Fusion Retro Books is proud to announce the re-publishing of The Book of the Game of the Film, a book that enjoyed a small print run a few years back and sold out instantly. We have added a new cover, dusted off some of the cobwebs, and generally improved here and there. The book is hardback and coming in at 306 pages.
Hardbarck - 306 pages, A5 Landscape
From Jerry, the book's author:
You may wonder why anybody would want to spend almost three years writing a 150,000-word apology for one of the most frowned-upon and exploitative trends of the electronic gaming industry’s formative decade. “Film tie-ins were rubbish!”, you shriek, painful memories of Cobra on the Commodore 64 freezing your blood, the despair at wasting your hard-earned pocket money on yet another officially licensed letdown feeling as real today as it did almost forty years ago. Bear with me though, for while some undeniably awful film adaptations were released in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, the chaff-to-wheat ratio was probably no different from that for original game concepts, and in amongst the Highlanders and Howard the Ducks were some outright licensed gems; Aliens, Ghostbusters, Batman: The Movie, The Untouchables, Labyrinth and Platoon, to name but half a dozen.
Well over a hundred films — most, but by no means all, of the ‘80s — found themselves reimagined as interactive experiences for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Apple II, BBC Micro and other home micros of the day, and The Book of the Game of the Film is my forgiving celebration of these titles. The story does not end at film licences alone though, which is why you will also find in the pages that follow analyses of games based on television programmes, high-street brands, sports stars and events, pop groups, comic-strip heroes, novels, and traditional board games. The result, I hope, will be two-fold; fellow retro-gaming geeks will delight in a nostalgic dip into an ocean of vintage programs — some unforgettable, others perhaps best forgotten — while a broader readership can enjoy revisiting hundreds of highlights from which the cultural landscape of their youth was composed. A few rules have been applied with reasonable rigidity in deciding which games to cover, and how. Crucially, all titles selected must have been released for 8-bit home computers; those that appeared only on an 8-bit console — such as the Nintendo Entertainment System — but not on a home micro did not qualify. Each film, programme, comic or what have you has been allocated one page, even if more than one adaptation of that property existed; for example, WarGames has a page to itself, whereas the two unrelated Gremlins adaptations have been asked to share. As this is nominally a book on games about films, I have tried to ensure that every single such release has been included, although I am bracing myself for being informed by keen- eyed readers within a week of the finished books being dispatched that I have made at least one glaring omission — for this I apologise in advance.
- Jerry Ellis
