This week in Retronauts, all the work that fits in print on podcasts.
Hi everyone, welcome to retronauts episode.
I believe this was uh 700, oh god, i don't know.
760 maybe, let's see.
Let's look at the notes.
Yes 760, i remembered right for once.
Um, i am jeremy parish and i'm here to talk about books, as you know.
Thank you for having me.
And I want them to talk about basically the art of publishing books or other publications about classic games in the year 2026.
How has it changed?
What's different?
What's new?
What's challenging?
What's cool?
So without further ado, I will let everyone introduce themselves.
We do have a regular Retronauts contributor here.
Please speak up and introduce yourself, Nadia.
Hi, everyone.
I am Nadia, and I am a regular here, which I'm very sorry about that.
But yeah, I am happy to be on the show and talk about my upcoming book.
So thank you for inviting me.
Yes, and we do have someone else who has been on the show before, briefly in a segment recorded on the spot at Long Island Retro Expo.
That's you, Pat.
Oh, I do remember that.
Hi, this is Pat Contri.
It was very quick.
That's right.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
No, but my name is Pat Contri.
I started off. as one of the, I guess, first wave of retro gaming YouTubers in 2008.
And I've, from there, started doing stuff like Flea Market Madness.
I was producer, director on the Video Game Years documentary series.
I helped produce the Not For Resale video game store documentary, amongst other items and podcasts.
Yeah, it is great to finally get you on the show in a formal capacity.
It's been overdue.
I'm a big fan of your work, by the way.
My husband and I watch all your stuff.
Thank you, Nadia.
Appreciate that.
And then finally, last but not least certainly, the person responsible for publishing most frequently here.
We have someone – I don't think you've been on the show before, have you?
I don't think so.
Regular listener, first-time caller.
Ryan Berger from Old School Gamer magazine.
For the last eight years, we've been publishing Old School Gamer every other month, anywhere from 60 to 80 pages covering video games, pinball –.
All in the retro arena, which for us counts as 20 years plus.
I don't know where you guys judge that line to be, but 20 years back is what we consider to be retro.
That is always a topic of some contention where we're concerned.
I drew a line a long time ago.
This was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
10 years back is not that different looking than it is today.
I mean, it's different.
You didn't have DLSS or whatever.
Still real people making real games back in those days.
But yeah, certainly the line has shifted quite a bit.
So to me, 10 years is like – at that point, something is kind of historic.
It's been in the air for 10 years, so that feels okay.
But I don't consider – something 10 years old retro at this point.
Well, for really it's somebody.
When you think of high school and college.
What you played back then is what it personally is for me.
For the younger crowd out there that's listening to this, yes, it is the Wii.
It is the PS3.
It is that kind of material.
But yeah, a lot of people consider it starting at the NES arena.
Well, I think of Atari and Intellivision.
There's always the distinction between retro gaming versus classic versus vintage.
They have different definitions.
So I always conflated a couple of them.
I used to say well, retro gaming to me was sort of the cutoff when the arcades died out in the late 90s.
So I was considered like the Dreamcast sort of as the cutoff.
That's no longer applicable.
It's probably...
As Jeremy said, about two generations back is what it definitely used to be.
But now the generations are melding and don't matter anymore.
So I think 20 years from now, the historians might look at it differently than we do.
Yeah no, you look back 20 years and, like I said, you had the Wii launch and that was really kind of the.
That was the last standard definition system.
So that kind of feels like a line in the sand a little bit.
But, you know, it is sort of arbitrary.
And anyone who puts a point down and says this is where retro starts, this is the cutoff.
Someone's going to argue with it.
And that's you know.
Gaming has been around long enough that there are all of these sort of, you know, paleological eras.
You know looking through back through history and geography.
So it's fine.
When I started, I guess my interest in.
You want to say retro gaming or gaming history began probably when I was about 11 or 12 years old.
So now I'm going to date myself.
I was born in 80.
So we're talking early Super Nintendo era, late NES era.
80 babies.
Yep.
United.
My friend Billy had an Atari 2600 and a lot of games because he probably –
Got a lot after the video game crash for pennies on the dollar.
So it always fascinated me how okay this seemed out of time to me versus NES, Super Nintendo games and the PC games I played.
So I remember trying to purchase it from him and the games, even when I was 11 or 12 and his parents wouldn't let me.
So that was my first dipping the toe in the water into discovering an era of games before I could like remember them for the most part.
Yeah.
I started with the Clico vision.
And so I went really far back there when the children say like, Oh, the PS three is retro.
I'm just like I'll take it because it's convenient for work, but otherwise you're wrong.
Yeah, you know when, when kids talk about how like, the first game they played was overwatch or minecraft minecraft actually is pretty old, but you know, like breath of the wild and then you know, i start to feel the mummy dust creeping up.
I mean, for me arthritis creeps in, for me the um like, my interest in Older games started when I came across I'm sure I've told this before on the podcast, but I came across just a flea market that had a bunch of NES games.
And this was kind of toward the end of the Super NES era.
It was right before PlayStation launched, I think, and Saturn.
So...
I saw those.
I was like, oh, I threw those aside so I could play Super NES games and play CD-ROM games on my Mac.
But actually, these were really good games.
They were really fun.
I should try them again.
And then the following year, emulation started happening in 96.
And I started going to flea markets, you know, pawn shops and stuff, and they were just closing out NES, Super NES games for dirt cheap.
And so I started amassing older games and saying, these are actually pretty good.
And then, you know, I'd go on to websites like GameGamers.com.
I can't remember the GameSpot website. kind of side spinoff.
Yeah, it was gamers.com that had the, the reader reviews.
And I would just like review old games.
For any ass that, and no one read those, but it was just kind of fun to, you know, stretch my legs a little, I guess.
Well, I think I've got the senior set here in that.
I mean, I remember my Intellivision.
I remember my TI-99 4A playing Parsec and Munchman loading stuff off cassette tapes.
I don't know if any of you have ever been to the Vintage Computer Festivals, but that's a whole other vine where people are still living in like 16K levels.
Hey hey, 16K.
What does that get you today?
So you know, now that we've all established the fact that we like old games, and have for a long time, how did you start writing?
And you know, just like saying, maybe my work should be about old games.
This is what I'm going to do.
This is me.
This is my ethos now.
Pat, I guess you kind of got there first.
Did I?
You said you were on YouTube back in 2008 talking about old games.
So that is kind of putting yourself out there, not publishing in print, but certainly creating material and covering stuff and building awareness as people started to look online and say what do my fellow nerds have to say?
Sure.
So I started collecting games.
Around 96, definitely by 97, I was Heading up the flea markets.
I was going to my local Funko Lands.
Rest in peace, because I loved that store.
And then also dabbling with emulators and buying games in early eBay in college and then getting Mike Ettler's NES Rarity Guide.
Shout out Mike Ettler, one of the unsung heroes of the history of video games and collecting.
He doesn't get the credit he deserves, and I'd love to meet him one day and talk to him.
He's still in New Jersey at Video Game Connections, I believe, in the store.
So, all that said, in college I dabbled in video production and writing, and I wrote a couple of screenplays.
And then this YouTube thing hits in 2006.
And then one of the phenoms still to this day was the James Rolfe's Angry Video Game Nerd character, which is, you know, over the top.
Look at the video games.
But it was historical because there wasn't really conversations happening about these games that came out at that point, 15 to 20 years before, in that capacity, in that medium.
And I said to myself I think I have the ability to do something like this in a slightly different way.
I could use my knowledge at that point as a collector of retro games and my small knowledge in video production, because back then there was a much wider gap between those that could create and those who could not, because you had a.
The knowledge and money gap to get into it was steep 20 years ago.
It was, yeah.
And so it was a combination of all that, plus something that – I was going to talk about you with offline, Jeremy.
The three stooges on NES.
That was one of your more recent videos.
Am I in trouble?
You are in slight trouble, which we'll get into later.
But there was – it's still on YouTube.
I'm not trying to shame them.
But there was probably – if you probably search by the earliest YouTube Three Studios NES video, you'll find someone playing it in real time using like their – it sounds like one of those old gateway stick microphones and criticizing the game because they didn't understand like, what the point was or what it was about.
So it was someone that was playing the game who did not really know what the Three Stooges were.
And I was a huge Three Stooges fan growing up in the 80s.
So it was a combination of all those things that said well, I think I can educate a little bit and use my little goofy humor to sort of tell a story at the same time.
And that's how I got into you want to say writing about video games, because you're writing those short, silly stories that appear in video form.
How did that translate into book publishing for you, though?
That's a weirder through line.
I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I'd gone to a few conventions and I looked at the market and there wasn't anything at the time that existed that I wanted to read about the NES.
There wasn't a full-color review of each page, gives every game its due, full-color screenshots.
Describes every single game, not just the popular ones, not just the first party ones.
And I was like, you know what?
I want to do something that I think I would enjoy as a reference guide and do that style.
And so there wasn't, I think, a structure for how to do that at the time.
So I had to sort of put one together based upon things I had read.
And so I did a Kickstarter that I launched during – it was the fifth NES charity marathon.
We used to do these 24-hour NES marathons, me and my podcast partner, Ian Ferguson.
And so I launched the Kickstarter.
Thinking, oh, I'll get like a few thousand dollars.
It has 30 days.
I think I put like a $15,000 or $20,000 goal on it.
It hit the goal in about 15 minutes of launching.
So to me, it showed at the time there was a need for that sort of book to exist in that format.
That large, you know, 9x12 book. you know, sort of coffee table.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's sort of like it hit me like a like a ton of bricks, because I I didn't have the experience to uh, or a team yet to put all that together.
It was like, Oh, I'm going to write about all these games myself, all with Ian.
We're going to write about all 800 plus NES games.
Just like that.
Yeah.
Just like that.
And then it was um, for lack of better term, hell on earth uh, because Ian's time commitments uh, could not keep up with the project, with other things going on.
Um, so then I took on more than I hired other writers to help work on it.
And we and I sort of just it was trial by fire uh, to establish even a writing style uh, How do you do this?
How do you have like a semi uniform style to throw this all into one book and able to publish it in one in one volume?
How do you do that?
And it was, you know, three years of hard work.
And I screwed up a bunch of things I wouldn't do 10 years later.
But it ended up, I guess, finding an audience enough.
I want to call it like it wasn't professional.
It wasn't amateur.
It was somewhere in between that first book.
And from there the knowledge that we got translated into doing a Super Nintendo book, then doing a second and third print of the NES book in there, and then the N64 book.
That came out a year and a half ago in the fall of 2024.
And it was sort of like building knowledge upon knowledge about how do you take this seriously enough to make it not just viable from a monetary standpoint to support itself, but that it has some historical value on top of the entertainment factor of reading about these games.
And that sort of has been a 12 year process and establishing that and and refining that and honing that skill uh between not just myself but my other editors and the rest of the writing team.
Nice.
All right.
That's uh yeah, I.
I find that um Publishing is very much a pick-it-up-as-you-go kind of experience, in that you look back at the work you published 10 years ago and think wow, really.
Yep.
I don't want to look at anything I published 10 years ago.
There's a lot of my older work that I'm very proud of, but also I look at it and I'm like, oh.
Oh, wow.
That's bad.
Not good.
Not good.
Yeah, yeah.
Not a promo, but that's the reason why, instead of doing a fourth print run of the Ultimate Guide to the NES Library, it's been out of print for two and a half years.
I don't want to know how much money I've lost, not instantly reprinting it but it's not a small amount of money.
But I said to myself, why do that when I know we can do better now?
So let's do the entire book from scratch and re-edit and rewrite it.
So that's why I want to do – like with all the knowledge from the past 10, 12 years, much better –
We're all much better writers.
We're all much better researchers.
There's better resource guides out there and research materials to work with.
Let's do it now much, much wiser, more mature and a lot more gray hairs.
Let's do it.
Yeah, it's hard to say no to the opportunity to do something, you know, kind of remaster it.
Like, I get George Lucas and what his deal is now that I've been, you know, working in publishing.
I'm eager.
You know I've published books on like in-depth books on the NES 85 86, 87 years, those libraries and I'm.
I have scripts for 88 and 89 now, but the opportunity has come up to revisit the 85 86 book.
And I'm like well, that's been in print for a long time and it's had a few different printings, but there's so much more I could do now that I'm kind of taking the bigger, more contextual view.
Yeah.
What if I included a lot more information about the arcade games that are the counterparts of these, and so forth?
Like, you know, do I do I want to do that?
Do I want to keep kind of spinning my wheels over the same ground and eventually move on to new stuff?
It's it's kind of a toss up.
Like, I want to do the new stuff, but also like.
I know I could redo that old stuff better.
So, you know, it's one of those existential crises that's going to keep me up at night, I'm sure.
Sure.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I think we can hear from Ryan about how he got into the publishing.
Yeah.
That is exactly where I'm headed.
Okay.
Let's back up.
High school kid.
I'm a mobile DJ.
I do school dances and weddings.
That's where we start me out.
Let's see.
I get a job after college.
I hate it.
I get out of that.
I get more into IT.
And I create a website in 1995, so right on the cusp of things, called ProDJ.com.
I then 14, let's see 95, whatever 2006, whatever that mathematically figures out to being.
I purchased the trade magazine and convention for the DJ industry.
So these are the guys who do weddings, school dances.
All the industries had trade magazines at the time.
Yeah.
And teachers had their magazines.
Printers had their magazines.
Everybody has magazines.
But that started to fade in the 2010s.
But before that faded too much, I create a magazine called for retro video games.
It all kind of came out of me going to Classic Game Fest, the Austin show, July 2017.
And then we had our first issue ready by PRGE, Portland Retro Gaming Show, in November 2017.
And like what you guys are saying, oh my gosh, that first magazine looks like crap.
Okay.
And I'd had experience with doing a lot of this kind of stuff before that.
But the magazine we had designed for disc jockeys was more of a industry magazine.
It was more, I don't know how to describe it.
It wasn't a fandom magazine like what we're dealing with here.
I had read Retro Gamer, UK magazine.
I'm sure you guys have all seen it.
I remember when it used to come with discs in the front.
I loved it.
I still get it digitally.
But no one had done it successfully for more than about a year at a time, a year or two when I decided to get into it.
In the US, yes.
There is some Italian magazines.
There's a couple different people in the UK with some great stuff out there, but no one else in the US.
So we started it up, and it's been a blast.
Not making much money at it.
Never really had the goal of that.
I'm enjoying what I'm doing.
I'm enjoying interacting with people like yourselves, getting to meet Ken Williams, having breakfast with Nolan Bushnell.
All that kind of stuff is just crazy.
But yeah, we publish every other month.
We just celebrated our 50th issue.
Working on number 51 that's behind schedule, that We'll be out by the time everybody else hears this and having a blast doing it.
I mean, it was just a transition from me coming out of my shell as a DJ, being a geek, creating a website, being a journalist online purchasing the established print magazine, to creating a fan magazine using my same skills.
I love doing it.
I also love being a high school teacher, which I transitioned to around the same time.
Oh, cool.
Do your students think you're really cool?
Some of them really do, especially when I bring in someone like Carlos Pessina, who worked at NetherRealm Studios for the last 25 years.
And they sit and talk to my students and they realize he was Raiden or i, david crane, talking to the kids and i have to explain to him who this guy is and what he's done and everything and i think he's just amazing.
And they say oh yeah okay whatever yeah um we, we get john romero from doom to show up.
I mean we know who that is.
So yeah yeah, but yeah, i mean it's been fun.
Um, We're just having too much fun with it.
I'm an okay writer.
I'm a better organizer and business person.
I have other people that do most of the writing for the magazine.
It's interesting you said that you try to apply some of your skills from your prior.
You know work life.
Because, again, if there wasn't like a blueprint for us to do any of this, really.
And then you have to discover people with different skill sets.
Some people are good writers.
Some people are good editors.
It took me a while to figure out folks that are great writers don't necessarily make good editors.
Oh, no.
Or vice versa.
No.
I guess I was fortunate enough where, like you Ryan, project management.
I always excelled at project management.
And that honestly, was my corporate life, was mostly project management and that which, when you're managing these teams of people like, for example, on the new NES book that I'm working on or the N64 book, it's about a combination of editors and writers and artists.
You're talking between 20 to 25 people, something like that.
So it's recognizing that we're all pulling towards the same goal.
And then how do we accomplish that with all these different people and personalities and what they excel at?
And how do you sort of maximize everyone's abilities to do this?
You have to recognize what works, what doesn't, and who can make these things work better.
That's something I guess I found along the way that I was good at.
Otherwise, these books would be impossible for me to do.
The first book was – I did 90%, 80% of the overall work on the first book in terms of the writing.
The editing, putting it all together in InDesign, finding all the assets and all that, and it almost broke me and I couldn't put myself through that again.
I just couldn't.
Yeah, I know, with our 50th issue we had 30-some different writers writing segments to it and we ended up coming up with 70 great games and we had to roll them into our next issue.
I'm looking on my screen right now at Google Doc, which I keep track of.
This is March 2026, DOS Gaming of the 80s and 90s.
List articles that we wanted.
List who's writing them.
I'm looking at the JRPG one, which we have a bunch of people writing for.
And on that one especially, for instance and that's our May issue I had to go to an outside source.
I talked to Jeremy.
He found me a couple other people that we didn't have someone who had direct expertise in that.
It seems like a lot of people know a ton about their exact subject.
If I want to find someone to talk about the TRS-80 computer –
Or the TurboGrafx-16.
You can find a niche person that's really deep into that.
And then there's some other people that will go out and write on anything and will research it.
But I like having the passion of someone that wants to write specifically on a deep topic that they absolutely love.
Sure.
And Ryan, you would understand being in this that that's only part of your job.
Yes.
Because you also have to then find people that create art, create assets.
You have to manage if you have advertisers or sponsors for issues.
You have to have people responsible for doing the layouts and approving that.
And it's a lot to juggle.
Yeah, it's a lot.
So Ryan has to not only know the basis of the expertise, of the knowledge of being able to hire folks to do that part of it.
But that's only like half of the work.
There's still another world outside of that in production that you have to at least know what you're doing.
Yeah, I have a gentleman named Tristan Nabarro who's in charge of our graphics work and layout, and Adobe InDesign, who's put out books similar to you guys on stuff.
And he just spends his entire life for like two weeks out of every two months working on it and showing me updates.
I mean, I'm due to receive an update later tonight of little changes.
We made, little things, we just tweaked.
And he's taken our magazine way beyond just column column, insert photo.
That wraps around here kind of vibe.
I'm using my hands, not remembering that this is not a video thing.
You're allowed to speak with your hands on our podcast.
He never dropped that.
He never dropped that habit.
But yeah, I mean getting it to lay out – and we finally now, with what we've done, the last three issues I consider – a professional-looking magazine.
It's great, and that's why I feel even worse about my old stuff and I want to redo some of the material and publish it in a compendium edition.
But do I update everything off of it into our new skills?
Not really.
I mean, people want to see some of the old stuff, but I kind of feel...
I don't want to put it out because it looks so bad.
The content is better than the layout, without a doubt.
I mean Capcom still publishes the original Mega Man, even though that's a pretty rough-looking game, especially next to its sequels on NES.
Pat, don't be offended.
I like the original Mega Man.
I owned the original Mega Man back in the day.
But compared to where that series went...
I think it could be tempting for them to say like, what if we spruce everything up with Mega Man 6 style graphics?
But they don't.
They put it out there because that is the work that they created.
They did have powered up RIP.
It's the reason why people like me will always say that I want the original Star Wars and I do not like the special editions.
Because that art existed at the time and place it was created, and that's what established what it was.
And you cannot take it out of that time period and compare it, at least in my opinion, to something decades or even five or six years later.
Because that's the foundation.
Without that, the sequels don't exist.
Yeah.
I like, I like when people reprint old material, republish old material and give you the option.
Like here is a new take on it.
Here's something fresh, like with Star Trek, the next generation, where they've got the digital uh, the CGI effects.
But you can also turn that off and watch.
You know, classic Star Trek uh, video toaster graphics and they look pretty bad.
But, you know, that's how it was.
And it looked cheap, even in 1987.
And that's okay, because that's kind of what television was at the time.
But then they've, you know, tweaked it a little bit.
So you've got CG models and things like that.
And it looks a little more contemporary and giving people that option.
I think that's always a great way to preserve media is to say like here's you know, here's what it was.
And now here's something that might be a little easier for people accustomed to new ways of doing things might be a little more comfortable with.
Yeah.
That's always a very hot point of contention again on acts of love.
God, where our co-host victor, is very much into that old school quote-unquote friction and we argue a lot about that, because i'm the kind of person who's like oh, i've never played final fantasy 10 before.
I guess i'm just picking it up on the switch and a lot of people scream no, they screwed up titus's face, not like yeah, but they have like fast forward.
So i don't know what to tell you man, i'll take your face.
Well, we all do get to celebrate Star Wars, I guess next year for the 50th anniversary in the original, super original edition, without him messing with stuff.
Han's shooting first and everything that goes with it.
I was in a theater when that happened.
Man, people were not happy.
Oh, I wasn't.
I guess it goes back to the point of.
When should you stop meddling with the original work?
And I guess that goes with me redoing this book.
But I can honestly say for example, I rewrote dozens from scratch reviews that I did from the first edition.
And I rewrote all three Super Mario Brothers.
I felt it was incumbent upon me to write three of the most important games that came out on the platform.
Plus there are like full-page, you know, 600-word reviews.
The others are like, whatever, 450, so those are fleshed out more.
I looked up my Super Mario 3 it was one of the last reviews I wrote and then Daniel Greenberg one of our editors Stoller editors.
I was working on with him and what I wrote like whatever a month ago was so much better than what I wrote like 11 years ago.
Yeah.
That's, that's what I want to leave in the history or excuse me.
That's what I want people to remember that version when I'm dead and gone in a hundred years.
If there's a book around, I want them to read what I wrote a month ago.
It's a much – it respects the game a lot more than what I did, knowing a lot less about what I was doing 11, 12 years ago.
And that's all part, I guess, of the learning and growing process as you go.
But is that the same as having Greedo shoot first?
I don't know.
I hope not.
I hope not.
So, Nadia, what about you?
How did you get into this deep, dank world of writing about video games and putting it into print?
I took a very much more roundabout way than a lot of you.
For the starters, I flunked college and I flunked out of college.
So I went into the workforce when I was in my 20s.
And just to kind of.
Past the time, I just wrote a lot of fanfiction.
And I actually started this back in high school.
I started writing Mega Man fanfiction.
And frankly, I've never stopped.
I'm still writing it, to be honest with you.
And I have written official Mega Man stuff for Capcom through the Robot Master Field Guide and the Maverick Hunter X Field Guide, which both are published by Udon.
I wrote it with my husband.
Unfortunately, they've been out of print for a while.
I'm really hoping they come back someday.
Um...
So I moved on to the internet, and when I started – I'd say the 2000s is when blogging became very big.
So I started up several blogs.
I started – I've told this story before.
This is going to bump up the rating to M. I'm very sorry.
But my real first breakout, I suppose, blog, if you want to call it that, was –
I don't even know how I found it.
There was a McDonald's hentai that I thought was really funny, so I wrote about it.
It got some attention, and people started reading my stuff.
I was on some platform, I don't even remember, but I moved on to LiveJournal.
Eventually, Jeremy said to me, hey, you like Mega Man like a crazy person.
Do you want to write for this new site called 1up.com?
I'm like, sure, why the hell not?
I wrote an article about Mega Man.
I'm like, wow, I'm addicted now.
I just started writing and writing and writing.
Eventually it got to the point where, Like I, have chronic body pain and I used to work with animals as well as writing.
And I couldn't do that anymore.
I couldn't be a groomer.
So because my body just it just started to hurt too much.
So I said, OK, well, I guess I got to really buckle down and start writing full time.
So I've been doing that ever since.
And I'm publishing my first for me book, like by me for me.
It's called From Pixels to Prose, What Video Games Taught Me About Storytelling.
It's from Retro Games Books.
It's coming out soon, I hope.
Very soon, I hope.
Jeremy knows what I mean.
I owe someone a very, very overdue foreword, and I need to write that ASAP.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, I'm very much looking forward to it.
It's I've had a couple of people read the book.
They say it's very good.
So I'm very entertaining.
Oh, good.
So you have read it.
I'm happy.
I have read it.
Yes.
So there we go.
There's the review.
Five stars from Jeremy Parrish.
Yes.
It's a triumph.
A triumph.
A triumph.
As long as it kept you entertained, man, that's all I care about.
That's my main thing with writing.
I'm not, like, we were talking earlier about how some of us are organizers, some of us are editors.
I can edit.
I'm not good at it.
It's actually my husband who is the major editor, fact checker kind of person.
And actually right now he is writing as well.
He is writing the, he wrote the Mega and Legends comic for Udon, which was published very recently.
Free comic book day, there will be a battle network.
He wrote that as well.
So please support us.
Did I miss what, Maria?
I'm sorry.
Did you say what the new book's about?
Did I miss that?
Oh, I'm sorry.
It's basically the subtitle is what video games taught me about storytelling.
And I've always been a storyteller.
I've always been a reader.
And that's one of the reasons I got into video games, especially RPGs, because I was like oh my god, you can read in a video game.
That's so cool.
That made me very cool with all my friends, let me tell you.
So I was always a writer, as I said.
When I was a very little kid I wrote I swear to god Archie fan fiction because I read a lot of Archie comics growing up.
So, again, I eventually moved on to Mega Man and other video games.
And the book is about how it got me into storytelling.
Like, obviously, there's like other books, there's movies, there's more kinds of media out there.
But video games don't really get much of the credit they deserve for storytelling.
So, Bob's your uncle.
I like what you said about you started writing and you realized, oh, this is addictive.
That moment when you realize you can push your opinions about some niche little thing that you enjoy and broadcast it out onto everyone else and get money for it.
That's an amazing sensation.
That's a triumph.
You could also push negative opinions of things and get people's attention too.
Sure.
I think trolling and that kind of bait is easy, but –
If you have something substantial to say, that's the real trick getting that out there and getting someone to offer you money in return for publishing it.
It's really hard.
Congratulations, you've made it.
It's actually – I meant to say Ryan very quickly.
I had a very small stint in writing for trade magazines and I kick myself now because it was really lucrative at one time and I got in just in the end.
I wrote at least two articles for a magazine called Just Labs, as in Labrador Retrievers, because I was a dog groomer.
So I wrote a couple of stories for this magazine magazine about hunting Labradors, like raising them, very specific, very niche, and I'm like okay, here's how you groom your Labrador, here's the brushes you use, here's how you clip their nails.
It's a Got some good money for the time.
Unfortunately,
That was the very end of it all.
Yeah, I mean really that – a lot of that super niche stuff disappeared when Facebook allowed everybody to communicate directly and they could target ads straight to you.
I mean they didn't need us new as much as it was before.
But the reason why the retro gaming magazine stuff is taking off is because people are into physical stuff.
That's why we're able to do it.
That's why our books work.
That's why all this stuff is out there because we like physical products.
We don't want to be renting the game like a lot of games are nowadays.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
And Ryan, you have just provided me with a beautiful segue into my next question for everyone, which is what do you think is interesting about print as a medium?
What can't you do in other mediums that print allows you to do?
Why are you messing with something that everyone keeps telling us is dead?
I mean, I remember...
And, you know, when you add print to that, that's a that's an extra step.
You have to go someplace and buy something.
You can't just like read it online immediately.
Right.
So it seems like kind of a challenge, but surely there must be some kind of benefit to this that everyone sees and gravitates toward.
I guess the way I could start out is a little bit of curation.
I mean everything is out there.
Everybody says things.
If it's on the internet, it's true, of course.
Of course.
Of course.
But –
To take that next step and actually put honestly money behind it.
You've got to have a quality level.
You've got to turn your things up a little bit to do stuff.
I mean, yeah, there's vanity presses.
There's being able to print stuff through Amazon.
You can print anything.
But at the same time, when you put the work into it, you do everything behind it.
It's more than just an impulsive process.
Yes, Mega Man number whatever is the worst of the group.
You guys are all talking Mega Man, so I thought I'd cover Mega Man.
Is there a worst Mega Man, by the way, in the whole series that no one likes?
Okay.
Do you want me to give you the NES Guidebooks opinion on that?
Well, you guys are all totally about the Mega Man and I want to talk about Night Stalker on my television.
But yeah, I mean there's an investment in what's happening with things and there's a curation of it.
I mean, be it someone submitting a book to Jeremy to publish him editing it, putting it out there, someone investing in printing it, sending it out, or someone doing the same process, like what Pat is doing with gathering all these different materials and organizing and having a standard to stuff.
It's not just a blog, I guess is the way of saying it.
Yeah, I think about this a lot because the Kickstarter that I did It was so successful for the first book.
I had zero expectations.
I didn't know if it was going to make $20,000, $30,000.
It hit $145,000 in the first book.
Awesome.
And that just showed me that, wow, people are starving for this sort of book.
Why?
And I don't know if it comes back to the actual physical object itself.
I think that helps a bit.
And books never really died physically.
That's what's so weird about this.
Everything, all other physical media, for the most part with little bits of, like you know, vinyl comes back a little bit.
We do, we still do.
Like you know, Living to Run Games does their prints of some of these digital games.
But books.
I think it's the feeling of responsibility that, As Ryan said, this is all curated and put together.
This must be worthy for me to look at.
And so I will discover things going through this.
I never would have thought on my own to go out and look for the information of
I think it's a combination of that.
It's a combination of you know.
For example, I'm going through, you know this book and oh, I'm going to learn about Ninja Gaiden.
I know about that, but hey, what about Ninja Kid?
That's a more uncommon game I might have never known of.
And then right after that, I read about Nobunaga's Ambition.
It's like oh, that's a strategy game.
Maybe I heard that, but it's all in front of me to now digest.
I'm already invested. in this, this form, this product, this medium.
Now I want to learn about things that someone else decided that you should.
These are the.
These are the bits of information I think are important for you to learn about.
And I think there's something to that.
I agree.
Yeah.
Um, For me it's kind of an ego thing, whereas I'm very old school and I know this is completely out of date thinking.
But when I really started getting into writing it was like print is the legit, print is the you have.
As Pat said, print just got more and more valuable as digital became just kind of encroached on everything.
And you know what?
I.
I went on a bus the other day and I saw several people just reading books.
People are reading books again.
And myself, even like I have nothing against e-books.
I read them all the time.
But there's just something about sitting down with a book that makes me if I get into it, I'm like, oh, I'm not going to stop and check my mail the way I would even with an e-book like.
I'm just sitting there reading, and it's just writing in its purest form, especially in this day and age.
You don't have to deal with your browser crashing because a whole bunch of ads are going to pop up.
You're just reading some words on a page, and we kind of lost something with that.
And e-books don't have like quick flipping between two things or a third thing real quick.
You can't do that with an e-book.
It's just something to like.
Oh, I want to flip through to this section real quick and go back to this one and put my finger in between two pages.
There's just something to that that you can never replicate with an e-book.
You just can't.
Well, in e-books, unless you have a PDF, you can't recreate a physical layout precisely the way it looks on the page.
And for me, design was actually my inflection point into publishing.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a comic book artist.
And Then realized maybe I'm not good enough at drawing to be a comic book artist, but I can be a graphic designer.
So I studied graphic design and then got into the real world and discovered that all people want me to do with graphic design is make phone book ads which suck.
So –
I always had this aspiration to create books and publish books and design books.
And along the way, I realized, oh, I actually write pretty well, so I could write and design books.
But it wasn't until Hearst sold EGM and the Ziff Davis magazine group.
No, actually Ziff Davis sold the magazine group to Hearst and Hearst said oh, we already have magazines.
We don't need this.
We just want the website.
And all of a sudden, my avenue for writing in print.
Like Official PlayStation Magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly GMR, they all went away.
And so I got into self-publishing.
Initially, it started out pretty minimal.
You couldn't do a lot on blurb.com in a book in 2009, but... those tools improved.
And then you know, I kind of parlayed those self published books into working with a fan gamer, then then parlayed that into just having my own book line at limited run, where you know books can look the way that I want them to.
And you know, for me there's a lot of pleasure not only in writing the book And having someone else edit it.
Thank you.
But also like making the pages look the way I want to take photographs and capture screenshots and come up with layouts and arrangements that, just you know, hopefully enhance the text and supplement the text and give people a better idea.
Like, what is this guy writing about?
Old video games, so what?
But then you have the layouts with screenshots and photos of the screen that just kind of convey hopefully, the spirit of the video games.
So yeah, for me it's really about The physicality of the thing, but also just like this is kind of the way I'm visualizing it in my head and this is the best way for me to get it out.
And, you know, there's there's value to video, too.
But to me, print is just the purest form of. expressing those ideas.
And it's probably because I'm old and grew up reading books and comic books and magazines and so forth.
But to me there is still like this, this kind of physical anchor of concepts that you know.
You put it onto the page and it becomes more real somehow.
And I really I'm really drawn to that.
That's the part I've enjoyed about the last couple of years.
I mean, our magazine looked good before it would have themed pages.
It would stylistically do stuff.
We'd pull content.
But the last year since Tristan came on with us, we're able to make it look and pop out and be like part of the game on things.
And I've got a lot more excited about what we're putting out.
So, I mean, it's it's.
It's growing in your skills and seeing the results of it lay out and really be fantastic.
So we've talked kind of glancingly about the process of publishing and the importance of having the right team to have someone who knows their topic and is a good, clean writer, someone who likes to edit and doesn't necessarily want to be a writer but loves bringing out the best of the, you know, the best possible version of what's been submitted, of having designers, of having someone to kind of corral the entire team together.
But just beyond that, What's challenging about publishing in print?
I feel like all of us, as Pat said before the episode began, could do an entire episode just about how hard it is sometimes to bring a print publication into existence.
So maybe, Pat, you want to lead since it sounds like you've got some grievances to air.
Oh, wow.
That's a negative sort of slant on what I was going to say.
You know, grievances with the universe, not necessarily with any one person.
Oh, I have grievances with particular individuals that worked on my books.
But I probably won't publicly say who they are.
I think –
It's a tough medium, because I think Ryan alluded to the fact that – I'm not mixing your words, I hope where you said it's not something that's making me a lot of money doing this.
He put down a zero sign.
Oh, yeah.
We're not visual again, are we?
For me, it has.
It has.
It has.
It has to have enough value in it that not only can I dedicate three to four years, like the N64 book took four years of my life.
An opportunity costs a lot of rework, a lot of money to editors and writers, and it has to be worth that investment on the back end.
So that's part of it.
But it's it's discovering and.
Finding those people that not just can work on the project consistently but do the assignment to the expectations, not just to me, the editor-in-chief, but to what I expect the end consumer and a reader to expect.
And that's easier said than done for a lot of reasons.
There is no such thing, at least from what I'm doing, no such thing as a I want to say professional retro game reviewer.
They don't exist.
Um, there's not, I can't, you know, there's not someone on LinkedIn.
I can search for a retro video game reviewer and have a list of of a few hundred people that have done it consistently and done it to what I want or the style that I expect.
And so just finding consistent quality people that are not trouble, that know that Hey, I'm part of a team, that I might have to curtail some of my eccentric writing natures to fit the style of 15 other people on this project and know that this is one mission, that I'm a part of a team.
It's like playing on a football team.
You're one of 11 people.
You're all going towards the same end zone.
And doing that has been so difficult.
To find writers that not just are consistent, are good, could take good direction without holding grudges at one side.
Because we've had writers that have dropped off because they were unhappy with what an editor said or recommended.
Yeah, where it's like their ego was like how dare you have me change what I think is a work of art, what I've written, and it's perfect and pristine how it is?
And there is a lot of that amongst not just writers but people that work in any form of art or entertainment that have problems adjusting or taking criticism when it comes to that.
And Brian has probably been in the same shoes working with certain writers.
They're probably the same way where it's like –
How dare you touch what I think is perfect on the page?
Yeah.
We've made edits to people's pieces before, and it's like, no, you submitted it.
You're getting paid for it.
You're doing this.
It's great.
The nice thing I like about having things the last couple of years is we started out with almost completely volunteers, and volunteers would submit their material when they felt like it.
We've started moving into a lot more paid writers that know what they're doing once they've established themselves with us.
And it does help tremendously in that, yeah, I mean, this is a professional publication.
We need to work with you.
So I mean for me, exactly what Pat was saying.
That is, the tough spot is working with people, and people that don't like each other.
He got the lead story.
Why was he mentioned on this?
It's like, slow down.
None of us are making a living at this.
We're all doing this for various reasons.
Yeah, and then I learned quickly that professional the meaning of professional doesn't mean as much as you think it does, because someone who says i'm a professional and i hired people that wrote for magazines, wrote for retro gaming, uh websites and had quote-unquote experience doing this, that washed out from the project's Because they could not either adapt their style or fit to the writing style guide of what we had.
And I have a huge writing guide style for these books.
The instructions are very, very specific about how you write these.
And I train them the same way I train the editors.
It's not just I just drop them in.
Some professional writers that had written for a famous magazine said this is not something I can do.
I can't wrap my mind around what you're asking for.
Or some got super insulted and said, how dare you try to, you know, teach or train me.
I was writing when you were still in grade school.
And seriously, someone said something like that.
And I was like, all right, that's fine.
You don't have to be in the project.
That's fine.
Goodbye.
So it's a lot of as Ryan would probably think, it's a lot of personality juggling as well when you're in this sort of business with teams.
That's part of project management.
And sort of dealing with again people's strengths and weaknesses and giving people a little bit of rope to make mistakes.
But realizing at some point.
We all have a standard that we must attend to when we're working on these projects.
Otherwise, especially for my book, where my books are like well, we have the same amount of words per game to write about.
This is the assignment.
Every game gets its exact same due.
It's not like one game gets 1,000 words and one game gets 100.
Every game is treated exactly the same.
That's the mission.
And that's a tough pill to swallow for some people, some writers, when they realize that I really have to work at this.
And sometimes the amateurs are better than the pros.
It really comes from your, I guess, your ability not just to write, but the wanting to learn more and to adapt.
Exactly.
The other side of things that I deal with is just getting bills paid.
We're a unique medium.
You've got to decide how many books to print, either do it through a Kickstarter avenue or whatever.
We've got to pay the bills in the magazine and when we print the magazine we're not making a lot of money off of it.
We're covering a couple of advertisements that we've done different deals with and it helps out with stuff.
Paying to put out a magazine in a world that people used to think magazines were cheap and free.
You get a $30 annual subscription to Sports Illustrated.
They send you the free football phone as part of it.
And me trying to get $15 for a magazine and it costing me.
Almost as much as a subscription.
And by the time they get out there I've got to make a dollar or two and pay my small expenses off of a couple of advertisers.
So, I mean, it's a tough toss-up on financial stuff also.
We've looked into and have done and are going to be doing some more in the book area, and I understand what you're dealing with.
You've got to find a niche that maybe someone hasn't covered yet or hasn't been covered well.
I mean, and you were the first one to put out these Nestbooks, but now there's been a dozen other people do something like it.
Now, with your next edition, you're coming up with more of what makes it definitively the best product out there.
Well, there's people on the call here that have also done NES books, so I don't want to say it's the best one.
My NES books are very different in nature than yours.
Yes, they are.
I don't see any competition there at all, honestly.
I feel like we're creating different things.
Yeah, yours are interesting.
I haven't read a lot of them, but yours are a more thoughtful glance at the period in time and everything revolving around the game.
You know, tucked into what the game is about.
It's a more sort of thoughtful approach that I don't have the page space for.
I just don't.
I just don't.
You're doing 600 words or 400 words a book per game?
425 or 650 for the five-star single-page reviews.
Or, as I'm doing, between 1500 and 3000 or 4000 words for a game, depending on the game, and For me it's really about context and explaining, like where does this fit in history and what are you know like the cultural and historical factors that fed into this game?
I mean, you can't talk about, you know, the Zapper light gun without explaining.
In my opinion, you know like.
The, the feedback that the static that was created around realistic depictions of weapons and toys in the 1980s and how parent groups were like this is not good.
This is not cool.
And so suddenly it becomes orange, you know, like that's a big part of the story.
Oh, sure.
Oh, this is an aside, but I remember when they shifted how the toys looked, because I had a toy Uzi that looked like a real Uzi.
So did I, yeah.
Oh, I had water guns at school.
Oh, that would not fly.
And then, once you hit what 1988, it was like okay, they have to be orange and neon, and tips on them.
Megatron's a tank?
What?
I had a cap gun that was die-cast.
It looks really, really realistic.
Oh, yes.
Really nice hefty thing, too.
Could have killed someone with it in other ways.
Master Chief style.
Another thing to bring up is we have limited lengths to deal with, where a YouTuber can just add two minutes to it.
They can just keep on going.
We have a certain amount of space that we can do.
I mean we can keep adding more pages to it, but that adds expense to what's there.
So you got to decide at what point –
Are we getting so deep that this should be a two-part article or it should be a book instead?
A lot of what we do in the magazine is we'll cover – like, for instance, I'm contacting a group that does the TI-99-4A, that old computer that I was into.
And I'd like to do a two-page article on that.
They could probably give me 300 pages of depth.
But I don't want that.
I want the niche.
Someone else put out a book on that.
Great.
But I want what the average person would want to read.
Correct.
And so just to get back to Jeremy's thoughtful approach, which I wish I could do more of.
So, for example, I have the review and I have the reflection section underneath each game, which is more historical background, the legacy of the game.
Why this was important when it came out, but I cannot dedicate nearly as much space to that as I do the review, because that's most, first and foremost, what the Ultimate Nintendo books are.
They are review guides.
It tells you about the games.
So I do wish – so that's one of the challenges in editing is like oh boy, we can talk about Super Mario Brothers in the background, forever in the historical, but we have to cut this off.
We have to – it has to fit on the page.
Another good example of a book done by Limited Run that I absolutely loved, Atari Archive.
That's the exact opposite of –
Like what Pat is doing.
Atari Archive took one game and wrote about everything around it that influenced everything going up to the combat.
Game was tank, was this, was that before it?
And that's a totally different level.
I mean I would – I never need that much detail in what I do.
That's where the handoff is.
To something of that level, it's fantastic.
And I want that next book to come out, by the way.
And I think we can encourage Kevin to do.
I want the next one because I love that.
Kevin Bunch is a legitimate historian and he's really gone into things like researching the FCC to understand how government regulations impacted video game consoles in the 1970s, which was, it turns out, really a massive influence.
It had a huge effect on just the nature of what video game consoles were, and even which ones could come out and kind of slip through the system and became dominant in the market.
It's pretty wild.
But yeah, he is working on the second volume now.
I've given him the green light, so it'll happen.
It's going to be a good one.
It all comes down to what is your goal?
What are you trying to accomplish with this?
Are you trying to educate about one game or a subset of games?
In my case, are you trying to give a historical record of every game that came out in the console?
In one in one sort of like one package or do you want to learn about articles?
I'm sure you have, Ryan, you have themed issues where it's like this.
Usually we learn all about this and that.
And so it's like, what what how will this affect the person reading it?
Like, what are they getting out of this?
And then I guess, in my case, or for books, when someone picks this up 30 years from now, what do they – what I hope they can still remember or want to learn from this in the future?
Like I think unless you know that going into it, it's hard to get the final – version of what you have in mind to to the finish line, like you have to have that always in the back of your head.
Uh, when i'm editing super mario brothers 3 and writing it, i have to give the exact care and detail to that as pictionary, because there might be someone 50 years from now that says to themselves i want to learn about pictionary.
I can't half-ass that just because people don't remember or regard Pictionary in the same way as Super Mario.
That's not my responsibility to make that decision.
It's not.
It's my responsibility to find those games in the library and give them the same amount of due as you want to say the heavy hitters of the console.
It's sort of like making sure they're not forgotten in my head.
We can't forget about these games just because people didn't buy them as much as the popular games.
I take that very seriously.
That is a part of my philosophy, too, is give time to the games that are bad or forgotten.
Because someone worked on these.
Someone played this game as a kid and really loves it, even though it's complete garbage.
And that's fine.
That's valid.
I may not agree.
I may not like The Three Stooges as a property.
Not just a game, but there we go.
I'm not preaching to the choir on this one.
But Nadia, I want to hear from you.
What have your challenges been and what are you out there trying to do?
Your work is very different, I think, in nature than everything else we've been talking about.
Yeah, my book is – I mentioned I started off writing blogs and this book has a very bloggy style.
I think you'll agree with that, Jeremy.
And when I started out – It's like the longest blog I've ever read.
It's very – no, it's like very earnest and from the heart, but also it just like – it segues into new topics very, very fluidly.
Oh, thank you.
I'm very glad to hear that.
Yeah, it's actually an extension of what Pat said earlier.
When I started this project, of course, like every stupid idiot who wants to do a book, I say this is going to be easy.
I'll just write a big blog.
It's not that easy.
I wrote my first draft, and it was good, but it was not cohesive.
You said the book flowed and I'm glad to hear that because you put a lot of work into making that flow.
And to do that, like I had an excellent editor at Retro Game Books.
And to do that you have to be stoic enough or have your heart kind of steal your heart for criticism.
That's what I'm saying.
Because you have to say to yourself okay, this editor is trying to help me, trying to make my product better.
And if an editor is not being like hey, you stupid asshole, you suck, then they usually have at least a good point that you should listen to.
And I think by working with the editors at Retro Games Books, I made the project a lot better.
And, As someone who's been writing for the games industry for a very, very long time, I have crossed paths with copy editors before, like Jason Wilson.
You, Jeremy Parrish?
I'm not a copy editor.
Were you ever a copy editor?
No, it's torment for me.
I hate… hate copy editing.
It's so slow and laborious for me.
It's just not a natural way for me to think.
I'm someone who has to just vomit content out.
I can't bring order to other people's vomit.
It just doesn't work.
That's why I like working with editors.
Order to other people's vomit.
That's kind of a That gave me a mental image.
That's publishing for you.
Yeah.
I have the taste in the back of my throat now.
Thanks.
But editing is a very specific skill.
It is.
Yeah.
And that's why I respect editors, because a lot of the time they're right.
And so I writing something and publishing it is being vulnerable.
Especially in my case, this book is very, as Jeremy said, it's from the heart.
And initially, the book was more based on facts about games.
And my editor said, this is good, but you know what?
I really want to hear about more how these games, what they mean to you.
Because that seems to be where the best content comes from.
So he was very gentle about it, if you know what I mean.
He was like, you know, please understand I'm trying to help you.
You don't have to take any of this advice.
And I'm like, no, man, this is great advice.
Like, as Pat said, I think a lot of people are just kind of resistant to criticism and editing.
And I understand why that's a very, very hard thing to take.
Even when a comment is nice on something that's being edited of mine, I have to kind of like go and be pissed off for a little bit.
I have to like stomp off and pout.
And then I'll go back and say, well, okay, they have a point here and I'll fix that.
Also, I think what's beneficial about me is that I don't want to stop learning how to write.
I always want to change what I'm doing.
I always want to try new things.
I always want to make myself not if not marketable, God knows adaptable.
Like I want.
I've had people tell me that their kids love my work, like the Mega Man books they put out.
And that makes me so happy because that's all I want.
That's.
So ideally what I'd love to do with this book once it's out is tour it around the city maybe.
I have plans already to go to the Toronto Public Library System, which is a great system, and promote it through there, because they have gatherings all the time and meetings for authors and whatnot.
The Toronto Public Library System is very, very good.
I will defend it with my life.
Yeah, that's what I want.
I just want people to remember why they love games.
And in this horrible, horrible world we're living in, I'm really hoping that it'll be warm, without being too twee or shallow.
Yeah.
No, I...
I really feel like being edited is it's difficult.
Like putting your thoughts, your words out there.
And someone is saying, You could have done that better.
That's hard.
Yeah.
But yeah, I feel like I am a good writer because I got harsh feedback throughout my life.
And instead of letting that discourage me and stop me from writing, it kind of pissed me off sometimes.
And I was like, you know what?
I'm going to show you.
I had a teacher in sophomore year.
English in high school and her grading was brutal.
Like she just destroyed.
You know, we would get essays, we'd write essays, the whole class would be assigned it.
She just demolished everyone.
She would give us a content grade and a mechanics grade.
And like in the you know she would never give anyone below a failing grade, like never give anyone a failing grade on content
But the lowest you could get was like 70 out of 100.
But on mechanics, you could get a zero and everyone did.
And over the course of the year you could I think you could kind of track the people who were going to become writers or were going to go into some kind of writing-oriented related vocation, because they were the ones who brought their scores up from zero to 99 100.
And it was hard fought.
And you know, when I got into the press and contributed as a freelancer to EGM and OPM and so forth, Guys like Dan Hsu were not gentle.
I mean, they weren't mean, but they were also very blunt.
Like you're writing in cliches.
Don't do that.
Like never say gaming goodness.
That's trash.
Don't do that.
Like apparently everyone does that at some point.
Everyone turns in an article that says gaming goodness.
And he says, no, never use this phrase.
And there's a lot of those just like.
Lazy cliches and turns of phrase and just – cliche constructions.
And and egm and the other magazines were really good about saying not only like this is not up to snuff, but also like you got to cut this down so that it fits in the space.
Like you yeah, you have to write to the voice of the magazine and every publication has its own voice.
Like If you compare – go back to 1995 and compare Game Fan Magazine to Edge Magazine.
Those are like – Very different.
And you would never mistake one publication's content for the other, because they were just so different.
But there was consistency and not uniformity, but consistency within those publications.
And that's the sign of good editors.
I mean, you can argue if you think game fans editors were good, but they knew their assignment.
They were out there to express themselves and to just voice the joy of loving video games.
And it was messy and chaotic, but it was earnest.
Again, you know, like I said about your work, like it was it was real.
And.
I respect that in hindsight as much as I respect something like Next Generation, which was kind of
Sipping the tea with a pinky out and saying, well – They hated Mega Man Legends.
They hated it.
This game, it's fine.
But imagine if it were in polygons instead of sprites.
And, you know, that was a perspective also.
It's like the Frasier crane of the crowd.
Yes.
Yes, yes.
Thank you.
The only other thing that really hit with me is –
Just recently, with an article I wrote for the issue we're working on right now.
I wrote about my memories of BBSs, Bolton Board Sisters.
Oh, my brother had one.
Okay.
And –
I kind of droned on a bit at the beginning and my editor cleaned it up and said well, we're not going to talk about this part.
It's like, but that's part of my memories.
Yeah, but you kind of went too deep on the memory stuff.
You want people to connect and understand that you're not just a professional writer, which I'm definitely not, but that you're not a writer yourself that just happens to write on video games, versus someone that is a video game fan.
That is a okay writer.
I want to have that perspective.
And he's able, he's able to clean me up.
Jared props to you.
He does great work for me, but I fought him on it.
And he's, and I gave back into him because he is the ultimate um decision maker on content in the magazine, because he can step out of it better than I can.
So, video game publishing, very challenging.
And that's fine.
You know, you need a little friction for it to be worthwhile.
It's just like video games themselves.
But there's good to come out of it too.
In addition to the publications that we create, I feel like in the process of making books, making material about video games, you become smarter about video games.
You learn things.
I'm curious to know.
Where has your perspective shifted?
What have you learned since you started doing this?
When you look back at your older work, what do you look at and think, nope, blew it there?
I think we are a product of the information and resources available to us.
Absolutely.
So I don't think like I messed up.
I definitely made errors.
I'm not talking about like hey, I dropped in the wrong screenshot here, or you know, I'm putting together.
Like you know, in the N64 book there was a couple of assets that were out of place.
That's going to happen.
But in terms of like the actual research and putting your nose to the grindstone, I've learned that –.
What is what the official story is, is often wrong.
And the information out there has not been collected properly or disseminated properly, even officially.
So that was sort of like a weird pill to swallow discovering these things.
And the fact that no one up to that point had really told me that hey, you can't trust these sources out there.
You can't trust, even if it comes from Nintendo or if it comes from these third-party publishers, because they didn't care when it happens.
They didn't care enough to track these things from a historical perspective.
And that was something that to me was sort of like a shock to my system.
Because if I'm trying to record this properly, like who can I count on to give me the proper information?
And then you learn that I have to count on myself and other people that are basically tradesmen, historians because they don't exist.
Video game historians is not like hey, there's a hundred years of people going to universities and studying this.
It's not a thing.
People on this call are part of the first or second waves of gaming historians on here.
And it's something that I'm still sort of like struggling to wrap my mind around and still not sure about a lot of these sort of dates.
We have some resources like Computer Entertainer at the time, which would actually call and track when these things were released.
You can look at board production dates, for example, and realize that, for example, Mega Man –
Mega Man, the first run of Mega Man was produced end of November 87.
That's the board.
That doesn't mean it came out in 87, because there's a time frame in between doing that, putting the box together with this.
Putting it on a freighter to come across the ocean to get sent to Nintendo's warehouse up in Washington State.
And they get disseminated out everywhere.
So it's discovering that no one cared about the history as much as you do working on this.
And that's a strange thing to sort of accept and see.
Yeah, no, I've certainly encountered a lot of those discrepancies.
I mean soccer for NES is a great one, because it's been proven that that was a game available in New York in October 1985 to November 1985.
But Nintendo lists it as a 1987 release.
So I don't know why.
Mock Rider, they list as a launch title, and it was an 86 title.
It's like, if Nintendo doesn't care, and they're putting out False information for decades.
And they're supposed to be the source.
First party is the source.
It's bizarre.
And I don't – I guess I took it for granted.
But thankfully a bunch of us, not just me or other people in the past 10 years, I think before the call, Jeremy and I talked about it.
In the past 10 years about, we've come such a long way in uncovering a lot of these gaps, a lot of these missing or hidden developers, shadow developers on these NES games and others.
It seems like once you get to the 90s, it's a lot more clear on what actually happened.
But the 80s, we still don't know who developed the uncanny X-Men NES game.
Which is probably just as well for those people.
Let them be anonymous.
There used to be, release dates used to be a lot more catch-as-catch-can.
I have a good memory.
Yeah.
I have a vivid memory of – I used to go to an independent store here in Toronto called Independent Gaming or something like that – or Gamerama, sorry.
And when Chrono Trigger came out, I actually called him and said like hey, is Chrono Trigger here yet.
And he's like –
I've got to go to the airport to pick it up now.
You can come over later.
Like that was the kind of thing you got back in the day.
I would say maybe it was Mortal Monday that changed everything.
Suddenly release days became a thing.
What about Sonic Tuesday?
Maybe it was Sonic Tuesday.
I don't think we had that in Canada.
I think we were left out of Sonic Tuesday.
Sonic Tuesday.
But we did have Mortal Monday.
I remember that vividly.
I mean, amongst other things like this is a show and tell time, but one of the things I'm doing for this book is we're doing a lot more of the international releases and like the unlicensed stuff.
And I did not have an expertise in how big the Brazilian NES market was.
Oh, huge.
Yeah.
The Brazilian NES market was probably just as big.
It might have been bigger than the European NES market at the time.
For just the overall number of games released that were official, unofficial and obviously they had so many clone consoles that came out there.
And so, like, for example, I'll give you an example.
Show and tell.
This is a game from Milmar called Millionaire.
That was also a Sachin Asian release in 72 pins.
So it's just discovering that, trying to find out, okay, these Brazilian publishers.
How many of them were pirated?
How many of them were – they had the actual rights to release these legally?
And no one has done research to the extent to do a book to easily say oh, here's a list of the pirated games.
Here's a list of the ones they got the rights to.
Like, for example, Gradiente we know probably got the rights to do something like Stealth Games.
You know they had, they had, they had packing games.
You know for my Ghostbusters, Super Pitfall with, with their Phantom system.
So it's like those are likely licensed releases from the original rights holders.
But the fact that, like we're unsure about a lot of these still, it just makes me realize that there's a lot of gaps that have to be filled in while we're we're doing this sort of work.
I didn't expect it.
The problem is now that a lot of the people that were the first person that did these actual things are getting to that age that they aren't going to be around much longer.
So documenting these first generation of Atari through Nintendo, through Super Nintendo kind of stuff.
You'll have some documents in some warehouse, but the people who made these games aren't going to be around a ton longer.
Sure.
And they remember the stories differently.
We published a big interview with Nolan Bushnell I was thrilled to be able to do from Atari fame.
And on my mailing list of the magazines is Alan Alcorn.
And he said, okay, I want to do the interview.
And we did an interview basically to say his side of the stories that was a little bit different to people.
That were both primary sources.
Everybody knows the Nolan Bushnell versions of the story because he's been out there.
Alan's a little bit quieter reserved, engineer type of guy and he remembers everything differently from Sears, from Andy Capp's tavern with Pong and fixing all the stuff.
We've got to get these stories down.
And paper is stronger than anything else.
Jeremy, as you've told me before, a lot of your prior stuff that was on the interweb disappeared when things happened.
Yeah, that stuff goes away.
And YouTube someday will go away.
Not me.
I'm sticking around forever.
I'm going to be in that Krang robot suit.
Just my brain telling people about video games.
Part of my day job is I do the yearbook.
Remember yearbooks?
I worked on a yearbook, man.
I am the yearbook teacher at the high school, okay?
And I'm having to explain to these kids that TikTok or whatever will probably not be around forever.
20 years from now when you want to show your kids these pictures.
And we're going to have to explain what the six, seven – meme thing was back in the day.
And you're not going to be able to pull up a video because it's not going to be around.
It's going to be the MySpace or the Friendster of 25 years ago.
So get it in paper.
Get it on something solid.
Can you tell a passion about this?
Get it down and get it out there.
And The kids just don't understand.
I'm even trying to connect with their parents, and they're not quite understanding.
It's me that's almost a grandparent level to some of these kids.
That understands that going back to my wife's 35th high school reunion was an absolute blast to look at her yearbook and find people that are there.
In print means it's staying around.
Simple as that.
Absolutely.
So you hope that the people that are entrusted to create these works on paper know what they're doing or at least have the dedication since there's a lot more investment mentally physically, monetarily to putting something in physical paper format that you hope their heart's in the right place to do that.
That's the hope.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Speaking of the future, this is taking us into our final topic for the episode, the final question.
In addition to preserving information for the future, where do you see your work going from here?
What's next on the horizon in terms of publishing for you?
Do you, Do you just want to keep kind of going in the same direction you've been going, or do you have new ambitions that are still kind of being felt out, sounded out?
Who wants to speak first?
I'll cover first.
For me because we have that moving schedule of what is retro.
It's now covering the Wii, the Xbox 360 and PS4.
My problem is going to be when we start moving into the arena of virtual products, of download-only products.
It's going to be tougher for me to do things.
So I could see another 10 or 15 years.
Who knows if I'm going to be doing this 10 or 15 years from now.
But I could see another 10 or 15 years of talking about those types of games.
But how do we get into covering –
All those little games on our phones, all those little games, you know, all the stuff that's out there, all the indie publishing.
So yeah, for me it's just the moving schedule, what's 20 years old and what I consider to be retro.
Yeah, we just published at Limited Run.
It's actually still on the shipment coming in.
But Kurt Kolata and Hardcore Gaming 101 put together a huge book on licensed movie games from the 80s and 90s.
And so many of those are just like a minefield of games that can no longer be played.
They were for, you know, smartphones or they were for Japanese Java phones, feature phones.
Yeah, those are just they're just gone there.
They're like.
They can describe, based on you know some bad YouTube footage, what those games are, but you can't play them and weigh in on them, unless you're very fortunate and find someone who has, you know, still like a working iPhone 3G that has iOS 20 on it.
And those are out there, but do they have the games loaded on them?
Do they still work?
How about Flash games?
Remember the Flash game?
Oh, Flash – I mean, Newgrounds, thankfully, is still around.
I mean they've – Adobe just announced that it was discontinuing support for Flash, and all of those things are going to stop working.
But people are building – uh, frameworks to substitute for that, so that those things will keep going.
But yeah, so many of those games just bubbled away into the ether.
Yeah, there definitely is a desire to preserve.
Um i i ryan, you work with children.
You would know far better than i would, but i feel like kids today have an appreciation for stuff that came from the aughts and the tens.
Um, I think they know they're getting cheated a little bit.
I think they know that there's a tactile world that is gone and there's no reason for that to be the case.
There's no reason why books should go out of fashion.
We've already talked a great deal about why they're beneficial.
For myself, I have published several books.
I mentioned the Mega Man books.
I've done work for Inside Editions.
I have a book called The Gamer's Bar, which is basically it's cocktails and mocktails with a video game theme.
I got away with – yeah, it's from Inside Editions if you want to pick it up.
It's on Amazon and everywhere.
I got away with a cocktail called The Seat of Hojo.
Because we had to have a cocktail based on Sephiroth and my editor was like oh, why don't we do?
I don't know something cliche.
I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And I did that.
My favorite, though, was Cody Travers' Toilet Wine.
And I said, there's no way anyone's going to pass this, but they did.
And I'm like, oh, shit, great.
So go buy that book if you want.
I have some other coming more coming from them.
But what I want to do for myself again is first I want to see how this book is received.
And then I might make a decision from there because I could easily write more books in that style.
But I also want to write fiction.
And I have a lot of great fiction ideas.
I have written fiction in the past on like commissions.
I've done like a couple of books for that, too, but not anything like that's mine again at.
I have like a compilation book that I have some stories in and whatnot.
I just want to do – I've always wanted to write fiction and maybe I'll get there sometime.
Thanks.
I think I agree.
I always – my passion was always writing fiction.
Right, yeah.
Whether it was screenplays I dabbled with.
The Path to NES Punk video series is fiction.
You can argue the merits of some of it, but it's fiction that I enjoy doing.
And then this is nonfiction that while I excel at the process, it's not something.
I wake up every day saying I must work on this guidebook.
Yeah.
I feel like it's a duty.
It's yeoman's work.
It's not something that, you know, like I know other people are enjoying it.
I see them buy the books, but it's not something where, like 20 years from now, I'll want to like talk about with people.
But it has to get done.
Someone has to do it.
With that said.
The new NES book will come out.
The Super Nintendo book did a double print run.
This is great timing, guys.
Late 2019.
I said this would be good enough to do like a year and a half, two years, three years of conventions and, oh boy, a pandemic happened.
But that's almost sold out.
I don't want to think about how much wasted money – an extra storage cost I incurred with that.
Uh, but so so I'll reprint the superintendent book with you know, update the layouts and stuff like that.
And I'll, you know, I'll reedit some of it.
But after that, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure in terms of nonfiction.
Uh two, two members of my team really want to do a game.
Cube guidebook.
And, and, It's doable.
It's about 600 games.
It's not as bad as doing 800 games, but the newer the games are like.
With the N64 book I said well, it's half the games of Super Nintendo.
It should take half the time.
Oh, no, because the games are more complex and are harder to learn and get through.
And so –
I said to the two editors if I work on a GameCube book, I really honestly I cannot work on it day to day in project manage.
I've done three of these.
Well, now four over 10 years.
They take three years each.
But on average, I just want to be the CEO, show up at a meeting and just guide you.
I just don't have it in me probably to do the same amount of work on a GameCube book.
I just don't with all the other stuff going on.
But we'll see.
Never say never.
People ask me, Pat, why don't you do a Game Boy book?
And I say, well, that's a lot of games, first and foremost.
Second, there's not nearly as much nostalgia for Game Boy as other consoles.
And so you have to – of course, unfortunately you have to factor in what's the monetary outcome of this investing a lot of money and three to four years of your life only to see nobody buy it.
It's a tough pill to swallow when you're self-publishing.
I agree.
I think you need to go Virtual Boy.
I heard something about Virtual Boy.
I think someone took care of that.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, there was one book.
What does it start out as?
April Fool's joke, if I remember correctly, by somebody.
Are you kidding?
I can't tell if you're kidding.
No, it started out as an April Fool's joke and then someone called him on it.
I think someone made a Virtual Boy book.
Yeah, I did.
But it wasn't an April Fool's joke.
Oh, whoops.
Okay, never mind.
I tried to help you with that.
That's not the book I was thinking about.
I forgot if I told you, Jeremy, I was in touch with the pro wrestler Kenny Omega.
Oh, hey, really?
Because when he used to be at New Japan Pro Wrestling, he thought he might have access to the finished but unreleased New Japan Pro Wrestling Virtual Boy game.
Oh, shit, really?
I couldn't get at it.
So someone has some prototype or something of that.
It just has, we, you know, anyway, didn't have that one's probably not showing up on an SO.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want to, I want to bring Kenny Omega on my podcast.
I want to talk RPGs with him.
There you go.
He's a huge gamer.
Yeah, he is.
Uh, yeah.
So anyway, video games and video game books.
What a glorious world.
Um, I think we'll, uh, we'll wrap it up here.
I don't need to talk about what I'm doing in the future, because I I like you, can't stop me from making video game books.
I love it.
It's what I love doing.
So it's just what I'm going to keep doing, but it's been great having all of you on here and bringing very different perspectives on things and lots of experience.
Um, So yeah, that's this year's referendum on video game books.
There's a lot of video game books being made these days.
So I'm sure we'll keep revisiting this topic with lots of different people and getting lots of different perspectives.
But this was a great little –
Great little convention of folks talking and sharing their thoughts on things.
I had fun.
I will wrap now and tell people that we appreciate their support of Retronauts and for listening to the show.
If you enjoyed it, you can go to Patreon and subscribe, patreon.com slash retronauts.
By subscribing, you make sure that this podcast continues happening.
It is supported through almost entirely through user subscriptions on Patreon.
So that's awesome.
Patreon.com slash RetroNuts.
That's the pitch.
Lots of good stuff there.
Check it out.
You'll love it, I promise.
Now everyone else can tell us where we can find your work.
Pat, do you want to kick things off?
Where can we find your books, etc.?
Sure.
Thanks so much for having me on.
I feel like it was overdue, but I'd love to come back.
UltimateNintendocom is where you can not just order the N64 book or Super Nintendo book.
You can also pre-order the new NES book or you can wait for the Kickstarter on that.
That'll probably be later in the year.
I also do a Goofy podcast and other stuff that you can search up if you want.
Ryan, what about you?
Old School Gamer magazine, OldSchoolGamer.com.
We are the only North American multi-format retro gaming magazine.
We have fun doing it.
And check out OldSchoolGamer.com slash Retronauts so I know that you heard about me from here.
Nadia – oh, you.
We know you.
You know me.
You can't get rid of me.
I'm irrepressible.
I'm Nadia Oxford.
I also do the Acts of the Blood God, which is a RPG series, a podcast about RPGs, old and new Eastern, old and new, Eastern and Western.
Uh, hopefully you will see my book soon and I hope you will buy it and I hope you will enjoy it.
Please tell me what you think.
I'm on blue sky at Nadia Oxford.
Uh, you can find me.
I never go away.
And you can find me, Jeremy Parrish on blue sky as Jay Parrish.
You can find me, you know, all the usual places online.
You can also buy my most recent book, which I have very, very deliberately did not talk about.
So this wouldn't seem like a me podcast, but Metroidvania, the history of Metroidvania, decade one, available at all fine bookstores through Patreon.
Limited Run and Dark Horse.
It's a collaboration.
It's very cool.
If you go to a bookstore and they don't have it, they are not a fine bookstore and you need to tell them to get their act together.
Special order it.
You can also just get it online.
It's available there, too.
But it's a Hopefully the first of like three Metroidvania history books that I will publish decade by decade.
Assuming that anyone actually picks this one up and their you know dark horse says this is worth doing more of.
If not well, I guess you'll just have YouTube or you know, publish pamphlets or something and hand them out at events.
Anyway, this.
This has been retronauts.
You have been listening to retronauts.
Thank you everyone for joining us.
Uh, Pat, Ryan and Nadia.
Thank you everyone for listening.
I can't name all of you, but there's thousands of you.
So thank you.
Good night.
Thank you.
