Kirby tends to look angry and battle-ready on North American boxes, but seems to be having a jolly time on those same adventures in Japan. These slight variations, however, are nowhere near as noticeable as the radical splits in box art during the early days of console gaming. I began wondering just why box art localization has shifted away from highly idio- syncratic repackaging—why the inspired, sloppy, thrilling, ridiculous, or just plain baffling box art styles of yesteryear have mostly disappeared.
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No one in my family seems to remember just when we bought an NES. I maintain that it was a present for my fifth birthday in 1987, though true to its original Japanese name, it soon became a “Family Computer.” My earliest memories of playing Nintendo were swapping controllers with my sister to play Super Mario Bros., cheering when my dad finally knocked out the celebrity final boss of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, and attempting to make urban legend into reality by trying in vain to shoot down that mocking dog in Duck Hunt. None of these, however, can hold a candle to the events of April 3, 1988. That Easter Sunday, I awoke to a special kind of egg hunt that could only have been dreamed up by my mom. Golden (plastic) eggs had been scattered throughout the house, and I had to track each one down to unlock a hidden treasure. Inside the shiny eggs were all sorts of strange artifacts: an hors d’oeuvre skewer in the shape of a sword, a toy apatosaurus, a small metal key, a monster finger puppet. After I had assembled all of these items, I was given the ultimate prize, The Legend of Zelda.
I instinctively knew it would be special. The heraldic box art was already whispering to my imagination. The upper left of the regal escutcheon on the box was a win- dow to something shinier than any of the eggs I had found that Easter morning—the aureate cartridge itself. For me and countless other players, The Legend of Zelda was a golden ticket into the world of epic gaming. Japanese players, however, did not receive anything close to this spe- cial treatment. The box art of the original Famicom disk version, The Hyrule Fantasy: Zeruda no Densetsu, shows an anime-style Link crouched in front of the Hyrulian land- scape. The game itself was an elongated yellow floppy disk, a pale comparison to the shiny cartridge released in North America.
The box art conceived for other fantasy questing games in North America took cues from The Legend of Zelda’s packaging. Its own golden-carted sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, shows a large jewel-hilted sword, and Square’s Final Fantasy took the typical role-playing imag- ery further, showing a crystal ball above a crossed sword and battle-axe. The Japanese Famicom boxes have vastly different imagery. Rinku no Bōken shows the elven hero slightly matured and adventuresome, and Fainaru Fanatajī depicts a fey swordsman in ceremonial armor in the now timeless style of series artist Yoshitaka Amano. Neither of these cartoonier approaches seems to have found favor with early marketers of Japanese games localized for North Americans. Instead of the heavy anime stylings of Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Quest series, for instance, the Dragon Warrior games feature scenes that could have been lifted from the covers of generic Western fantasy novels. These box art localizations exchanged cute for cool, childlike for adult, and play for adventure.
The larger adventure genre similarly translated approachable and ethereal Japanese box art into more intimidating and straightforward North American terms, sometimes with hilariously bad results. Perhaps the most infamous example of North American box art localizations is Mega Man. The character immortalized by this cover is far removed from the version on the Japanese release of Rokkuman (“Rockman”). Instead of a friendly robo-boy with an arm cannon who battled other bipedal robots, North Americans saw an adult in safety pads awkwardly wielding a pistol on a futuristic pinball landscape. Beyond the sheer incompatibility of this art with the game’s con- tent, the box art version of Mega Man is off-model, with strange bodily contortions and a misshapen helmet. His hangdog, almost haunted expression tells us what we can easily ascertain—there is nothing mega about this man.
Ultimately, North American NES players didn’t adapt the old adage about not judging a book by its cover— despite the fact that the gameplay of Mega Man had little to do with its packaging, the game sold poorly. But the North American manual for Mega Man tells a different story, and one closer to its Japanese origins. After skipping past the steroid-fueled welcome from Capcom’s partially eponymized mascot Captain Commando, the reader gets a glimpse at how Mega Man was envisioned for Japan— a plucky hero who is more playmate than action figure. Here in this 1987 package begins a long-standing tension between the Japanese Rockman and Western depictions of Mega Man.
(Read the rest of this essay in Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology.)
Today in our interview series Matt Bell (Baldur's Gate II) interviews Gabe Durham about Bible Adventures.
Matt Bell: It seems like as the editor and founder of Boss Fight Books, you might have a harder time than most writers choosing a game to revisit and write about. After all, you've seen a lot of pitches, and you've seen what works and what doesn't in other books in the series, and I'm sure you have a pretty good idea which kinds of games make the best choices. So why Bible Adventures?
Gabe Durham: I think that since I'm the guy steering this ship, one potential pitfall of writing a Boss Fight book would be feeling like I need to somehow write the ULTIMATE Boss Fight book--one that does it all. Picking this oddball subject immediately sidelines that sort of pressure.
That said, it IS a subject that lends itself to multiple approaches: a history of Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree, an analysis of each of the games, a reflection of my own experience with Bible Adventures and other Christian products, and a larger look at the legacy of these games.
Going into the project, my most useful guide for how to engage with a single work was Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love, about the Celine Dion album of the same name. Like Wilson, I liked the idea of looking hard at a cultural punching bag and investigating what the work can tell us about the world and ourselves. I became enamored with the question, "Why does Christian stuff like this exist at all? And what does that stuff have to do with religious faith?" So what looks at first like a winking history of a kitschy cult classic turns into an earnest look at the intersection of faith and commerce.
One of the odd things about Bible Adventures is that it's an unlicensed NES game. What does that mean, and what effect did that have on the game's development?
Nintendo of America had tremendous power in the NES era. If you were a third-party developer like Konami, you were Nintendo's bitch. Not only did they demand changes and censor content (no swears, blood, nudity, politics, religion, etc.), they also physically manufactured all the games and then sold them back to the developer at a high price per cartridge. This meant Nintendo decided when your game would be released, how many copies would be made, and how much they would promote it in Nintendo Power.
Wisdom Tree worked outside of this system. They were true indie developers (way before that was a term) who developed, manufactured, and sold their own games. The downside: They had to figure out where to sell the games, how to convince people that the games were legit, and how to get the game cartridges past the Nintendo's 10NES lockout system.
Bible Adventures stars Noah, David, and Moses's Mother. Last night, I watched the Darren Aronofsky film version of Noah's story, and was curious about how he'd turned it into a pretty decent action movie, among other things. To give us a taste of the gameplay in Bible Adventures, what's Noah's part of the game like?
It's a platformer where you pick up animals and bring them to the ark. Sometimes you've got to lure the animals with hay or knock them out cold to get them on board. The one really inspired game mechanic (referenced in the book's cover) is that you can stack multiple animals--so as Old Man Noah you can hoist horses and cows over your head and still run at a full clip back to the ark.
Unlike the other two games, which can be completed pretty quickly, "Noah" takes forever. It's fun for a little while and then most of us give up around stage 3. I've heard Afronsky's Noah is overly long too. I guess epic apocalyptic stories like the Noah myth lend themselves to overstaying their welcome.
For the purposes of the book, are you playing the game on an emulator or do you have an actual copy of the game? I once played it over a few beers at Salvatore Pane's house in Indianapolis, so I've had a very small taste of the real thing.
I played the real thing as a kid but this year it's been on a Sega Genesis emulator. (it's got slightly better graphics than the NES version.)
My own NES is packed away at my dad's place or I would have bought a copy of Bible Adventures on eBay by now. The game sold well in its day so it's not hard to find a cheap copy of Bible Adventures. Bible Buffet and Sunday Funday are another story.
The description of the book for the Kickstarter campaign mentions "our retro obsession with 'bad games.'" What do you mean by that? What are some of your favorite infamously bad games?
There's now a pantheon of famous bad games. Shaq Fu, Superman 64. The most famous bad game of all time is E.T. for Atari. And we all have memories of when we bought cheap games with high hopes and were sad to see them fail us. I remember buying a game called Hybrid Heaven for N64--I couldn't believe how awful it was and that I was stuck with my poor choice.
In the book, I get into the fact that retro games collecting has created a weirdly inverted retro games market: Classics like the Mario games can be bought for cheap, but Bonk's Adventure for the NES goes for a lot of money now because nobody wanted it when it came out. Same goes for several Wisdom Tree games. This phenomenon partially explains the recent rerelease of Wisdom Tree's lone SNES game, Super 3D Noah's Ark--it offers collectors a new shot at checking an item off their list.
As the editor of Boss Fight Books, what's the game you're most surprised you haven't received a pitch for yet? Is there something that seems obviously to deserve this kind of treatment but hasn't been suggested yet?
Star Fox. Starcraft. Mario Paint. Wild Arms. Bust-a-Move. That drug dealer game for TI-83. I also haven't seen a pitch for League of Legends, the most popular game in the world.
To me, it's all about the author's take, though. Any game could make a great book or an awful one. Finding out what happens when we devote all this attention to a single cultural artifact is the big experiment and the big reward, so I'm trying to not get too hung up on HAVING to do books on certain games but instead finding the right game/author combos that will open the series up in exciting directions.
Today in our interview series, Chrono Trigger author Michael P. Williams asks Matt Bell some questions about D&D and his forthcoming book, Baldur's Gate II.
Michael P. Williams: I've got to tell you up front: I'm a Dungeons & Dragons nerd who has never roleplayed in real life, but I read almost every Dragonlance novel published through the mid-1990s, and I adored the “Monstrous Compendia” published by TSR. What has your history with D&D and roleplaying games in general been like?
Matt Bell: My D&D history begins with the computer games, not the pen and paper game, although the timing of getting into both modes was pretty close. As far as I can remember, the first D&D experience I had was SSI's extraordinarily difficult Heroes of the Lance, adapted from Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragons of Autumn Twilight, which I didn't read until years later. Shortly after, I found my dad's copies of the Basic and Expert box sets hidden high in a closet in our spare room, which introduced my brother and I to the original game. In the following years, we played nearly every D&D game that came out for the PC, and we bought and read and planned from many of the second edition AD&D rule books and campaign settings. Despite how much time and money we invested in the game materials, I don't think we actually played very often, or at least not until we were much older. (My brothers still play, and when I was writing The Last Garrison I rejoined them, but by then we were playing fourth edition.) At the time, we just couldn't find enough other people to play with, and it's very hard to play a two-person game. I think that was one of the alluring aspects to most video game versions of D&D: They simulate what is essentially a social experience, translating it for a single player.
As a novelist and an RPGer, you've had the power to create characters in a variety of settings. What similarities and differences have you experienced with creating characters for novels, for customizable computer RPGs, and for tabletop RPGs?
One of the things I talk about in the book is about how Gorion's Ward, the protagonist of the Baldur's Gate saga, is presented to the player in a very similar way to how fairy tale characters are constructed. Rather than the kind of fleshed-out round characters we're used to in most novels, where characters come with explicit full psychological motivations and backstories and so on, Gorion's Ward is given very few traits when the story opens, just a sketch of a past and a handful of starting statistics and skills that do not by themselves create character. Instead, the player is tasked with interpreting these mechanical aspects of the game into a person they can invest in emotionally, which occurs through character choices in response to the puzzles and story decisions of the game, and through character customization when you gain new levels or equipment. In a novel, you're usually given quite a bit more about the character, and of course you don't usually get to chart the course of the action. But in my own work, it's still important to leave some blanks in the character's makeup that the reader will have to fill themselves. That's part of what allows a reader to become invested in the character and his or her story, this sense that they're the ones who actually created the character, by imaginatively investing so much of themselves.
Your book is centered around Baldur's Gate II, a game that is a sequel to Baldur's Gate, and with its expansion pack Throne of Bhaal considered, is also a sequel to itself. What makes this a standout game compared to other video games in the larger Baldur's Gate series?
I think Baldur's Gate II is the heart of the series. The first Baldur's Gate was a revolutionary advance in D&D gaming, but its story is much thinner than BG2's. Because it deals with lower level characters, the gameplay in BG1 isn't nearly as difficult or as interesting, and it also has a more generic fantasy art style than BG2. As for Throne of Bhaal, it's a great expansion—really almost a true sequel—but it's so reliant on an understanding of Baldur's Gate II that it would have been hard to write about on its own. Despite being the middle of what is essentially a trilogy of games, Baldur's Gate II is probably the best vantage point from which to discuss the whole.
Baldur's Gate II is set within the context of the D&D campaign setting, Forgotten Realms, while your own D&D novel, The Last Garrison, is not set within any particular campaign. How important is the Forgotten Realms brand name to Baldur's Gate II? How might the game look if it were set in another D&D campaign, like highly polytheistic Dragonlance universe, or the very gothic Ravenloft setting?
It's an interesting question, because Baldur's Gate II is set in a part of the Forgotten Realms I hadn't read much about at the time, in the setting's novels or rule books. I think that was probably by design, as Bioware has made a similar smart decision with other licensed worlds, like not setting their Star Wars RPGs in the same time period as the movies. BG2 definitely has the Forgotten Realms in its DNA, and your quest takes you to some of the most famous places in that world, like a drow city in the Underdark, which must have pleased fans. At the same time, I think the designers had a lot of room to make their corner of the Forgotten Realms their own, for the purposes of the game. The other games built on the Infinity Engine that powers Baldur's Gate are probably more tied to their respective settings: The Icewind Dale games are set in the titular location, made famous by R.A. Salvatore's bestselling Drizzt Do'Urden series of novels, and Planescape: Torment—maybe my favorite of these games, despite writing about BG2—is absolutely integrated into its campaign setting, and probably couldn't exist without it.
So far, Boss Fight Books has tackled three very different RPGs: Earthbound, a Japanese RPG set in a modern world; Chrono Trigger, another JRPG set in a fantasy world; and finally Jagged Alliance 2, a Western RPG set in modern times. Baldur's Gate II, a fantasy WRPG, completes this matrix. What similarities and differences do you see among Baldur's Gate II and these other games? Also, how will BG2 the book differ from these previous Boss Fight installments?
To be honest, I haven't played more than an hour or so of both Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, so I can't speak to them too much. My instinct is to say that Baldur's Gate II is less whimsical than those games, but BG2 has its moments of whimsy and humor too, and I know both Earthbound and Chrono Trigger are very serious in their own ways. I do think Jagged Alliance 2 and Baldur's Gate II share a lot in the ways that players interact and come to care for their characters, as that was the most memorable part of Jagged Alliance 2 for me. As for how my book will differ from the earlier books: I'm sure there's some crossover, but one unique thing I'm trying to do is to explicitly explore how different game systems work from a novelist's perspective. For instance, Baldur's Gate II is such a story-driven game, but how do narratives work to create tension and conflict when the character isn't bound to follow any particular storyline at any time? Or how does character development work, compared to how it works in a novel? There will also be critical discussions of the game's depictions of violence and morality and romance and gender, subjects I don't think have been covered in the same way in earlier books. It's an incredibly rich game, and its ambition means there's a lot of material to explore.
I'd like to say I'm chaotic neutral, but I'm probably just a boring ol' neutral good. What is your favorite of the nine D&D alignments, and where do you think you'd fit into this scheme?
In pen-and-paper D&D, I pretty solidly played chaotic good characters, which seems about where I'd categorize myself in real life, although I probably lean more lawful these days too. In novels, I like a character who's willing to bend the rules for the greater good, and in my own writing I perhaps especially like characters whose belief in their own goodness compromises them morally, by allowing them to take actions that without that self-justification would be clearly wrong. I think most otherwise good people compromise themselves morally in many small ways, and I'm always interested in the stories we tell ourselves to get away with those compromises. That seems like the province of the chaotic good, and it's probably one of the more interesting spaces in D&D's alignment system.
We've tapped a few of our authors to interview our new Season 2 authors. Today, Jon Irwin (Super Mario Bros. 2) interviews Ashly and Anthony Burch about their forthcoming Metal Gear Solid book.
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Jon Irwin: What would you have said on that day in 2008 if someone told you, in 2014, you'd be co-writing a book on Metal Gear Solid? Or in 1998, when you played the game for the first time?
Anthony: “How did you get inside my house, time travelling Jon Irwin”
“Also are the Star Wars prequels good”
Ashly: "OH MY GOD DOES THIS MEAN I GET TO MEET DAVID HAYTER" (spoilers, hypothetical Ashly: the answer is no)
Your videos often veer into the surreal. Hideo Kojima, director of the MGS series, is known for his outrageous storytelling. How have these games influenced your own sensibilities and creative output? Or do you find your existing personalities pushed you toward certain types of games?
Anthony: I think we naturally share some comedic sensibilities with MGS, and always have. Kojima often breaks his own narrative rules and the fourth wall for no reason at all other than to be interesting, or funny, or surprising. Some of the best moments in the MGS series have a “let’s do this random thing because fuck it” attitude that resonated with us as children and sticks with us as adults. Our writing is definitely full of lots of shrugging “ah, what the fuck”-type gags, because it’s honestly just a lot more fun and freeing than taking yourself seriously a hundred percent of the time.
Ashly: Adding onto what Anthony already said, I think we also derived our love of over-the-top, excessively-cinematic fight scenes and confrontations from the Metal Gear series as a whole. The end of MGS4 literally made us jump to our feet and scream, prompting us to do a SIGNIFICANTLY LESS COOL version for the season 1 finale of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'.
Anthony, you work for Gearbox Software as a writer on the Borderlands series. You also wrote for Destructoid. Compare writing for a video game to writing for an online audience, to writing a book. How different, or similar, are they?
Anthony: Writing for a video game is highly collaborative and structured. You have to work with many different teams to tell a story, and that story must almost always be subservient to the needs of the player and the game design. First, you make sure the player understands what they need to do; then, you have to convince the player WHY they need to do it. Only after you’ve done those two things can you even begin to start getting cute and clever with jokes and characterization.
Writing for internet videos is pretty much the exact opposite. Our scripts don’t have to get approved by anyone other than our small three-person production team. There are no rules for what we can or can’t write, so long as the gags are funny. There’s no consistency, no overall goal, no mission statement other than “be brief and make people laugh.”
Writing the book with Ash has been an interesting mishmash of the two experiences. On the one hand, the book is kind of a freeflowing conversation between Ash and I, and we tend to meander and digress and make jokes about Space Jam. On the other hand, we want the book to feel like A Relatively Intelligent And Readable Thing That Is Worthy Of Your Time Because It Is A Physical Book With Pages And Stuff, so it ultimately needs to feel more like a cohesive whole rather than a bunch of random, internet video-esque nonsense.
Ashly, you began a blog called How Games Saved My Life, collecting testimonials about the positive impact games have had on others during tumultuous or difficult times. We could all use a bit of saving these days. What's the one game you would point to as being most likely to help someone in the throes of anxiety/hurt/depression/toothache/etc.? Any games you try to avoid if feeling overwhelmed by _______?
Ashly: I think the answer to your first question is going to be very different for different people. For some, hopping in a game of TF2 with friends is an enormously cathartic experience. For others, it's immersing themselves in Minecraft. For me, it was playing Harvest Moon 64 and Spelunky. I think the wonderful thing about games and one of the really beautiful and enlightening things for me about curating How Games Saved My Life is that every game speaks so differently to each person that plays it. For some folks, Harvest Moon 64 is a boring farming simulator. But for me, for a little while, it was a lifeline. When I'm feeling particularly vulnerable, I personally avoid games that necessitate high stakes cooperation, like Left 4 Dead or League of Legends, etc. In the right mood, those games are amazing, but if you already feel fragile, they can be pretty hard to get through.
Your book is pitched as a "celebration/takedown" of a series you feel has lost its way. When did you start to suspect this game, such a large part of your youth, was losing its hold on you? Was there a specific in-game moment when you looked at each other and knew things had changed?
Anthony: Well, there are two big things that I fell out of love with when it comes to Metal Gear Solid: the narrative style, and the game’s depiction of women. I grew tired with the former after playing relatively cutscene-free narrative experiences like BioShock and Shadow of the Colossus.
The feminism angle only dawned on me a few years ago, as Ash and I worked on more directly feminist HAWP episodes and started casting a more critical eye on the media we loved. Slowly, Meryl seemed less like a badass chick who got stuff done, and more like a halfhearted “Strong Female Character” who still gets damseled (and, uh, raped offscreen) halfway through the game.
Ashly: I don't think I realized just how strikingly problematic MGS is in many ways until we revisited it for this book. I had certain memories of odd, sexist moments or clunky dialogue. And any MGS fan is acutely aware of Kojima's affinity for cut scenes, which, like Anthony, I've lost my taste for. But it wasn't really until we started unpacking a lot of the stuff in the game to write our book that I was struck by, not only how sophisticated it is in some ways, but also how wholly immature it is at the same time.
Writing a book is hard for one person, let alone two. How are you choosing to write as a twosome? Will you each have your own chapters, or is it more collaborative and mixed up?
Anthony: Bit of both. I’ve got an entire chapter on gameplay all to myself, but the vast majority of the book is Ash and I batting ideas back and forth, building off the others’ arguments and generally trying (and not always succeeding) to come to meaningful conclusions.
Ashly: What Anthony said! Apart from gameplay, which is Anthony's jam, and feminism, which is my solo chapter, we're sort of sustaining a conversation throughout the rest of the book.
Not only do you work together as siblings, but your dad also joins the HAWP fun in recurring roles. What was in the water back in your hometown to make you all the way you are? And will Papa Burch show up in your Boss Fight entry?
Ashly: It's funny what a combination of intense boredom and heat will do to a kid. I wrote a lot of Sailor Moon fanfiction. Like, a lot of Sailor Moon fanfiction, y'all. I'm not sure how I made it this far.
Anthony: Arizona is basically a sun-scorched wasteland from which no good things can grow. I think we evolved our stupid senses of humor as some sort of defense mechanism, in the hopes that sufficiently crass fart jokes would help us find a way out of Phoenix. Somehow it worked!
And nah, Papa Burch probably won’t show up. He’s basically illiterate.
Now that we're Kickstarting a new season of books, I checked in with Ken Baumann to talk to him about his work as a cover designer. - Gabe Durham
Boss Fight Books: What's the difference between a good book cover and a bad one?
Ken Baumann: A bad book cover desperately communicates; a good book cover gets your attention, but leaves something unsaid. Or maybe this: to be good, a book cover must be at least a bit mysterious.
When you agreed to do these covers, I don't think I had many demands. I knew the spines needed to be numbered (because I loved that about 33 1/3), I think I requested we somehow visually indicate the console or computer, and I'm positive I didn't want to get sued. But the whole minimalist aesthetic and use of real photography was all you. Where did this approach come from?
I’ll cop to it: I just wanted to create a series like Peter Mendelsund’s great Foucault covers. Those covers—and Mendelsund’s covers as a whole—are so ordered and simple, so limited, and yet they're also alluring, enigmatic, and, to the reader in the know, clever.
Sometimes I'll suggest a cover concept to you, and you'll say something like, "Well that doesn't quite fit." What rules do you keep to? Or, maybe better: What constraints do you work under?
I try to make sure that each Boss Fight cover has just one ploy, or just one concept. In other words, I want each cover to have the bare minimum amount of visual information to stimulate at least these responses:
1. The cover should entice the reader who isn’t familiar with the game, and
2. The cover should let the reader who is also intimate with the game know that, yeah, we love and understand your game too.
I’ll take the Super Mario Bros. 2 cover, for example. While that cover has three visual elements—the star, the beet, the cherries—the triptych is structured to allude to a slot machine, which should be automatically intuited by most readers. And to those who understand the game, they’ll recognize that all three objects are powerful, helpful, and make your experiences as Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool, and Toad a lot more fun.
In other words, I want each cover to elegantly stimulate joy and curiosity in the reader, and joy and intimacy in the gamer.
For Spelunky, I pushed pretty hard for an adorable pug because that is my permanent damsel whenever I play. [For readers who have never played it, you get to pick whether you're saving a hot babe, a hunky dude, or an adorable pug.] But you made a passionate argument for the eggplant. What about the eggplant sums up the magic of Spelunky?
Well, here’s the thing with the Spelunky cover: I read Douglas Wilson’s article at Polygon and sort of had a spiritual experience. The arbitrary presence of the eggplant within Spelunky, and the absurd quest to beat the game holding just that eggplant, reminded me of the beautiful human impulse to pursue a goal that is so impractical, so worthless, but to pursue—and finally achieve—that goal so damn well—with such crazy stupid grace—that the pursuit and subsequent achievement of that goal transcends any considerations of the goal’s intrinsic worth to humanity. In other words, Bananasaurus Rex’s solo eggplant run is so skillful that it is immediately more interesting, more harmless, and therefore more heartening than 99% of our species’ other bungled, boring, and/or harmful endeavors. So yeah: I wasn’t budging on the eggplant.
What are your favorite Boss Fight covers so far?
I’ve got soft spots for them all, but I’m very happy with the Galaga, World of Warcraft, and Metal Gear Solid covers.
I enjoy the Galaga cover because I think that it does exactly what I set out in that earlier question: You see a wasp, which is familiar enough, but that perfect formation of wasps feels unnatural, feels too neat or structured. Early video games are full of natural objects that are represented and arranged in that blocky Euclidean way.
The World of Warcraft cover is ideal to me because it states the most culturally-accepted idea about that game, which is—like a coin—double-sided:
1. World of Warcraft has made a lot of money, and
2. World of Warcraft is primarily about plunder and adventure, both in-game and in the real world.
The intersection of these two ideas is the phenomenon of farming, which first became a cultural item of the news cycle with World of Warcraft. So yeah: one simple image, three potent allusions.
And finally, Metal Gear Solid. This is my favorite cover. It’s so ridiculous, but so is the idea that the world’s greatest spy/assassin walks around while hiding underneath a cardboard box. But a cardboard box is so innocuous and so everyday that it is basically invisible, which is why Kojima’s joke—and that element of the game—works.
Will you tell about how you created the Metal Gear Solid cover?
I found a box in my garage, flipped it upside down in my backyard, my wife hid underneath the box and lifted it a tiny bit off the ground (yes: book designers gladly sequester their wives to a life in cardboard boxes), then I photographed the box from different angles and with different lighting, and then we—you and I—chose the box that felt most like Solid Snake was in there.
Are there any games that you want us to do a book about SOLELY because you want to do the cover?
Any games. All games. I find that the limitations and conceptual play necessary to make a good Boss Fight cover provide me a designer’s version of a Zen exercise.
Hi Everyone,
I'm proud to report that Season One of Boss Fight Books is finally complete!
This week, Super Mario Bros. 2 by Jon Irwin shipped to backers, got some strong reviews from Nintendo Life and Cliqist, and had a elease party/reading in Atlanta feat. the brilliant Ian Bogost.
Now anyone who wants can order a Season One Instant Subscription. This week, you can even take $5 off a print (or combo) subscription with the discount code "INSTANTSUB."
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Naturally, Boss Fight is also looking ahead to the future, which is why I wanted to offer you a sneak peek at the cover of our next release:
Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology is an eBook anthology of essays and short stories about video games. The good news: It's slated for release next month.
Yours,
Gabe
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Hey All,
Hope you're having a great summer.
We're getting really excited here to deliver book #5 in less than three weeks on Monday, August 25. It's Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi. We're really proud of it. This is the first title in our series in which the author has been granted full access to the game's creators. It offers a detailed look at how a great game gets made, as told by a writer who has spent a lot of time in the game industry himself. The book also features a foreword from games journalist Rob Zacny. We're tweeting snippets from the book all month from @BossFightBooks.
If you're a writer and you'd like to read an early digital review copy of JA2, please let us know at bossfightbooks@gmail.com.
In the cool press department, we've got new reviews of Chrono Trigger, Galaga, Galaga, and a Galaga excerpt.
For just a couple more days, anyone who buys a paperback from our store can enter discount code "DOLLA" on checkout for $1 off.
Meanwhile, the final book of Season One is following close behind. Super Mario Bros. 2 by Jon Irwin comes out in late September. I think you'll find it's worth the wait!
Yours,
Gabe Durham / Boss Fight
Since I started Boss Fight Books last summer, one of the biggest pleasures of running/editing “the 33 ⅓ of video games” was discovering Michael P. Williams. Boss Fight’s Kickstarter backers selected Chrono Trigger as the game they most wanted to read a book about, and when I put out a call to writers for Chrono pitches, it was Michael’s that blew me away.
What sealed it was a three-hour phone “interview” about Chrono Trigger, Dragonball Z, Secret of Mana, Japanese culture, and I think maybe the Star Wars prequels. My question, “Could this guy I’ve never met write a whole book about Chrono Trigger?” was more than answered. Michael’s writing is energized by a deep curiosity, a willingness to delve into his subject, to take Chrono Trigger as seriously as possible, and have a blast while doing it.
Case in point: In this interview, I asked him a dumb question about Spekkio, one of Chrono Trigger’s minor NPCs, and found, to my delight, that he had plenty of thoughtful Spekkio commentary ready to go. When I emailed him, “That’s a better answer than I deserved,” he replied, “It's an answer I'd thought about too! I didn't get to do nearly enough NPC analysis but there was just no room. I could have written a whole chapter about them. Ah well! This'll have to do, in the expanded gaiden of my book.” I need to go look up gaiden, but already I’m into the idea.
Now that his book is written, edited, and published, I thought I’d interview Michael again--this time not for his job, but just for the fun of picking his brain one more time. - Gabe Durham
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Gabe Durham: In what could be the most controversial part of the book, you DARE to criticize the game's time travel mechanics. What--in movies, games, books, pop culture, whatever--is an example of a time travel plot that really gets it right? And what's a time travel plot that is just garbage?
Time travel is general is always going to involve a bit of bullshitting! Stories that get too hung up on paradoxes end up being really cumbersome, smarmy, and sometimes plain old unfun. One of my favorite masterfully handled time travel stories has to be 12 Monkeys (I haven’t seen La Jetée, on which it was based). The finality of time, the merciless grip of causality—it just gets so much right. But it’s a dark movie. And as you approach the ending you feel the noose of the time loop tightening around you. It’s a really tense movie. But it’s not fun.
If I want to go with fun, I’d go with Futurama. While the show does have its share of flub-ups in continuity, it does treat time travel with both irreverence for its conventions and with respect for its possibilities. As the series progresses, for instance, we continually learn more about the 1999 life of protagonist Philip J. Fry, and the circumstances surrounding his importance to the space-time continuum. At first Fry’s coming to the 31st century is a bit of a comedic fluke, but later it seems that many events have conspired to make this happen. The most vulgarly amusing of these is Fry’s having sex with his own grandmother to become his own grand-father/son—a special kind of incest that renders his brain “special” (read: “often stupid”), making it the most powerful counterweapon in the universe against a species of intergalactic brains that want to destroy all of existence. While autograndparenting is only hinted at in Chrono Trigger, Futurama provides a hilarious parody of the classic Grandfather Paradox that cripples many other time travel stories.
Meanwhile, there are far too many time travel flops to list, but Martin Lawrence’s Black Knight strikes me as one that is potentially offensive on any number of levels. Its worst sin, however, is its predictable fish-out-of-water storyline, and it’s a stark contrast to Futurama’s successes with the same trope.
Your book pokes at Chrono Trigger from just about every angle you could think of: The Hero's Journey, gender, physics, translation, etc. Why do you think CT is so ripe for this approach? And were there other angles that you tried to pursue that didn't work out?
Michael P. Williams: Since Chrono Trigger was a game designed by the collective input of a huge team, it felt right to take an unapologetically “kitchen sink” approach to never analyzing and critiquing it. It didn’t feel like bad form to mix and match approaches—critical race theory, queer studies, traditional literary criticism, and whatever else I smushed in there—though this would have passed muster as a “research book.” I also knew this was going to be a grab bag of topics—the game is just too multifaceted and too diffusively authored to articulate a single auteur-like vision.
I originally did have the idea of making this more academic than it ended up being—using words like auteur, for example. But then I got both intimidated by what I didn’t know and by what I’d have to learn just to start the process of learning more. I didn’t want to get paralyzed by unknowledge, so I just dove in at a certain point, leaving many sources unchecked. I had to remind myself that I was emphatically not writing a dissertation on Chrono Trigger, and that therefore I didn’t need a thesis. When I tossed out trying to find a unifying principle to rectify the disparate content of the game, I was actually able to start really writing.
I had had the serendipitous foresight to pack the prospectus I originally pitched to Boss Fight Books with tons of topics. Then again, I had also had the dedicated madness to watching ten straight hours of Chrono Trigger playback videos on YouTube while scribbling down notes. Of the 70% or so that was legible, I ended up with a huge, messy list of potential ideas. This very loose collection of talking points eventually was reshaped into many of the final chapters of the book.
One of the pleasures of editing this book was watching your balance of lucidity and generosity as a critic. Who are some arts critics you admire? What are some venues/websites that are really killing it?
I have to admit I approached this with some virgin eyes. I am not a huge follower of criticism. In fact, I’m poorly read when it comes to current culture. I read the Onion A.V. Club sometimes, or maybe a book review now and then, but in general I try to experience the original and don’t often look for critical consensus, or outliers.
It’s funny to me, though, that I tend to only seek out reviews when I loathe something—I want to feel vindicated. Many of my Google searches have been formatted as “___ is terrible” or “I hate ___.” I’ve had many things to fill in those blanks, often TV shows and movies. I will list three for you: The Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series), and Sideways. I have always found at least one excoriating review to justify my viewerly ire.
Something you don't get into in the book: What do you make of Spekkio? It always feels like a weird power play when Spekkio, before gifting the power of magic to the Future Saviors of the Earth, makes them walk around the room three times. Also, if his level of power matches whomever is in the room with him, what does he look like when alone?
Spekkio is a unique character in that, we have no idea what he really looks like. He's sort of like the lightbulb in the fridge, or the tree falling in the unheard woods—we can only guess what face he shows when he is showing anyone his face. Skilled players might be able to meet Spekkio in his weakest form, a small froggy. Most players will first encounter him as a furry kilwala, a kind of rabbit-ape. And as your party's lead character gets stronger, so do Spekkio's six distinct forms. His final form might be the toughest enemy in the entire game.
I think his major function is to serve as a friendly foe, a kind of constantly upgrading Gato—the karaoke battlebot that you can fight early on in the game. He's a way to test your skills in a relatively risk-free place, and if you can best him, you can earn limited-supply power-ups. Spekkio then fulfills a limited "coliseum" function—a feature which was never fully integrated into Chrono Trigger except by hackers.
As a character, Spekkio's major contribution is to unlock our characters' latent magic talents, and to hint at the development of magic in the world. Since he tells us prehistoric Ayla cannot use magic, we can make some guesses that magic was an invention of the Zeal Kingdom siphoning off Lavos's powers, else it was a wild card that Lavos introduced into the human population and that Zeal learned to exploit. We also know from Spekkio's housemate Gaspar that other visitors had been popping up in the End of Time, so whether these people got powers unlocked is an open question for fanfic writers to answer.
I like to think of Spekkio as more a trickster than an asshole, and his little game of walking his chamber thrice-deasil is a way to humble the characters rather than humiliate them—sort of like a Zen master making students sweep floors, maybe? Maybe also helps prepare the characters to accept the absurdity of magic. Even Hogwarts kids probably laughed the first time they said some Latinish gibberish and a spirit animal appeared. Without a sense of humor, ultimate power can lead people down a dark path.
By the way, according to the Japanese guide Chrono Trigger: Ultimania, you can actually trick Spekkio into believing you've traveled the room three times by following a weird, zigzag path. I admit I accidentally exited the room a few times trying to hug the walls, but this frustration of having to start over again can generously be read as an extension of the Zen analogy. Try, try again! And curse at the screen a bit too.
You successfully tracked down both Chrono Trigger's SNES translator/localizer Ted Woolsey and DS retranslator Tom Slattery for the book, and you read up on countless interviews in both Japanese and English with the game's developers. What about the game's creation surprised you? Did anything ever burst the bubble of what you'd assumed the creation of CT must have been like?
Oh, yeah! I’m like a bloodhound with these things. I was surprised how accessible both Ted and Tom were, and so willing to answer my questions. I even tracked down the only copy of Ted’s master’s thesis, and found it had surprising connections to Chrono Trigger. It was like experiencing my own personal synchronicity, and it was incredibly inspiring. I’m sure Ted was a bit spooked by my stalkiness there, but I think he was also glad to receive a PDF scan of an early opus.
As far as the creation of the game, I was surprised by how little the “Dream Team”—the three major producers and creators of the game—had to do with the game. The sheer amount of uncredited effort by people like Masato Katō—who wrote a good chunk of the game—and Yasunori Mitsuda—whose music many of us can still hum in the shower—was astounding. Granted, both guys’ names appear in the credits, but Mitsuda got totally snubbed in the so called “Developer’s Ending”—instead of him, it’s Nobuo Uematsu, who barely scored half a track for the game. I call bullshit on Japan’s hierarchical respect there.
Disappointments like these, however, were strongly offset by gems of esoterica, like the fact that Frog would probably have originally been “Spider,” or that the game was sort of the best leftovers of a failed Secret of Mana prototype. In the end, it’s always good to take a peek behind the curtain—even the humbug Wizard of Oz had plenty of cool shit to give away, floating head or not.
You wrote this book pretty quickly! I had this unique experience of getting to serialize your first draft as you were writing it, getting a new chapter every few weeks. What was your regimen like? And did we awaken a bookwriting beast that lurked within you all along?
The beast had always been lurking, and he was hungry! You just gave it something else to eat—though I assure you, many a cookie was consumed during the writing process.
After the initial research phase—which was a whirlwind two month process of gathering and compiling sources in English and Japanese—I started trying to flesh out the outline I had had in mind since the initial pitch. I started writing these chapters in book outline order, thinking I could keep the running train of thought on track. It became clear to me soon, though, that I was actually writing not a continuous narrative, but rather a series of interdependent chapters that could each be individual essays, if not for some transitioning thoughts that I later inserted to make the book flow more naturally. So, I’d have an idea for a theme, start taking notes. The notes would become a chapter outline, and then finally feel structured.
My library was a great place to work. It’s so quiet there—but not deathly quiet! The ambient soundtrack of shoes on the hard linoleum; soft, insistent coughing in the distance; the sound of dry, hushed laughter in a seminar room—all of these were incredibly relaxing. Often I would just sip my coffee and start pounding the keyboard, connecting the dots of the outline basically. There were some points when I was so in the zone that I would finish a whole subchapter in less than an hour. So, I guess part of my speed was having the right writing environment. Plus, being surrounded by knowledge was not just gratifying, it was incredibly useful! Articles and books for reference were often literally at my fingertips, so I didn’t really need to put many things on hold while I waited for sources to back up my writing.
More practically: as the bookwriting beast had just emerged, it needed some training. I really wanted to make this book good. I have to say, as fueled as I was by Ken’s EarthBound excerpt on Kotaku, I was also intimidated by the skill of his wordsmithing. Writing something both longform and creatively scholarly was a foreign concept to me, so following the deadline of having a first draft by Spring 2014—we originally had aimed for a Summer 2014 release—I created my own “halfth draft” deadline of Christmas 2013. I just wanted to get everything I had in for an initial pass through before even attempting a solid “first draft,” which was completed much sooner than anticipated. Looking back, these fractional draft numbers were probably confusing—I did call my individual chapter submissions “zeroth drafts”!—but this was also a manifestation of my fear of “this isn’t good enough yet.”
I still feel this a bit. In fact, I’m sure I will never not find a fault with any edition of Chrono Trigger—or anything else I write—but at some point you have to let these things go out into the world and succeed and/or fail! I’m confident that after all the hard work we’ve put into Chrono Trigger—and despite any typos or omissions— it’s exactly the kind of book I wanted it to become.
Hey Everybody,
A few tasty media morsels:
Buzzfeed interviewed Ken Baumann and Gabe Durham about Boss Fight & EarthBound.
On the new episode of the podcast My So Called 8bit Life, Michael P. Williams talks Chrono Trigger with host Roberto Villegas.
Polygon covered Darius Kazemi's Critical Proximity talk on what a game's code can tell us. The actual talk is here.
The first chapter of EarthBound gets the Rap Genius treatment.
WRITERS: Don't forget to reach out if you want an early digital galley of Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams.
Everybody else: It's coming SOON. The paperbacks are being printed as we type.
Yours,
Boss Fight Books
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