On his inspiration behind the
book
For nine years, I’ve been running an entertainment website,
reviewfi x.com where I review video games, comic books and music
so I’m constantly getting stuff to review. I got this book by Brett
Weiss and it was The 100 Best Video Games 1977-1987. I wrote the
review and I ended up buying about 20 games that were in the book.
It was written in a geeky and fun way and it made me want to go
out and get more of those games. I have about 2,000 video games so
I have a pretty extensive video game collection but seeing some of
these games I didn’t know existed was awesome. I never really read
a video game book like that. I’ve always read opinion-based books
and this was like little snippets on history of the games.
I’m not really interested in reading a book with someone else’s
opinion. I want to read something that is based in fact.
There aren’t many video game books out there. There are a few
good ones, but not one that tells the stories of games that we grew
up playing.
If you’re in your 30s, you’re in a pretty cool place. You grew up at
the end of the Atari 2600 era and you probably started playing the
NES and as you got a little bit older, you played Super Nintendo, then
there was the 32 bit era and you matured during the PS2 and PS3 era
and now you’re an adult, probably married, with kids with a PS4, so
we’ve kind of seen it all.
I wanted to write a book that kind of had games from every genre
and console from the early ‘80s to now and allow the developers
to tell their story.
Brett Weiss played an infl uential role. He wrote the
forward in my book, also having ready video game books
and being a gamer for so long. When you’re a college
professor, you work four days a week and can
support a family. So you have a lot of time to
do other stuff and a lot of college professors
don’t. I make sure I do more in those three
days than most people can do.
On a greater demand
for retro gaming
During the course of writing this book, Atari
announced the Atari Box and the NES classic was released.
People want to learn about them and want to read about
them.
There are people I know now that are in their 50s and 60s who
look at me and ask you’re writing a book about video games? Why?
They think it’s still kid stuff .
I told them 30 years ago, you wanted to write a book about Bob
Dylan and everyone was like who is going to care about Bob Dylan
decades later or you wanted to write a book about “Casablanca”
and everyone thought you were crazy.
Video games are one of the most important art forms in the
world and 30-40 years from now, they’ll probably still be the most
Courtesy of McFarland
Cover The Mind Behind Games:
Interviews with Cult and Classic Video Game Developers
important. It’s going to continue to develop so I think that gamers
are a lot smarter than a lot of people think. I think they’re hungry for
knowledge.
What is in the book
There are 36 games featured in the book and I interviewed over 50
developers. I asked every developer the same question, which was
Courtesy of Patrick Hickey
Patrick Hickey
Courtesy of Patrick Hickey
Patrick Hickey
Courtesy of Patrick Hickey
Patrick Hickey with fans
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