I recently stumbled upon Bitmap Books, a book publisher based in England with an growing portfolio of beautifully niche books on videogames. I purchased Go Straight: The Ultimate Guide to Side-Scrolling Beat-‘Em-Ups, their latest release that is all about one of my all-time favorite genres — the side-scrolling brawler. They have many other books that sound just as interesting, and I reached out to them to see if I might obtain some for review. I’m humbled and pleased to say that they responded with prompt kindness, sending me three books.
The first book of the three that I have read is all about games that were never released. Written by Frank Gasking, The Games That Weren’t is a fascinating book covering over eighty games, over the span of about forty years, that never saw the light of day. On the contrary, these days, with so many platforms (if you count online/mobile), games are released almost daily (even if the vast majority of them are forgettable at best). And we all know how much press the bigger releases get as they get closer to launch — marketing from every angle, various launch editions — it’s an endless cycle, with always the next big thing around the corner, and it can be pretty exhausting and often underwhelming. Anyway, years ago, I learned to enjoy the niche, the less-hyped-about, the more passionate things in gaming, be it rarer, older hardware, or games. In fact, most of my favorites are things that largely went under the common radar. Well, there’s no getting further under the radar than never being released at all, which is what made The Games That Weren’t such an interesting read.
Let’s cover some of the quantifiable facts. The books dimensions are reminiscent of some of my favorite textbooks from college. It’s 6.7″ wide, and 8.2″ tall, with 644 pages (including Foreword, Table of Contents, Contribution and Thanks, and a Glossary). The physical quality of the book is superb, and I find this to be the case with all four of the Bitmap Books I have now. The quality of these is special; I wouldn’t know the terminology specifically without a little help, so I will borrow this description directly from the source: “edge-to-edge high quality lithographic print with special fluorescent ink throughout. Sewn binding for enduring quality and the ability to lay flat for ideal double-page image viewing. Coloured bookmark ribbon.” These are premium features for a book that’s endeavoring to be, and succeeding at in my view, the go-to choice for the topic at hand. In other words, the content of the book is top notch, and the Bitmap set out to make the physical book top notch as well, from the inks to the binding to the handy bookmark ribbon that matches the theme of the book.
Before getting into the content of the book, I want to make special mention of the way these books are shipped. First, upon ordering, buyers get a high quality PDF file emailed to them. It’s a secure PDF file watermarked with your email address on every page, and it’s also set to disallow editing and printing, too. The resolution of the PDF is outstanding. Having a digital copy of your Bitmap library is a wonderful thing to keep with you on the go because I can totally see needing to reference it during the course of conversation or research. Plus, I have seen a trend on some of Bitmap books whereby if you have previously bought the book, and they have a new edition, you get to have the PDF of the newest edition for free to supplement your (older) edition book. Very cool.
Tracking updates via email and text from DHL made it clear when my book(s) were arriving, which is always appreciated. In contrast, I recently ordered an elliptical machine and the tracking process on that was terrible — it came over ten days later than expected and seemed to be stuck in delivery-land multiple times, but I digress. Upon receiving the books, I was pleased with the quality of the packaging, which features a fun, generic eight bit artwork design and the Bitmap logo. The outer box has a “tear here to open” perforated line, so you can leave all the scissors and knives aside. Inside of this outer layer then comes another protective layer, coupled with these blue hard foam corners since no one likes creases on the corners of their books. A soft plastic-y wrap covers the book itself, which has that unmistakable new book smell.
All that said and the packaging done away with, I was ready to jump into Gasking’s book about all of these potential gem titles that never made it. The reasons are numerous, and in the opening pages, two pages are dedicated to a partial, big print list — development issues, publisher changed mind, hardware failures, legal problems, company buyout — and many more reasons like that are at the crux of many games’ demise. Although the crux reason for a game’s failure could have been a way to divide the book up into sections, I rather liked how Frank instead went by chunks of time, beginning all the way back with 1975. Five total sections are included: 1975-1979, 1980-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-2009, and 2010-2015.
Reading about these games that failed to launch proves to simultaneously to be a history lesson that is bigger than just the game itself. By that I mean that the reason for a game’s failure is often tied to the state of the industry at the time, especially in those formative years, such as during the early 80s. One of my favorite long-form articles in the book is about Dark Tower, a game that was due out on the Vectrex and based on a popular board game. This game was almost entirely a solo effort by John Hall, who spent sixteen-plus hour days holed up in his home in the mountains of San Bernardino working on the game, only to find out later that Milton Bradley had bought the Vectrex from General Consumer Electronics. There’s a lot more to this tale that I won’t spoil, but suffice it to say that reading about Dark Tower, which I previously had zero knowledge of, and seeing a couple of screenshots of it, was one of my favorite parts of the whole book.
Each game that Frank covers, of which there are over eighty, is addressed in similar format as far as you get the name of the game, the year and platform(s) it was intended for, and whether or not it’s available to play. You have to read the article (some of which are very short while others, often including developer interviews, are thousands of words long) to find out the exact reason(s) as to why the game never made it. It might surprise you, as it did me, that not all of these eighty-plus titles are gone forever — many of them are actually available to play today thanks to the passionate work of videogame preservationists. Like digital archaeologists, the preservationists go to great lengths to save videogames, even (or especially) the unfinished, unknown, unloved ones. Every so often, you hear a story about someone who bought an old devkit on eBay, only to find a half finished, never released version of Castlevania on the Dreamcast or something, and that stuff for a guy like me is just really fascinating. Anyway, thanks to preservation efforts and tools like emulation, this history can be accounted for, appreciated, and passed down, and I think that’s a really neat thing.
Sometimes, though, games aren’t available at all, like Captain Seahawk, which was being made by Atari for the arcades in 1978. This was the ultra rare case of a console title being the inspiration, or port really, for an arcade release. Lead developer Mike Albaugh notes that “I may have a diazo print of the top of the bezel art, which might have been used on the test unit, but I haven’t seen it in years. I also haven’t run across any code, graphics, or source,” but indications are that the search is not over. Another example is Lethal Weapon, a game intended for the Sega Master system in 1992 that was to coincide with the release of the third movie. All of the contents of this game were held at Ocean Software, but to date, no one has turned up any material on it. It’s not just the older games that are sometimes still unplayable, either. For example, 2015’s Human Element, intended for release on the Ouya, PC, as well as Xbox One and PS4, is still unplayable as the the developers Robotoki closed their doors.
I could go on — but the real enjoyment of this book is not reading my take, but picking it up for yourself. Clearly, I found The Games That Weren’t to be an awesome slice of gaming history. I found the quality of the Bitmap Books experience — from time of order to receipt, to unpacking, to the digital PDF copy, to the workmanship of the book, to the content of the book, to all be top tier. On top of that, the price is very reasonable as well, with most of their books priced at under $50 before shipping. Check’em out.
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