Books written (entirely or partially) by Chris
Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life (2004, BradyGames)
Author’s note: The first book ever written in English on the subject of Japanese video games at large, Power-Up drew on the work I had done for my senior thesis at Tufts University, “The Cinematic Japanese Video Game.” Subjects included a breakdown of the narrative structure of Donkey Kong (this was the first publication to argue that Donkey Kong was the first game to use animated graphics to tell a complete three-act story), explorations of Japanese game genres like RPGs and music, and the first extensive, career-spanning interviews with creators like Eiji Aonuma and Fumito Ueda.
Power-Up was out of print for many years following its initial publication in 2004, but has since been re-released by Dover Publications.
Retro Gaming Hacks (2006, O’Reilly)
Author’s Note: After the tech publisher O’Reilly released the successful book Gaming Hacks in 2004, it wanted to follow this up with Retro Gaming Hacks, jumping on the (then fairly new) trend of emulating or otherwise playing and tinkering with classic games. Gaming Hacks’ author Simon Carless didn’t want to pen the book himself but recommended me. I ended up writing half of the entries and assembling a crew of experts to write the other half, including my friend Robbie Dieterich, who went on to help create the games Elite Beat Agents and Lips among others and is currently creating new games for the 8-bit NES.
Mad Science: Einstein’s Fridge, Dewar’s Flask, Mach’s Speed, and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries That Made Our World (2012, Little, Brown)
Author’s Note: Writing for a web-based publication generally means seeing your work go through various stages of degradation. Links break, images get distorted or deleted, the article becomes technically available but impossible to locate in practice, etc. So it’s nice when even a little bit of that work becomes available in hardcopy, like this collection of “This Day In Tech” columns. Flip to page 268 and you can read about the founding of Nintendo on September 23, 1889, among other entries penned by me.
Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life (2016, Dover Publications)
Author’s Note: After Power-Up was out of print (and not available digitally, either) for over a decade, the publisher Dover Publications stepped in to help get it back into print in 2016. I took this opportunity to write some new material, chiefly an all-new chapter about the life, work, and legacy of Nintendo’s former president Satoru Iwata, who had passed away the year before. I had been fortunate enough to interview Iwata in 2012, and added never-before-seen quotes from that interview to this chapter.
Good Job, Brain!: Trivia, Quizzes and More Fun From the Popular Pub Quiz Podcast (2016, Ulysses Press)
Author’s note: In 2012, I began doing a weekly podcast with my pub trivia team. (Which, by the way, is still going!) In 2016, with the podcast having gotten rather popular, we were approached by Ulysses Press to see if we wanted to turn our content into a book, and we definitely did want to do that. It’s full of quizzes, puzzles, trivia, and humor.
Final Fantasy V (2017, Boss Fight Books)
Author’s note: Having not written a new book in well over a decade, I finally got inspired by the launch of a new publisher called Boss Fight Books, which publishes books about individual video games by a variety of authors, which blend personal stories with gaming history and critique. I was only a few pages into my first read of one of these when I realized I had to write one about a game that had a profound impact on me and my career: Final Fantasy V. The book is a history of Final Fantasy V, based on an extensive interview with its director Hironobu Sakaguchi, but also a story about growing up and discovering the world.