I’m not usually one to toot my own horn, but I thought I’d share this little tidbit of news with all of you. In March 2012, Anna Anthropy released her book Rise of the Video Game Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form and my hack project HyperBound was given a three page write-up!
This was a bit of a surprise for me! I hadn’t received very much HyperBound press after the deluge in 2007/2008, and I was never contacted about my inclusion in the book. In fact, I only found out a month or so ago, after it was brought up to a friend of my in passing conversation.
I’ve included an excerpt of the book below for your perusal:
HyperBound takes its name from “hypertext,” text that’s arranged in a nonlinear structure. (This book is a text: it’s arranged to be read from start to finish, one page to the next. A website, where you might click on a word to “link” to a page about that subject, is hypertext.)
What better model for the nonlinear exploration of text than the space of a digital game, where the player moves around the world by moving her character across the screen, encountering characters, and listening to what they have to say? That’s the part of the design of EarthBound that HyperBound has lifted. What it’s rejected is the fighting. The hack is purely about exploring the world and discovering the text, and original script written by Iantorno and his brother.
-Page 77, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters
It’s a pretty neat feeling to be in a book! I heartily recommend picking up a copy if you want to learn more about indie games, hacking, and just game development in general. It is a pretty neat resource, and features some other neat projects like Sonic 2 XL and the Mother 3 translation by Tomato.
And if anyone wants to feature HyperBound, Unearthed, or any other project hosted on this site in their book/blog/magazine/etc… just let me know. I’m a sucker for free press!
