By Nate Crowley

Solaris, out now

A rather different look at the history of computer games

My first memory of computer games is being run over. Horace Goes Skiing involved taking a… I’m going to go with protozoa, called Horace across a motorway. One, presumably, in the Alps, given your objective was to cross the road, get some skis, cross the road again, ski and die.

It was by all weights and measures a terrible game. I still miss it. And Chucky Egg. And Chucky Egg 2. And Chucky Egg: Hen Ragnarok. And Operation: Wolf, which I once managed to get through three levels of without killing a single person. Oh! And the Spectrum light gun! And parallax scrolling! And Lara Croft dying over and over on that BLOODY opening level of Tomb Raider 3.

My point is this: computer games are brilliant, even when they aren’t.

And, as Nate Crowley points out, they’re brilliant when they aren’t real too.

Growing out of a magnificently vast twitter thread, this collection of fake games from one of the best horror authors in the field, is hilarious. Actual honest to God, Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalogue level magnificent.

Nate tracks the evolution of computer games from those early Horace Goes Skiing days through to modern consoles. He does this in a manner which is both absolutely straight faced and utterly, relentlessly funny. Better still, he does this in continuity. Game studios rise and fall, entire franchises are referenced in passing. A weirder, funnier computer games ecology springs to life before your eyes and you want to play all of it. Especially Jaguar Exsanguination Tycoon.

And this thing is full of gems. Kabage, and the controversy of the ‘adversary’ that appears in some versions of it is magnificent. Regency Ogre Duelist gives Regency English literature the ogres punching each other it desperately needs. And Sally Longnose balances legal procedurals with Sting, Zootopia and the aching realization that I can’t play it for real.

But there’s actually a bigger service Nate does here than create a better, fictional history of computer gaming. This is a book about joy. The joy of cracking open a new game, of beating a level, of plummeting to your death as a red cabbage screams at you. And beneath that, it’s a book about everything that makes geek culture lovely. The joy of shared experience, the things we make out of the things we know.

Fun.

And God knows, at the end of this miserable, misbegotten excuse of a year, we need that.

Verdict: This is one of the best books I’ve read this year, created by one of the best people I know. It reminded me that there is joy in the assembly of knowledge, of jokes that are based in shared experience and most of all, that computer games are brilliant. I can’t think of a better recommendation than that.

Aside from fish punching, obvs.

Alasdair Stuart