Boss Fight Books celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier this year, and now they’re back with a brand new batch of books. A Kickstarter campaign for Boss Fight Books: Season 7 promising four new volumes in the series began on August 20th.
If you’re unfamiliar with Boss Fight Books, the publisher produces “documentary-style books about classic video games” that tackle the “history, meaning, and legacy of a single video game”. Would you like to know which titles will be included in Season 7? Drumroll please…
First up is EverQuest by Matthew S. Smith. Featuring interviews with nearly a dozen members of the development team, EverQuest will examine the MMORPG’s creation and its “rocky” launch:
“You’re in our world now.” This bold tagline led Sony’s 1999 ad blitz for EverQuest, the year’s most anticipated massively multiplayer game. Though just five words long, it challenged players to live in a virtual world beyond anything they’d experienced before—and delivered. The game that proved the MMORPG’s potential, EverQuest outsold all prior entries in the genre and was the most popular subscription game in North America for five years until Blizzard’s World of Warcraft overthrew it. Yet EverQuest lives on, with tens of thousands of players logging in every day.
Based on new interviews with EverQuest developers and veteran MMORPG developers, journalist Matthew S. Smith explores EverQuest’s unlikely creation at a studio built to develop sports games, a rocky release which overwhelmed the game’s ill-prepared datacenter, the enticing game loops that placed EverQuest in a media firestorm around gaming addiction, and the real-money black market for EverQuest items that foretold the future of digital goods.
Boss Fight will head down under with James O’Connor for the second book of the season, which promises a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Untitled Goose Game. The book will include original interviews with all four lead developers at House House, as well as other contributors to the game’s development:
It’s a beautiful day in the village, and you are a horrible goose, ready to wreak charming havoc on the weary locals. You’ll ruin their gardens, invade their pub, and terrorize their children. What kind of scoundrels would make such a devious game?
Before the critical acclaim, the tweets from celebrities, the major awards, the memes, the fan art, and the legion of players, Untitled Goose Game was just the goofy dream of House House, four friends in Melbourne, Australia. What began with a photo of a goose and the joking caption “Let’s make a game about this” transformed into one of the wittiest and most stylish games of its generation.
Through interviews with the creators and their co-conspirators, journalist and developer James O’Connor tells the story of how this indie megahit came to be, revealing how the team succeeded by evolving their friendship into an art practice, contributing to the wider Australian game development scene, trusting their own good taste, and never, ever naming their game. Honk!!
The focus on free-form adventures will continue with the third book, Outer Wilds by Tommy Wallach. Like the other books so far, Outer Wilds will include original interviews with the development team at Mobius Digital. But the author is an escape room designer, so he’ll also look into the puzzle box nature of the game and how it “offers up true mystery without resorting to videogame-y puzzles”:
Maybe it’s happened to you too. You’re talking to a friend about your favorite games, and their voice suddenly drops to a whisper. “Have you played… Outer Wilds?” When you ask what makes the game so special, their only response is a smile and a promise: “Go play it. You’ll see.” After enough of these cryptic conversations, you finally try the game—and suddenly you’re the one praising Outer Wilds to anyone who will listen.
In this volume, novelist and escape room designer Tommy Wallach explains how a project that began as a USC student’s master’s thesis ended up winning “Game of the Year” from Giant Bomb, Polygon, Eurogamer, and The Guardian. Along the way, he’ll discuss how Outer Wilds uses theme to reconcile the age-old battle between narrative and gameplay; how its unique form of knowledge-based gating spurs player curiosity; how it offers up true mystery without resorting to videogame-y puzzles; and how its spectacular DLC, Echoes of the Eye, remains true to the spirit of the base game while transforming its tone completely.
Breaking a bit from the rest, the The final title in Boss Fight Books’s seventh season will be Dance Dance Revolution by Jessica Doyle and Jordan Ferguson. The arcade favorite literally changed the world when it first appeared in 1998, and though its been out of the limelight recently, this history of the game (with commentary from “the artists, influences, and innovators” behind the series) is sure to be a wild ride:
On September 26, 1998, a video game made its debut in Japanese arcades. It was over seven feet tall and weighed just over 900 pounds. It had no characters, no story, no quests to fulfill or bosses to beat. What it had was a metal platform on which you were supposed to stand, put your feet into the right place at the right time, and dance.
Join two music critics, long-ago players, and Sota Fujimori fans as they take you on the astonishing journey through the artists, influences, and innovators of Dance Dance Revolution, a game two and a half decades in the making and still going — in homes, arcades, and expos.
From its unexpected appearance to its social heyday to its reappearance in the American market, DDR has taken many forms — not all of them sanctioned by Konami. It has spawned community, creativity, competition, lawsuits, 1,000+ songs that range from wacky to tacky to beautiful, and yes, a lot of dancing. While we were all leaning on the back bar, working up a sweat, DDR managed to change the world.
The Kickstarter campaign for Boss Fight Books Season 7 will conclude on September 17th, with EverQuest set to be published as an ebook and a paperback by the end of the year. The remaining three books should follow shortly after throughout the first six months of 2025.