Here’s a look at some of our recent and upcoming projects!
HG101 Presents: Sega Console Classics Vol. 1
It’s been awhile since we’ve done a Sega book, hasn’t it? Here’s Sega Console Classics Vol. 1, with a whole variety of Sega characters drawn by regular HG101 contributor Thor Thorvaldson. This entry focuses on the 8/16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog games, as well as the classic entries in the Phantasy Star and Shining Force series. We’ve rounded this out with some reviews of early Master System titles, along with a handful of SG-1000 pieces. We’re anticipating this will be out in Fall, but if you’re a Patron at a $5+ tier, then you can check out a pre-edited, content complete PDF right now!
HG101 Presents: Now Playing: A Guide to 1980s and 90s Movie Games
This 400 page book covers over 700 games based on 1980s and 1990s movie tie-ins, plus even earlier titles as well. We’ve jammed a whole lot of weird gaming history in here! It’s still going through the publishing process so we’re polishing it up a little more. It should be available from Press Run Books some time in 2025!
HG101 Presents: Arcade Cult Classics
This book came out earlier this year! While most of our books cover various publishers or genres, this one just focuses on weird arcade games. Given that it’s pretty obscure even by HG101 standards, it’s probably no surprise that it’s not selling terribly well. If you’re the type of person that wants to check out weird and unknown games on MAME, or want to delve into the stranger games in Hamster’s Arcade Archives series, please check it out! And if you like it, please consider giving it a review on Amazon. This goes for any of our books, actually. Even though we’ve been doing this for more than a decade, these reviews help convince the almighty algorithm that we’re not just scamming people and these are actual books worth reading.
….And Beyond!
We’ve got a few other things in the works, though these probably won’t be ready until deep into next year. The next few books we’re planning focuses on more Taito games (as a follow-up to our Digest Vol. 2), one deep dive into the entire Ys series (and other early Falcom action-RPGs), and then maybe something focusing on SNK and Capcom’s non-fighting game library. I also really love the 1990s PC gaming scene so I want to expand on that. You’ll probably notice we’re featuring more Japanese PS1 games, and we’re working to give a big overview of that scene to eventually be compiled in a book. This is a scene that hasn’t been well documented in English so we’re digging up a lot of interesting titles. And while it’s not strictly video game related, I’ve been delving into the retro anime scene over the past few years. I think a lot of people who are into retro games would really like anime from this era since they spring from the same Japanese pop culture well – the PC Engine CD was basically a 1990s anime OVA machine, after all.
HG101 Hits the Big 2-0
Did you know the HG101 is 20 years old? I never kept precise records, but it officially went online some time in early 2004. Back then, I’d positioned it as a successor to the Classic Gaming Review Archive, a small review site I ran in 1998/1999. This was mostly so I could keep using the same server space on Gamespy, and I don’t think any of the actual content was carried over. Just be aware that browsing that archive has some very, very old reviews, and some of the formatting is broken, but otherwise this is pretty much what it was like back in the late 1990s.
Recently I was shocked to learn that some other smaller websites that I thought were indie like Destructoid and Siliconera (which I used to write for way back when) were actually owned by corporations. The internet has changed a lot over the past two decades, with so much of it being swallowed up by corporate ownership, but I’m happy to say that HG101 has remained completely independent all this time. (I’ve also never received any offers to sell the site, but I think that has to do with vulture capitalists having no interest in a gaming history/niche games brand.) There have been a couple of major changes over this time – in 2014-ish when we introduced the Patreon, allowing us to fund and expand the number of posted articles, and in 2017 when we converted from crusted old hand-coded HTML to a WordPress CMS, which brought with it its own ups and downs. But otherwise, I’ve run it the same way since I’ve been doing it for the past 20 years.
Lately I’ve been seeing parts of the internet, both indie (ROMHacking.net) and corporate (Game Informer) continue to crumble. Part of the reason I started doing books back in 2011 was due to a love of physical media, and part of it was to help fund the site. But it was also to preserve at least some of the writing, in the chance that the HG101 website ever went down. Just to be clear, I have no intentions of stopping any time soon, but rather a reminder that the internet is a lot more fragile than people generally believe it to be. One of the main reasons I run ads on the site is to keep a revenue stream open to keep it self-sustaining, but the ad industry has been wrecked so badly in the last few years that this monthly revenue wouldn’t even cover the hosting.
There’s a cost associated with remaining indie and focusing on gaming history, so please consider dropping a few bucks on the site Patreon! We’ve had to cut back article posting a little bit since our funding has been dipping in recent months, so anything to chip in a bit would help keep up the pace! At a $3 level, you’ll get access to more than 300 Patreon exclusive podcast episodes, along with higher quality versions of the 700+ public episodes. At the $5+ level, you’ll get PDF and Kindle versions of our latest books, with higher donations getting even more copies. This is the cheapest way to get digital copies of our books, too! Any level of donation also gets you a special role in the HG101 Discord (though please remember to message me because the automatic process doesn’t seem to work correctly). This also supports all of the other projects that I’ve mentioned above, so you’ll be helping with that as well! Donors will receive previews of these just to see how they’re shaping up!