Digital book release: Game Boy Works Vol. I

After months of revisions and additions, the next Video Works companion book has arrived! And it is… a reissue. Sort of.

Game Boy Works Vol. I encompasses almost all of the content of Game Boy World 1989 and Game Boy World 1990 Pt. 1, so you may have read most of this material already. However, this book has been greatly improved over the older versions. The printed edition will be another high-quality hardcover edition from Fangamer (those of you at the print tier will be receiving it over the summer along with Game Boy Works Vol. II, which is about eight entries away from being text-complete). 

It's not just the printing and binding that have improved, though! I've revised each and every entry in this volume (that's more than 60 games' worth) to bring the text up to date, fix grammatical errors, and generally tighten the writing. On top of that, I've created a huge amount of additional supplemental content in the form of sidebars and other box-outs. Nearly every game is accompanied by more screenshots than before, the layouts are more standardized, and I reshot photos of every single 1989 game to bring those photos up to spec.

Oh, and the book is now full of macro photos of games running on colored, biverted, original Game Boy screens. For a little of that better-than-you-remember it retro hyper-fidelity. I even managed to get my systems modded screens whose colors match the layout schemes, for an extra touch of class.

There are two games missing here that were in the original editions — Pipe Dream and Spider-man. I cut those for reasons of length, as the folio structure of the books meant I had to get everything into a page count multiple of 32… but as it happens, this also means the book covers everything through the end of June 1990, and Vol. II will begin with July 1990. 

Anyway, this is the first of three books that you'll be seeing throughout the year. I expect to have Game Boy Works Vol. II complete in July, and Super NES Works Vol. I should ship in time for the holidays. So even though this is a reprise of older material, you'll still be getting two all-new volumes of material in 2018! Still, I wanted to put this book together before those, because I feel the Game Boy retrospectives deserve to be treated with the same love as the NES books. The early Game Boy videos and books were learning experiences for me on my journey to professional-quality production, and these games shouldn't be neglected just because they had the bad luck to be my training wheels.

Finally, I won't be submitting this book for printing for a few weeks, so… if you happen to spot any errors, typos, or weird visual glitches, please let me know! 

Thanks as always for your support, and please enjoy the book.