J 14

Back in 2013, video game journalist and historian John Szczepaniak embarked on a crowdfunded adventure to chart the hitherto untold stories of the Japanese game development community. He flew out to Japan and spoke to some of the unsung heroes of the gaming world - as well as few true legends, such as Henk Rogers and Yuzo Koshiro.

Szczepaniak's interviews would form the basis of a three-volume series of books, all of which we were happy to include in our round-up of the best gaming books money can buy - they're that good. Packed with anecdotes and amazing stories, they're utterly essential reading, so you can imagine how upset we were when we heard from Szczepaniak himself that the company he uses to publish them was shutting up shop and they would soon be going out of print; because of the amount of Japanese text involved, switching to another print-on-demand publisher sadly wasn't an option.

Thankfully, UK publisher Read-Only Memory has come to the rescue and is pulling all three volumes into an edited version named Japansoft: An Oral History. The follow-up to Britsoft: An Oral History, this revised edition will use Szczepaniak's original work as its basis, but will include new content, unseen photos and a host of original illustrations by Yu Nagaba. The new interviews include Dylan Cuthbert, Manami Matsumae and Keiji Yamagishi, and the book will be edited by Alex Wiltshire, formerly of EDGE magazine.

Japansoft is currently up on crowdfunding platform Volume, and has raised £4,000 of its £15,000 goal at the time of writing. There are 48 days remaining, so if you'd like to see this book make it into production, make sure you pledge some cash.

In the meantime, if you already own the original three volumes of Szczepaniak's masterpiece, consider yourself very lucky - we imagine they will only increase in value as the years roll by.

This article was originally published by nintendolife.com on Fri 19th October, 2018.

[source vol.co]