Book launch teaser video!

The 50 Years of Text Games book is launching its crowdfunding campaign next week. Here’s a little teaser of the promo video:

Yep, that’s good old Bebas Neue, which has kind of becoming the brand identified for the book version. Picking fonts for this has been interesting: go retro and you risk diminishing the message that these games are still being made and innovating, go elegant or classical and you risk losing the digital feel; too futuristic also feels wrong. I really like this font’s mixture of bold certainty, elegant curves, and timeless design.

You’ll hear about it here, but I’d still appreciate it if you could sign up to be notified by Kickstarter when the project goes live, which helps their algorithms and other people see the momentum and enthusiasm for this project. (If you’re anti-Kickstarter, which I totally get, there’s some info in my previous post about other ways to support the project.)

More news

• I made a (very short) post yesterday about how I created a reproduction of some of the earliest digital text ever shown on a screen, for the book’s chapter on the pre-1971 history of text games.

  

• You saw a glimpse of it in my post last week, but I did an official cover reveal for the hardback on social media:

  

• I appeared on the Advent of Computing podcast to talk about the project and early computer game history, and also on Brophisticate to chat about Inform and the 1980s era of interactive fiction. Both were great conversations.

The campaign will launch next week! I’m very excited and more than a little nervous. There will be some more fun surprises coming out over the course of the month, both about the campaign and new game history content, so stay tuned! Excited to see how far we can get the word to spread.