Game Boy World 1990 Vol. 1 preview! (Patreon)

Hi everyone, I'm happy to announce that I completed the initial layout and text placement for Game Boy World 1990 Vol. 1 over the weekend. I still need to give the a second round of text revisions, extensions, and sidebars, followed by a proper copy edit... but all the images are placed and text has undergone initial adaptation from video to print. It's looking pretty fantastic, I have to say. So I'm sharing a short preview here of the book's first 17 pages, which includes one of the new sidebars.

The final page count comes to 236, which is almost exactly the midpoint in terms of length between GBW89 and Good Nintentions... which brings the price to almost exactly the midpoint between them as well (looks like $38 color, $16 B&W). Of course, those of you who back this campaign at the book level don't need to worry about such nonsense; you will be receiving a copy in the mail next month. PDF-level backers can expect your edition of the book by the end of April.

I'm afraid I will be breaking some hearts with this book, though; I went with the larger edition size (8x10") despite more votes to keep it consistent with GBW89. I agree that consistency on the bookshelf is important, and my initial instinct was to print at the smaller size... but ultimately, I realized the larger size better benefits all the original photography and screen captures that adorn nearly every page of the book. This is ultimately about preserving and presenting an overlooked slice of game history, and in the end I felt I could do that best by giving the content a little more room to breathe. 

The unfortunate reality of GBW89 is that it was a bit of a learning exercise. It initially began life as a landscape-format book, but very few of those editions were ever published since I immediately switched over to Amazon's print-on-demand service, which doesn't offer a decently sized landscape option. It's a shame, because GBW is really well-suited to a horizontal page layout... but we work with the cards we're dealt, and Amazon's service is vastly more affordable, and accessible, than Blurb was. Just as the early GBW89 videos seem REALLY rough in retrospect, the book does too. 

That said, I'm as anal-retentive as any of you, and having a smaller GBW89 on the shelf is really going to bug me. At some point this year, I'm probably going to revise that book yet again and resize it to match the other books. I'll be happy to offer any of  patrons who own GBW89 a copy of the resized edition for cost + shipping  — that will probably be about 1/2 the Amazon list price. It's not a perfect solution, and ideally I'd just give it away for free, but I'm afraid living on a game journalist salary makes that impossible. Sorry about that!

Anyway, enjoy this warts-and-all first look at GBW 1990 Vol. 1