Video game book and documentary interviews

At a glance, House House’s 2019 honking sensation Untitled Goose Game may not seem like the most obvious choice to write a book about. The game — essentially a stealth game where your job is to cause trouble — was a viral hit, but isn’t filled with extensive lore or complex mechanics that beg to be broken down over the course of hundreds of pages. So when Boss Fight Books announced a Goose Game book, I was curious to see what approach it would take.

As it turned out, not only there was a fascinating behind-the-scenes story, but the game ended up being a perfect entry point to talk about developer House House and the broader Australian game development community — which has struggled to make a name for itself over the years.

Most video game art books follow a certain template: Load up on concept art, show how the game evolved during production, add some commentary to connect the dots. Some lean more heavily on a studio’s history and others focus on technique, but it’s a proven formula that, in the best cases, has produced books that are themselves works of art.

I’ve been especially impressed by Thatgamecompany’s books over the years, though, because of what they’ve added to that template. Starting with The Art of Journey in 2012 and following with The Art of Sky in 2024, the studio has checked all the boxes you’d expect from an art book, then layered on custom interactive extras.

Back in 2021, Philip Summers launched a Kickstarter campaign for Hand-Drawn Game Guides, a series of books that resembled traditional strategy guides, apart from the fact that they were all illustrated by Summers. The campaign was a hit, generating over $300,000 in pledges, but like a number of fan projects utilizing game company IPs, it was pulled before the countdown ended.

He ended up changing plans due to legal concerns, going on to work on other projects and releasing the planned guides from the campaign as free downloads. From the outside, that seemed like the new path for Hand-Drawn Game Guides.

When you’ve devoted years of your life to covering Street Fighter 2 history, it’s nice knowing you’re not alone. So when I heard about the documentary Here Comes a New Challenger a few years ago, I was excited to see another take on the greatest game of all time.

Now available for free on Tubi, the movie takes a broad look at the game and its impact, featuring former Capcom staff such as Yoshiki Okamoto and Yoko Shimomura as well as those who were involved in the game’s broader cultural footprint, like Steven E. de Souza (who directed the 1994 live-action movie), Paul Davies (who wrote about the game in the media), and Mick McGinty (who drew the game’s Western box art).

History is told by the winners, the saying goes, and that’s certainly been true with English-language coverage of the video game industry. Want coverage of the NES and PlayStation? That’s easy to find. Want coverage of the Zemmix and Dendy? Were you even aware they existed?

Lewis Packwood’s book Curious Video Game Machines was written to fill in some of those gaps. Structured around game consoles and hardware that never got much attention in the West the first time around, the book is an exhaustively researched look at a world that has largely been unexplored — either in English, or at all.

In February, Housemarque closed out Sony’s State of Play presentation with a trailer for its next game, Saros, a big new original game that builds on what the studio made with 2021’s Returnal, generating plenty of excitement and positioning the team as one of Sony’s premier first-party studios.

Years before any of that kicked off, though, Housemarque was a small, independent team working on arcade-style shooters like Resogun, Dead Nation, and Matterfall. During the production of one of those, 2017’s Nex Machina, the studio let a documentary team in to film the process.

Julian “Jaz” Rignall has been playing games for nearly 50 years, and writing about them for most of those. The former competitive arcade game player and Mean Machines editor has seen the games industry morph through more generations than are easy to count, and now he’s written a book about it.

The Games of a Lifetime is part memoir, part archive, and a generally fascinating look at gaming history through the eyes of someone who was there for most of it, cherry-picking some of his favorite memories and telling stories about his experiences that are broadly relatable to anyone who played these games.