Video Game Development - The Rock and Roll Years: A Life in Pixels

by Shaun McClure

This is a first hand account of working in video game development in the 1980s and 1990s - From his start as a freelancing artist whilst still at school , working from his bedroom, to a gradual progression into full-time employment for some of the best known game developers of the era - Sleeping under office desks when wages haven't been paid, psychotic co-workers and the inside story of some of the best , and worst of the early 8-bit and 16-bit computer and console games.

245 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 15, 2017

Reviews

[Rosslyn Carlyle · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author sent me the second edition of this book as part of a premeditated plan of sexual harassment and abuse. He approached me pretending to want a professional adventure writing collaboration and wanting to send a different book. He sent this trauma dumping book and mentioned that the night before it arrived in the post.

This man is deeply manipulative, scheming, and inappropriate. He lies and schemes because nobody is holding him accountable for blatantly sexually harassing women he thinks are 30 years younger than him. It's ridiculous.

This author can barely even write, this has no actual grammar just randomly strewn "em dashes" and commas placed randomly. He's an extremely unreliable narrator and the book doesn't exist to share industry information so much as to try and force a misogynistic and self satisfying worldview on the readership.

The illustrations are extremely low effort photos to the point that the game map Shaun brags about can't even be read. This zero effort author is actually offensive to expect paid for this crap.

He's never taken even a basic writing course, and it shows because even this second edition reads like an overnight first draft kind of quality. The reader's time is wasted time after time as he rambles on about the same things repeatedly, but this is assumedly at least in part because he's spent his entire life being completely booze drenched.

I'd give this crummy book zero stars, if I could.
It's not even anything worth having for free.

[Tim Webber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike sone of the more 'high-profile' books about game development in the 80s and 90s, this book tells a grittier story of those days. The author is very frank about his experiences and honest in how he recounts his feelings. It has been a very informative and pleasurable read.

[Gordon Sinclair · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars rounded down.

Being fairly obsessed with retro video gaming (and especially the ZX Spectrum) I was really interested to read this book and whilst it is in desperate need of editing and repeats itself A LOT, it is still fairly interesting to get a peak inside the early days of the British video games industry.

It does feel like lots of bits were written in isolation and then patchworked together, resulting in the author repeating himself or talking about a subject multiple times and then randomly explaining what it is a chapter later.

[Javier Recuenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome recount of al those halcyon days.