StoryBundle, a new service that lets you pay as much (or as little) as you want for preselected bundles of ebooks, announced on Wednesday that their latest bundle is a collection of writing about video games. Among other things, it includes two books by Jordan Mechner, the man behind Prince of Persia, as well as two issues of Kill Screen.
Sundog Lit is putting together their first theme issue, and it’s going to be all about “Games” of all types: video games, baseball games, Game of Thrones, etc…
But no experience is wasted on a writer who is a compulsive memory-miner, and Rushdie put his video-game expertise to good use in the two children’s novels he wrote for his sons, though the second, Luka and the Fire of Life, is more directly indebted to Mario and Luigi than the first. The first, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, was dedicated to Zafar and written during the fatwa years, investing it with an immediacy that gave it a haunting power. Easily the most enchanting of Rushdie’s many novels, this allegorical tale about the war between Storytelling and Silence was an acutely topical portrayal of the synchronous real-world battle between free speech and fanaticism. In the novel, one of young Haroun’s tasks is to rescue the talkative and tuneless Princess Batcheat (baatcheat is the Urdu word for conversation) from Khattam-Shud, the emperor of Silence. Was the chatterbox Princess a reincarnation of the “insufferably pink Princess Toadstool?” And did Mario inspire the character of the mustachioed water genie Iff, who uses his plumber’s wrench to turn on and turn off the faucet through which the Stream of Stories flows via “a P2C2E” (Process too Complicated to Explain)?
Nina Martyris, “Salman Rushdie Meets Super Mario”
George Plimpton seriously did try everything.
Such are the joys inspired by the intrepid backlist sleuthing of our own Mark O’Connell.
Source: theverge.com
PacMan player, be not proud, nor too macho, and you will prosper on the dotted screen.
[Martin Amis] is almost as enthusiastic about PacMan [as he is about Space Invaders], although you get the sense that he sees it (in contrast to Space Invaders) as a fundamentally unserious endeavor. “Those cute little PacMen with their special nicknames, that dinky signature tune, the dot-munching Lemon that goes whackawhackawhackawhacka: the machine has an air of childish whimsicality.” His advice is to concentrate stolidly on the central business of dot-munching, and not to get distracted by the shallow glamor of the fruits: “Do I take risks in order to gobble up the fruit symbol in the middle of the screen? I do not, and neither should you. Like the fat and harmless saucer in Missile Command (q.v.), the fruit symbol is there simply to tempt you into hubristic sorties. Bag it.
The Arcades Project: Martin Amis’ Guide to Classic Video Games by Mark O’Connell
This really exists. And our own Mark O’Connell wrote about it.
