The CRPG Book – OUT NOW!

gallery.mailchimp.com/1bf8b4af68dd8655830957188/images/cb2e6004-5b38-4608-8de6-9be5e6462743.jpg

We're very proud to announce that The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games is now available to purchase. After a very successful pre-order period, we decided to reprint the Standard Edition to give more people the chance to own this amazing book.

Spread over more than 500 pages, The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games reviews over 400 seminal games from 1975 to 2015, covering the role-playing classics we all know and love such as Ultima, Wizardry, Fallout and Mass Effect – all brought to life with vibrant and engaging in-game images. Each entry also shares articles on the genre, mod suggestions and hints on how to run the games on modern hardware. The book is completely by written by fans, AAA developers, indies, journalists, modders and industry personalities such as Chris Avellone, Ian Frazier, Scorpia, Ferhegón, Richard Cobbett, Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green, Durante, George Weidman and Tim Cain, to name but a few.

We also have a small amount of the sought after Collector's Edition available. These are priced at £49.99, which includes the A4 Dungeon Map Pad, Postcard Pack, A2 Poster and Pencil. We also have a small amount of the Collector's Edition which don't include any goodies, which are priced at £39.99.

Available now with global tracked shipping.

I think it's time to begin working on the updated version of the book. So here we go.

First, I want it to cover games up to 2019, so we need to add games from 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Here's a tentative list:

2016
Darkest Dungeon
Tyranny
Kim
Steve Jackson's Sorcery

2017
Battle Brothers
Prey
Expeditions: Vikings / Conquistador
NieR
ELEX
SpellForce III / series
Slay the Spire
Torment: Tides of Numanuma
West of Loathing
Grimoire
Mass Effect: Andromeda

2018
Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Pillars 2
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Kenshi
ATOM
Star Traders: Frontiers
Battletech
Bard's Tale 4
Cultist Simulator
Dragon Quest XI
Monster Hunter: World
The Council
Vampyr
Gujian 3

2019
Outward
Greedfall
The Outer Worlds
Stygian
Disco Elysium
Slay the Spire
A Legionary's Life

Other goals would be to add old games I missed/didn't have time, like Elvira, SpellForce, Black Crypt, Dragon Wars, Unreal World, BattleTech and Buck Rogers.

We must also update current reviews with new info, like Wasteland Remaster or the new Titan Quest expansion, for example. Might be good to double-check some mods too. Some reviews might be worth to re-write or re-edit entirely.

Finally, I really want to add that section about old computer platforms. Not having it in the original release is my biggest regret, hope to deliver it this time.

I'm still working out the details, but if you want to help with any of this, even if it's just some suggestions, please tell me!

Made an excel file with the game list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EesmyPbsVzEkSwoNOmvqCs2w9V89lyiP0lL3XurZG_0

Update 28 - Three years later

crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/newnnew.jpg

It’s been now a bit over 3 years since the CRPG Book was released as a PDF, back in February 2018.

In this time, the PDF had over 160,000 downloads, while the hardcover book sold out and raised £18,473 for charity.

I’m extremely happy with how things turned out, Bitmap Books even asked for a reprint of the hardcover version. However, I still want to do one last, big update to the book, fixing some mistakes and oversights that really annoy me.

Goals for the updated version:

- Add new games up to 2019 and a few older games that were missing, such as SpellForce
- Add the long-promised section explaining what’s an Amiga, a C64, a ZX Spectrum, etc
- Add an article on MUD & MMORPG history
- Add a section on important RPGs that were never released in English, especially those from France, Turkey, China & South Korea
- Update some old articles with new info, such as the Wasteland remaster and the Skyrim SE
- Fix some mistakes of the original release, ESPECIALLY the contributor’s credits, as I made a mess and a few people weren’t properly credited

Don’t expect this to be finished in 2021, but some of them are already done and can be enjoyed now, as I either post them on twitter or publish them as stand-alone articles on Medium as they get done:

The article on MUDs and MMORPGs history

Last year I wrote an extensive article on something entirely absent from the CRPG Book: MUDs and MMORPGs. While they deserve an entire book about them, it’s important to see how their evolution influences single-player RPGs.

crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/mmo.jpg

The article on Chinese RPGs

China produced over 100 PC RPGs in the 90s and early 00s, almost all of them never released abroad. The CRPG Book has Chinese Paladin, an extremely important title that got a fan-translation, but there’s MUCH more to examine here.

crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/ddc29-1c4zknyhddrl7xr45x1g8nw.jpeg

Podcast interview

This week I had a fun chat with Frank Cifaldi and Kelsey Lewin at the Video Game History Foundation about the CRPG Book, how to make old RPGs accessible and the goals in updating the book. You can hear it here.

crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/podcast1.jpg

Once again, a call for reviews

As I mentioned, there’s still a few games I would like to add to the book, so we’re in need of volunteers willing to write about games like Outward, Caves of Qud, Planet’s Edge, Nioh 1 & 2, etc. You can see the full list here.

That’s it, thanks everyone for reading and for the support during all these years.

Update 29 - The expanded edition is released!

crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2022/01/header3.jpg

The CRPG Book Expanded Edition brings 152 pages extra pages, 56 new game reviews, several new articles, a lot of revised content and a glorious cover art gallery! The total: 680 pages!

You can freely download it here: DOWNLOAD THE CRPG BOOK PDF

The road so far

Eight years. It’s been now eight years since that poll at the RPG Codex to determine “the best RPGs ever”, which then became a massive list with 72 RPGs, until evolving into a book with over 400 titles.

Overall, I’m extremely happy and grateful for everything that happened – I met a lot of amazing people, the PDF got over 160,000 downloads and the physical book raised £20.992 for charity!

And people are also happy with it - look at the reviews on Goodreads!

crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2022/01/goodreads.jpg

It was Eurogamer’s Editor's Choice, calling it “The New Standard”, and was featured on many websites, videos and podcasts! Hell, we even have a team of volunteers doing a Chinese translation of the book! (BTW, they’re looking for Traditional Chinese volunteers).

Still, I’m very critical of its shortcomings, which led to this update.

Expanding the book - and the video game canon

This new edition adds new games from 2017-2019, but the goal of this project was never to keep up with recent releases. This update is all about fixing the flaws of the original release – errors, typos and important games that I missed, like Tunnels of Doom, Adventure Construction Set, SpellForce and Boiling Point - but also entire scenes or historical events that I overlooked or didn’t even know about.

For example, some might be surprised that I included Swords and Sandals: Gladiator in the book.

crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2022/01/kronk.jpg

But it was a big mistake to not skip it before - an RPG that has been played over 350 million times!

During these past years, I came across many situations like these – important or extremely popular games that exist outside of the traditional “video games canon”. Some are small but influential, such as BBS ‘door games’ or the early French RPG scene, others are absolutely massive, such as Flash games or the hundreds of RPGs only available in Korean or Chinese.

I was quite ignorant about these when creating the first edition of the book. I added Chinese Paladin as a curiosity, I had no idea that it was one of the oldest and biggest RPG series in the world - so influential that it managed to impact the world of cinema, TV shows and novels in a way no western RPG ever did.

crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2022/01/paladin.jpg

The people I met, the games I played and the excellent books (Video Games Around the World, Video Games in the Global South and Gaming the Iron Curtain) that came out in these past years showed me how biased and limited our image of video game history truly is - and how the book was echoing this same distorted image.

As such, the main goal of this new version is to expand the video game canon. We already had a nice chronicle of the main RPG titles, but now it’s complemented by more Mac-only titles, Flash RPGs, RPG Maker games, MUDs, Online RPGs, untranslated RPGs, etc. I couldn’t go in-depth into them without derailing the book, but I hope they help expand our perception of the genre and lead to more in-depth explorations in the future.

What we currently understand as “video game history” is but a tiny fragment of what people are actually playing all across the world. We should celebrate efforts like the translation of 80s Slovak PC games, the Primeiro Contato podcast that explored the Brazilian game industry or the Russian Video Game Comrade channel, and I humbly suggest people write more about their local scenes - make videos, scan boxes and magazines, take screenshots, help fan translations, or simply write your memories about things like playing ShacraMUD in Chile, creating IGM’s for Legend of the Red Dragon, running a game BBS in Egypt, playing Czech adventure games, going to a PC Bang in Korea, etc…

These might sound like basic things for those who lived them, but it’s shocking how little information we have in English about some games that are cultural landmarks or sold millions of units.

A new printed version & a final appeal

Finally, yes, I am working with Bitmap Books to produce a printed version of this update, once again sold as a charity fundraiser. But due to production schedules, it won’t be available until 2023.

In the meantime, if you download the PDF and enjoy our work, please consider donating. I don’t ask for donations to myself, but rather to Instituto Dara, an NGO that helps families get access to food and support during this time of crisis: https://dara.org.br/en/conheca/quem-somos/sobre-nos/

I know that the last 2 years have been hard for everyone, but Brazil is in a frightening economical and political crisis, and even 5 dollars is a significant amount when converted to local currency.

crpgbook.files.wordpress.com/2022/01/3394-moradia-4-2048x1367-1.jpg

If you donate, please send me a PM or email with a receipt and I’ll include your name in a special thank you page for the printed version & accompanying PDF.

Thank you for reading, hope you enjoy the book. Stay safe!