Monday, March 28, 2011

HG101 Presents: The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures

So, in the past I've made passing references to a book I've been working on, putting out calls for submissions and sticking up a placeholder page. Well, after two and a half years of work, we're putting the finishing touches on HG101 Presents: The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures. It's an ode to one of the oldest genres in electronic gaming. It is over 760 pages in length, covers nearly 300 games and includes a number of interviews with classic game developers. It is an expansive tome, jam packed to the brim with history, criticism, and trivia. If you've ever asked the question "If I like LucasArts and Sierra games, what other games should I play?", then this book should be your bible.






As of current planning, the book should be available by late April. The physical copy will cost $27 from Amazon (and qualifies for free super saver shipping), while an e-book for the Kindle will cost about $10. For right now, the physical copy is only technically available on the US Amazon site due to constraints with Createspace, the print-on-demand publisher I'm using, though copies tend to filter to international sites like Amazon UK over the course of a few weeks. The Amazon US site should ship overseas, though.

Please check out the HG101 Presents: The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures page for a full table of contents, as well as some history behind the project, what our goals were, what it entails and why the coverage was shifting towards adventure games (and PC titles) for quite a while. Hopefully this will be first in a series of gigantic catalogs of retro gaming! Here is a sample PDF of roughly 30 pages or so.

10 comments:

  1. Can't wait to order this, I plan to the very moment it is available!

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  2. This may be a silly question, but do any profits got support the site functioning, or just covering the cost of production and maybe another book?

    This wouldn't normally be something I'm interested in, but If it directly helps out the site, I may pick it up.

    Also, please do some articles on how this was made. What software was used, the publishing and editing process, how games were chosen... The works.

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  3. Towards the production of the book and any future projects. Right now I'm planning something similar but for Konami games, but I'd also like to do smaller books focused on singular series, but in color.

    The page on the site talks about the selection criteria. Once it's been out for a bit I'll probably write a bit about the production process. In brief, for software, the layout isn't anything fancy so we just used MS Word, and we're using Createspace for the POD vendor.

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  4. is the book just words or are there lotsa pictures (in colour?)

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  5. And for morale and motivation we're mainly using beatings and reduced food servings.

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  6. Tons of pictures - a box shot and at least one screenshot per game (two or three, depending on the length) but it's all B&W. Color printing is still expensive - anything over 150 pages because price prohibitive.

    You can find some sample pages here:

    http://hg101.kontek.net/book/03-29-11_draft.pdf

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  7. sooooo are article that are in the book but aren't on the site ever going to get posted on the site?

    also i'm really curious but what's the name of the game featuring the green banana samurai fighting banana monsters?

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  8. The larger ones (Zork, King's Quest) definitely will be posted on the site at some point. The game with the bananas is the Japanese text adventure version of Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, which will also probably make it up eventually. I'm undecided on the rest, but a significant chunk that's not already posted will probably stay exclusive to the book.

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  9. i tought princess tomato in the salad kingdom was a nes game? is that an obscure msx version or something like that?

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  10. It was originally a text adventure for various Japanese home computers. It was later ported to the Famicom and drastically overhauled (including a menu-based interface), and translated into English, which is how we know it.

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